Category Archives: Law and Justice

Epstein Eve in the Grey Lady

“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Wow. Check out what the NY Times published on the eve of the deadline for the DOJ [partially, conditionally, grudgingly] complying with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, unanimously passed by Congress (but for one diehard MAGA representative) and signed into law, thirty days ago, by Trump himself:

The article (which Trump surely regards as a treasonous, false, witch hunt hit job) begins:

Jeffrey Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” He and Donald J. Trump also had “no formal relationship.” They went to a lot of the same parties. But they “did not socialize together.” They were never really friends, just business acquaintances. Or “there was no relationship” at all. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”

For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Trump and his representatives have offered shifting, often contradictory accounts of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, one sporadically captured by society photographers and in news clips before they fell out sometime in the mid-2000s. Closely scrutinized since Mr. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell during Mr. Trump’s first term, their friendship — and questions about what the president knew of Mr. Epstein’s abuses — now threatens to consume his second one.

The controversy has shaken Mr. Trump’s iron hold on his base like no other. Loyal supporters have demanded to know why the administration has not moved more quickly to unearth the convicted sex offender’s remaining secrets. In November, after resisting months of pressure to release more Epstein-related documents held by the federal government — and facing an almost unheard-of revolt among Republican lawmakers — Mr. Trump reversed himself, signing legislation that requires their release beginning this week.

Mr. Epstein had a talent for acquiring powerful friends, some of whom have become ensnared in the continuing scrutiny of his crimes. For months, Mr. Trump has labored furiously to shift himself out of the frame, dismissing questions about his relationship with Mr. Epstein as a “Democrat hoax” and imploring his supporters to ignore the matter entirely. An examination of their history by The New York Times has found no evidence implicating Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s abuse and trafficking of minors.

But the two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.

Read all about it

In response to a detailed list of questions from The Times, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement: “This fake news story, which is not worth the paper it’s printed on, is just another stale regurgitation of decades-old false allegations against President Trump. The truth will remain the same no matter how many times The New York Times tries to change it. President Trump did nothing wrong, and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for being a creep.”

And one last bite (from the article), with the classic Trump assessment of a guy he now claims to have hardly known:

In the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein — now extraordinarily wealthy and well connected — seemed to grow less content with the anonymity he had carefully drawn around his life and business. In 2002, practically inviting public scrutiny, he arranged to fly with former President Bill Clinton and a celebrity entourage on a humanitarian trip to Africa. Details of the trip were soon shared with The New York Post’s Page Six. Not long after, New York magazine published the first major profile of Mr. Epstein. Mr. Trump provided the headline quote: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

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.

Trump kills

As a comedian, less so than as the president of the United States. He is a killer though, his psychopath father made sure of that. He has exhibited a taste for killing people, whenever he has the power to do so. He didn’t blink when told that the shuttering of USAID would kill 2,000 poor people a day, most of them little brown children, he probably made one of his famous wisecracks.

As his first term was ending Trump was enraged and anxious to execute federal death row prisoners after his loss in the “rigged election“. That his hyper religious Christian AG Bill Barr went into overdrive to support Trump’s killing rampage tells you all you need to know about far right Christianity. It was important for these angry, punitive men to kill these federal prisoners before Trump lost the unchallengeable power to do so. They rushed to kill several men of color and a woman, Lisa Montgomery [1], so crazy it’s hard to understand why she wasn’t locked in a mental institution for life.

Of course, once he was unfairly snubbed and deprived of the recent Nobel Peace Prize he so richly deserved, he began to refocus on an emergency war on drugs against the “narco-terrorist” government of Venezuela (as well as stepping up violent ICE  attacks on his own civilian population).  In addition to the documented torture of illegally detained non-criminals at his private detention centers, now holding close to 70,000 people in cruel conditions, he has killed at least 87 South Americans in strikes on small boats after accusing the crews of acts of war against the USA.

The rage to prevail has always animated our current president, the “Winner”, and killing is the ultimate assertion of an extreme notion of power, I suppose. Trump argues that he is free to kill anyone he designates a deadly enemy under IEEPA – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Oh, wait, that’s his fig leaf for his illegally imposed tariffs. He is allowed to murder suspected drug dealers anywhere, he claims, because of another emergency war power someone told him about, possibly the rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798, plus he has “an Article II” and, most convincingly of all, the people he is killing — “narco-terrorists” — are totally evil.

Oddly enough, former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is in detention at the International Criminal Court at the Hague for the identical crime, executing suspected drug dealers without arresting, charging and trying them first.  Although Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the International Criminal Court in 2019, much of the wholesale murder he committed took place before that date and so he’s still under the court’s jurisdiction and locked up.

Last month, judges decided to keep Duterte in custody, finding that he was likely to refuse to return for trial and could use his freedom to intimidate witnesses.

According to court filings, Duterte instructed and authorized “violent acts including murder to be committed against alleged criminals, including alleged drug dealers and users.” The charges against him date from Nov. 1, 2011, when he was still mayor of the southern city of Davao, to March 16, 2019, when the country withdrew from the court. He was president from 2016-22.

Estimates of the death toll during Duterte’s presidential term vary. National police put the figure at more than 6,000, while human rights groups claim up to 30,000. Families of victims hailed Duterte’s arrest in March.

Of course, Donald Trump’s body count somehow doesn’t include the more than 600,000 who have died so far as a result of Trump’s largest campaign donor, failed humanoid Elon Musk, being tasked with shutting down USAID, with Donald’s, and Charles Koch’s and the Heritage Foundation’s, blessing.  That alarming number of innocent dead, the poorest people in the world and their children, is expected to reach a million very soon, and more than 14 million over the next few years.

What are you going to do? Not everybody in the world is a winner… “and if you’re a winner, you get to kill whoever you want, they let you do it. Ask the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, they’ll tell you, just like they did when they declared me the winner of Trump v. United States.”

[1]

The Department of Justice has scheduled three federal executions during the administration’s lame-duck period: Orlando Hall on November 19, Lisa Montgomery on December 8, and Brandon Bernard on December 10. The last time the U.S. government carried out an execution between a presidential election and the inauguration of the new president for a federal crime was nearly 132 years ago, on January 25, 1889, when the outgoing administration of Grover Cleveland executed Richard Smith, a Choctaw Indian, for a murder on tribal land in Arkansas. source

Montgomery was the 11th prisoner to be killed by lethal injection since Donald Trump resumed federal executions last July after a 17-year hiatus. The president is an ardent supporter of capital punishment. source

Of course he is.

Department of War Crimes

One more chapter in the Age of Incoherence. There is apparently controversy about the legality of the US military killing civilians of foreign countries who are on boats, or survivors clinging to the wreckage of boats blown out of the water by the Trump Department of War [sic]. Six former service members, now in Congress, made a video reminding active service military and intelligence personnel of their duty to disobey unlawful orders. They were immediately threatened by Mr. Trump, who has never been more sane or measured — prosecution for sedition and execution!

Maximum lethality, baby. We are the department of death, destruction and faithful devotion to our savior, Jesus of Nazareth.

First of all, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, ordering the killing of survivors of an illegal drone attack in international waters, ordering an admiral to “kill them all”, is presumed to be a totally legal order, entitled to the strong presumption of legality, if done by the Department of War. The real problem Secretary of War [sic] Pete Hegseth faces is the stream of seditious leakers who make these legal orders public. These traitorous leakers will be found by the most transparent administration in history, and they will be secretly tried and executed for treason, presumably.

Secretary Hegseth posted a reminder to troops that orders from superiors are presumed legal and disobeying orders presumed legal is a crime punishable by court martial and what Senator Mark Kelly is facing from the newly lethal Department of War. I couldn’t find that post anywhere, though it appeared in a news feed on my phone this morning. I was too slow to do a screen shot…

There’s also the small matter of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

U.S. service members take an oath to uphold the Constitution. In addition, under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial, service members must obey lawful orders and disobey unlawful orders. Unlawful orders are those that clearly violate the U.S. Constitution, international human rights standards or the Geneva Conventions.

Service members who follow an illegal order can be held liable and court-martialed or subject to prosecution by international tribunals. Following orders from a superior is no defense.  source

This will have to stand in for the latest example of Secretary Pete’s wise, sober and inspiring leadership via X, a repost from the man who made him Secretary of WAR [1]. But first, here’s what Mr. Trump himself posted about the military taking an oath to the Constitution and not a dictator on day one.

[1]

The eternal horror of things like the so-called Epstein files

I woke up thinking how the longtime operation of Jeffrey Epstein and his wing-woman Ghislaine Maxwell (including Epstein’s convenient death in federal detention during Trump 1.0) is the perfect illustration of how the powerful always prey, unaccountably, on the vulnerable. The privileged elites, rightfully hated by virtually everyone else, live by a different set of laws, rules and morality than the rest of us. They have always felt truly feel entitled to own everything and to make every decision for everybody else.

The rest of us are fungible, expendable pawns to be used to their best advantage. Their logic is impeccable, if self-serving. If 60,000 more poor people die preventable deaths, or 600,000 (estimated deaths so far from Musk canceling USAID) a million, or a hundred million, as the direct result of policies that ensure that the wealthiest can hoard even more wealth, how is that the fault of the super-wealthy? It’s simply democracy.

These rich powerful men saw the needy, cute 14 and 15 year-old girls Epstein and Maxwell collected from broken homes in working class neighborhoods as disposable receptacles for their desires. Most kids that age are insecure and easily seduced by praise and promises. Epstein literally groomed them, using his ultra sophisticated and charming procuress Ghislaine Maxwell to gain their trust. Epstein and Maxwell showered attention, praise, money, expensive gifts and the promise of a bright future on susceptible girls. They carefully screened the girls so they could be freely exploited without any fear of anything ever happening to Epstein and other the powerful men who used them. The girls were just objects of lust for them.

To the girls, the attraction was being made to feel special and the promise of money and class like the elegant Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell was a spoiled, entitled, self-hating, pathetic, deeply damaged exploiter who was drawn to Epstein because he was like her beloved father, the ultimate scumbag billionaire who ripped off the pension funds of his own workers because he somehow wasn’t rich enough. Never having really had her shady, preoccupied father’s love (he left her nothing in his will) and in desperate need of wealth, she found another rich monster to cling to and became an abuser herself in order to feel some kind of power and self-worth.

The wealthy, well-connected men who sexually used these girls probably got off as much on the fact that the girls were garbage they could do whatever they want to as any other aspect of it. They were powerful and untouchable and these girls were cute, safe and ready for use, otherwise disposable instruments for the gratification of the mens’ undeniable desires. 

A highly respectable older man I once knew, who was likely a pedophile, asked me once why pedophiles were so hated, why they were so often killed by rapists and murderers when they got to prison. I stated the obvious — it’s probably because they prey on the most vulnerable and defenseless among us and the harm they do to their innocent young victims scars them for the rest of their lives. Even a psychopathic serial killer with a life sentence can probably grasp the evil of this on some level. If anyone deserves a harsh, violent end it’s someone who takes advantage of a trusting young person, and inflicts lifelong damage, for their own twisted gratification.

Of course, because of the wealth and power of the men Epstein secretly videotaped having sex with girls, the essential ugliness of the issue becomes obscured. It turns into an abstraction, a 1,000,000 page file to be haggled over by politicians, like the JFK assassination files. 62 years later, the true story of how JFK was killed, and who arranged his murder, is still shrouded in officially sanctioned bullshit. Anyone who questions the highly unlikely official lone gunman version is called a conspiracy theorist, though the real conspiracy appears to involve the obfuscation of what actually happened in Dallas and which powerful, unaccountable men arranged it.

A group of survivors of Epstein’s empire of lifelong trauma has shown great courage and resolve and they deserve a measure of justice for the abuse they were forced to endure. Their suffering is the heart of the Epstein files, whatever the rich fucks who scramble to protect themselves from shameful revelations about themselves may have to say about it. And, of course, it’s not as if Trump, Epstein’s lustful running buddy for decades, is mentioned in the files thousands of times, more than any other powerful man associated with the late pervert. Why would he be? There was no reason for the FBI to reassign 1,000 agents to spend thousands of hours scrubbing his name from files that are a complete hoax and don’t actually contain anything incriminating about anyone, was there?

And besides, while Trump pardons, the day after two ceremonial turkeys, a felonious former president of Honduras, imprisoned for importing tons of cocaine into the US, he is illegally killing men on boats (86 to date, that we know of) he accuses, with all evidence of their theoretical crime at the bottom of the ocean, of being terrorists bringing deadly drugs into the USA.

Welcome again to the Age of Incoherence. This is what happens when billionaires promote a power-crazed, vain, incurious, grandiose, crazy, manipulable, infinitely covetous idiot to power and age and genetics add dementia to the mix. What could go wrong?

Pam Bondi on the guilt of all Trump enemies, real or imagined

During a press conference after the dismissal of the cases against James Comey and Leticia James, AG Pam Bondi, who makes Bill Barr look like a straight shooter, was asked:

If I could just get your reaction to the James Comey and Leticia James cases being dropped today back in Washington.   James Comey put out a video, he said this matters most because a message has to be sent — the president of the United States could not use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies.  Your reaction to the cases being dropped and to that specific investigation.

“Sure, we’ll be taking all available legal actions including an immediate appeal to hold Leticia James and James Comey accountable for their unlawful conduct. I’m going to keep going on this, I’m not worried about someone who has been charged with a very serious crime. His alleged actions were a betrayal of public trust.”

Betrayal of public trust? 

The sitting attorney general, for the time being, anyway, stating “held accountable for their unlawful conduct” of two people hated by Trump who she was instructed to prosecute whether or not there was a likelihood of conviction in either case. She’s not worried about the feelings of someone she’s charged with a “very serious crime”.  She’s not worried about the fact the attorneys who work for her already wrote memos about all the good reasons to decline prosecution of these two. She’s not worried that her boss was credibly charged with very, very, very serious crimes he clearly committed, which would have been proved at trial with a mountain of evidence.  His crimes were especially heinous, like his ongoing mass murder of people on boats,  compared to the contrived “very serious crimes” that these two were vindictively charged with, at Trump’s command. Compared to Tom Homan taking a $50,000 cash bribe on videotape from the FBI? Commie talking point.

The presumption of innocence?  Not for people Trump tells me are evil! 

No wonder the Qataris used to pay Pamela Jo Bondi $115,000 a month for her lobbying and legal expertise…

Quickly forgotten atrocity by the deadly dotard in chief

Trump rage posted this in response to a viral short video in which elected veterans of the armed forces and intelligence services reminded serving members of their oath not to follow illegal orders.

The video was difficult to find on the YouTube search engine or any other search engine I tried.  Fortunately I had it in my history from viewing it the other day:

In fairness to the NY Times, a paper that regularly publishes important investigative pieces and blurs crucial lines with equal frequency, it ran this article yesterday.

Here are a few recent favorites of mine from the front page of the journal of record for the United States of America, but first:

You go, girl.