Do Not Forget — sometimes the narrator is unreliable

If a deeply damaged person, a huckster or a psychopath, tells you a story, from their point of view and in a way that seems to make perfect sense, don’t forget Boof Kavanaugh’s mother’s sound advice for judges:  what comports with common sense, what sets off your sniff detector, what does the storyteller have to gain, and lose, by telling the story the way he told it?

If you steal boxes of classified documents, some of which are eventually seized in a legal search by the FBI, proving that you have been lying in your negotiations with DOJ and that your lawyers swore, incorrectly/falsely, months earlier, that everything had been returned, although they prevented agents at that time from checking.   Not a promising scenario in court — unless you change the story to one that makes more sense to your needs.  

Here’s one: the FBI is lying, because of personal and political animus, another smelly, baseless partisan witch hunt, these people are vicious monsters who illegally stole MY stuff and won’t give it back.  Protecting my good name means much more than a bunch of spies being killed, or nuclear secrets of the US or our allies being sold, and the irreparable harm to ME is the most terrible thing ever, nobody’s ever seen harm like that before.

Or, in the case of a person no longer speaking to you:  YOU stopped speaking to me when you deliberately ended our friendship for no reason, you vicious, relentless fuck.

Take the sniff test on each of these scenarios.  Blow your nose.  Smell something you like.  Forget about it, but, of course, do not forget that many times when we are told a dodgy story, the narrator is unreliable.

Big Lie equals Big Grift

The most successful business venture Donald Trump has ever launched, with a 500% return on investment [1], that is, investing the initial money obtained in the grift and having it grow five fold, was monetizing the infuriating white lie that a powerful bipartisan cabal of pedophile cannibals and RINOs illegally deprived him of rightful reelection in 2020.

We now know that the DOJ is investigating this scam. 40 key players in the grift have recently been subpoenaed, a few have had phones seized. The DOJ is apparently not fooling around.

But what should not be overlooked is that F POTUS has proved that his genius is in mass marketing. He should be given kudos for that, along with his criminal indictment.

Greg Sargent writing in today’s Washington Post:

But the Times also reports this:
For months, associates of Mr. Trump have received subpoenas related to other aspects of the investigations into his efforts to cling to power. But in a new line of inquiry, some of the latest subpoenas focus on the activities of the Save America political action committee, the main political fund-raising conduit for Mr. Trump since he left office.
The Associated Press adds more, reporting that subpoenas have been issued to seek “information about the political action committee’s fundraising practices.”
This is of interest because the Save America PAC’s “fundraising practices” seem to represent the moment when the “big lie” monetized itself into the “big grift” in spectacular fashion.

https://wapo.st/3U9LG8k

[1] I base this profit margin on the uncontradicted statement by Eric Swalwell, at F POTUS’s second impeachment trial, that the Trump campaign spent $50 million dollars on advertising the lie that the election had been stolen. That 50 million investment resulted in an estimated 250 million fund. Not bad, Trumpie!

Propaganda 101

You take a political disaster for your side — say your man has illegally taken classified documents, some very sensitive, after leaving the White House, and they caught him lying about it, they have the actual evidence.   Say he also has hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due.  Say he also has a lifelong history of being transactional, doing anything to profit himself at the expense of suckers.   Somebody ratted to the FBI on him that he hadn’t returned all the classified documents his lawyers swore he turned over a month after the subpoena for the remainder of the documents.  Suppose empty top secret document folders were seized in a legal search, along with a hundred other unreturned classified documents.  The FBI search and seizure confirmed the probable cause that he had retained the illegally taken material.

Here’s what you do.  1) put the shoe on the other foot — why did the FBI take personal, private stuff that was mixed in with the classified documents?   That’s his stuff — why did the FBI seize HIS STUFF?   Explain that, FBI! DOJ!

2) the claims his lawyers came up with in federal court have never been litigated before, so you see, there are many complex legal issues that a team of genius lawyers has raised for the first time that will take a long time to analyze, though Judge Cannon did a brilliant job, under great time pressure.  Legally complex, since never litigated, you see?

3) the judge is only trying to provide transparecy, which is what the nation wants

4) The FBI taint team may have been tainted, because this is a partisan DOJ, unlike Bill Barr’s scrupulous DOJ

I only made it through the first two minutes, but I’m sure there are many more excellent examples of counterfactual “opinion” propaganda spread with an absolute straight face and an authoritative tone.  

The biggest question is what documents does F POTUS still have at Ivana’s private cemetery at Bedminster, at his Tower on Fifth Avenue, and who has paid big bucks, very big bucks, for some of the most valuable top secret intelligence and military information in the world?

Or, as Fox might put it, what right does the FBI have to take his personal collection of Playboy magazines just because there might have been a couple of empty classified document folders in there?

The real issue, aside from the DOJ’s suspicious lack of transparency, is why is the DOJ resisting a fair Special Master and meanwhile giving him the stuff they stole from him back and why are all these radical Left lawyers prejudging a case so complicated only the Supreme Court is really fit to rule on it? That’s why we need Special Master John Durham.

The appeal of a fascist leader

Members of the angry, frightened mass that become supporters of facist leaders love a totally “in control” guy who shows complete contempt for all of his detractors, and deadly scorn for his enemies. They love that he never backs down, takes no shit and gets terrible, public revenge against anyone who crosses him. They relate to being able to rip off a hated enemy’s head and shit down his neck.

The crowd that becomes followers of a fascist have always been with us, throughout history. They worship what they think of as strength and they admire a person who can take what they want, who is subject to no law but his will. They are, by personality and breeding, defiant authoritarians, filled with contempt for “weakness” and “perversion,” obedient only to the leader’s will. The most violent among them are members of the lynch mob, murderously enraged haters.

A charismatic fascist leader convinces the desperate crowd that he’s one of them. He may be very wealthy, obscenely privileged, enormously powerful, but in his heart, they know in their hearts, he’s one of them. He’s the man! He’s completely relatable, he’s just like us! As F POTUS, channeling Everyman, told the lackey he was about to send an angry mob to lynch “but wouldn’t it be cool to actually have that power?

The tragedy, of course, is that each of these people who passionately believe in their violent leader, who faithfully hate whoever the leader hates, also loves their family and friends, and many would run into traffic, or dive into a river, to save a toddler, any toddler of any kind, who found herself in deadly peril.

Loose Cannon

The brilliant, well-informed, cheerful Alison Gill has several very popular podcasts. I listen to the Daily Beans everyday, as essential as Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, in my opinion. Allison cuts to the chase, and is never afraid to call b*******, or use the word bullshit, or sometimes fucking bullshit (the Daily Beans is drily billed as “news with swearing”).

Allison does another podcast weekly, Cleanup on Aisle 45, with attorney Andrew Torrez. Torrez does not f****** swear, but he’s very fucking articulate and cut from the same cloth as Allison Gill. They recently analyzed lifetime federal judge Aileen Cannon’s ballsy but batshit crazy decision in Trump v Deep State Cucks. Allison called the episode “Loose Cannon”. You can hear the whole discussion at the link below, it’s fantastic.

https://megaphone.link/SHVA3925994146

Federalist Society stalwart Aileen Cannon

I’ll give you the gist of it from notes I took while relistening just now.

Cannon argues in her ruling that even though the Trump defense team did not assert any grounds for the court’s jurisdiction or submit any evidence or sworn statements by anybody, she was asserting equitable jurisdiction over this oddly amateurish, one-off motion, brought specifically to her courtroom in Fort Pierce. Without jurisdiction a judge may not hear a case.

Equitable jurisdiction can only be found where there is some kind of inequity or unfairness that the law cannot otherwise address. The argument for equitable jurisdiction was not made by Trump’s lawyers, Cannon found it based solely on attorney argument at the hearing. This reticence to say anything under oath by lead attorney Jim Trusty, Torrez pointed out, was a clever move (in a corrupt judge’s courtroom) by F POTUS’s lawyers. Since attorney argument during hearings is not subject to the penalties of perjury (as an untruthful sworn court filing would be, and motions for equitable relief always depend on convincing sworn statements.) they left themselves free to throw things against the wall and see what the judge would make stick.

Cannon (who refused amicus briefs from conservatives opposing F POTUS’s motion, unheard of behavior from a judge) makes arguments in her ruling that Trump’s lawyers never raised in their idiosyncratic, frivolous filing. She applies the four Richey factors from a 1975 case where Mr. and Mrs. Richey sued the IRS to get back papers taken in a search. The appeals court in that case sets out what a moving party must show to get equitable relief in federal court in a pre-indictment case against the government.

The first and most important factor the moving party (movant) must show is that the government “displayed a callous disregard for the movant’s constitutional rights” (such as by deliberately not obtaining a legal search warrant prior to the search). Cannon admits this was not the case in the legal FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.

But she then decided that factor number two weighed heavily in F POTUS’s favor, that he had a compelling interest in and need for the personal property seized.

Kind of counterfactual when it comes to all of the executive branch documents he was illegally hoarding. It was, of course, not his property.

The third factor is a showing of irreparable injury to the moving party, something else Trump’s lawyers did not allege in their dodgy papers. Allison reads some testimony from his lawyer Jim Trusty, a long time criminal defense attorney from a white shoe Washington DC boutique white collar criminal defense law firm, in response to this question from Cannon. Trusty mumbles and mutters and eventually comes up with a vague, and irrelevant, claim of “institutional harm”. Cannon takes this and runs with it, the harm is to Donald Trump’s reputation and good name, presumably as an honest man, great party leader, past and future president and a lucrative brand.

Lawyers for George W. Bush argued a better, though also asinine, irreparable harm to their client in Bush v Gore — if the recount wasn’t stopped and all the Florida votes were counted their client would suffer the irreparable injury of losing the 2000 presidential election. If you have unethical members of your legal fraternity deciding the case, you have a shot at that kind of bullshit flying. It worked like yer proverbial charm for Dubya and Cheney, with conflicted but unrecused Scalia and Thomas casting the deciding votes in the 5-4 one off ruling.

The fourth factor is whether or not there’s an adequate remedy at law for the grievance, like a regular appeal. In this case, ordinarily Trump would be able to raise Fourth Amendment defenses about the government search only once he was a defendant in a criminal trial. Here judge Cannon is allowing Donald Trump to delay the investigation of the evidence of a likely crime (and how many of these documents he’s already sold to Saudis, his friend in Moscow, and all the highest bidders all around the world is inpossible to guess) as he did in every previous investigation, baseless witch hunts all. He is, as we all know, a serial and habitual obstructer of justice. So Judge Cannon just tried to help him out here a little bit. And who could blame her?

In weighing the equitable interests on both sides, Cannon decided that F POTUS’s squishy irreparable reputational injury claim (made by her in the absence of any irreparable injury asserted by the guy’s experienced white shoe lawyer) outweighed the two interests of the executive branch argued by the DOJ 1)– that the seized papers are needed to conduct an ongoing criminal investigation, and, 2) that they are needed for an urgent National Security harm/threat assessment.

Cannon dismissed the DOJ’s argument that the papers have all already been reviewed by a taint team and that the few attorney/client and personal ones have already been set aside and would never be seen by investigators. She noted in her ruling that the FBI and DOJ are “not always perceived to be impartial” (deep state cucks) and that there is a “perception” that they are both biased against fucking F POTUS.

This argument has the same stink as Lyin’ Ted Cruz’s sneered January 5th claims, citing the perceptions of millions who honestly believed in the rigged, stolen election as the reason that an independent committee had to be appointed to investigate the voter fraud that could not be proved in dozens of federal lawsuits. The perception you understand, the perception, you fucking fuck!

For good measure Cannon also opined that the movant was likely to succeed on the merits of the case — that the goverment illegally took his property. The likelihood of sucess is a heavy factor in the granting of injunctive relief (a legal time out to avoid irreparable harm), even if manifestly, ridiculously untrue in this case (he’d have to prove he was the actual owner of all those government documents owned by the executive branch) but good enough for a Federalist Society lifetime appointee just showing loyalty and gratitude to her unblemished benefactor. Love you, boss!

source: ballotpedia.org

How a functioning democratic government functions

If you believe in a democratic society, one where the government works for the people who elected it, not the people who paid to rig it, but the people who consented to be governed by it and cast their votes, you take the job of governing more seriously then a minority party that insists on its right to rule everything.

If your goal is to destroy the administrative state, when you come to power you leave entire agencies defunded and understaffed, run by idiot loyalists, the stupidest in-laws of your most idiotic donor hangers-on get jobs running vast bureaucracies they have no experience with. It’s like those 25-year-old preppy assholes Dubya and Cheney put in charge of Iraq after they destroyed the civil society of Iraq. If your goal is to prove that government is the enemy, it’s very easy to make the government you control a despicable fucking enemy.

Take the IRS for example. For the tax year of 2016 I was told by my accountant that I owed zero tax but that I still technically had to file. A few years later I was forced to pay about $2,500 including two large fines of about $400 each, plus interest that was constantly being compounded. The accountant explained later that when the IRS calculates your tax they are not obliged to give you the standard deduction, and suddenly you owe some tax on an inflated income, which is then subject to penalties and interest.

My long calls to the IRS were unable to resolve this, in part, I learned after an eternity on hold and then on the phone and then on hold again, because the matter had been turned over to a private third party collection company, and, I was told, the IRS no longer had my fucking file. They gave me an 800 number for this private third party collection outfit, I repeated the number back to make sure I had it written down correctly, as was my habit during the years I worked as a lawyer. I called the number for the collection agency. It was a recording at a used car lot. Then I got a bill with another $400 fine on top of it and I finally went online fucking paid $2,500 more than I owed just to be done with these evil toxic incompetent assholes. There was of course no appeals process available.

Then there is a functioning government, where the IRS has its budget restored and comptent administrators in charge. I get a bill supposedly for hundreds in penalties unpaid in a previous year, I think it was 2017. The IRS waited a few years to send me any notice of this so-called debt, all penalties and interest, the tax had been paid in full. I was slow to pay the goddamn thing. In my recent mail I had a check from the IRS, it was a refund from 2019. The check was for $23. I thought that was pretty goddamned paltry, then I opened another letter from the IRS which told me that $443 owed had been deducted from my refund.

How much simpler, more efficient, sensible and humane is that? That’s how the government is supposed to work in a goddamned democracy, you don’t farm things out to fucking corrupt for-profit assholes to do the job badly and more expensively than the government which is designed to do these exact kinds of administrative jobs.

Vote Democrat. These Nazis are not a political party in a democracy anymore. They are, quite distinctly, Nazis. Don’t forget the Nazis didn’t start mass murdering until many years in. They first had to establish a fascist state that would make it possible. Don’t vote for Nazis, ever.