What never gets old is a high-minded party taking the high road in a fight with a psychopathic enemy.   While the high-minded party cites respect for precedents, norms and common decency, the low-minded party, unhampered by any thought of fairness in a fight to the death, smiles as it straps on a switchblade-toed iron boot for below the belt kicking.

The meaning of Make of America Great Again, year 2000 model, while the final ruling in Bush v. Gore was pending:

The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said today that she was working at a conservative research group gathering resumes for appointments in a possible Bush administration but that she saw no conflict between her job and her husband’s deliberations on a case that could decide the presidency.

The comments from the justice’s wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, a former Republican Congressional aide, came as a federal judge in Nashville said Justice Thomas faced a serious conflict of interest as a result of his wife’s work for the Heritage Foundation.

The foundation has close ties to the Republican Party and would probably have a say in the hiring of key government officials if Gov. George W. Bush assumed the presidency. In e-mail distributed on Capitol Hill earlier this month, Mrs. Thomas solicited resumes ”for transition purposes” from the government oversight committees of Congress.

A decision by Justice Thomas to recuse himself could alter the outcome of the case now before the court, which is weighing whether to allow a manual recount of votes in Florida. On Saturday, by a vote of 5 to 4, the court blocked the recount for now. Justice Thomas, who was appointed to the court by President George Bush, Governor Bush’s father, was in the majority. If Justice Thomas were to recuse himself, it could result in a 4-to-4 tie in the case now before it, which would allow the ruling by the Florida Supreme Court to stand.

”There is no conflict here,” Mrs. Thomas said in an interview. She insisted that she rarely discussed matters before the Supreme Court with her husband and that Justice Thomas therefore should not consider recusing himself from the landmark case.

A spokesman for Vice President Al Gore said he had no comment on accusations of a conflict of interest. ”The Vice President has the highest regard for the independent judiciary, so we’re not going to comment on the various questions that have been raised,” said Mark Fabiani, a Gore campaign spokesman.

Ah! The fucking high road, boys and girls! Over and over.

It was surprisingly hard to find another source for this story I dimly recalled of the brilliant, unprincipled Scalia’s decision that he and Clarence Thomas would not recuse themselves from deciding the 2000 presidential election on 5-4 partisan grounds.  It must have taken me ten minutes, and several searches to corroborate my recollection. The information below is pretty specific, and would not be hard to further verify, if anyone truly cared to.  It supports with detail what I remembered of that stunning one-off Supreme Court overreach, the one that ushered in our age of neo-fascism/anything for a win, a savage, steel-toed kick to the groin, though arguably against the rules, is no disgrace, nor disqualifying, if the ref is on your side.

Besides Thomas, Scalia also took part in the decision while a close relative had a substantial interest in the outcome. Scalia’s son Eugene is a partner in the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where one of the senior partners is Theodore B. Olson, who argued Bush’s case before the Supreme Court.

Scalia refused to recuse himself from Bush v. Gore, although the lead lawyer for the plaintiff was, in effect, his son’s boss. He took the same position in the various legal proceedings that accompanied the impeachment of Bill Clinton, beginning with the Supreme Court’s decision to permit Paula Jones to proceed with her lawsuit against Clinton for sexual harassment, in which Olson provided legal assistance.

The personal conflicts-of-interest involving Thomas and Scalia were one-day wonders in the media, then quickly dropped after the two justices supplied Bush’s margin of victory in the 5-4 decision to halt the Florida recount. This kid-glove treatment is in marked contrast to the use of minor or even imaginary ethical infractions to witch-hunt cabinet-level officials during Clinton’s eight years in the White House.

Independent counsel investigations were carried out into the affairs of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, and, of course, Bill and Hillary Clinton, on much flimsier evidence than is already apparent in relation to the Supreme Court justices.

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Hillary Clinton, a bright, very competent but fairly uninspiring neo-liberal advocate of incrementalism and espouser of the meritocracy of her fellow Ivy League high achievers, society’s best, brightest and most ambitious (since childhood), was pilloried for referring to the ‘vast rightwing conspiracy” that regularly, and damagingly, attacked her for decades.   She was not wrong about the conspiracy which has been actively and effectively changing American politics into a no-holds-barred blood match for decades now and is in sight of its goal of a permanent one-party government directly controlled by the wealthy white partisans of the 1%.  

Not all conspiracies are hatched out of unfounded social media claims, spun out wildly to millions online by bot farms in Russia and elsewhere.  Pizzagate, once conclusively disproved (even if Hillary was running a child sex farm in the basement, there was no basement in that pizza place…), metastasized into Q-Anon (not just Hillary, ALL liberals are Christ-hating cannibal pedophiles!), in the spirit of fact deniers‘ now reflexive doubling down and doubling down until the lie is so gigantic nobody can say millions don’t already believe it (see, e.g., Ted Cruz, certification of Biden’s win must be postponed because of massive allegations of widespread fraud believed by millions).   

Not all conspiracy theories are created equal.   If you can show a straight line in concerted action, to benefit a particular group, such as the straight line wealthy ‘movement conservatives’ have been drawing since shortly after Brown v. Board of Education rocked their world by declaring segregation unconstitutional (partisan judicial activism, that unanimous decision!) then you have a conspiracy.   The conspirators don’t have to be in the same room, though they often are, as long as they are single mindedly united in advancing their movement’s common cause, especially if they work in a network of like-minded organizations that they fund with secret donations.   Case in point: attorney and president of Liberty Consulting, Ginni Thomas and her long jihad for a conservative, white, Christian fundamentalist USA. 

Bush v. Gore, the partisan 5-4 decision that decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election was one Ginni’s husband, Clarence, should have sat out, for ethical reasons.   The Supreme Court stopped the recount in Florida on the theory that, after the Supreme Court delayed the recount until it was too late to meet the constitutional deadline for counting all the uncounted votes, that it was too late and Bush, who led by very few votes (with thousands uncounted and tens of thousands more purged from voter rolls) had to be declared the winner [1].

As for the consistent inconsistency of this transactional group’s jurisprudence and modus operandi, note that this logic — we delayed you and now you’re barred by time limits we made you miss — is identical to the “logic” Republicans used as the rationale for acquitting Trump of any wrongdoing in connection with his January 6 riot to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.  McConnell refused to formally accept the articles of impeachment until after he had created a procedural Catch 22 — you can’t impeach somebody after they’ve already left office, however compelling the merits of the case might be, sorry, cucks.

Bush v. Gore prevented  “irreparable harm” to candidate George W. Bush, in a one-off political ruling it instructed posterity not to cite as a precedent (though it contained the poison pill of the independent state legislature doctrine).  The partisan 5-4 decision was placidly accepted by Gore who cited his constitutional obligation to obey the Supreme Court’s decision, stepped aside and let Bush be inaugurated after O’Connor,  Scalia, Rehnquist and Kennedy, joined by Clarence Thomas, ruled that Bush would be president, by bare Electoral College majority, Bush having one more than the necessary 270.   

Ginni Thomas worked for the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation at the time, an outfit that was busily staffing the prospective  Bush/Cheney administration.   Related organizations were on the ground stopping the Florida recount (including young partisans Boof Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who along with John Roberts, were also dispatched to Florida — check out this unimpeachable source), including self-proclaimed rat-fucker Roger Stone’s Dade County “Brooks Brothers Riot” where a well-dressed mob he assembled managed to stop the lawful recount underway in a large Florida county Bush almost certainly lost by thousands of votes (in an election he “won” by a few hundred, and falling fast, when the Supreme Court ordered the recount to stop).  Thomas supplied the deciding vote, giving Bush one vote more than he needed for a one vote Electoral College victory.  Democracy. Nothing to see here.  Scalia also had the appearance of conflict (I think at least one son was working for the Bush campaign), but Scalia was a brilliant, slippery bastard whose overarching principle was advancing his confidently espoused religious right-wing worldview.  

Then, of course, there’s this kind of in-your-face shit, always popular among Dixiecrats and the Ku Klux Klan, very fashionable right now in right wing states’ rights activism, this from Florida prior to the 2000 election:

Here is a December 12, 2000 New York Times article about the appearance of impropriety in Thomas not recusing himself from Bush v. Gore.  This “kerfuffle” with his influential extremist wife is certainly nothing new.

A similar conflict of interest presented itself in June 2018, when Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote on Trump’s “Muslim ban,” which barred foreign nationals from predominantly Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S. In 2017 and 2018, The New Yorker reported, Ginni Thomas’ consulting firm raked in $200,000 from a conservative nonprofit that submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court when it was reviewing the ban in Trump v. Hawaii, which in a 5-4 ruling led to the policy being upheld. 

Most notably, in January, Clarence Thomas stood firm as the lone dissenter in Trump v. Thompson, voting against allowing the January 6 selection committee to access president records from the Trump White House in their investigation of the Capitol riot. That decision came just a month after the panel was attacked in an open letter by Ginni Thomas, who in December called on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to expel Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., from the House Republican Caucus over their roles in the probe. 

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Here’s a nice slice of the letter to Kevin McCarthy (who quickly acted on it), signed by a Who’s Who of far-right activists, including Liberty Consultants President Ginni Thomas:

The actions of Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger on behalf of House Democrats have given supposedly bipartisan justification to an overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law, legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong, and which demeans the standing of the House.

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One month later, her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, took part in a case crucial to the same committee’s work: former president Donald Trump’s request to block the committee from getting White House records that were ordered released by President Biden and two lower courts.

Thomas was the only justice to say he would grant Trump’s request. . .

. . . The first major case that drew national attention to that potential conflict came in 2000, when the fate of the presidential campaign between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore came before the Supreme Court. At the time, Ginni Thomas was working with the Heritage Foundation to recommend people for jobs within a possible Bush administration. Some Democrats called for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from hearing the case that would decide the presidency, but Ginni Thomas told the New York Times at the time that “There is no conflict” and that she rarely discussed cases with her husband.

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Well, at least we get the occasional self-reflective mea culpa from the outlying Republican:

Sandra Day O’Connor, who was one of the five votes that gave Bush and Cheney the 2000 election (when you’re a swing vote, in a pinch, you have to swing with your team), later opined that the Supreme Court intervening to declare George W. Bush the winner (by a Florida decided Electoral College majority of 271-266) of a close election he’d almost certainly lost was “probably a mistake”:

Now she tells us. More than 12 years after the fact, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said it was probably a mistake for the Supreme Court to hear Bush v. Gore and anoint George W. Bush as president of the United States.

“It [should more accurately read “we” — ed.] took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,” Justice O’Connor told the Chicago Tribune editorial board on Friday. “Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’

She continued: “Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision. It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”

The result, she allowed, “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less than perfect reputation.”

Granted, we don’t know for sure whether Justice O’Connor wanted to take Bush v. Gore. Only four justices have to agree to hear a case. But we do know that she sided with the majority on the actual decision, which stopped the recounting in Florida and gave a one-vote majority in the Electoral College to the man who lost the national popular vote. The ruling was a huge stain on the court’s reputation because it appeared to be — may well have been — blatantly partisan.

[1] 

While the four-member liberal minority argued that the federal courts had traditionally deferred to state courts in the interpretation of state constitutions and state election laws, the five-member majority discarded their usual posture of support for “states’ rights” when it came into conflict with the interests of the Republican Party and its ultra-right backers.

Three days later, the same 5-4 majority handed down its final ruling, declaring, in a perfect Catch-22, that the delay in the recount—caused by its own order—had made it impossible to complete a recount in time to meet the December 12 deadline for certifying electors. Accordingly, the decision of the Republican-controlled state government, awarding the electors to Bush, was upheld.

Because the three ultra-right members could not obtain agreement from two other conservatives Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, to base the decision on Scalia’s Article II claim that the American people have no constitutional right to vote for president, the court majority found an entirely new legal argument to support its predetermined outcome: putting Bush in the White House.

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Ginni Thomas was Trump’s initial informal Czarina of loyalty telling him who to fire for disloyalty and who to hire because they would be loyal to him personally and to his mission to make America “great” again. Her services were so valuable to Trump that he eventually employed someone on site, full-time job, his one time body man, baggage handler and confidant, John McEntee. Was Johnny qualified for the job? At least as qualified as Ginni Thomas (or her dear colleague Sidney Powell, or Jared, for that matter). Check this shit out:

Sadly, neither Ginni or Johnny were outliers in Trump’s inner circle. They are two of the many loyal, ambitious assistants that any self-respecting (or even self-loathing) autocrat can always find, drawn to power like flies to shit.

Here is Jamelle Bouie in the NY Times, laying it out in an opinion piece entitled Ginni Thomas is No Outliler.

At this point, there’s very little distance between the fringes of the modern Republican Party and the elites who lead it. Superficial differences of affect and emphasis mask shared views and ways of seeing. In fact, members of the Republican elite are very often the fringe figures in question.

Take Virginia (known as Ginni) Thomas. She is an influential and well-connected conservative political activist who has been a fixture of Washington since the late 1980s. A fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump, she reportedly urged his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to do everything in his power to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election and keep Trump in power. And judging from her text messages to Meadows — which include the hope that the “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators” are awaiting trial before military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay — she is also something of a QAnon believer, one of millions of Americans who embrace the conspiracy theory that Trump is fighting a messianic war against the “deep state.”

Merrick Garland is not the Attorney General who can save democracy from the ongoing authoritarian coup by the forces who use the GOP as its battering ram. He’s not a wartime consigliere. A man of excellent reputation, he seems to believe, like Robert Mueller before him, that once the full truth comes out, in detail, America will embrace it. He believes this at a time when repeating a disproven lie about a rigged stolen election won by the loser in a landslide is a litmus test for one of our two major political parties. He proves this idealistic belief to America by hesitating, for three months now, to present the indictment of Mark Meadows to a grand jury (as required by law after a referral from Congress) for what he indisputably did by telling Congress Trump said to fuck off with their dirty little subpoena.

The DOJ investigation into Hunter Biden, seemingly over tax evasion matters, is in the news lately, competing with the shocking stories that the wife of conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is an insane, highly paid, influential Q-Anon activist/religious fanatic with close ties to the Trump White House, who was active in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, who influences her husband’s ethical decisions and that Trump is hiding seven hours and thirty seven minutes of White House phone logs, covering the Capitol riot and its immediate aftermath, from the January 6th investigation (which the Supreme Court justice in question seemingly believes, alone among his Federalist Society peers, the former president has every right to do).   

It has also been reported recently that the DOJ is slowly working its way up the insurrection food chain, they’ve got the people Trump hired to stage the event to set off the storming of the Capitol in their grand jury crosshairs now, we are told and that, by and by, we may even find out that Trump hired these people.    This is supposed to be reassuring, somehow, as Biden and the Democratic agenda is hamstrung by a Republican-controlled Senate (you only need to buy two Democrats when it’s 50-50 and you can filibuster to your little heart’s content).   Biden can’t even get money allocated by Congress to keep fighting covid.

When the news broke in 1974 that Nixon’s secretary had “accidentally” deleted 18 minutes of incriminating Oval Office audio recordings, Barry Goldwater, a radical right extremist Republican senator (in his day) went to Nixon, with a contingent of other Republicans, and told him it was time for him to resign.   Congress was going to impeach him if he didn’t quit and these Republicans were going to vote to convict him.  Nixon promptly left office, to be reborn as an elder statesman.   There are no Republicans currently in office (outside of the two purged members on the House January 6th Committee) who would do anything so “disloyal” to their lockstep smash-mouth party in 2022.  Not if they value their political careers.

Obstruction of justice is action taken to derail a legal proceeding or investigation.   It is a felony.  Nixon hiding evidence against him was classic obstruction of justice, something Nixon grasped immediately, as a lawyer.  It was once perfectly understood that the rule of law means nothing if powerful people can obstruct investigations into their corrupt actions.  If a person intentionally acts in a way to hide their misdeeds, by destroying evidence, intimidating witnesses, threatening officials, rewarding liars who protect them, they are guilty of obstruction of justice.  The obstructive acts may be a mix of legal and illegal measures and we are told that intent to obstruct justice can be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt sometimes.  One standard way to prove intent to obstruct justice is by showing a pattern of behavior calculated to thwart the administration of justice.   Here’s a famous example:

Trump asks FBI director Comey for personal loyalty, in a creepy one on one meeting early in Trump’s presidency.  He asks Comey to let Flynn go for simply making a mistake, for those lies he told and swore were true.   It is within the president’s power to fire an FBI director, so when Comey balks at taking a loyalty oath to the president, Trump fires him.   The next day he hosts an Oval Office celebration with a contingent of Russians, with the press excluded, to gloat that the Flynn-Russher thing is now over.   Soon thereafter his own DOJ appoints a Special Prosecutor to investigate Trump’s many ties to the Russians and their many acts to help him narrowly win a surgically crafted Electoral College majority and the presidency.  Trump obstructs the investigation at every step because, you know, Article Two, which is as all-powerful as the sacred Second Amendment itself.   

The Special Prosecutor documents ten instances of this obstruction of justice, including the lies told by Trump associates under oath, men who Trump later pardons.  Mueller states that he cannot exonerate Trump for these apparent crimes but that it would be unfair to accuse him of obstruction, in spite of the evidence, while he’s in office.   He writes that once Trump is out of office he can be prosecuted for these felonious acts.   

Trump was upset with his “weak” Attorney General Jeff Sessions who had recused himself after he lied about his own ties to Russia during the campaign and early in the Trump presidency.  After moaning that he was fucked, he kept badgering Sessions to “unrecuse” himself and fire Mueller.   That Sessions was following “ethics” rules about recusal was an infuriating betrayal to Trump, who changed the norm to anything beyond a crime that would 100% result in prison time being perfectly cool, for loyal members of his party (others should be locked up with or without trials).  Bill Barr auditioned for the Attorney General job by sending Trump a memo about how he’d rule that the basis for Mueller’s investigation is “untenable”.   Trump hired Barr and they announced that the Mueller Report was a complete and total exoneration of Trump, for everything.   Nothing to see here.  Liberals lose, go back to gnashing your teeth, hapless, weak, woke cucks.

Fast forward a few years and a re-election bid Trump lost, in spite of every effort to rig it in his favor by limiting absentee voting, and slowing down mail delivery, during the most deadly phase of the pandemic and spreading lies about massive election fraud.  Trump removed fifteen boxes of sensitive information from the White House, including Top Secret documents, when he left office, petulant about still being the president in spite of his substantial loss in the election.   For over a year his lawyers negotiated with Biden’s DOJ about those boxes and returning the stolen contents to the National Archives.    Negotiated… with an ex-president who committed an illegal act, over what he’d give back, how much more time he needed to finish photocopying everything, etc.   Negotiated. 

When Ginni Thomas’s texts to Mark Meadows were revealed the other day, with Meadows reassuring her that the King of Kings would rule in favor of good over the wickedness of the corrupt Left, it was another proof of what Trump has been insisting on all along — when the evidence comes out, the best people can get fucked.  You hide that dangerous material!   No tax return, no school transcripts, no White House visitor logs, no phone logs, no disclosures from anyone he forced to sign an NDA, no financial statements, no obeying subpoenas, no top secret documents returned without first laywering up and delaying it by a year, nothing.  Article Two and Bill Barr, bitches.

So, the only logical thing is to negotiate with him over how much he wants to compromise.  If he doesn’t want to be reasonable, there’s really no way the Department of Justice can force him to.  We have the rule of law here, after all, all of us who embrace this ideal must remain above the appearance of political motive, even when we’re locked up in Gitmo.

In our advertorial culture, where the wealthiest interests have a billion ways to influence public opinion, no citizen can rely on anything, meaning that whatever we say or think is just as good as the exact opposite, which we can also insist on with impunity, if the timing is right, with no consequences for our credibility.    If you walked into this pay-to-play world from a place with traditional values about truth, fairness, the need for facts to back an argument, you’d think you’d gone mad.   

It’s part of a deliberate strategy, you can watch Putin do it every day (we are liberating Ukraine from Nazis! — wait, from US/Ukraine chemical weapons, from NATO…) and, of course his “not a puppet, not a puppet” whatshisname, the GOP leader.  If you have any doubt about the strategy of calling critical thinking into question being deliberate, look at this short fake news clip:

https://youtube.com/shorts/cOCe8yn85Sw?feature=share

We have Trump recently publicly asking Putin to take a pause in deNazifying Ukraine to give him some dirt on Biden.   And why not?  He did this without consequence when he withheld military aid to Ukraine in his perfect call to Zelensky (and Barr did his best to bury the verified, urgent whistleblower complaint).   He did this as a candidate when he said, spontaneously, during a nationally televised debate “Russia, if you’re listening…” and within a few hours Russia provided some dirt on Crooked Hillary (kudos to pardoned felon Roger Stone).  He did this regarding the over 100 acts of coordination between his campaign and Russian agents, documented for all-time in the Marco Rubio Senate Committee report.   He does variations on this every time he transactionally lies to gain some kind of political/personal advantage, including his Big Lie, (not the one about the disputed size of his dick) about a stolen election.  39%, we’re told, fervently believe this destructive whopper from the master of accountability-free obstruction of justice.

The Department of Justice, headed by the supremely cautious Merrick Garland, has given no sign it is investigating Trump’s now well-documented plan to sow the news cycle with outright lies about a stolen election, strong arm state Republicans into flipping electors, recruit members of Congress to repeat this lie, block the certification of Biden’s “stolen” victory based on the millions of Americans who pollsters showed passionately believe this lie, summon an angry mob to Washington D.C., use a crackpot legal theory to put a “constitutional” fig leaf on a last ditch attempt of elected Trump diehards to overturn the will of the American people as he whipped up and unleash an angry mob to hang Mike Pence, after putting out a false statement the night before wherein Pence “agreed” to hold up the certification.   We’re told it’s hard to show the former president had “corrupt intent” in doing all these things. There’s a puzzler for you, law and order fans.

The DOJ has, however, allowed Barr-appointed special prosecutor John Durham to finish investigating the “oringes” of the fake Mueller witch hunt, on the grounds that it would have seemed “political” to interfere with an openly political investigation launched by Trump’s gunsel to create more doubt about fucking Mueller’s totally “political” investigation.   Durham turned up very little in an investigation that went on longer than Mueller’s.   He found no deep state conspiracy to fuck Donald Trump.   Then we get this, today, from a long expose in the Washington Post about Hunter Biden using his father’s name and position to get millions of dollars from foreign oligarchs:

Hunter Biden’s overseas work has been the subject of heightened scrutiny. He has been under federal investigation as part of an inquiry into his taxes, with witnesses called before a grand jury as recently as last month. Federal prosecutors had been attempting to determine if he failed to account for income from China-related deals, The Post has previously reported, although it is unclear whether that is still a focus. Republicans, meanwhile, have pointed to the Biden family’s business deals in China, along with Hunter Biden’s past membership on the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, as potential conflicts of interest.

Wondering why Congress’s contempt citation for Tea Party Jesus/Trump follower Mark Meadows has not been followed up on, in over three months?   The law, after all, requires DOJ to present the case to a grand jury.  Wonder no more.  Look, it’s all fake, OK? And now, a word from your rightful masters…