Author Topic: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State  (Read 347256 times)

G M

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1650 on: March 27, 2023, 07:20:55 AM »
Very good to see this footage escaping from the Memory Hole!

GM, can you go to the source material and post URLs of it directly?  I want to save it so as to protect if from being deleted again by the Goolag.

I will look for the best site hosting it.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1651 on: March 27, 2023, 07:27:00 AM »
THANK YOU.


Crafty_Dog

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1653 on: March 27, 2023, 02:23:02 PM »
In case the Goolag memory holes that URL, here is the article:

The Parliamentary Motive Behind the J6 Fedsurrection
March 12, 2023 | Sundance | 1,678 Comments
The Ring of Truth – “I am too well accustomed to the taking of evidence not to detect the ring of truth.” 1908, Edith Wharton

Much has been made of the events of January 6, 2021, and with the latest broadcast of CCTV video from inside the Capitol Hill complex, more questions have been raised.

Within the questions: the FBI and government apparatus had advanced knowledge of the scale of the J6 mall assembly yet doing nothing?  Why were the Capitol Hill police never informed of the FBI concerns?  Why didn’t House Speaker Nancy Pelosi secure the Capitol Hill complex, and why did she deny the request by President Trump to call up the national guard for security support?  Why did the FBI have agent provocateurs in the crowd, seemingly stimulating rage within a peaceful crowd to enter the Capitol building?  There have always been these nagging questions around ‘why’?



Long time CTH reader “Regitiger” has spent a great deal of time reviewing the entire process, looking at the granular timeline and then overlaying the bigger picture of the constitutional and parliamentary process itself.  What follows below is a brilliant analysis of the federal government motive to create a J6 crisis that permitted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to trigger an emergency session and avoid the 2020 election certification challenges.

Those congressional floor challenges, known and anticipated well in advance of the morning of January 6, 2021, would have formed a legal and constitutional basis for ‘standing’ in judicial challenges that would have eventually reached the Supreme Court.  The certification during “emergency session” eliminated the problem for Washington DC.

Regitiger explains below, only edited by me for clarity and context:

I think most, not all, but a large number of people, are totally missing what happened; and why this happened on Jan 6th.  I am going to try my best to outline the events that day, blast past the commonly held assumptions and get right down to the core corruption.

I will present this as a series of questions and answers.


♦ Q1: How do you prevent congress from delaying the certification of state electoral votes?

A: It requires a crisis. A crisis that creates an “emergency” …An “emergency” that invokes special house rules.

FACTS: Remember carefully, focus please. Just moments, literally 3 minutes before two representatives issued a vote for motions to suspend the certification, the House members were “informed” by capitol police and other “agents” that a protest was about to breach the chambers. It was at this time that key people: Pence, Pelosi, Schumer, Mcconnell can be seen being walked out and escorted from the chamber. This effectively halted the Entire Chamber Process.

♦ Q2: Why was it necessary to halt the chamber process?

A: The crisis was created to eliminate the motion challenges to halt the certification and to begin voting to look into voting irregularities and fraud

FACTS: The two motions were completely legal and constitutional under at least two constitutionally recognized procedures… procedures that would REQUIRE the house to pause the certification and then vote to determine whether the motions of suspend could move forward.

♦ Q3: What was so important to refuse this motion and the subsequent votes to suspend the electoral certification?

A: It was important to remove that process entirely and continue the fraud and certify the fraud with no detractors on record. This effectively gives no standing for a SCOTUS ruling appeal!  Understand this.  If those two motions, even just one had successfully been voted EVEN IF THE MOTIONS were DENIED IN VOTE, this gives those who presented them with STANDING FOR A CONSTITUTIONAL LEGAL ARGUMENT BEFORE SCOTUS.

♦ Q4: Could this have been done some other way other than creating a crisis/protest?

A: Unlikely. In order to prevent those two motions, requires that speaker of the house, minority leaders, and the president of the congress (vice president of the United States: Pence), to NOT BE PRESENT IN THE CHAMBERS.

Once the capitol police and other “law enforcements agents” informed the speaker and these three other individuals, Pelosi UNILATERALLY UNDER EMERGENCY RULES, suspended the business of the congress. This protest was necessary. The crisis was created because there is no other way to suspend the business of certification UNILATERALLY. By creating a crisis invokes emergency procedures. No other circumstances other than war or mass simultaneous explosive diarrhea can create such unilateral speaker delivered suspension of the certification.

♦ Q5: Why did the motions, once that the speaker RECONVENED congress, move forward back again to the floor for votes? Why were members disallowed to even consider putting forward ANY motions to the floor in when the chamber business was reopened?

A: The Speaker initiated the NEW sessions under special emergency rules. These rules abandon and make it clear that the ONLY purpose of the new session was to EXPEDITE the certification and dismiss all prior regular session procedural rules. This is why those two motions to table votes to consider a debate and pause to the certifications of state vote electors never happened later that evening when the house business was reconvened!

♦ Q6: Other than new rules, emergency rules, what other peculiar things occurred when the speaker reconvened?

A: Members were allowed to “vote” in proxy, remotely, not being present.  You can use your imagination about what conditions were placed on ALL members during this time to prevent anyone from “getting out of line”.

Also clearly, it was at THIS NEW SESSION that VP Pence, President of Congress, would also have no ability to even consider pausing the electoral certification, because there were no motions of disagreements on the matter. So, in a technical legal claim, he is correct that he had no constitutional authority to address any issues of fraud or doubts about electoral irregularities. But this completely dismisses the FACT that congress created rules in this crisis/emergency that never allowed them to be floored!

Understand what happened in Jan 6, 2021.  Don’t get hung up on Viking impostors, stolen Pelosi computers, podium heists, and complicit capitol police. Understand the process and what happened and what WAS NOT ALLOWED TO HAPPEN.

This was a coup….it was a very organized and carefully planned coup. VP Pence without a doubt as well as most members of the house were quite aware of how the certification was going to be MANAGED.  It would require new rules to prevent the debate clause from occurring!  New rules that ONLY AN EMERGENCY CRISIS COULD CREATE! So, they created an emergency.

•NOTED: I understand why many people have great interest in debunking the j6 event. I get that. I think it is important to dissect and examine the events of that day but please, step back and understand WHY these things happened. Examine the chain of events in congress.  Why those two motions that would have at least paused the certification THAT WOULD GIVE VP PENCE THE CONSTITUTIONALLY RECOGNIZED POWER TO MOVE TO SUSPEND THE ELECTORAL CERTIFICATION AND THEN EXAMINE THE IRREGULARITIES AND CLAIMS OF FRAUD!

At the very center of this coup stands Mike Pence, the same individual who also spoiled President Trump’s first opportunities in the earlies hours of his Presidency just 4 years prior, when he created and facilitated the removal of Lt General Michael Flynn. I will not spend much time on this thread explaining why Lt Gen Flynn was so important to President Trump and why the IC was so afraid he would have advisory power to the President. That I will leave for another day, another time. But understand this clearly: MIKE PENCE WAS AND IS WORKING FOR THE MOST CORRUPT CRIMINAL TREASONOUS PEOPLE IN GOVERNMENT.

•PRO TIP: If you really want to get a true understanding of this matter videos of protesters walking in the capitol is not going to address them. Actual video and timeline records of events and the specific actions taken by the speaker just moments before TWO MAJOR ELECTORAL ALTERING MOTIONS WERE ABOUT TO BE FLOORED.

This crisis was developed just in time with a precise coordination to prevent those two motions to be entered into the chamber record. The two motions do not exist. The emergency powers established in the new session made sure they never could be entered. The emergency powers could never happen without a crisis.

God Bless America!”

[link]



Note from Author: “I started this effort years ago.  To date, no one and I mean no one has replied.  It’s as if everyone that can expose it that has a larger platform is either disinterested, or suspiciously withdrawn from the issue.  I made several comments about this over the years right here at CTH, on article threads that are relevant to the topic.

I was watching the certification live that day. I recorded it ALL on every channel. I was doing this because no matter what happened that day, I KNEW IT WOULD BE A PROFOUND AND SIGNIFICANT EVENT TO REMEMBER. I never in my wildest imagination (and I have a pretty vivid imagination, always have), expected to see the unmistakable perfectly timed “coincidences” that occurred.

One member raises a motion (with another in waiting for his turn) those two motions were well known and advertised. These were motions to vote for a pause in the certification to examine electoral vote fraud and irregularities. I can’t speak to the veracity and substance of those motions. They were never allowed to even be floored. it was at that exact moment that the house chambers were suspended and 4 of the key members, Pence, Pelosi, Schumer and McConnell were escorted OUT right after initiating the end of the session.

Effectively, this resulted in that motion never being floored at all.  Then, when reconvened under special emergency rules, inexplicably those two motions (and perhaps more – we will never know – or will we?) were not even attempted to be motioned. That was not just peculiar to me.

It all started to make more sense when I did some study on constitutional law AND THE HISTORY of specific special authorities given to president of the congress, Pence in this case. Not only did he have the authority and power to suspend the certification, but the duty to address the motion in the same sense that it becomes vital to the debate clause.

There really is no higher significance of weight given to the debate clause than the certification of the votes. This was more than odd to me the way that the media and pence framed their narrative: Pence would not have the constitutional power to suspend certification.  Then it hit me, like the obvious clue that was there all the time. He was right. But the reason he is right, is because there WAS NO MOTION ON THE FLOOR TO CAUSE HIM TO SUSPEND!

Understanding this, happened for me about 4 or 5 months after this Jan 6 day.  I took me this long to examine the facts, look at the video again, compare it to the arguments made by several leading constitutional academics, and again, inexplicably even some that I respect seemed to dodge that central reality.  The motions were never allowed to be floored in the re-convened house rules later that evening. Most would not even venture to address the exotically coincidence that the moment those two members would stand to place the motion before the house, that the House Speaker Pelosi AND Pence ended the session, effectively blocking the motions from being heard in normal house rules.

It’s been a journey for me. A journey that was initiated because I am just a simple but curious person. Perhaps even to a point where I get obsessive in those efforts. Many days and nights combing over the details. praying and trying to make sense of what makes little sense. With over 6 states having serious well known and obvious defects in the voting process, some more credible to believe – some less, but one would not expect the house would be so deliberate in marching past the motions that were definitely going to be present to slow this process down and take the time to get it right. Even IF the claims never reached an intersection that would change the outcome.

There are two possibilities: Millions of people, against all the odds, hitting all-time records even past Obama and Clinton, voted for a naval gazing ambulatory pathological racist moron. And chose Joe Malarkey as their leader.  Or this was a coup, a conspiracy, and a treasonous manipulation regime change because President Trump could not be controlled by the deep state and globalists who OWN AND OPERATE WASHINGTON DC.

BOTH POSSIBILITIES ARE TERRIFYING.

The only way for THE PEOPLE to gain power in this country is to force the transfer of it.  If truth isn’t the fuel and vehicle, we will just be replacing deck chairs and hitting the next series of expected ice bergs.

Knowing the truth is not enough; however, it is truth that makes it a righteous cause.

God Bless America!”

~ Regitiger



Sundance provides an addendum in support:

Julie Kelly – […] Just as the first wave of protesters breached the building shortly after 2 p.m., congressional Republicans were poised to present evidence of rampant voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Ten incumbent and four newly-elected Republican senators planned to work with their House colleagues to demand the formation of an audit commission to investigate election “irregularities” in the 2020 election. Absent an audit, the group of senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) pledged to reject the Electoral College results from the disputed states.

The Hail Mary effort was doomed to fail; yet the American people would have heard hours of debate related to provable election fraud over the course of the day.

And no one opposed the effort more than ex-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

During a conference call on December 31, 2020, McConnell urged his Republican Senate colleagues to abandon plans to object to the certification, insisting his vote to certify the 2020 election results would be “the most consequential I have ever cast” in his 36-year Senate career.

From the Senate floor on the afternoon of January 6, McConnell gave a dramatic speech warning of the dire consequences to the country should Republicans succeed in delaying the vote. He downplayed examples of voting fraud and even mocked the fact that Trump-appointed judges rejected election lawsuits.

“The voters, the courts, and the States have all spoken,” McConnell insisted. “If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”

Roughly six hours later, McConnell got his way. Cowed by the crowd of largely peaceful Americans allowed into the building by Capitol police, most Republican senators backed off the audit proposal. McConnell, echoing hyperbolic talking points about an “insurrection” seeded earlier in the day by Democratic lawmakers and the news media, gloated. “They tried to disrupt our democracy,” he declared on the Senate floor after Congress reconvened around 8 p.m. “This failed attempt to obstruct Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our Republic.”

Crafty_Dog

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AG: McConnell's exhilarating insurrection
« Reply #1654 on: March 27, 2023, 02:25:00 PM »
second:

Cited in that article is this article:

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/28/mcconnells-exhilarating-insurrection/

By Julie Kelly
April 28, 2022
Adirty little secret about January 6—one of many—is that Democrats and establishment Republicans, not Trump supporters, wanted to shut down the official proceedings of that day.

Just as the first wave of protesters breached the building shortly after 2 p.m., congressional Republicans were poised to present evidence of rampant voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Ten incumbent and four newly-elected Republican senators planned to work with their House colleagues to demand the formation of an audit commission to investigate election “irregularities” in the 2020 election. Absent an audit, the group of senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) pledged to reject the Electoral College results from the disputed states.

The Hail Mary effort was doomed to fail; yet the American people would have heard hours of debate related to provable election fraud over the course of the day.

And no one opposed the effort more than ex-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

During a conference call on December 31, 2020, McConnell urged his Republican Senate colleagues to abandon plans to object to the certification, insisting his vote to certify the 2020 election results would be “the most consequential I have ever cast” in his 36-year Senate career.

From the Senate floor on the afternoon of January 6, McConnell gave a dramatic speech warning of the dire consequences to the country should Republicans succeed in delaying the vote. He downplayed examples of voting fraud and even mocked the fact that Trump-appointed judges rejected election lawsuits.

“The voters, the courts, and the States have all spoken,” McConnell insisted. “If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”

Roughly six hours later, McConnell got his way. Cowed by the crowd of largely peaceful Americans allowed into the building by Capitol police, most Republican senators backed off the audit proposal. McConnell, echoing hyperbolic talking points about an “insurrection” seeded earlier in the day by Democratic lawmakers and the news media, gloated. “They tried to disrupt our democracy,” he declared on the Senate floor after Congress reconvened around 8 p.m. “This failed attempt to obstruct Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our Republic.”

Congress officially certified the Electoral College results early the next day.

While he projected a sober tone to the American public, McConnell privately was ecstatic, a new book about the 2020 election reveals. “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” McConnell told New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin late on January 6, 2021 about Trump. Martin is the co-author of This Will Not Pass, of which excerpts were published in the Washington Post this week. Martin in the book recounts his midnight conversation with McConnell.

Trump, McConnell claimed, “put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger,” Martin writes. He then asked the reporter what he had heard about members plotting to invoke the 25th Amendment. Calling Trump a “despicable person,” McConnell reportedly bragged how he “crushed the sons of bitches” on January 6 and promised to do the same to them in the 2022 primaries.

Now, that seems like an oddly celebratory demeanor for someone who just survived an “attack on our democracy” and an alleged attempt to “overthrow” the seat of government power, doesn’t it? And why was McConnell so certain the four-hour disturbance would spell the end for Donald Trump?

Further—and more importantly—why did McConnell’s office fail to protect the Capitol on January 6?

His Sergeant at Arms at the time served on the U.S. Capitol police board, a four-man body that manages security at the sprawling Capitol complex. McConnell appointed Michael Stenger in 2018 to serve in that role; Stenger, in addition to his House counterpart, Paul Irving, rejected multiple requests by the Capitol Police chief for extra help in advance of January 6.

Steven Sund, a Capitol Police captain, said he spoke with Stenger on January 4, 2021 to ask for National Guardsmen. “Instead of approving the use of the National Guard, however, Mr. Stenger suggested I ask them how quickly we could get support if needed and to ‘lean forward’ in case we had to request assistance on January 6.”

He spoke with Stenger again on January 5; the board still refused to advance his plan for extra guardsmen.

As the chaos unfolded right as the joint session of Congress convened on January 6, Sund said he “notified the two Sergeant at Arms by 1:09 p.m. that I urgently needed support and asked them to declare a State of Emergency and authorize the National Guard.” Stenger and Irving, who were together that afternoon, said he was waiting for “authorization” by congressional leadership.

That approval came an hour later, but with a caveat: Sund also needed the Pentagon’s authorization.

“Almost two hours later, we had still not received authorization from the Pentagon to activate the National Guard,” Sund testified in February 2021. “Mr. Stenger offered to have Senator McConnell call the Secretary of the Army to expedite the request. I agreed that this would be a good idea. I followed up approximately 20 minutes later to check on the call and express the need for leadership to call to assist in expediting the request.”

Guardsmen did not arrive until 5:40 p.m., four-and-a-half hours after Sund’s first dispatch and after the protest had ended.

McConnell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser—the three leaders responsible for protecting the Capitol on January 6—still have not explained their failure to do so. Not only did McConnell’s top law enforcement officials purportedly overlook the potential for violence on January 6, he denied requests for more officers days before and delayed sending guardsmen to Capitol Hill that afternoon.

And it will be nearly impossible to find out why: Stegner, along with Irving and Sund, all resigned on January 7, 2021.

So, perhaps there is a darker explanation for McConnell’s  giddiness on January 6. What unfolded that day on McConnell’s watch ended Republican demands for an election audit; criminalized criticism of the 2020 election, which McConnell still describes as “fair” and legitimate; vilified Republican lawmakers; and prompted Trump’s second impeachment. McConnell also believed the protest would spell the end of the Trump movement, something the Beltway crony long attempted to quash.

Like the Biden regime, congressional Democrats, and the national news media, the aftermath of the Capitol protest achieved all sorts of political ends for Mitch McConnell.

And when it comes to January 6, there are no coincidences.


Julie Kelly is a political commentator and senior contributor to American Greatness. She is the author of January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right and Disloyal Opposition: How the NeverTrump Right Tried―And Failed―To Take Down the President. Her past work can be found at The Federalist and National Review. She also has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and Genetic Literacy Project. She is the co-host of the “Happy Hour Podcast with Julie and Liz.” She is a graduate of Eastern Illinois University and lives in suburban Chicago with her husband and two daughters.

Archive
Photo: Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer stand back to back in the House Chamber during a joint session of Congress on January 06, 2021. A group of Republican senators said they would reject the Electoral College votes of several states unless Congress appointed a commission to audit the election results. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)



ccp

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Grand Jury will be delayed for another month
« Reply #1657 on: March 29, 2023, 10:50:43 AM »
nothing to see here; not political strategy
a month break was "previously scheduled"

expect one of the other cases against Trump to be brought first now as the shysters
were praying for :

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/29/manhattan-trump-grand-jury-set-to-break-for-a-month-00089422

G M

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Re: Grand Jury will be delayed for another month
« Reply #1658 on: March 29, 2023, 10:54:24 AM »
nothing to see here; not political strategy
a month break was "previously scheduled"

expect one of the other cases against Trump to be brought first now as the shysters
were praying for :

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/29/manhattan-trump-grand-jury-set-to-break-for-a-month-00089422

I was told the walls are closing in…

G M

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OrangeManBad and indicted
« Reply #1659 on: March 30, 2023, 02:56:42 PM »

ccp

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1660 on: March 30, 2023, 03:41:13 PM »
charges not clear yet

but we know what they are

yes orange man bad
republicans bad
they are in the way of reparations checks
the religion of woke
replacement of Jewish religion with Democrat partisanship is on display

circus is on
we know what will be mass media blitz 24/7 wall to wall this weekend

good time to rent cabin in woods and get drunk like David Susskind said he did in order to quit smoking back the 70s

HISTORICAL! / FIRST!/ WATERGATE !/ SHOULD NOT RUN FOR '24 !

CNN PBS MSPCP NYT WP NPR NBC CBS ABC
ALL PARTYING !!

and we just have to sit here and watch the hypocrisy....complete made up twisting of the law ....
before our very eyes ....
thanks to corrupt media deep state etc.


G M

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1661 on: March 30, 2023, 11:19:08 PM »
"good time to rent cabin in woods"

I would suggest buying. And getting ready for what is now inevitable.

Not sure if this is the final match to be lit, but we are damn close.


charges not clear yet

but we know what they are

yes orange man bad
republicans bad
they are in the way of reparations checks
the religion of woke
replacement of Jewish religion with Democrat partisanship is on display

circus is on
we know what will be mass media blitz 24/7 wall to wall this weekend

good time to rent cabin in woods and get drunk like David Susskind said he did in order to quit smoking back the 70s

HISTORICAL! / FIRST!/ WATERGATE !/ SHOULD NOT RUN FOR '24 !

CNN PBS MSPCP NYT WP NPR NBC CBS ABC
ALL PARTYING !!

and we just have to sit here and watch the hypocrisy....complete made up twisting of the law ....
before our very eyes ....
thanks to corrupt media deep state etc.


ccp

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1663 on: March 31, 2023, 08:32:13 AM »
Epps , the supposed Trump fan
has a  Clinton Lawyer and one of the biggest Dem operative sleaze bags David Brock
working for him

to "get" Fox

clearly seen telling people to "get IN the Capitol"

yet never arrested
like noted in tape never trumpers as well as Leftist media protecting him unlike everyone of the other 1000+ who protested and got arrested and another 1,000 + to be arrested ...






G M

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Total control, they think
« Reply #1664 on: March 31, 2023, 09:50:36 AM »

ccp

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Dersh Grand Jury leak a IS A CRIME IN NY
« Reply #1665 on: March 31, 2023, 01:43:56 PM »
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-trump-indictment/2023/03/31/id/1114597/

[but never mind]

No Manhattan judge wants to miss out on the social circuit:

"He also said he doesn't think a Manhattan judge will dismiss the case to avoid being known as the person who freed Trump.

"Consider what happened to me in Martha's Vineyard when I simply defended President Trump on the floor of the Senate," he said. "I lost all of my friends. My wife lost all of our friends. No judges want to throw this case out.

"They are elected judges in New York, so this case has to be moved to a place where a judge can do honest justice rather than political or ideological injustice."


ccp

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1667 on: March 31, 2023, 02:51:46 PM »
agree with those
who point out it is past time for
Republican DAs to start doing their work in Red areas
where juries , judges , not rigged

for Democrats



G M

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Crafty_Dog

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No One Is Above the Law
« Reply #1673 on: April 03, 2023, 07:31:44 PM »
When a Democratic President Was above the Law
By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
April 3, 2023 3:04 PM
NRO

If you told us that perjury should go unpunished because it was ‘just about sex,’ you should sit out the ‘nobody is above the law’ argument.

One of the mantras of Democrats and their media voices in response to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump has been that “no one is above the law.” That’s a fine sentiment, but there are three very big problems with Democrats making this argument: They don’t believe it, they don’t mean the same thing by “law” as the rest of us, and Alvin Bragg is about the worst possible representative for the theory that violations of the law will never be tolerated.



In particular, I never want to hear another word — not another syllable — about how “nobody is above the law” from people who spent years on end telling us that perjury and obstruction of justice by the president should not lead to consequences because it was “just about a blow job.” I never want to hear this from people who professed to be horrified by “lock her up” chants on the theory that one should never call for jailing political opponents even when they have violated specific federal criminal statutes regarding the handling of sensitive information — least of all in defense of a prosecutor who ran for office publicly promising to go after this particular political opponent of his. I never want to hear it from people who said that the vice president could break a federal law without consequence so long as there was “no controlling legal authority” interpreting the law. I certainly do not want to hear this from people who are, even today, arguing that the president can get away with breaking the law and seizing the powers of Congress to give away half a trillion dollars of our money to his supporters so long as he can argue that nobody has standing to sue him in federal court.

Consider a sampling of statements by Democrats on the Trump indictment:


• Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois: “No one is above the law — not even a former president.”


• Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts: “No one is above the law, not even a former president of the United States.”

• Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona: “We’re a country of laws and nobody’s above the law.”

• Ex-Democrat Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona: “Politicians aren’t above the law.”

• Senator Mark Warner of Virginia: “In the United States nobody is above the law, especially not the leaders who have been entrusted with the privilege and responsibility of serving the American people.”

• Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.” (Forget the part about the defendant having to prove innocence, she’s rolling.)


• Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California: “No one is above the law.”

• Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts: “Nobody is above the law.”

• Congressman Dan Goldman of New York: “Donald Trump has demonstrated his belief that he is above the law, and nobody is above the law.”

• Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado: “Former President Trump’s indictment reminds us that no one is above the law and that we are all afforded due process and equal protection under the law.”

• Congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado: “No one is above the law in this country. Not even former presidents!”

• Congressman Chuy Garcia of Illinois: “Nobody is above the law.”

• Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas cited the indictment as “evidence that no one is above the law, even the president of the United States.”

I could go on, but you get the idea. If a memo didn’t literally go out, it may as well have.


This is not how Democrats talk about the law when one of their own is in the crosshairs. The most obvious and glaring parallel is Bill Clinton’s perjury. At the time, the all-but-uniform argument among Democrats was that the Clinton impeachment was “just about sex,” as if covering up a sexual affair is somehow a defense to breaking the law. On the simplest charge against Clinton, perjury in his civil deposition, there really was no question that Clinton lied under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He did so again in the grand jury. And yet, we were told that he should be neither prosecuted nor impeached, and that even investigating him for this was a terrible affront because he was the president.

Democrats were united in treating Clinton as being above the law against perjury, even though federal judges had previously been removed from office for committing perjury and filing false documents such as income-tax returns. Two hundred of the 205 House Democrats voted against impeachment. Every single Democrat in the Senate — every last one — voted for acquittal on all charges. That includes six Senate Democrats who are still there (Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray, Dianne Feinstein, Jack Reed, and Ron Wyden); it includes prominent Democrats who were in the House then, including Pelosi, Neal, Lee, Schumer (who voted against impeachment before joining the Senate and voting for acquittal), and Ed Markey; and it includes Joe Biden.

In his closing speech, Durbin argued that senators should focus on the partisan motives of Republicans bringing the charges: “When I listen to Paul Sarbanes recount the painstaking efforts to avoid partisanship during the impeachment hearing on President Nixon, it is a stark contrast to the committee process which voted these articles of impeachment against President Clinton. . . . The American people clearly believe that the process which brings him before us in this trial was too partisan, too unfair, too suspect.”


Biden literally argued that presidents should be judged by different standards:

We have heard it argued repeatedly that the Constitution does not create different standards for judges and the President. But that argument fails to comprehend the organizing principle of our constitutional system — the separation of powers. The framers divided the power of the Federal Government into three branches in order to safeguard liberty. This innovation — the envy of every Nation on earth — can only serve its fundamental purpose if each branch remains strong and independent of the others.

We needed a President who was independent enough to spearhead and sign the Civil Rights Act. We needed a President who was independent enough to lead the Nation and the world in the Persian gulf war. We still need an independent President.

The constitutional scholarship overwhelmingly recognizes that the fundamental structural commitment to separation of powers requires us to view the President as different than a Federal judge.

Consider our power to discipline and even expel an individual Senator. In such a case, we do not remove the head of a separate branch and so do not threaten the constitutional balance of powers. To remove a President is to decapitate another branch and to undermine the independence necessary for it to fulfill its constitutional role.

Only a President is chosen by the people in a national election. No Senator, no Representative can make this claim. To remove a duly elected President clashes with democratic principles in a way that simply has no constitutional parallel. By contrast, there is nothing antidemocratic in the Senate removing a judge who was appointed and not elected by the people. [Emphasis added.]

In remarks at the National Press Club in November 1998, Biden warned that enforcing the law against a president without scrupulous fairness could undermine public confidence:

The American people have a greater right than all of you. They have a greater right than the Congress, they have a greater right in the press as an institution, they have a greater right than the Senate. They have a greater right than any other single institution to make their own judgment. And they have made that judgment. And when we are going to take away. . . . We better be darn sure . . . that we can convince them that we’re doing it on the merits, as called for by the law and the Constitution and doing it fairly, for if we do not, we will further undermine the confidence in the American people in a democratic system that we have, and that’s all it runs on. The moment we lose the confidence of the American people that the system meets their needs is the day we lose our legitimacy.

He also argued that Kenneth Starr had gone too far in insisting that the law must be vindicated:

The grand jury system has been around for hundreds of years. . . . No one has ever pushed it to the limits that this man has. And what I worry about is what [a legal scholar] said to me. . . . He said Joe, remember, everything that is constitutionally permissible, is not necessarily wise, and everything, every exercise of power by a single branch of government is not necessarily prudent. No one in my view has pushed the envelope as far as this man has. And I think that is — I won’t say dangerous — I think that’s imprudent.

Clinton, in the end, was not removed from office. He was not prosecuted. The only legal consequence he faced was a brief suspension of his law license in Arkansas. He was welcomed back to speak at the Democratic convention in 2012, and there was nary a peep at returning him to the White House when his wife and vocal defender was the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2016. In the years since, even as progressives have developed post hoc qualms about Clinton’s predatory sexual behavior, scarcely any Democrat or any liberal or progressive commentator has argued that Clinton should have been prosecuted. When Kenneth Starr died in September 2022, there were no rethinkings or apologies for the period in which, as the Associated Press obituary accurately put it, “The White House pilloried Starr as a right-wing fanatic doing the bidding of Republicans bent on destroying the president.” It remains the position of most Democrats to this day that a federal prosecutor had no business investigating the president for a flagrant violation of an unambiguous federal criminal law.

If anything, Starr’s case against Clinton was much stronger than Bragg’s case against Trump. I will delve back into the precise details of New York’s false-business-records law when we see the indictment, but there are two fundamental and related differences between the law against perjury and the law against false business records, and they boil down to the questions of clear notice of the law and who exactly was harmed.

First, notice and clarity. I do not argue that former presidents should be above the law. They have no special immunity from prosecution. But Biden had a point in 1998-99: Presidents occupy a unique role in our system, which makes them very tempting targets for creative prosecutors, and which could easily touch off a cycle of partisan retribution. And our laws have expanded in complexity and vagueness in all manner of ways that give prosecutors too much discretion in deciding whom to investigate and charge. What should be true of every American citizen should be particularly true in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president:

If Trump — before, during, or after his presidency — unambiguously broke a clear law for which an ordinary person would be prosecuted, such as shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, [the Manhattan district attorney] would have a duty to prosecute him. But trumped-up charges against former leaders are a familiar sight in banana republics, one that America has thus far avoided. Mounting a prosecution against a former president — especially a former president who was investigated extensively in office without the bringing of charges by the self-styled “Resistance” — is a grave step for the nation and its confidence in the rule of law. That Rubicon should be crossed only on the basis of a case that can be easily explained and shown to people outside of deep-blue Manhattan as a well-known and traditional crime.

When you learn criminal law in law school, you learn the distinction between crimes that are malum in se and malum prohibitum. This is fancy Latin for things that are crimes because they universally recognized as bad acts, and things that are bad because they are against the law. The distinction tends to break down as a legal doctrine, but it is still a helpful way to think about the law. Murder, robbery, rape, fraud — these sorts of things have been banned by the law since Moses and Hammurabi, and in the English common law, many of them were treated as crimes even without the king or Parliament writing down a law against them. Every ordinary citizen knows without asking a lawyer or a policeman that stealing stuff is a crime.

Perjury may not quite be malum in se, but it is a simple and well-known crime, and any legal system that takes the testimony of witnesses needs a rule against lying on the stand. Most of us learn as kids from the first time we see a courtroom scene on TV or in the movies that you can get sent to jail for lying under oath. People get charged with perjury all the time. The decision not to charge Bill Clinton was a very public announcement that he, as the president, was above the law.

Falsifying business records is a very different thing. It is clearly on the malum prohibitum side of the line. It is easy to imagine a society that has no such law. One of the hallmarks of a malum prohibitum crime is that it is written without some of the traditional elements of common-law crimes. In a traditional common-law fraud case, for example, there must be a victim who relied on the lie and suffered damage. The statute intentionally omits these elements.

New York’s false-records law is what we might call a hybrid law: It requires proving a bunch of separately stitched-together elements, some of which are defined in other laws. Bragg, for example, is apparently going to try to rest his case on the theory that Trump was attempting to conceal a violation of the famously arcane and Byzantine federal campaign-finance rules. I doubt that the average New York attorney, let alone the average citizen, could define for you offhand what is and is not against the law under section 175 of the New York Penal Law.

That brings us to the other question: Who was harmed? In a perjury case, that’s easy. Bill Clinton was sued by Paula Jones, a subordinate employee during his tenure as governor of Arkansas, who claimed that he sexually harassed her with a fairly direct and crude pants-dropping proposition. Under the civil-discovery rules, Jones had the right to explore whether Clinton had done similar things to other women serving under him. When asked about Monica Lewinsky, Clinton lied and denied having “sexual relations” with her — after he reviewed an exhibit that explicitly defined “sexual relations” to include “contact with the genitalia” performed to “arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” Jones’s lawsuit was dismissed not long after, but when Clinton’s perjury came to light, he settled the case on appeal for $850,000.

The harm from Clinton’s perjury was straightforward: Jones was entitled to develop truthful, relevant evidence in order to have her day in court. Her lawyers asked a direct question. Clinton could have quibbled with them, but he chose instead to stonewall and conceal the facts.

Here, the theory is that Michael Cohen made hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels to cover up Trump’s affair with her — all of which was entirely legal, however tawdry and dishonest — that Trump wrote checks to Cohen to reimburse him, that those checks falsely classified the payments as legal fees, and that they were accordingly entered as such on the books of the Trump Organization. Even under Section 175.10 of the Penal Law, the courts have still required prosecutors to prove that a false entry was “material” — that is, that it was important to someone who might review those books — and that the defendant had an “intent to defraud,” i.e., that he at least intended there to be a victim.

This is why the bulk of uses of the false-records law have involved insurance frauds, government-benefits frauds, tax evasion, or the like — situations in which the false record is presented to someone else in order to claim money from them. “Intent to defraud,” in the law, typically refers to defrauding someone of money or property. In one 1998 case, a New York court threw out a charge that a call-girl ring falsely classified payments for prostitution as payments for other services (such as a limousine). The prosecution said that this was a fraud on American Express, but American Express wouldn’t actually care what the bill said, so long as it got paid. As the court noted, the real targets of the deception would be the wives of men visiting prostitutes — not someone who was defrauded in a business transaction. The one major case where the false-records law was used against a campaign-finance violation involved a Brooklyn politician who received payments from a lobbyist that exceeded the legal limits under state campaign-finance law. This was money he wasn’t entitled to receive.

Who was harmed by what Trump wrote on his checks, or by what the Trump Organization wrote about the checks in its ledgers? Trump clearly never wanted anybody but Cohen and his accountants to see the checks. The Trump Organization isn’t a public company with innocent shareholders; Trump owns it. The Manhattan DA already abandoned an investigation into Trump defrauding his lenders, because they were big, sophisticated banks who knew who they were lending to and got paid back. The checks were written at a point when any campaign-finance reports covering that period wouldn’t be filed until after the election anyway. There are a couple of possible legal weak links in the case, including the statute of limitations and the question of whether the New York law can properly be read to allow a backdoor to enforcing Federal Election Commission regulations, but the one at the heart of the case is the flimsiness of the theory that these were material false statements aimed at defrauding anybody at all.

It is precisely in cases of such charges under artificially vague and hybrid laws that a prosecutor has maximum discretion to decide how far to stretch the law beyond its ordinary contours onto unprecedented ground. That is where a prosecutor should exercise that discretion with maximum judgment. To speak of that discretion as “the law” is to confuse the rule of law with the rule of lawyers. And it is a spectacular feat of chutzpah to do so in defense of Alvin Bragg, whose tenure as a prosecutor has been defined by his refusal to prosecute whole categories of violations of the law, while publicly pledging to pursue one particular man.

So, when these people talk about who is and isn’t “above the law,” remember: They don’t mean a word of it.

G M

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Re: No One Is Above the Law
« Reply #1674 on: April 04, 2023, 07:41:10 AM »
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/134/214/894/original/a666f0434a7508e7.png



When a Democratic President Was above the Law
By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
April 3, 2023 3:04 PM
NRO

If you told us that perjury should go unpunished because it was ‘just about sex,’ you should sit out the ‘nobody is above the law’ argument.

One of the mantras of Democrats and their media voices in response to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump has been that “no one is above the law.” That’s a fine sentiment, but there are three very big problems with Democrats making this argument: They don’t believe it, they don’t mean the same thing by “law” as the rest of us, and Alvin Bragg is about the worst possible representative for the theory that violations of the law will never be tolerated.



In particular, I never want to hear another word — not another syllable — about how “nobody is above the law” from people who spent years on end telling us that perjury and obstruction of justice by the president should not lead to consequences because it was “just about a blow job.” I never want to hear this from people who professed to be horrified by “lock her up” chants on the theory that one should never call for jailing political opponents even when they have violated specific federal criminal statutes regarding the handling of sensitive information — least of all in defense of a prosecutor who ran for office publicly promising to go after this particular political opponent of his. I never want to hear it from people who said that the vice president could break a federal law without consequence so long as there was “no controlling legal authority” interpreting the law. I certainly do not want to hear this from people who are, even today, arguing that the president can get away with breaking the law and seizing the powers of Congress to give away half a trillion dollars of our money to his supporters so long as he can argue that nobody has standing to sue him in federal court.

Consider a sampling of statements by Democrats on the Trump indictment:


• Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois: “No one is above the law — not even a former president.”


• Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts: “No one is above the law, not even a former president of the United States.”

• Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona: “We’re a country of laws and nobody’s above the law.”

• Ex-Democrat Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona: “Politicians aren’t above the law.”

• Senator Mark Warner of Virginia: “In the United States nobody is above the law, especially not the leaders who have been entrusted with the privilege and responsibility of serving the American people.”

• Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.” (Forget the part about the defendant having to prove innocence, she’s rolling.)


• Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California: “No one is above the law.”

• Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts: “Nobody is above the law.”

• Congressman Dan Goldman of New York: “Donald Trump has demonstrated his belief that he is above the law, and nobody is above the law.”

• Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado: “Former President Trump’s indictment reminds us that no one is above the law and that we are all afforded due process and equal protection under the law.”

• Congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado: “No one is above the law in this country. Not even former presidents!”

• Congressman Chuy Garcia of Illinois: “Nobody is above the law.”

• Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas cited the indictment as “evidence that no one is above the law, even the president of the United States.”

I could go on, but you get the idea. If a memo didn’t literally go out, it may as well have.


This is not how Democrats talk about the law when one of their own is in the crosshairs. The most obvious and glaring parallel is Bill Clinton’s perjury. At the time, the all-but-uniform argument among Democrats was that the Clinton impeachment was “just about sex,” as if covering up a sexual affair is somehow a defense to breaking the law. On the simplest charge against Clinton, perjury in his civil deposition, there really was no question that Clinton lied under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He did so again in the grand jury. And yet, we were told that he should be neither prosecuted nor impeached, and that even investigating him for this was a terrible affront because he was the president.

Democrats were united in treating Clinton as being above the law against perjury, even though federal judges had previously been removed from office for committing perjury and filing false documents such as income-tax returns. Two hundred of the 205 House Democrats voted against impeachment. Every single Democrat in the Senate — every last one — voted for acquittal on all charges. That includes six Senate Democrats who are still there (Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray, Dianne Feinstein, Jack Reed, and Ron Wyden); it includes prominent Democrats who were in the House then, including Pelosi, Neal, Lee, Schumer (who voted against impeachment before joining the Senate and voting for acquittal), and Ed Markey; and it includes Joe Biden.

In his closing speech, Durbin argued that senators should focus on the partisan motives of Republicans bringing the charges: “When I listen to Paul Sarbanes recount the painstaking efforts to avoid partisanship during the impeachment hearing on President Nixon, it is a stark contrast to the committee process which voted these articles of impeachment against President Clinton. . . . The American people clearly believe that the process which brings him before us in this trial was too partisan, too unfair, too suspect.”


Biden literally argued that presidents should be judged by different standards:

We have heard it argued repeatedly that the Constitution does not create different standards for judges and the President. But that argument fails to comprehend the organizing principle of our constitutional system — the separation of powers. The framers divided the power of the Federal Government into three branches in order to safeguard liberty. This innovation — the envy of every Nation on earth — can only serve its fundamental purpose if each branch remains strong and independent of the others.

We needed a President who was independent enough to spearhead and sign the Civil Rights Act. We needed a President who was independent enough to lead the Nation and the world in the Persian gulf war. We still need an independent President.

The constitutional scholarship overwhelmingly recognizes that the fundamental structural commitment to separation of powers requires us to view the President as different than a Federal judge.

Consider our power to discipline and even expel an individual Senator. In such a case, we do not remove the head of a separate branch and so do not threaten the constitutional balance of powers. To remove a President is to decapitate another branch and to undermine the independence necessary for it to fulfill its constitutional role.

Only a President is chosen by the people in a national election. No Senator, no Representative can make this claim. To remove a duly elected President clashes with democratic principles in a way that simply has no constitutional parallel. By contrast, there is nothing antidemocratic in the Senate removing a judge who was appointed and not elected by the people. [Emphasis added.]

In remarks at the National Press Club in November 1998, Biden warned that enforcing the law against a president without scrupulous fairness could undermine public confidence:

The American people have a greater right than all of you. They have a greater right than the Congress, they have a greater right in the press as an institution, they have a greater right than the Senate. They have a greater right than any other single institution to make their own judgment. And they have made that judgment. And when we are going to take away. . . . We better be darn sure . . . that we can convince them that we’re doing it on the merits, as called for by the law and the Constitution and doing it fairly, for if we do not, we will further undermine the confidence in the American people in a democratic system that we have, and that’s all it runs on. The moment we lose the confidence of the American people that the system meets their needs is the day we lose our legitimacy.

He also argued that Kenneth Starr had gone too far in insisting that the law must be vindicated:

The grand jury system has been around for hundreds of years. . . . No one has ever pushed it to the limits that this man has. And what I worry about is what [a legal scholar] said to me. . . . He said Joe, remember, everything that is constitutionally permissible, is not necessarily wise, and everything, every exercise of power by a single branch of government is not necessarily prudent. No one in my view has pushed the envelope as far as this man has. And I think that is — I won’t say dangerous — I think that’s imprudent.

Clinton, in the end, was not removed from office. He was not prosecuted. The only legal consequence he faced was a brief suspension of his law license in Arkansas. He was welcomed back to speak at the Democratic convention in 2012, and there was nary a peep at returning him to the White House when his wife and vocal defender was the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2016. In the years since, even as progressives have developed post hoc qualms about Clinton’s predatory sexual behavior, scarcely any Democrat or any liberal or progressive commentator has argued that Clinton should have been prosecuted. When Kenneth Starr died in September 2022, there were no rethinkings or apologies for the period in which, as the Associated Press obituary accurately put it, “The White House pilloried Starr as a right-wing fanatic doing the bidding of Republicans bent on destroying the president.” It remains the position of most Democrats to this day that a federal prosecutor had no business investigating the president for a flagrant violation of an unambiguous federal criminal law.

If anything, Starr’s case against Clinton was much stronger than Bragg’s case against Trump. I will delve back into the precise details of New York’s false-business-records law when we see the indictment, but there are two fundamental and related differences between the law against perjury and the law against false business records, and they boil down to the questions of clear notice of the law and who exactly was harmed.

First, notice and clarity. I do not argue that former presidents should be above the law. They have no special immunity from prosecution. But Biden had a point in 1998-99: Presidents occupy a unique role in our system, which makes them very tempting targets for creative prosecutors, and which could easily touch off a cycle of partisan retribution. And our laws have expanded in complexity and vagueness in all manner of ways that give prosecutors too much discretion in deciding whom to investigate and charge. What should be true of every American citizen should be particularly true in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president:

If Trump — before, during, or after his presidency — unambiguously broke a clear law for which an ordinary person would be prosecuted, such as shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, [the Manhattan district attorney] would have a duty to prosecute him. But trumped-up charges against former leaders are a familiar sight in banana republics, one that America has thus far avoided. Mounting a prosecution against a former president — especially a former president who was investigated extensively in office without the bringing of charges by the self-styled “Resistance” — is a grave step for the nation and its confidence in the rule of law. That Rubicon should be crossed only on the basis of a case that can be easily explained and shown to people outside of deep-blue Manhattan as a well-known and traditional crime.

When you learn criminal law in law school, you learn the distinction between crimes that are malum in se and malum prohibitum. This is fancy Latin for things that are crimes because they universally recognized as bad acts, and things that are bad because they are against the law. The distinction tends to break down as a legal doctrine, but it is still a helpful way to think about the law. Murder, robbery, rape, fraud — these sorts of things have been banned by the law since Moses and Hammurabi, and in the English common law, many of them were treated as crimes even without the king or Parliament writing down a law against them. Every ordinary citizen knows without asking a lawyer or a policeman that stealing stuff is a crime.

Perjury may not quite be malum in se, but it is a simple and well-known crime, and any legal system that takes the testimony of witnesses needs a rule against lying on the stand. Most of us learn as kids from the first time we see a courtroom scene on TV or in the movies that you can get sent to jail for lying under oath. People get charged with perjury all the time. The decision not to charge Bill Clinton was a very public announcement that he, as the president, was above the law.

Falsifying business records is a very different thing. It is clearly on the malum prohibitum side of the line. It is easy to imagine a society that has no such law. One of the hallmarks of a malum prohibitum crime is that it is written without some of the traditional elements of common-law crimes. In a traditional common-law fraud case, for example, there must be a victim who relied on the lie and suffered damage. The statute intentionally omits these elements.

New York’s false-records law is what we might call a hybrid law: It requires proving a bunch of separately stitched-together elements, some of which are defined in other laws. Bragg, for example, is apparently going to try to rest his case on the theory that Trump was attempting to conceal a violation of the famously arcane and Byzantine federal campaign-finance rules. I doubt that the average New York attorney, let alone the average citizen, could define for you offhand what is and is not against the law under section 175 of the New York Penal Law.

That brings us to the other question: Who was harmed? In a perjury case, that’s easy. Bill Clinton was sued by Paula Jones, a subordinate employee during his tenure as governor of Arkansas, who claimed that he sexually harassed her with a fairly direct and crude pants-dropping proposition. Under the civil-discovery rules, Jones had the right to explore whether Clinton had done similar things to other women serving under him. When asked about Monica Lewinsky, Clinton lied and denied having “sexual relations” with her — after he reviewed an exhibit that explicitly defined “sexual relations” to include “contact with the genitalia” performed to “arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” Jones’s lawsuit was dismissed not long after, but when Clinton’s perjury came to light, he settled the case on appeal for $850,000.

The harm from Clinton’s perjury was straightforward: Jones was entitled to develop truthful, relevant evidence in order to have her day in court. Her lawyers asked a direct question. Clinton could have quibbled with them, but he chose instead to stonewall and conceal the facts.

Here, the theory is that Michael Cohen made hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels to cover up Trump’s affair with her — all of which was entirely legal, however tawdry and dishonest — that Trump wrote checks to Cohen to reimburse him, that those checks falsely classified the payments as legal fees, and that they were accordingly entered as such on the books of the Trump Organization. Even under Section 175.10 of the Penal Law, the courts have still required prosecutors to prove that a false entry was “material” — that is, that it was important to someone who might review those books — and that the defendant had an “intent to defraud,” i.e., that he at least intended there to be a victim.

This is why the bulk of uses of the false-records law have involved insurance frauds, government-benefits frauds, tax evasion, or the like — situations in which the false record is presented to someone else in order to claim money from them. “Intent to defraud,” in the law, typically refers to defrauding someone of money or property. In one 1998 case, a New York court threw out a charge that a call-girl ring falsely classified payments for prostitution as payments for other services (such as a limousine). The prosecution said that this was a fraud on American Express, but American Express wouldn’t actually care what the bill said, so long as it got paid. As the court noted, the real targets of the deception would be the wives of men visiting prostitutes — not someone who was defrauded in a business transaction. The one major case where the false-records law was used against a campaign-finance violation involved a Brooklyn politician who received payments from a lobbyist that exceeded the legal limits under state campaign-finance law. This was money he wasn’t entitled to receive.

Who was harmed by what Trump wrote on his checks, or by what the Trump Organization wrote about the checks in its ledgers? Trump clearly never wanted anybody but Cohen and his accountants to see the checks. The Trump Organization isn’t a public company with innocent shareholders; Trump owns it. The Manhattan DA already abandoned an investigation into Trump defrauding his lenders, because they were big, sophisticated banks who knew who they were lending to and got paid back. The checks were written at a point when any campaign-finance reports covering that period wouldn’t be filed until after the election anyway. There are a couple of possible legal weak links in the case, including the statute of limitations and the question of whether the New York law can properly be read to allow a backdoor to enforcing Federal Election Commission regulations, but the one at the heart of the case is the flimsiness of the theory that these were material false statements aimed at defrauding anybody at all.

It is precisely in cases of such charges under artificially vague and hybrid laws that a prosecutor has maximum discretion to decide how far to stretch the law beyond its ordinary contours onto unprecedented ground. That is where a prosecutor should exercise that discretion with maximum judgment. To speak of that discretion as “the law” is to confuse the rule of law with the rule of lawyers. And it is a spectacular feat of chutzpah to do so in defense of Alvin Bragg, whose tenure as a prosecutor has been defined by his refusal to prosecute whole categories of violations of the law, while publicly pledging to pursue one particular man.

So, when these people talk about who is and isn’t “above the law,” remember: They don’t mean a word of it.


G M

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1678 on: April 08, 2023, 03:52:45 PM »
anyone else notice that suddenly after some rich tech guy gets murdered on the streets of SF , NOW we are hearing more and more about how SF has declined

not mentioned on MSM until it was one of their own tech elites....

they think they are immune because they were badges with letter D on their lapels

they better think again ... :wink:

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1682 on: April 16, 2023, 09:00:32 AM »
Very good to see this footage escaping from the Memory Hole!

GM, can you go to the source material and post URLs of it directly?  I want to save it so as to protect if from being deleted again by the Goolag.

https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63661

https://rumble.com/v2en5uk-january-6-care-package.html

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1683 on: April 16, 2023, 09:43:09 AM »
Can one of us download this footage before it is disappeared please?

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1684 on: April 16, 2023, 09:47:46 AM »
Can one of us download this footage before it is disappeared please?

Why? What is the point? So someone can smuggle it to Andrew McCarthy someday and the scales will fall from his eyes?

 :roll:

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1685 on: April 16, 2023, 09:50:59 AM »
So that we can fight the Big Lies of the Deep State!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1686 on: April 16, 2023, 09:56:00 AM »
So that we can fight the Big Lies of the Deep State!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How many of your lefty friends have seen the massive evidence of the J6 FEDsurrection? Did they care?

Has noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy avoided seeing it?

Bezmenov warned us.

You aren't voting your way out of this.

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1687 on: April 16, 2023, 08:14:29 PM »
Nonetheless, would you please download it for future reference?

Some of us have not given up.

ccp

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Judge to Bragg
« Reply #1688 on: April 20, 2023, 01:49:17 AM »

G M

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I wonder if noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy will comment on this...
« Reply #1689 on: April 20, 2023, 07:37:03 AM »


Crafty_Dog

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Mike Morell and Anthony Blinken and the Letter of the 51
« Reply #1691 on: April 22, 2023, 11:19:44 AM »
A trip down memory lane about Mike Morell on our forum:

https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?action=search2

Crafty_Dog

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Deep State Andy on Mike Morell
« Reply #1692 on: April 22, 2023, 02:15:11 PM »
The Obama-Era Hatchet Man at the Center of Biden’s 2020 Campaign Deception

Left: President Joe Biden holds a meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., June 1, 2022. Right: Former CIA acting director Michael Morell speaks during a forum on election security in Washington, D.C., October 30, 2019. (Jonathan Ernst, Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
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By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
April 22, 2023 6:30 AM
Gee, what a surprise to find Mike Morell deeply involved in Biden’s cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
So how shocked, shocked should we be that, when the Biden campaign needed to call in a pro in the dark art of politicizing intelligence, it turned to none other than former CIA muckety-muck Michael Morell? You may remember him as the man behind the infamous Benghazi talking points . . . about which he has been just as honest as he is now in Deep State–splaining to us that his effort to help Joe Biden slough off Hunter’s scandalous laptop as Russian disinformation was not — really not, cross-his-heart — a scam to frame the laptop as Russian disinformation.



As our Ari Blaff reports, Morell has fessed up to the House Judiciary Committee that, in the weeks just before the 2020 presidential election, he and his pal Antony Blinken (then a top Biden campaign adviser, now the secretary of state) cooked up the shameful letter signed by 51 partisan Democrats — I mean, er, scrupulously nonpartisan former intelligence and national-security officials. That letter, which branded the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, is itself an exquisite piece of disinformation, based on exactly zero, zip, nada evidence, and trading exclusively on the credentials of the former officials.

In other words, this is strictly a case of Washington insiders’ cashing in, for partisan gain, on the perception of credibility that results from having had privileged access to national-defense secrets. Worse, they issued their deceptive letter in the teeth of incontestable indicia of the Hunter laptop’s authenticity — evidence so overwhelming that even alumni of our spotty $90 billion per annum intelligence community should have figured it out.


As illustrated by Steve Hayes’s excellent review of Morell’s revisionist memoir, he and his admirers in the media–Democrat complex have energetically labored to memory-hole his doctoring of the talking points generated by the Obama administration following the jihadist massacre of U.S. personnel in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. As Obama officials well knew, the operation in Libya that night, on the eleventh anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 atrocities, was a coordinated terrorist attack. But because it occurred less than two months before Election Day, with Obama campaigning for reelection on the fiction that he had “decimated” al-Qaeda, the unvarnished truth would not do. Thus did Obama officials strain to depict the massacre as triggered by protests run amok in reaction to an anti-Muslim video.

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The CIA knew right away that jihadists had attacked the compound. This patent fact was immediately reported to Washington, including to the State Department. Indeed, it was known that jihadists were conducting surveillance of the American compounds even before the attacks. The later indictment of Ahmed Katallah made the terrorism instigation clear (even though, of course, the Obama Justice Department made no mention of al-Qaeda in the charging document).


In the days after the massacre, the Obama White House wanted the role of terrorism erased. To report what had happened forthrightly would not only have undermined the president’s reelection-campaign messaging. It would also have underscored the reckless failures to secure the American compounds. That’s what made them such an inviting target for jihadists who, on that fateful night, murdered U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, State Department official Sean Smith, and two government-security contractors and former Navy SEAL officers, Glen Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods.

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Biden Campaign Played Active Role in Suppressing Hunter Biden Laptop Story, Congressional Testimony Reveals
Of Course There Has Been Biden Administration Political Interference in the Biden Family Criminal Investigation
Hunter Biden Grand Jury Witness Asked to Identify ‘Big Guy’ in Chinese Equity Deal
Consequently, as Obama adviser Ben Rhodes put it in outlining the administration’s messaging “goals,” officials needed “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.” Gregory Hicks, the State Department official who was briefing his superiors from Libya during and after the attack, later testified that the video was a “non-event” in Benghazi. Yet, after consulting with President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put out a statement blaming the video for the attack, despite privately informing her daughter and the Libyan president that the attack appeared to have been carried out by Ansar al-Sharia, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

Talking points about the attack, to be shared with Congress and ultimately the public, were prepared by intelligence officials in coordination with the White House, the State Department, the FBI, and other relevant agencies. The originally drafted talking points mentioned attacks that had been conducted by Islamic militants with ties to al-Qaeda, including Ansar al-Sharia. The talking points were then edited and, as Hayes recounts:

In every case, the changes made by administration and intelligence officials to the Benghazi talking points originated by the CIA had the effect of downplaying the significance of the attacks—cutting “Islamic,” replacing “attacks” with “demonstrations,” removing “with ties to al Qaeda,” excising mention of the involvement of Ansar al Sharia.

The talking points became a script for Susan Rice, the Obama White House adviser — and now Biden White House adviser — who notoriously made the Sunday talk-show rounds to sell the administration’s claim that the video had ignited the attack.

When it eventually emerged that the intelligence had been politicized to obscure the role of terrorists and create the misimpression of a “spontaneous” uprising, members of Congress pressed intelligence agencies for answers. At a House Intelligence Committee hearing in mid November 2012, Morell testified along with Obama’s national-intelligence director, James Clapper, and other top intelligence officials. The committee asked Clapper who was responsible for the talking points. As Clapper replied that he had no idea, Morell — who had been directly responsible — sat mum.

Later, as Obama mulled nominating Rice to replace Clinton as secretary of state but worried that her disastrous post-Benghazi Sunday show rounds would prevent her confirmation, the White House persuaded the ever-accommodating Morell to accompany her to Capitol Hill meetings with key senators. Morell knew Rice’s statements in the media appearances had been misleading, but agreed to tag along when she met with three Republicans who had closely followed Benghazi developments — John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte. Pressed about the editing of the talking points, Morell falsely told the senators that the FBI had been the culprit. Risibly, he elaborated about how the bureau had supposedly raised concerns that allusions to al-Qaeda could compromise its criminal investigation.


Senator Graham proceeded to call FBI headquarters, and later recalled that “they went ballistic” over Morell’s allegation. Whereupon Morell changed his tune, suddenly remembering that, well, actually, his CIA had made the changes to the talking points. Eventually, called to testify under oath, he further, shall we say, refined this account, conceding that he’d personally made significant changes.

I know this will stun you, too: Originally, Morell insisted that the talking points were developed by intelligence officials and shared with the White House only for its “awareness,” and certainly not to coordinate a message about the events in Benghazi. Later, when the administration was forced to release emails that showed close coordination, Morell admitted that, well, there just might have been some coordination afoot.

Remarkably, in putting together the letter from the 51 former officials, Morell has told House investigators that his motive was twofold: “One intent was to share our concern with the American people that the Russians were playing on this issue; and, two, it was [to] help Vice President Biden.”


Good ol’ Mike Morell, always with the security of the American people in the front of his mind. In point of fact, while the Russians had nothing to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop, the data from the laptop elucidated the tight connection between the Biden family and America’s most challenging adversary, the Chinese Communist Party. The latter’s operatives, with their close ties to Xi Jinping and his regime, have poured millions of dollars into the Biden family coffers, and the laptop contents corroborate that the point of this operation was to buy the elder Biden’s influence.

But why would that be of any concern to a selflessly dedicated, scrupulously nonpartisan intelligence pro, right?

Editor’s Note: This article has been emended since its original posting to correct the spelling of Ben Rhodes’s last name.


ccp

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Elizabeth Holmes may not go to jail
« Reply #1694 on: April 27, 2023, 09:23:23 AM »
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/26/no-prison-yet-for-elizabeth-holmes-following-last-ditch-appeal.html

Justice continues to sink to new lows
puts thousands of human beings lives at risk knowingly doing inaccurate testing

Rule of Law

"rule of lawyers"


G M

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Re: Elizabeth Holmes may not go to jail
« Reply #1695 on: April 27, 2023, 09:29:47 AM »
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/26/no-prison-yet-for-elizabeth-holmes-following-last-ditch-appeal.html

Justice continues to sink to new lows
puts thousands of human beings lives at risk knowingly doing inaccurate testing

Rule of Law

"rule of lawyers"

Good line!

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1696 on: April 27, 2023, 12:31:46 PM »
Stealing that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ccp

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1697 on: April 27, 2023, 01:32:57 PM »
would make a great front for  T shirts

but would probably have some DA go after the makers
« Last Edit: April 27, 2023, 02:07:11 PM by ccp »

ccp

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Jonathan Turley : Biden's "made men"
« Reply #1698 on: April 28, 2023, 08:02:44 AM »
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3963743-antony-blinken-and-the-made-men-of-the-biden-administration/

John McCain was right about this :  Blinken is no good and dangerous:

https://nypost.com/2021/08/19/mccains-2014-attack-on-tony-blinken-reemerges-amid-afghan-exit-chaos/

And now we witness the total chaos during his being SoS all around the world with enemies and former allies

he should be jailed along with Myorkas Sullivan and Biden

G M

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Re: Jonathan Turley : Biden's "made men"
« Reply #1699 on: April 28, 2023, 09:16:57 AM »
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3963743-antony-blinken-and-the-made-men-of-the-biden-administration/

John McCain was right about this :  Blinken is no good and dangerous:

https://nypost.com/2021/08/19/mccains-2014-attack-on-tony-blinken-reemerges-amid-afghan-exit-chaos/

And now we witness the total chaos during his being SoS all around the world with enemies and former allies

he should be jailed along with Myorkas Sullivan and Biden

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/on-war-and-wars/

You aren’t voting your way out of this.