Category Archives: Law and Justice

Nothing whatsoever to see, or smell, here

From a recent Washington Bezos exclusive:

Prospective jurors in [Roger] Stone’s trial had completed confidential questionnaires that asked for their views on Trump, Stone and others caught up in Mueller’s investigation. Stone’s lawyers agreed to keep the responses confidential, and no details had been disclosed publicly. Questionnaires completed by those selected as jurors were later leaked to right-wing operatives, prompting an FBI investigation. No findings were ever publicly disclosed.

https://wapo.st/3bDVo1p

Jennifer Rubin — homerun

Writing in the Washington Post Jennifer Rubin makes an irrefutable argument against the popular media talking point that prosecuting those who participated in a many tentacled plan to overturn a democratic election would somehow make us look like a Banana Republic.

Here is her short list of things a democracy must prosecute such people for if it is to protect democracy itself:

How do you know democracy is unraveling? It is when an incumbent does these sorts of things:


Refuses to acknowledge he lost an election.

Uses captive media outlets to undermine the sanctity of elections and lie about election “fraud.”

Ignores mounds of evidence showing the election was legitimate.

Attempts to use the Justice Department to throw doubt on the legitimacy of an election.

Pressures state officials to “find” just enough votes to change the result of a key state.

Pressures state officials to retract voting certificates and create fraudulent documents to override the will of the people.

Cooks up a scheme to retain power that his own counsel understands would be illegal.

Pressures his vice president to disregard his oath and help facilitate the coup plot.

Calls angry people to show up at the nation’s capital just when the legislature is counting electoral votes and promises the gathering will be “wild!”

Invites an armed, unhinged mob to march on Congress and promises to join them in confronting the elected leaders carrying out their constitutional duties.

Incites the crowd to hold his vice president responsible for not having the “courage” to overturn an election, even as the violent mob moves in on him.

Refuses to use law enforcement or national security personnel to put down his supporters’ violent insurrection.

https://wapo.st/3OHvR4U

My GAWD!

Let Heather tell it:

This morning, Jon Swaine and Dalton Bennett of the Washington Post reported that on October 11, 2019, at Trump’s National Doral golf resort in South Florida, Danish filmmakers caught an unguarded conversation between Trump allies talking about their legal exposure because of their work for the president. 

Recording a documentary about Trump’s friend and operative, Roger Stone, the filmmakers caught Stone and Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Stone’s lapel microphone talking about Stone’s upcoming trial for lying to Congress and witness tampering during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. . .

. . . [Trump advisor and campaign chief executive Steve] Bannon viewed Stone as the Trump campaign’s access point to WikiLeaks.” Stone lied to Congress five times, interfering with their Russia investigation, and threatened another witness to try to keep him from exposing Stone’s lies.

At the time the new tape was recorded, Stone was complaining that prosecutors were pressuring him to turn on Trump, and on the tape, said he might “have to appeal to the big man.” Gaetz can be heard agreeing that Stone was “f*ck*d,” but Gaetz didn’t think he would “do a day” in prison. Claiming he had heard it directly from Trump, Gaetz said: “The boss still has a very favorable view of you,” and continued, “I don’t think the big guy can let you go down for this.” “I don’t think you’re going to go down at all at the end of the day,” Gaetz told Stone.

Gaetz sits on the House Judiciary Committee and thus had seen portions of the redacted sections of Special Counsel Muller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the committee members were prohibited from talking about it except among themselves, Gaetz talked with Stone about it, telling him that he was “not going to have a defense.” 

And it just gets deeper and deeper as Bagpiper Bill Barr waltzes in, at the big guy’s urging. read on:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-30-2022?utm_source=email

Joseph fucking Caffari finally makes the news

If this Washington Post caption is not the most chilling one you’ve read this month, I’d hate to see the one that chilled you more:

Chad Wolf, a former secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, during the America First Policy Institute’s America First Agenda summit in Washington, D.C., US, on Monday, July 25, 2022. The nonprofit think tank was formed last year by former cabinet members and top officials in the Trump administration to create platforms based on his policies.

“To create platforms based on his policies.”   Trump’s policy is simply self-promotion and the corrupt exploitation of everyone else for the profit and glory of himself and his gold-plated brand.  Similar to the GOP party platform for 2020 — whatever the Orange Autocrat wants, baby.

Breaking news:  Joseph V. Caffari, Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, Trump-appointee, has been hiding his knowledge of the destruction of evidence of likely crimes for months.  Also implicated in the destruction of January 6th evidence story (although not the cover up), surprisingly, are Trump’s former acting  DHS secretary (Trumpie said he loved acting, can hire and fire ’em at will, no vetting, no pesky Senate advice or consent) Chad Wolf, and another totally like non-corrupt Trump appointee, former acting deputy untersharführer for DHS Ken Cucinelli, all of their texts from that period also, unfortunately, accidentally deleted in the routine “reset”.   America first, baby.

Carol Leonnig reports in the Washington Post:

Text messages for former President Donald Trump’s acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli are missing for a key period leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to four people briefed on the matter and internal emails.

This discovery of missing records for the senior-most homeland security officials, which has not been previously reported, increases the volume of potential evidence that has vanished regarding the time around the Capitol attack.

My man Cuffari doesn’t enter the story til paragraph six, but it’s a pretty good role the tireless watchdog’s got, nonetheless:

The office of Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari did not press the department leadership at that time to explain why they did not preserve these records, nor seek ways to recover the lost data, according to the four people briefed on the watchdog’s actions. Cuffari also failed to alert Congress to the potential destruction of government records. . .

. . .In a nearly identical scenario to that of the DHS leaders’ texts, the Secret Service alerted Cuffari’s office seven months ago, in December 2021, that the agency had deleted thousands of agents’ and employees’ text messages in an agency-wide reset of government phones. Cuffari’s office did not notify Congress until mid-July, despite multiple congressional committees’ pending requests for these records.

The telephone and text communications of Wolf and Cuccinelli in the days leading up to Jan. 6 could have shed considerable light on Trump’s actions and plans. In the weeks before the attack on the Capitol, Trump had been pressuring both men to help him claim the 2020 election results were rigged and even to seize voting machines in key swing states to try to “re-run” the election.

Hmmm, the coincidences here, all amounting to lost evidence of likely criminal conspiracy among top-ranking Trump loyalists, really are amazing, especially since they all seem so eerily like deliberate destruction of evidence and a hamfisted coverup of that destruction of evidence, during an investigation that evidence is extremely pertinent to.   To a paranoid person it could almost seem like part of a long, seamless pattern of ongoing obstruction of justice.

Obviously:

Neither Cuccinelli nor Wolf responded to requests for comment. DHS’s Office of Inspector General [Cufarri] did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Wolf and Cuccinelli had remained at DHS as Trump openly challenged the 2020 election results, even though the agency led efforts to help state and local governments safeguard the integrity of the election results.

Starting in late December, numerous DHS intelligence units across the country were warning of extremely worrisome chatter in white nationalist and pro-Trump social media platforms that were promoting coming armed to Trump’s Jan. 6 rally and using violence to block Biden from becoming president.

In late December, Trump railed in a Cabinet meeting that his secretaries were failing to properly help him investigate fraud that had corruptly “given” the election to Joe Biden, but cited unsubstantiated claims. Trump fired Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in a tweet after Krebs countered Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud, and complained that Wolf should have moved faster to force Krebs out. . .

. . . Wolf had resigned five days after the attack on the Capitol, and cited “recent events” as well as legal rulings questioning his legitimacy to continue leading the department as an acting secretary for 14 months. . .

. . . A Government Accountability Office report in 2020 found that Wolf and Cuccinelli were ineligible to serve in their positions because their appointments had not followed the proper order of succession, an issue the GAO referred to the DHS Office of Inspector General. [that would be our boy Joseph V. Cuffari, for those keeping score at home]

Oh, my God!  Is there no end to the unfounded partisan insinuations against poor Mr. Trump?!  Here is the rest of Carol Leonnig’s scabrous story:  https://wapo.st/3PQ5Dic

Trump’s ongoing obstruction of justice, today’s edition

Why does the mainstream media have such a hard time having an unpaid kid spend a minute on google getting further information on a story of great and immediate public concern?  Joseph Cuffari, the man who ordered the Secret Service to stop looking for the incriminating texts they deleted, from the lead up and the day of the Trump riot, is nowhere to be seen in the media.  His name is rarely mentioned, though he recently ordered the internal search by the Secret Service to immediately cease, while his office investigates the apparent criminal cover-up of destruction of evidence, causing great confusion — and delay — all around.  Congressional Democrats are now calling for the DHS Inspector General, this same Mr. Cuffari, to “recuse himself” from the criminal investigation of the Secret Service.

If an unpaid intern had looked up the Trump-appointed, still serving, Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Cuffari, she’d have immediately found an April 8, 2022 letter from a government watchdog group to Joe Biden giving ample reasons for Cuffari’s removal as IG.   At the time Cuffari had known for at least two months (the writer of the letter, Congress and the public would not, until five months later) that vital criminal evidence, the Secret Service’s text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, had been destroyed, irretrievably deleted in a “planned January 27 data migration” by the USSS.  The letter begins:

Dear President Biden:

In order to preserve the integrity of the independent inspectors general system and to begin counteracting the pervasive culture of impunity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we urge you to take swift and decisive action to address the chilling lack of independence demonstrated in multiple instances by DHS Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari, who was under investigation as of February of this year by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s (CIGIE) Integrity Committee. While POGO has said in the past that it would be reasonable to place Cuffari on administrative leave pending the findings of a CIGIE investigation, our enclosed reporting reveals such extraordinary and improper deference to DHS officials that we call on you to immediately remove Cuffari from his position as DHS inspector general.1 . . .

. . . POGO’s most recent investigation documents an unreleased survey in which more than 10,000 employees at DHS law enforcement components said they have experienced sexual harassment or sexual misconduct, part of an unpublished report that Cuffari still has not released, even though the survey was conducted from fiscal years 2012 to 2018. The same POGO investigation documents Cuffari’s signed instructions resulting in the removal of evidence from a 2020 report showing that Customs and Border Protection, a DHS component, substantiated domestic violence charges in 30 cases involving its employees — then continued to allow them access to government firearms.

That latest investigation is enclosed, as are previous POGO investigations which revealed that Cuffari quashed a pair of investigations involving the Secret Service that had been recommended by the agency’s career staff, that he repeatedly impeded and delayed two ongoing investigations into alleged intelligence manipulation and whistleblower retaliation, and that he may have illegally “retaliated” against former high-ranking employees within the DHS inspector general office.4

Cuffari’s lack of independence contributes to a culture of impunity at DHS and its components. Time and time again, Cuffari has used the authority of his office to bury instances of systemic wrongdoing and perpetuated an environment in which dysfunctional and predatory behavior goes unpunished. This should be deeply concerning to you and anyone else committed to the principles of accountability, transparency, and oversight in the federal government.

source 


Wake up, Sleepy Joe, Biden-appointed, Senate-confirmed US Secretary of DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas, Congress, mass media.  What is a justice obstructing, evidence burying fuck like Cuffari still doing in the US government, as unaccountable watchdog for a huge, vital agency, no less? 

Oh, yeah, remaining loyal to his unhinged patron, obstructing justice, and a Congressional investigation, by telling USSS to stand back and stand by.    Come on, man!  None of this is that hard.

What do you really want?

Boil it down to what you actually need to have a good life.   I suspect even the most ardent Nazi or Klansman will have a list fairly similar to mine.  For Nazism to flourish, the fact of our mortal commonality, that vast confluence of basic human/animal needs and desires, must be denied.  Denial is a powerful force in human affairs and so it is not hard to prove to a racist that all his problems are imposed on him by the Other, powerful, pathetic, inhuman monsters who are vastly inferior to him.  It’s not true, strictly speaking, but we have seen the limits of true and false in recent years, they are no barrier to any faithful belief.

What do we agree that we all need?  All of us need love and understanding.  Parents should be gentle with their children, firm when needed, and never abusive toward them.   We need friends, people we can share our lives with, the good and the bad.  Friends don’t always have to agree with us, but they always treat our feelings with care.  We need to laugh once in a while.   We need sex, and tenderness, from our partners.   We need to feel productive, however we define that.  We need food, clothing, shelter, health care, treatment of diseases that threaten us.  We need a feeling of dignity. We all want to feel safe from attacks, safe from natural disasters, the destruction of our biosphere, safe from criminals, safe from killers of various kinds.  We want to live in peace and be treated fairly by others. We want to control our own lives.  We want to live in a world where justice rules, everyone’s basic needs are met and bad people are kept away from the rest of us. 

An insane criminal court judge I used to know coined the phrase “honor anemia” to describe a root cause of the epidemic of anger, despair, shame and violence that is convulsing our society.  Most people feel they are treated as disposable by a profit-driven economic system that clearly favors only the rich and famous.  The lack of respect the other 98% of us rightfully perceive is constantly burning us, like a draining physical disease that saps our better nature.   The judge, who was greeted as “Your Honor” in all of his favorite restaurants, and who eventually convinced me that he was not just blowing smoke when he claimed he was insane, was certainly an example of the disease he diagnosed as a widespread cause of American misery.

Our better natures are challenged a hundred times a day in our corporate media-driven culture. Scroll through the headlines of your favorite newspaper and try to remember that you are a reflection of the divine.  Read one headline too many and you find yourself snarling “fuck that, these Nazi motherfuckers have to pay!”   The Nazi reader will have a similar reaction to the headine that finally sets him off “fuck that, these Jew motherfuckers have to pay!”   The impulse, of course, is identical.

We go to the dark side when our ability to keep hoping is finally crushed.   In many of us, this hopefulness is a tiny, often timorous flame, as fragile as the human soul itself.  Take away hope and you destroy the impulse to strive to be better, to dream of anything better than despair and revenge.  You wind up joining the Ku Klux Klan, and screaming in the torchlit night, with your equally enraged comrades, filled with the virile mass-murderer’s belief that at least you can go out taking some fucking inferior race mongrels with you.   A dead-end dream that leads only to death, but a dream, at least.

There are many more things that unite us than divide us.   We all need a home.   We will all die.  We all grieve and mourn the deaths of our loved ones. We all feel well-disposed toward people who treat us with kindness.  We prefer to trust people than to assume that everyone is an irredeemable piece of shit.   We all want a better world.   We would all at least flinch to see a baby toddle into traffic, or into a river, many of us would leap to save the kid before thinking about it.

The “genius” of Nazi-types is in creating specific, infuriating wedges to drive us apart.  Keep us divided, angry, afraid, insulted, ignored, ravaged by “honor anemia,” savaged daily by crushing examples of injustice, informed in a stilted status quo–confirming way by a corporate press owned by a small handful of billionaire sociopaths, and you have fertile soil for an ideology of hatred and revenge.  Then the only trick is to keep that rage focused on anyone who denies that dictatorship/oligarchy is the best form of human society.  Punish those who tell the truth under oath, criminalize dissent, incentivize partisan vigilantism and violent intimidation of hated, inhuman enemies worthy of only death.  

Me, I’m trying to keep my eye on the ball.  Someone, I think it was the Jewish sage Hillel, wrote “in a place where there are no mensches, strive to be mensch.”   Strive, my dear unknown friends, to be a fucking mensch in your life.  It is the best we can all hope for.

Obstruction of justice, witness tampering, willful destruction of evidence?

It’s almost impossible for me to understand how a 6-year and counting seamless pattern of lying, obstructing investigations, quid pro quo pardons for people who lied to obstruct, real time witness tampering, ongoing obstruction of investigations, orders to defy subpoenas, false privilege claims, ongoing destruction of evidence, has not given an apolitical Department of Justice enough evidence to bring obstruction of justice charges against the most corrupt administration in American history. I mean, seriously, what the fuck?

The official phase began when new president Trumpie fired FBI director James Comey for insufficient personal loyalty to the boss when he refused to “drop the Flynn thing.” Flynn pleaded guilty to lying about his illegal contacts with the Russians, eventually a Special Counsel was appointed and negotiations were undertaken with Trumpie to testify under oath. Despite his Bannon-like bluster about not being afraid of Mueller (who he tried several times to fire, enlisting various lackeys including White House Council Don McGahn, to do his dirty work), the ex-president agreed only to have his lawyers respond to written questions, his answers claiming no recall of anything, except for the final answer about Flynn, Kislyac, Jared, Don Jr., Bannon, Erik Prince and others. That was, arguably, one of Trumpie’s most “inadequate responses”. The response was, and I quote, “no response given.” Inadequate, indeed. But apparently no indication of intent of any kind, and absolutely no legal repercussions.

The piously corrupt William Pelham Barr, took the extraordinary step of trying to rescind the charges against Flynn, charges Flynn had already pleaded guilty to. Barr argued in a motion to dismiss that Flynn’s admitted lies to the FBI were “immaterial” and therefore noncriminal. In coordination with Flynn’s new lawyer, Sidney Powell, the DOJ moved to dismiss Flynn’s guilty plea. Trumpie later pardoned Flynn. Nothing to see here! Flynn, who went on to advocate invocation of the Insurrection Act and the imposition of martial law so his buddy could remain in power, recently pleaded the fifth over and over again in response to virtually every question the January 6 committee asked him. As you do, you know, when you have nothing to hide.

No presidential phone records during the riot that Trumpie unleashed on the Capitol, all gone, along with the burner phones Trumpie used to speak to his allies in Congress, and in the Willard hotel war room. Call logs all gone missing, whoops. No outtakes from Trumpie’s January 6, go home, beloved patriots video. Secret Service texts from the lead up and the hours of the riot, all permanently deleted after preservation orders were sent by numerous government entities. Though DHS has known about this by all appearnces illegal mass deletion of evidence since at least February, just last week they announced a criminal investigation into what appears to be a criminal cover-up that the Trump appointed director of DHS may well have been personally involved in. Nothing to see here, but the attorneys for people stonewalling the January 6th Committee, paid for by Trumpie, get copies of all transcripts, which the vindictive boss carefully reads, don’t forget!

Apparently, in a post-truth USA, proving obstruction of justice is virtually impossible. If the person angrily denies he obstructed Justice, intimidates all witnesses to his obstruction and rewards everybody who lies about, and obstructs investigation into his obstruction, in a pinch pardoning them, well isn’t that kind of a draw?

Trump 2020– fuck the transition!

In the overwhelming torrent from the high powered right-wing fire hose of excrement, it’s hard to keep track of all of the poisonous shenanigans that keep us constantly distracted from focusing on any one depraved or illegal act by Trump’s wildly obstructionist GOP. 99% of them in the House of Representatives voted recently against contraception, same sex marriage, abortion, and interstate travel for pregnant women. That betrayal of American values and our notions of privacy and personal freedom barely made the news.

It’s worth noting that our original insurrectionist former president, before he finally petulantly relinquished power (and did not attend his successor’s inauguration, which he tried to prevent), the stinking angry two year-old did not have a transition team giving the new Biden Administration daily briefings on Covid, national security or anything else.

Mind you, this was during a huge surge in infections and deaths Trump caused (with the assistance of Barr, DeJoy, Kavanaugh and others) by forcing voters to vote in person, rather than more safely by mail. The frequently repeated preemptive excuse for Trumpie’s loss was massive voter fraud, but even Bill Barr himself, one of the most despicable lying smug fat fucks of all time, told the president that voter fraud claims were bullshit, “they’re shoveling bullshit, Your Highness.”

Trumpie’s refusal to cooperate in any way during the transition was as unprecedented as a lame duck president hatching a multi-tentacled conpiracy to prevent the peaceful transfer of power and remain in office. The punishment this unprcedented rogue former president receives must also be unprecedented. It has to be a cautionary lesson to every future enraged two year-old who manages to get enough free speech/financial backing to become president.

Trump’s lawyers argue like Trump

“The … suggestion that President Trump did not act swiftly enough to quell the violence is absolutely not true. Upon hearing of the reports of violence, he tweeted, pleading with the crowd to be ‘peaceful,’ followed by a tweeted video urging people to ‘go home’ and to do so in ‘peace.’ He and the White House further took immediate steps to coordinate with authorities to provide whatever was necessary to counteract the rioters. … He, like the rest of the Country, was horrified at the violence.“

— Trump lawyers’ trial memorandum, second Trump impeachment, Feb. 8, 2021.

https://wapo.st/3b0P3wF