Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

A fund to compensate violent “victims” for abuse that never happened

First of all, corporate media, and everybody else, stop calling this brazen criminal conspiracy to steal thousands of millions from the taxpayers to pay criminals loyal to our criminally insane president millions a “SETTLEMENT”. The scam, perhaps Trump’s brain trust’s biggest FUCK YOU to Americans yet (you know this complex fraud wasn’t the dotard’s idea), is not a settlement. Heather:

In her order dismissing the suit, Judge Kathleen Williams noted that because Trump’s dropping of the suit “does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record. Additionally, Defendants—federal agencies represented by the Department of Justice, which has an independent obligation to uphold the ‘public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources’ and the ‘fair administration of justice,’ neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.”

Judge Williams was not alone in her skepticism about the deal. Andrew Duehren of the New York Times reported today that career lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service thought the agency should fight Trump’s suit, noting that the statute of limitations for such a suit had run out, the Justice Department has previously taken the position that people cannot sue the IRS for the actions of a contractor, and the Justice Department settled a similar case from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin with a public apology rather than a monetary payoff.

The document that purports to be a “settlement” has the words “settlement agreement” written in capital letters across the top of it, but the important word is “agreement.” It is not the settlement of a legal case: Trump dropped the case when it looked like the judge would throw it out.

It is simply an agreement between Trump and his own appointees at the Department of Justice. source

Soul dead, amoral, power-crazed Trump sycophant Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, feverishly auditioning for the fulltime job, announced the purpose of the fraudulently acquired $1,776 million tax-payer dollar slush fund under the discretion of the new Commission on Covfefe and Justice for MY MOST LOYAL FIGHTERS, irrationally asserting that it was “a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”

It is, in fact, an unlawful, completely opaque process for disbursing illegally seized tax dollars, with a deranged and demented CEO (Trump) having the final, secret say on all payouts to reward violent fighters who committed various felonies for the selfsame criminal president. There is no legal definition of “lawfare” or “weaponization” (Nazi buzzwords, like lugenpresse — Lying Fake News), although Blanche’s DOJ openly engages in both, daily, bringing repeated, baseless prosecutions against Trump enemies who are forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars defending against nakedly evidence-free charges that ultimately get thrown out of court.

“Redress,” in Blanche’s statement defending the illegal slush fund, means the secret distribution of up to a million dollars each for 1,776 violent patriots, without any oversight, except for the unlimited discretion of the man obsessed with building the Donald J. Trump- Marie Antoinette- Jefferey Epstein ballroom. If the payouts were hypothetically limited to $50,000 a man, that’s a grateful, pumped up army of 35,520 private citizen thugs, preemptive pardons in hand, to bully and intimidate, shoot, even kill, citizens at polling places. In Trump v. United States his handpicked far right partisan lickspittles ruled that their man is allowed to commit crimes, or order the commission of crimes, including, presumably murder, if he can argue, with his usual cogency, that the crimes were committed in the exercise of his core duties.

Putin helped Trump by calling in hundreds of bomb threats in Democratic districts on Election Day 2024. Why not? His boy gave him everything he asked for, and he continues to. That’s what friends do for each other. ICE might not be the proper goon squad to intimidate voters at the polls, there could be successful legal challenges, but a private army of proven violent extremists would be perfect. With a preemptive pardon in the pocket of every weapon wielding “poll watcher,” whether or not masked or in a KKK hood, how many wrong colored voters will be too intimidated to vote? Plus, mail-in voting is fraud! Even the CEO of the US Postal Serves agrees, sir, yes sir! (tears rolling down his strong, masculine cheeks).

This fake settlement is a major criminal conspiracy by our own federal government (or at least between Trump, Blanche and Bessent). As Heather laid out above, the judge who dismissed the case for lack of a genuine controversy in the lawsuit, because Trump controls both sides, as Trump was voluntarily dropping it (and “settling it”), noted in dismissing it that there was no settlement included in the papers Trump or the IRS filed in his fake case against his own Executive Branch agency. The IRS also filed nothing in regard to any “settlement”.

Of course, the obvious question is what does a slush fund to pay violent rioters, and reward American Eichmann Jeffrey Clark and co-conspirators, have anything to do with Trump’s complaint in the fake case against the IRS that the judge dismissed? It’s as solid (and irrational) as the connection between the correspondents’ dinner and Trump’s fucking Epstein ballroom. Back to fucking Todd Blanche, then, and a cooler head than mine for some details:

In essence then, the settlement gives Trump full control over almost $2 billion of taxpayer money to spend however he wants, without oversight. The Department of Justice document establishing the fund declares that “[o]nce the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.” . .

. . . A document—this time signed by Blanche himself—amended the previous agreement to add: “The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, “and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims” that, as of yesterday, “have been or could have been asserted” by the IRS against them or “related or affiliated individuals” or companies. In other words, Blanche is asserting a blanket promise to stop all IRS audits of Trump’s taxes and not to prosecute any crimes Trump, his family, his businesses, or his associates might have committed that crossed the IRS. . .

. . . [Legal analyst Joyce] Vance commented that “[t]he optics of this are so bad that it’s hard to believe Trump would expose himself to their consequences unless he really needed this deal.” It’s probably worth remembering that, after years of pursuing the gangster Al Capone, the government finally managed to convict him of tax evasion. It appears Blanche and Trump’s loyalists are trying to make sure that can’t happen again, declaring any such investigations the “weaponization” of the Justice Department.

Holly Baxter of The Independent reported today that in the midst of all the chaos—including his war on Iran and rising fuel and food prices—Trump called a sudden, urgent press conference today as Blanche was testifying. But what was on his mind was not Iran, or prices, or his corrupt agreement with the Department of Justice. He wanted to talk about his ballroom.

Trump’s comments in that press conference have invited commentary suggesting he is turning the White House into a fortress. Describing the ballroom, he said: “Between the drone-proofing, the missile-proofing, we have ah, and the drone capacity upstairs, we can have all sorts of military—I hate to use the word snipers—but we have great sniper capacity. It’s built for our snipers, not enemy’s snipers, our snipers. And because of the height we get a very clear view of everything all over Washington.”

source

Here’s the wall the demented paranoiac had built around the White House during his increasingly unpopular first term. It was up, protecting him (like the bulletproof glass he stood behind), on that beautiful January 6 morning when he urged his Day of Love crowd to march with him to the Capitol, peacefully, without a permit (which would have come with massive police presence, probably thwarting his surprise attack), and persuade the joint session of Congress to get with the Stop the Steal program, after peacefully breaking through police lines, gently smashing windows to patriotically trespass in the building, and respectfully defecate in the halls of Congress like the meek tourists they were, while politely calling for Mike Pence to come out and calmly walk to the gallows so they could, kindly, lovingly, stretch his neck a bit. Every one of those loyal patriots who served their master that hallowed day, and were unfairly persecuted afterwards, deserves a new arsenal of automatic weapons, a motor boat and a nice new car — no?

“A matter of political controversy”

For a Trump nominee to concede that the violence on January 6, 2021, a riot that shut down a joint session of Congress about to make Biden’s victory official, was not a patriotic Day of Love, and perfectly reasonable “legitimate political discourse” is to betray his/her/its deranged master. No Republican is allowed to say that January 6 was anything bad, at worst it can be called a “matter of political controversy.” You know, we can agree to disagree about what we disagree about, right? A talking point, no matter how incoherent, is good enough in the corporate America of 2026, when it comes to blindly partisan lifetime appointees to the federal bench.

The same goes for the legitimate election of Trump’s opponent in the 2020 election. “He was inaugurated…” is the only acceptable answer to the question “was Joe Biden elected president in 2020?”. It is political suicide in Trumpworld to concede that Biden won an honest and fair election (that would make Trump, history’s greatest winner, a loser!). You certainly don’t want to get the most vengeful compulsive liar in American history mad at you. So you choose your evasive words carefully, or repeat the ones your learned colleague just farted out.

In a similar vein, The Confederacy, of course, never lost the Civil War, a war of Northern aggression which was not fought to protect slavery but over states’ rights — to have slavery in their own states. The Nazis never lost World War Two, or caused the deaths of tens of millions, they just had to lay low while the generations who knew their crimes in detail died off. When enough time goes by everything in the past can be seen as “a matter of political controversy.” Everything inhuman is GREAT AGAIN, for anyone still gaga for MAGA. In the land of the desperate, faith beats reason every time.

Total exoneration

Donald Trump has never been totally exonerated in his long life of being endlessly, unfairly persecuted, no more than he has ever been held accountable for any of his various crimes and misdeeds. He has defeated justice many times, by delay, bribe (e.g. Pam Bondi in Florida, $25,000 to her campaign if she’d drop case against his fake university) obstruction, vexatious litigation, using government resources to prosecute vendettas, making threats against judges, jurors, witnesses, calls to violence, getting others to cover up his many crimes.

The second most corrupt Attorney General of modern times, Bill Fucking Barr, lied when declaring that the Mueller report “totally exonerated” Trump when Mueller wrote, in his report:

Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment [that Trump did not act with corrupt intent and did not commit felonies]. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. . .

. . . The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

I know we live in a post-fact age, but consider this:

Any president who leaves office, illegally taking with him with boxes of classified and top secret papers, although presumed innocent until convicted, is a criminal suspect until investigated and exonerated of wrongdoing. Especially if, like Trump, he claims he can declassify them with his mind, that he doesn’t have them, that he returned them all already, that he’s willing to show the government that he doesn’t have them, then gets one of his lawyers to lie that no more classified documents are in his possession, and so on, rope-a-doping the authorities for a year and a half. When a federal judge signs a search warrant, specifically describing the evidence of crime being sought and the exact places where they are likely hidden, that’s not an “illegal raid”. There is nothing more legal, under our law, than the execution of a search warrant adhering strictly to the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

The punchline; they find some of the classified documents the president illegally took when he was dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House. They find boxes of the documents he claimed he didn’t have, in a bathroom, in a ballroom, in his sock drawer, the ones he lied about having (or selling to Putin, Mohammed bin Bonesaw, et al).

He got away with clear violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice because he had a corrupt judge, appointed after he lost the election he claims was stolen from him, throw the case out, on the shabbiest of legal theories (tip of the cap to Clarence Thomas) after dragging her feet for over a year ruling on routine motions.

Consider Trump’s long campaign to reverse the results of the 2020 election, an election he was told, and knew, he lost (‘how did I lose to that piece of shit?’ he asked one of his lackies after losing the election). 60 baseless law suits, pressure on various state officials, a lying $50,000,000 ad campaign (payments for ‘Stop the Steal’ ads stopped on January 6, don’t you know?), slates of fake electors, threats to state officials, an illegal plan to get the DOJ to contest results in states he lost, a plot with his “friends” in Congress (“The Greenbay Sweep”) to throw the final certification into the House so he’d be declared the winner, increasing madness unto epic fury leading up to the passionate Day of Love on January 6, 2021, when he whipped up a crowd he knew to be armed to go to the Capital for a bloody riot the RNC later rebranded as “legitimate political discourse”. We all saw that legitimate political discourse unfold on TV, along with the president who sent the mob to disrupt the joint session of Congress and watched the assault on TV for over three hours, and how it led to 140 Capitol and D.C. policemen hospitalized with grievous injuries sustained during the legitimate political discourse. That he beat being prosecuted for his multi-tentacled treason and shitting on his oath to defend the Constitution, by delay, obstruction, threats, violence, etc. does not mean he was exonerated for jack shit.

Now Trump’s fully weaponized, selectively prosecuting DOJ, led by his criminal and impeachment attorneys, has fired everyone involved with either prosecution against their boss. At a far-right event the other day, Nazi consigliere Todd Blanche proudly announced this purge was complete. Fair is fair. Come to kill me, I kill you, how you like that, asshole?

Here’s one of the “righteously” fired DOJ attorneys, J.P. Cooney, with a short summary of how guilty Trump was of both of these disqualifying criminal conspiracies. Cooney is now running for Congress in Virginia.

Criminally insane

Rachel Maddow makes a good point here, why would the Republicans invite Jack Smith to testify publicly when all he would say is what he said? 

Trump was the chief propagator of  the big lie (stolen 2020 election), the fake electors, the coercion of state officials,  the frivolous, evidence-free, court challenges, the plot to have Mike Pence announce Trump had won the election, the Green Bay Sweep,  and the bloody riot at the Capitol with the gallows outside to hang Mike Pence.  There was only one leader, one beneficiary, of this desperate many armed criminals octopus, Donald Trump.

The madness of Donroe

The Donroe Doctrine sounds about right for this idiot and his “views” on “international” “law”.  The far-right, and everybody who loves absolute power, are crazy about a good doctrine or theory to cover their irrational, exploitation-justifying ideas.   The Unitary Executive Theory [1], the Political Question Doctrine, “Originalism”, “Textualism” “Birtherism”.  Makes you feel real smart, and infallibly reasonable, citing to a learned theory or doctrine, even if it’s pulled directly out of some insane zealot’s ass.

The president’s National Emergency shock troops, ICE, have openly murdered a protester in Minneapolis. She was shot seemingly complying with ICE’s order to move her vehicle, she was moving away slowly when she was shot in the face. You can watch the entire hideous event on video.   The ICE agent was shooting into a car moving away from him, in self-defense and to protect fellow officers and the public, as puppy killer Kristi Noem insisted in a very dignified news conference. The doctrine or theory of why this was a righteous shooting is forthcoming. 

Meanwhile, these genius theoreticians have successfully turned a deadly riot, in the minds of roughly a third of the population, into an innocent, praisworthy display of loving patriotism.  No plaque for obstructionist, woke Capitol police overrun by the good guys that day! MAGA Mike Johnson will not allow it, not while he gets the final say.

Day of Love —  kissing booth

Nowhere does Trump’s conviction that he, and he alone, has the right to run the United States show more clearly than in the White House’s rewriting of the history of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol were Trump supporters determined to overthrow the free and fair election of Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes in 2020, replacing him with Trump by virtue of their belief that no Democrat could be fairly electedT.

But the official White House website reversed that reality today, claiming that the insurrectionists who beat and wounded at least 140 police officers, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol building, and called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence were “peaceful patriotic protesters.” The real villains, the White House wrote in bold type, were “the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters.” source

Meanwhile, the entire DOJ is working around the clock, to the exclusion of everything else, on hiding the incriminating sections of the Epstein files.  The Department of Justice does this in open contempt of the 534-1 bipartisan bill Trump himself signed into law in November.

You can argue with Nazis, but it won’t help you. An idiot disposed to violence is always right, no matter what.  Ask Donroe.

[1]

Since first hoisted by President Ronald Reagan’s second-term Attorney General Edwin Meese, the unitary executive banner has flown as an originalist imperative, catchily articulated by wordsmith-in-chief Justice Antonin Scalia. Quoting t he so-called vesting clause of Article 2 of the Constitution—“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States”—Scalia spun that text to “not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.” Scalia’s chestnut bred an asserted (though not demonstrated) corollary: that to effectively deploy this sweeping authority, presidents must hold an indefeasible power to remove senior executive officials, certainly agency heads, at will, for any reason or no reason. source

Criminally insane idiots & incoherence

Adam Serwer wrote a book during MAGA’s first term in the White House entitled The Cruelty is the Point. Very true. Millions of those who are devoted to Trump love his cruelty, which they believe is not a sign of painful weakness by one of strength. Killing over 100 unarmed men in small boats on the ocean, and almost that many during an illegal FBI/military incursion into Venezuela to render its president to a US court, is heedlessly, idiotically cruel. His people love that he does this kind of shit.

Trump accuses Venezuelans of smuggling fentanyl into the US and has Hegseth kill them a thousand miles from our shores, blowing up and sinking their small boats and then killing survivors. When the corpses wash up on land, along with pieces of their boats, not a trace of fentanyl is found. Smuggling drugs is not a capital offense, even if proved with a mountain of seized fentanyl. Even if you are a strongman dictator like Rodrigo Duterte, currently cooling his jets in a prison at the International Criminal Court in the Hague for his extrajudicial executions of suspected drug dealers. Still, the cruelty of this random, impossible to justify mass murder, and the unappealable violence of it, excite the grievance-drunk lynch mob that is Trump’s electoral base.

The cruelty is certainly the point, but equally essential to fascism is incoherence. If your explanation for your illegal, murderous actions is completely incoherent, self-contradicting, ridiculous, stupid, senseless, plainly false, a series of constantly changing brazen lies — well, congratulations you have escaped the trap of Reason. No argument can succeed against relentlessly asserted incoherence. Incoherence embraced by the faithful, unchallenged by trusted mass media, equals absolute control.

Ask the Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Diet Coke bringer Little Marco Rubio [1] what the legal authority for a bloody extraction of a foreign leader is. That this violent, murderous attack on a sovereign nation violates the UN Charter the US signed is beyond question. It is an act of war to kill 80 more people, including civilians, to seize and render the head of a foreign country, and his wife, to “face the wrath of the American justice system” as cruel idiot Pam Bondi styled it. The Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Ethics Advisor/cheerleader will mumble and fumble and give no hint of any legal authority for the mass killing in Venezuela, or the kidnapping, except to speak of leverage and whatever evasive drivel happens to seep out. He will blandly deny the assertions of his commander-in-chief while dodging questions and becoming increasingly indignant. Corporate media will not embarrass him too many follow ups, particularly once the guy gets testy and defensive. And so it goes.

The cruelty is the point, it frightens the opposition and thrills millions of sadists whose only real pleasure is the deliberately inflicted pain of others. The incoherence is also the point. There is no argument with a willful tyrant who wields incoherence as his final rationale. Ask Mr. Hitler.

As usual, a complete and coherent account of the illegal invasion of Venezuela comes from Heather Cox Richardson.

Epstein at Trump’s second, or third, wedding.

From The Onion, America’s finest news source.

[1] Little Marco’s actual titles: Secretary of state. Acting administrator of the (dismantled, defunded) U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration. And now interim national security adviser to President Trump.

Whatever they say, whatever proof they claim to have, it never happened, none of it!!!

“[Trump], in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to state legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.”

If this testimony had been aired live, two days before the law required all of the Epstein files be made public, imagine the shit show, even on Bari Weiss’s CBS. That’s why it happened behind closed doors, why Trump’s puppets waited until New Year’s Eve to release it. Jim Jordan, a belligerent cretin whose claim to fame is that as a college wrestler he was impossible to pin (like when he was assistant coach watching college wrestlers being sexually abused by his boss, and since) was completely overmatched by Jack Smith. Smith made the clear case against Trump for conspiring to overthrow election results after losing the election in 2020. There is no doubt that the events were set in motion for the benefit of one man, Donald, and the amoral billionaires who are his chief benefactors/beneficiaries. To wit:

Meritocracy

Here are the two slam dunk federal cases against Trump, in a nutshell. He violated the Espionage Act by illegally taking classified documents with him when he left the White House. He “negotiated” with the Department of Justice and the National Archives for a year about retaining the documents, lied about having classified documents, claimed he could declassify them with his mind, had his lawyer lie in a false affidavit that he’d already returned them all. There was probable cause for a judge to issue a search warrant. The FBI found file boxes full of illegally retained government documents, including classified ones. There is not anything alleged about any of this. His obstruction of justice, his lies, his lawyers’ lies, his illegal retention of the documents, all matters of public record. Only Clarence Thomas, in a note to Venezuelan-American judge, lame duck Trump lifetime appointee Aileen Cannon, got Trump off the hook for this one, by declaring Jack Smith illegally appointed (spoiler alert, he wasn’t, he was only appointed too late to do his job).

The Washington D.C. case is equally straightforward. Trump knew he’d lost the election, he was told several times by his closest advisors, as they later testified under oath. He continued to lie about iihht (and $50,000,000 was dumped into an ad campaign to promote this lie). He worked with fake electors from several states in a scheme to throw the election to the GOP majority (by state) House. He called election officials to twist arms in states he lost. He had operatives accessing voting systems, bringing frivolous lawsuits, spreading knowingly false information. He called for a crowd to assemble in Washington D.C. for the morning of the certification of Biden’s win. He whipped up the crowd for an hour and urged them to parade (without a permit, which would have mobilized DC police to supervise it) to the Capitol to “peacefully” fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore. As the riot unfolded, and before his allies fled for their lives, e called his allies in Congress urging them to execute the plan to illegally keep him in office. He watched the riot live on TV for hours. It was with great reluctance that he finally made a video telling the rioters to go home (none were arrested), that he loved them, that America would never forget this day of love.

Just to prove his great fuck you to democracy had been perfectly righteous, on his first day back in the Oval Office he pardoned all of the rioters who were found guilty of violent assaults on January 6th. A Day of Love. 2020 was a stolen election, ask any current GOP member, they all wriggle away from answering that Biden won. “Well, Biden was the president…” they will say. Yep, he was.

Meantime, a robust 1% of the Epstein files have been made public (with massive redactions) by the most transparent administration in US history under (and in defiant contempt of) the Epstein Files Transparency Act Trump himself signed into law. Do not compare the murderous, compulsively lying Mr. Trump to Mr. Hitler! How dare you?!! By all means, dude, illegally invade a South American country and render the leader and his wife to … CECOT? What could go wrong?

Editors do not have the right to edit, only Trump does

Trump Files $10 Billion Suit Against BBC Over Documentary

The New York Times reports on another sickening MAGA attempt to intimidate media that reports unflatteringly on the historic ugliness of their dictatorial leader.

Trump, after shaking down ABC for $16,000,000 with a frivolous lawsuit over an on-air comment that Trump had been found civilly liable for rape (the judge in that case said as much, it is only an idiosyncrasy of New York State law, he explained, that differentiates “sexual assault” — no penis in vagina proved — and “rape”) and CBS for the same amount for doing what every TV station does — editing an interview, has also sued the NY Times and, the other day, the BBC.

The faltering, insanely litigious president ridiculously claimed, through his army of low rent Roy Cohns, that the BBC unfairly and viciously edited segments of his infamous January 6th speech to a crowd that stormed the Capitol moments later to make it falsely look like he had urged them to storm the Capitol.

Here are the highlights of his long harangue to the rioters on January 6th. You be the judge if there is a way to edit this incendiary speech where he is not telling the crowd he’s riled up for over an hour, with detailed lies about a “stolen election” he knew he had lost, to hit the Capitol, he promised he was going down there with them, “and we fight like hell or we won’t have a country anymore.”

You have to love the generally spineless NY Times’ last line in its report on this Hitlerian move on the part of Putin’s pliable puppet, Donald J. Trump, now suing the British Broadcasting Corporation, an outfit almost as despicable in his squinty eyes as our own Public Broadcasting Service. Here’s the Times, at its best:

The president also has a defamation lawsuit pending against The New York Times, which accuses the news organization of trying to undercut his 2024 candidacy and disparage his reputation. The Times says the lawsuit has no merit.

Speaking of Trump v. United States

“Conspicuously absent [in the dissent] is mention of the fact that since the founding, no President has ever faced criminal charges—let alone for his conduct in office. And accordingly no court has ever been faced with the question of a President’s immunity from prosecution. All that our Nation’s practice establishes on the subject is silence. . .”

Chief Justice John “Arbitration Clause” Roberts, writing for the 6-3 Federalist Society majority in Donald J. Trump v The United States (2024).

I finally read this stinking pile of rabidly activist partisan juridical offal, a July 4th pre-election present to the plaintiff, Mr. DJT, so that you don’t have to. Note the Federalist Society/Heritage Foundation/judicial activist approach taken by Chief Justice John “Balls and Strikes Umpire” Roberts and his ilk.

Take the result you want (no prosecution of Project 2025’s declared presidential candidate) and work backwards from there by narrowly following the desired path. Minimize the many damning specifics of this case, mere allegations, many of them baseless or constitutionally irrelevant, keep the ruling as abstract, narrowly legalistic and generic as possible (in other cases, do the exact opposite, obviously, whatever the desired result dictates). In Trump v. US, obviously, start by framing the constitutional question of a candidate indicted on dozens of federal felony charges not even arguably part of his “core official duties” as narrowly as possible, some MAY have been part of his official duties, like so:

We granted certiorari to consider the following question: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

(note: for ease of reading I omit all citations. Decision, citations, concurrences and dissents can all be found here.)

On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted him on four counts for conduct that occurred during his Presidency following the November 2020 election. The indictment alleged that after losing that election, Trump conspired to overturn it by spreading knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the collecting, counting, and certifying of the election results. According to the indictment, Trump advanced his goal through five primary means. First, he and his co-conspirators “used knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislators and election officials to . . . change electoral votes for [Trump’s] opponent, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., to electoral votes for [Trump].” Second, Trump and his co-conspirators “organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states” and “caused these fraudulent electors to transmit their false certificates to the Vice President and other government officials to be counted at the certification proceeding on January 6.”  Third, Trump and his co-conspirators attempted to use the Justice Department “to conduct sham election crime investigations and to send a letter to the targeted states that falsely claimed that the Justice Department had identified significant concerns that may have impacted the election outcome.”  Fourth, Trump and his co-conspirators attempted to persuade “the Vice President to use his ceremonial role at the January 6 certification proceeding to fraudulently alter the election results.” . And when that failed, on the morning of January 6, they “repeated knowingly false claims of election fraud to gathered supporters, falsely told them that the Vice President had the authority to and might alter the election results, and directed them to the Capitol to obstruct the certification proceeding.” Ibid. Fifth, when “a large and angry crowd . . . violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding,” Trump and his co-conspirators “exploited the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification.” .Based on this alleged conduct, the indictment charged Trump with (1) conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U. S. C. §371, (2) conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in violation of §1512(k), (3) obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding in violation of §1512(c)(2), §2, and (4) conspiracy against rights in violation of §241.[1]

Trump insisted nobody can do shit to him because of Article II. The district court disagreed. The appellate court affirmed the trial court’s decision. Here’s what John Roberts quoted from their decision:

The D. C. Circuit distinguished between two kinds of official acts: discretionary and ministerial (citation). It observed that “although discretionary acts are ‘only politically examinable,’ the judiciary has the power to hear cases” involving ministerial acts that an officer is directed to perform by the legislature. (citation). From this distinction, the D. C. Circuit concluded that the “separation of powers doctrine, as expounded in Marbury and its progeny, necessarily permits the Judiciary to oversee the federal criminal prosecution of a former President for his official acts because the fact of the prosecution means that the former President has allegedly acted in defiance of the Congress’s laws.” (citation). In the court’s view, the fact that Trump’s actions “allegedly violated generally applicable criminal laws” meant that those actions “were not properly within the scope of his lawful discretion.” (citation), The D. C. Circuit thus concluded that Trump had “no structural immunity from the charges in the Indictment.” Like the District Court, the D. C. Circuit declined to analyze the actions described in the indictment to determine whether they involved official acts.

We granted certiorari to consider the following question: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

John Roberts includes this weighty consideration, properly enough, in deciding how much unaccountability a certain former president would enjoy (he does so in passing, of course):

We must, however, “recognize[ ] the countervailing interests at stake.”. Federal criminal laws seek to redress “a wrong to the public” as a whole, not just “a wrong to the individual.”. There is therefore a compelling “public interest in fair and effective law enforcement.” The President, charged with enforcing federal criminal laws, is not above them (citation). . .

And this is why Roberts is a fucking Nazi:

. . . Such an immunity is required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the Executive Branch, and to enable the President to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution. Indeed, if presumptive protection for the President is necessary to enable the “effective discharge” of his powers when a prosecutor merely seeks evidence of his official papers and communications, it is certainly necessary when the prosecutor seeks to charge, try, and imprison the President himself for his official actions. At a minimum, the President must therefore be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” . . .

. . . As for a President’s unofficial acts, there is no immunity. The principles we set out in Clinton v. Jones confirm as much. . .

. . .The indictment broadly alleges that Trump and his co-conspirators sought to “overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election.”. It charges that they conspired to obstruct the January 6 congressional proceeding at which electoral votes are counted and certified, and the winner of the election is certified as President-elect. As part of this conspiracy, Trump and his co-conspirators allegedly attempted to leverage the Justice Department’s power and authority to convince certain States to replace their legitimate electors with Trump’s fraudulent slates of electors. According to the indictment, Trump met with the Acting Attorney General and other senior Justice Department and White House officials to discuss investigating purported election fraud and sending a letter from the Department to those States regarding such fraud. The indictment further alleges that after the Acting Attorney General resisted Trump’s requests, Trump repeatedly threatened to replace him. . . .

. . .The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials. And the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority. Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials. . .

. . .The indictment’s remaining allegations cover a broad range of conduct. Unlike the allegations describing Trump’s communications with the Justice Department and the Vice President, these remaining allegations involve Trump’s interactions with persons outside the Executive Branch: state officials, private parties, and the general public. Many of the remaining allegations, for instance, cover at great length events arising out of communications that Trump and his co-conspirators initiated with state legislators and election officials in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin regarding those States’ certification of electors. .Specifically, the indictment alleges that Trump and his co-conspirators attempted to convince those officials that election fraud had tainted the popular vote count in their States, and thus electoral votes for Trump’s opponent needed to be changed to electoral votes for Trump. After Trump failed to convince those officials to alter their state processes, he and his co-conspirators allegedly developed a plan “to marshal individuals who would have served as [Trump’s] electors, had he won the popular vote” in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, “and cause those individuals to make and send to the Vice President and Congress false certifications that they were legitimate electors.”. If the plan worked, “the submission of these fraudulent slates” would position the Vice President to “open and count the fraudulent votes” at the certification proceeding and set up “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect.” According to the indictment, Trump used his campaign staff to effectuate the plan. On the same day that the legitimate electors met in their respective jurisdictions to cast their votes, the indictment alleges that Trump’s “fraudulent electors convened sham proceedings in the seven targeted states to cast fraudulent electoral ballots” in his favor. Those ballots “were mailed to the President of the Senate, the Archivist of the United States, and others.”.

At oral argument, Trump appeared to concede that at least some of these acts—those involving “private actors” who “helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding” at the direction of Trump and a co-conspirator—entail “private” conduct. 

But then, during anal argument, the president had a shit fit. He agreed that he could send SEAL Team Six to kill the Biden Crime Family. All of his conduct was official, throughout his presidency, his reluctant post-presidency, during his first, second and third presidential campaigns and all the years leading up to, and including, the Apprentice, as well as his childhood and the years of his sexual maturity — all immune from any criticism, allegation or anything hurtful to his sense of self.

. . . On Trump’s view, the alleged conduct qualifies as official because it was undertaken to ensure the integrity and proper administration of the federal election. Of course, the President’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” plainly encompasses enforcement of federal election laws passed by Congress. Art. II, §3. And the President’s broad power to speak on matters of public concern does not exclude his public communications regarding the fairness and integrity of federal elections simply because he is running for re-election. Similarly, the President may speak on and discuss such matters with state officials—even when no specific federal responsibility requires his communication—to encourage them to act in a manner that promotes the President’s view of the public good.

“encourage them to act in a manner that promotes the President’s view of the public good.” Fuck you, John, seriously.

. . . Indeed, a long-recognized aspect of Presidential power is using the office’s “bully pulpit” to persuade Americans, including by speaking forcefully or critically, in ways that the President believes would advance the public interest. . .

Such as the public interest in violently storming the Capitol to prevent certification of an election result the electorally defeated president does not like.

. . .The essence of immunity “is its possessor’s entitlement not to have to answer for his conduct” in court. Presidents therefore cannot be indicted based on conduct for which they are immune from prosecution. As we have explained, the indictment here alleges at least some such conduct. . .

Trump claimed he couldn’t be prosecuted for the same things he was impeached and unsuccessfully removed for. Roberts, bravely calling balls and strikes (after getting ready to rule basically exactly this):

. . .The implication of Trump’s theory is that a President who evades impeachment for one reason or another during his term in office can never be held accountable for his criminal acts in the ordinary course of law. So if a President manages to conceal certain crimes throughout his Presidency, or if Congress is unable to muster the political will to impeach the President for his crimes, then they must forever remain impervious to prosecution. . .

Finally Roberts dismisses the doomsaying dissenters who seem not to want an openly corrupt president with a long criminal history to be immune for all criminal acts he can justify as falling within the outer limits of his core powers.

. . . As for the dissents, they strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today—conclude that immunity extends to official discussions between the President and his Attorney General, and then remand to the lower courts to determine “in the first instance” whether and to what extent Trump’s remaining alleged conduct is entitled to immunity. . .

. . . Unable to muster any meaningful textual or historical support [1], the principal dissent suggests that there is an “established understanding” that “former Presidents are answerable to the criminal law for their official acts.”  Conspicuously absent is mention of the fact that since the founding, no President has ever faced criminal charges—let alone for his conduct in office. And accordingly no court has ever been faced with the question of a President’s immunity from prosecution. All that our Nation’s practice establishes on the subject is silence. . .

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, dissented:

Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.

The indictment paints a stark portrait of a President desperate to stay in power.

In the weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, then-President Trump allegedly “spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won,” despite being “notified repeatedly” by his closest advisers “that his claims were untrue,”.

When dozens of courts swiftly rejected these claims, Trump allegedly “pushed officials in certain states to ignore the popular vote; disenfranchise millions of voters; dismiss legitimate electors; and ultimately, cause the ascertainment of and voting by illegitimate electors” in his favor. It is alleged that he went so far as to threaten one state election official with criminal prosecution if the official did not “ ‘find’ 11,780 votes” Trump needed to change the election result in that state. When state officials repeatedly declined to act outside their legal authority and alter their state election processes, Trump and his co-conspirators purportedly developed a plan to disrupt and displace the legitimate election certification process by organizing fraudulent slates of electors.

As the date of the certification proceeding neared, Trump allegedly also sought to “use the power and authority of the Justice Department” to bolster his knowingly false claims of election fraud by initiating “sham election crime investigations” and sending official letters “falsely claim[ing] that the Justice Department had identified significant concerns that may have impacted the election outcome” while “falsely present[ing] the fraudulent electors as a valid alternative to the legitimate electors.”  When the Department refused to do as he asked, Trump turned to the Vice President. Initially, he sought to persuade the Vice President “to use his ceremonial role at the January 6 certification proceeding to fraudulently alter the election results.”. When persuasion failed, he purportedly “attempted to use a crowd of supporters that he had gathered in Washington, D. C., to pressure the Vice President to fraudulently alter the election results.” 

Speaking to that crowd on January 6, Trump “falsely claimed that, based on fraud, the Vice President could alter the outcome of the election results.”  When this crowd then “violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding,” Trump allegedly delayed in taking any step to rein in the chaos he had unleashed. Instead, in a last desperate ploy to hold onto power, he allegedly “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” by pressuring lawmakers to delay the certification of the election and ultimately declare him the winner. That is the backdrop against which this case comes to the Court.

The Court now confronts a question it has never had to answer in the Nation’s history: Whether a former President enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution. The majority thinks he should, and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.

Or as John Roberts, and his five reactionary colleagues on the nation’s highest court, would say “I know you are, but what am I?” And it’s not like Trump has done anything illegal, corrupt, unconstitutional or stinking to high heaven since becoming the 47th president…

“The indictment paints a stark portrait of a President desperate to stay in power.”

[1] As corporate pantload Roberts himself notes, this is the first time the question of immunity for a criminal former president has ever come before the Supreme Court, so where is the precedent he chides the dissent for failing to cite supposed to come from? Once again, John, fuck you and the Nazi horse you rode in on.