Category Archives: Law and Justice

scumbag lawyer’s argument, MAGA-style

From the Colorado appeals court’s decision removing Trump from the Colorado primary ballot after finding him an officer who, at minimum, gave aid and comfort to insurrectionists (“hostages”) violating his oath to protect the country from insurrections against the Constitution. Recall how expeditiously this legally sound ruling was taken up and overturned by the Federalist Society Six, all but one appointed by a Republican president who’d lost the popular vote.

This same immovable block, including two billionaire befriended extremists whose wives have expressed undying love for Trump and what he stands for, is slowly delaying Trump’s criminal trial in D.C. (since DOJ’s December request for a ruling on Trump’s absurd, fascistic claim of absolute, blanket presidential immunity) for his central role in planning and carrying out the Hail Mary January 6 riot to obstruct an official proceeding and prevent certification of victory of the man who beat him by 7,000,000 votes.   MAGA Justice Samuel “burn witches”;Alito was fixing to stay the official proceeding, while Trump’s allies in Congress took other measures to get him extra-legally inserted as the president.  This plan was  described  years later by insane Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell [1] (who amazingly, still has a law license), if the vote to certify Biden’s victory hadn’t happened late that night. 

[1]. After Giuliani’s segment ended, Powell took the lectern and alleged, without evidence, that an international communist plot to rig the 2020 election had been engineered by Cuba, China, Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and antifa.[14][66][67][68] She also alleged that Dominion Voting Systems “can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden”.[69] The source for many of these claims appeared to be far right news organization One America News Network (OANN).[14] She also repeated a conspiracy theory[70]—spread by Congressman Louie Gohmert, OANN and others[71]—that election results showing a landslide victory for Trump had been transmitted to the German office of the Spanish electronic voting firm Scytl, after which a company server was supposedly seized in a raid by the United States Army.[14] The US Army and Scytl refuted these claims;[72] Scytl has not had any offices in Germany since September 2019 and does not tabulate US votes.[73][74

It can’t happen here

You have the sad sight of ambitious, unprincipled, obsequious followers summoned by a criminal defendant, the self-proclaimed avatar of retribution, already found guilty of fraud several times over, adjudicated to have sexually assaulted a woman in a high-end department store, and then defaming her as a liar, shirking their public duties to rail, outside the courthouse where their boss is on trial, against the totally unfair judicial system of the country that is about to vote and theoretically put their contemptuous master back in the White House.

You have an actual Nazi on the Supreme Court (not the Black Klansman this time) flying the distress flag in front of his house for days after the January 6 riot in support of the defeated insurrectionist president, in solidarity with the insane lie that the guy who lost by seven million votes was the victim of massive bipartisan fraud, stabbed in the back by RINOs who pretended to follow the so-called law instead of “finding” the requested votes. This fly encrusted piece of shit, Sam Alito by name, who defended himself imbecilically, in an account peppered with lies, about why the flag was upside down outside his house for a brief few days after the insurrection (his wife did it, the neighbors are vicious, his children were in danger), will cast an unappealable vote to decide whether his leader is immune from all prosecution for anything he did while president, including planning and calling for the violent attack on the Capitol while uttering the word “peace” a few times during his long, vehement, lying incitement speech.

This unbiased justice flew an upside down flag to publicly show his solidarity with the boss and his claim to retain power, legal or not, he and his wife simply love what he stands for.

Here’s a sixty second snapshot of our historical moment:

Why nobody does it better than Heather

Jerry Garcia is supposed to have said that you shouldn’t try to be the best at something a lot of people are doing. You should try to be the only one doing what you do. That describes Heather Cox Richardson, historian, writer and incomparable reporter.

She has the greatest gift for setting things in clear perspective, often with a historical analog, a haunting echo of the past, presenting the most consistently important contemporary reporting. Her May 7 account of American law’s current struggle to contain a brazen gang of determined maniacs cuts to the point, over and over.

It begins:


The past two days of former president Trump’s criminal trial for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, to silence her before the 2016 election have been illuminating in different ways.

Yesterday, witnesses established that the paper trail of payments to Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who forwarded the money to Daniels, had been falsified. That paper trail included invoices, checks, and records. Witnesses also established that Trump micromanaged his finances, making it hard to believe he didn’t know about the scheme. 

That scheme looked like this: Former Trump Organization employee Jeffrey McConney said that Trump’s former financial chief Allen Weisselberg, who has gone to jail twice in two years for his participation in Trump’s financial schemes and is there now, told him to send money to Cohen. Cohen had paid Daniels $130,000 from a home equity loan in 2016 to buy her silence about a sexual encounter with Trump. Cohen received 11 checks totaling $420,000 in repayment, including enough money to cover the taxes he would have to pay for claiming the payments as income for legal services, and a bonus. 

Nine of those checks came from Trump’s personal bank account. His team sent the checks to him at the White House for his personal signature. 

A number of observers have suggested that the evidence presented through documents yesterday was not riveting, but historians would disagree. Exhibit 35 was Cohen’s bank statement, on which Weisselberg had written the numbers to reflect the higher payment necessary to cover Cohen’s tax bill for the money. Exhibit 36 was a sheet of paper on which McConney had recorded in his own hand how the payments to Cohen would work. The sheet of paper had the TRUMP logo on it. 

“It’s rare to see folks put the key to a criminal conspiracy in writing,” legal analyst Joyce White Vance wrote in Civil Discourse, “but here it is. It’s great evidence for the prosecution.” 

source

Subscribe to her email. She sends one of these concise, clear-headed, timely letters from an American every single night.

Nazi logic American style

In order to have a smoothly running totalitarian state, absolute obedience to the will of the leader is essential. It is impossible for an army to efficiently carry out obscene orders if individual officers and soldiers are allowed to have their own subjective moral opinions about right and wrong. Authority flows top down and loyalty is rewarded, until a sacrifice is needed, in which case it will be undertaken willingly, in the name of protecting the infallible leader. If your leader is, God forbid, on trial for a specific set of illegal acts, shift the legal focus from the acts in question to a series of academic future hypotheticals. Why dwell on, or indeed allow discussion of, anything that will make the leader look as guilty as he appears to be? That would be self-sabotage of the worst kind.

There is a universe, offers Trump’s attorney, in an excellent impression of the insane Robert F. Kennedy Jr., where this would be an official presidential act entitled to absolute immunity from prosecution. I don’t recall Justice Sotomayor asking Mr. Sauer under what Bizzarro World situation this could be an official act. After all, if the guy is corrupt, there is a justice system in place, unless the corrupt political rival is somehow above the law…

As for the defense of murder of a political rival as an official presidential act, I guess Sauer’s argument would go like this: lets say, for example, that the defeated president truly and honestly believes the candidate who defeated him is an evil vampire who drinks the blood of innocent white Christian children while he diddles them.   After all, no less than the brilliant, respected Alan Dershowitz made the arguably not demented argument at one of Trump’s impeachment trials that if the president, or presidential candidate, truly, honestly believes something that nothing he does in connection with that truly held belief can ever be against the law.  After all, führerworte haben gesetzeskraft, as German legal experts used to say during the Thousand Year Reich.

The leader’s word, you understand, has the force of law. Every one of the leader’s farts, the force of prophecy. The leader’s temper tantrums — irrefutable directives from a higher power. Ask anyone who has been in the courtroom with Leader Trump, as he nonchalantly catches a few winks while his vicious enemies weakly flail away, trying to unfairly destroy him. Ask particularly about the prophetic farts…

Opening remarks before an illegitimate 6-3 extremist court

This is the brief opening statement by John Sauer, attorney for criminal defendant/movant Donald Trump,setting the stage for moving the court to create a new doctrine that would protect the criminal ex-president from prosecution for any of the many crimes he committed while in office.

I have rebutted each of his asinine talking points.

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution there can be no presidency as we know it.  

This statement is a lie.   It is also called rhetoric or puffery, part of the lawyer’s art of persuasion.  At bottom it is plainly false.  Asserting that a right that never existed has always been essential is a cynical and ballsy opening move.  Claiming that a president’s preemptive and eternal immunity from accountability for criminal behavior is a precondition for preserving a centuries’ old institution is as perverse and audacious a lie as can be told.  

For 234 years of American history no president was ever prosecuted for his official act. 

That is because for 234 years, no American president, with the exception of Richard Nixon, was ever in danger of being prosecuted for any act, official or otherwise, committed while in office.  All were constrained by law and the fear of punishment after leaving office. Trump was the first lawless, recklessly criminally inclined president in 234 years.  

He insists now on his right to be an untouchable mob boss.  And as for Richard Nixon, he accepted a pardon  to shield himself from prosecution, even knowing as a lawyer that he was accepting the equivalent of a guilty plea in exchange for the pardon.   Even though Nixon never accepted responsibility for his criminal activity in the White House, he knew the law, his criminal exposure and likelihood of conviction and took the necessary steps to protect himself.  No previous president risked committing outright crimes because they knew they would be prosecuted for them, particularly by their political adversaries, once they were private citizens again. In Trump’s twisted little mind Nixon’s only crime was that his balls weren’t big enough to get away with whatever he wanted to do. If the president believes it’s right, it cannot be a crime. Dershowitz belched up that old Nazi chestnut one of the times they impeached Trump.

The framers of our constitution viewed an energetic executive as essential to securing liberty.  

The framers of our constitution viewed the American chief executive as the opposite of a Divine Right right king, the unaccountable tyrant they had overthrown to form the new nation, the world’s first democracy.  The crucial requirement for a democratic leader is being accountable to the constitution and the laws of the land. That would’ve been understood among the framers of our constitution as nonnegotiable. Nobody can make a coherent argument against that self-evident proposition,  dig up fucking Antonin Scalia and he’d say the same.

If a president can be charged, put on trial and imprisoned for his most controversial decisions as soon as he leaves office, that looming threat will distort the president’s decision making precisely when bold and fearless action is most needed.

There is no threat whatsoever to any president other than the single one, Trump, the man making the argument before the Supreme Court.  Only Trump openly employed criminal means to achieve illegal ends– in this case overruling the will of 81,000,000 Americans, and a robust Electoral College majority, to overturn their constitutional choice for president.  It was bold and fearless of Trump to spend $50 million promoting the lie that the election had been stolen from him. The Big Lie he vigorously promoted he knew very well was a lie, he had been informed numerous times that it was a lie, he didn’t care.   

It was bold and fearless of Trump to urge a mob of angry followers that he had stirred to violence, a mob directed from a war room manned by Bannon, Kerik, Giuliani, Eastman et al, coordinated with Roger Stone, Mike Q-Anon Flynn and the Proud Boys, among others, a mob it turns out Trump knew was armed, and sent to the Capitol to violently stop the certification of his electoral loss. These things are all indictable and very serious criminal offenses, part of an octopus armed conspiracy to violate the law and the constitution to overthrow the rule of democracy. They are bold and fearless crimes no sane president would dare contemplate.

Every current president will face de facto blackmail and extortion by his political rivals while he is still in office.

Also simply a lie.  Additionally, Trump is the only kind of politician who routinely blackmails and extorts his political rivals.

The implications of the court’s decision here extend far beyond the facts of this case.   

They will extend far into the future, and harmfully influence it. But as for the present and the past, they extend only to the facts of this case. The Nixon case is moot now. The only other case that is comparable to the hypotheticals in this case are the exact facts of the Trump case the prissy Nazis on the court are all dancing around daintily.  To my chagrin, from the extended excerpts I heard,  what I heard my most trusted legal pundits talking about, even the non-Nazi justices did not directly and thoroughly address the stinking 50,000 pound orange turd in the room. For some reason the underlying facts of the case that brought the controversy to the Supreme Court were barely alluded to in all the academic “hypotheticals”.

Could president George W. Bush have been sent to prison for instructing an official proceeding or allegedly lying to Congress to induce war in Iraq? Could president Obama be charged with murder for killing US citizens abroad in a drone strike?  Could president Biden someday be charged with unlawfully inducing Come on immigrants to enter the country illegally for his border policies? 

This Biden query, ostensibly added in fairness to the current president, is a particularly nauseating and gratuitous bit of Koch network “fuck you, Biden.”  The other cases pose legitimate questions for democracy and both should’ve been investigated as criminal acts, or at least challenged as things future presidents would be on notice were out of bounds for presidents to do.

 The answer to all these questions is no. 

Wrong answer, moron.

Prosecuting the president for his official acts is an innovation with no foothold in history or tradition and incompatible with our constitutional structure.

False and false.

The original meaning of the executive vesting clause, the framers understanding and intent and unbroken historical tradition, spanning 200 years and policy considerations rooted in the separation of powers, all counsel against it. 

They all counsel strongly for holding a criminal president to account, counselor. 

I welcome the court’s questions. 

We have no questions for you, nor will we hold your bald-faced lying against you, you’re one of us. We will give you everything you ask for because we’re all on the same team, buddy.  And you have to love a man with balls as big as yours going for broke, brazenly doubling down on transparent lies and sweating it out to be a real bare-knuckle brawl winner like our indomitable sponsor Mr. Koch!

Putin is laughing his evil ass off

It’s hard to grasp the passionate MAGA embrace of dictatorial, enemy assassinating war criminal Vladimir Putin, except that their leader, a vain, compulsively lying orange-faced man with pale pink ears,  appears to truly love the taste of Putin’s ass.   Heather Cox Richardson, putting a few pieces together:

Under its new co-chairs, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Trump loyalist Michael Whatley, the Republican National Committee last week sent out a robocall to voters’ phones saying that Democrats committed “massive fraud” in the 2020 presidential election and that “If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.” This is a straight-up lie, of course—Trump and his loyalists have never produced any evidence for their accusations and lost more than 60 court cases over it—but Trump clearly intends to make it a centerpiece of his campaign. 

While Republicans are pushing the Big Lie, in The Bulwark today, conservative commentator Mona Charen noted that Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelensky this week warned the U.S. that Ukraine will lose the war against Russia’s aggression if it does not get U.S. aid. 

“Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history,” Charen wrote. “If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the [Republicans] than anyone other than Trump…. [T]hey mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin,” she said, “must be pinching himself.”

Heather’s full letter

Muddled with a bit of unneeded ideology, but making a reasonable point Biden should think about

I read an interesting critique of Biden’s campaign speculating about why, in spite of his impressive achievements in office, he seems to be trailing, or at best tied with, the destructive Trump in a nation many (on all sides) perceive to be broken. The author of the op ed writes as a professional centrist with a seeming bent toward the myth of The Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan. Aside from some nods to the MAGA right (Trump’s economic policies the first three years of his administration were widely seen as a great success), he makes an excellent point.

In a moment when so many are angry and feel betrayed by our institutions, where even an historically strong economy leaves millions feeling screwed, Biden the Institutionalist needs to vow to make fundamental, transformational change to fix broken institutions and commit to using the government to make real fairness a core and long term goal of his next term.

Ronald Reagan was a bigot and something of a dunce, though he was indisputably a very effective front man for the interests of our greatest, if most avaricious, citizens, the 1%, the best of us, born booted and spurred, continuing the ride the rest of us. There was no reason, but an appearance of giving credence to both sides of the political spectrum, for the op ed’s author to mention Reagan in the paragraph about Biden committing to reform, or to cite with approval Reagan’s words about limited government, but the larger point makes sense. Biden should stress his commitment to making the necessary reforms to a system many Americans now see as badly wounded, if not already broken beyond repair (enter dictator, who alone can fix it). Democracy has not broken yet, but there are crucial reforms that will make it stronger against determined enemies, here and broad, that we now know are maniacally intent on permanent minority rule.

A few examples of desperately needed reform: an independent, nonpolitical system for lifetime judicial appointments in which party operatives and ideologically committed judicial fraternity members would be ineligible for office. A rebalancing of the Supreme Court with several additional law abiding new justices. An end to the filibuster and the Electoral College, two crucial instruments for minority control, both remnants of slavery. No more one legislator blocking of all appointments in the manner of ignoramus Senator Tommy Tuberville. An independent commission to rule on electoral maps and have new ones drawn and implemented quickly. An interbranch dispute resolution court to quickly decide all conflicts between the three branches of government. An expedited way to keep vexatious, frivolous, transparently delay-seeking legal motions out of our courts. There are many institutional reforms that need to be done, a commitment to do them would strengthen Biden’s appeal and inspire voters to sign on.

Otherwise the party that has carried out its long term goal of creating hostility against our own government, who has broken all of the institutions that protect the will of the majority in a democracy, gets to benefit from the broken system. By their disabling of government, MAGA/Koch vindicate the demented Reagan’s glib assertion, regurgitating a very old line and making it his own, that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” Here is a paragraph from the op ed I mentioned up top.

Even better would be an effort to develop a reform agenda: Mr. Biden could declare it’s long past time for America to put its house in order, to begin cleaning up the messes of the past two decades, to face our problems and return to our own best national self. He might even think of adapting and repurposing for the center-left a few lines from Ronald Reagan’s first Inaugural Address: “It’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”

full op ed

J6 hostage profile

Insurrectionist morons like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Lyin’ Ted Cruz and their ilk, taking their cue from the Big Orange Turd, keep referring to the rioters arrested for their violence on January 6, 2021 as hostages. According to this deranged theory the indicted and convicted rioters are political hostages, unfairly arrested, subjected to bogus political prosecutions, illegally locked up and being badly mistreated for merely engaging in forceful protest that the RNC officially designated “legitimate political discourse”.

Everyone knows what hostages are, they’re people taken prisoner by force, kidnapped and held for ransom, usually by criminals or terrorists, in order to extract concessions from the loved ones of the hostages they are holding. The civilians kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th, being held as pawns in a negotiation, are hostages.

By contrast, and in direct contradiction to compromised Speaker of the House MAGA Mike’s recent lie, no protester walking in the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, no matter how peaceful, was innocent of, at the very least, criminal trespass. The entire MAGA crowd right wing fabulist Tucker Carlson called “respectful, peaceful tourists” entered after a violent armed crowd overran the police lines, sending dozens to the hospital, and broke into the locked building where a joint session of congress was in progress. Leaving aside the disgusting detail of how many of these innocent patriotic citizens defecated and pissed in the halls of the People’s House, while sacking it.

Many of these militant, right wing, white nationalist motherfuckers, like the ones who chanted “Hang Mike Pence (bring him out!) hang Mike Pence (bring him out!)” were guilty of crimes much more serious than trespass, in spite of Ronna Romney McDaniels’ alternative fact styling of their activities as “legitimate political discourse.”

Here is a very short description of one of Trump’s so-called hostages, the innocent patriots that he is fixing to fully pardon in his syphilitic fever dream of a second term when he would be a dictator for one day.