The lawyers Trump is still able to hire filed a unique motion in federal court the other day related to his right to retain government papers after leaving office. The judge gave them a few days to fix their filing, since shewas legitimately confused about what they are seeking and why they are seeking it in her federal courtroom.
The 27-page filing is replete with Trump’s typical political bombast, including boasts about the power of the former president’s 2022 campaign endorsements and about the Mar-a-Lago estate itself. But it also confirmed aspects of the timeline related to the Mar-a-Lago search, including the fact that the Justice Department issued two subpoenas prior to the search — one for documents on May 11 and another for security camera footage in late June. . .
. . .“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home. ALL documents have been previously declassified,” Trump declared.
Rupert Murdoch’sNew York Post clarified that Trump didn’t have his lawyers include that strong paragraph in his motion for a special master:
“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home. ALL documents have been previously declassified,” Trump said in a statement on his Truth Social platform soon after the motion was filed.. .
. . .Three days after the raid, on Aug. 11, the former president’s attorneys attempted to convey a message to Attorney General Merrick Garland from Trump during a conversation with Bratt. That message, according to the filing, was:
“President Trump wants the Attorney General to know that he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is ‘angry.’ The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know.”
You know, as you do when you want to make sure the guy knows it’s a nice little democracy he’s got here and it would be a shame if something happened to it.
In 2010 the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, ruling 5-4 that corporations have the same right to political speech as any other person and can pay for as much constitutionally protected free speech as they like. The rationale given by Anthony Kennedy was that transparency about who was donating the money would alleviate any concerns about hidden hands manipulating American politics, since Americans would know who funded various political messages.
I’ll let Heather Cox Richardson tell this grotesque story, which was reported in yesterday’s NY Times (link above, at top):
Today’s big news is an eye-popping $1.6 billion donation to a right-wing nonprofit organized in May 2020. This is the largest known single donation made to a political influence organization.
The money came from Barre Seid, a 90-year-old electronics company executive, and the new organization, Marble Freedom Trust, is controlled by Leonard A. Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, who has been behind the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. Leo has also been prominent in challenges to abortion rights, voting rights, climate change action, and so on. He announced in early 2020 that he was stepping back from the Federalist Society to remake politics at every level, but information about the massive grant and the new organization was broken today by Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times.
Marble is organized as a nonprofit, so when Seid gave it 100% of the stock in Tripp Lite, a privately held company that makes surge protectors and other electronic equipment, it could sell the stock without paying taxes. The arrangement also likely enabled Seid to avoid paying as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the stock. Law professor Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School, who specializes in philanthropic policy, told the New York Times: “These actions by the super wealthy are actually costing the American taxpayers to support the political spending of the wealthiest Americans.”
This massive donation is an example of so-called “dark money”: funds donated for political advocacy to nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. In the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision, the Supreme Court said that limiting the ability of corporations and other entities to advertise their political preferences violates their First Amendment right to free speech. This was a new interpretation: until the 1970s, the Supreme Court did not agree that companies had free speech protections.
Now, nonprofit organizations can receive unlimited donations from people, corporations, or other entities for political speech. They cannot collaborate directly with candidates or campaigns, but they can promote a candidate’s policies and attack opponents, all without identifying their donors.
“I’ve never seen a group of this magnitude before,” Robert Maguire of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) told Casey Tolan, Curt Devine, and Drew Griffin of CNN. “This is the kind of money that can help these political operatives and their allies start to move the needle on issues like reshaping the federal judiciary, making it more difficult to vote, a state-by-state campaign to remake election laws and lay the groundwork for undermining future elections.” Our campaign finance system, he said, gives “wealthy donors, whether they be corporations or individuals, access and influence over the system far greater than any regular American can ever imagine.”
Right-wing demagogues are making the same point that the Confederates made back when they were defending their constitutional right to hold other people as property and do with them as they pleased. It’s like the goddamn Civil War was never fought, or won by the forces of the Federal Union. Swastikas and Confederate flags, free speech protected under the First and Second Amendments, States Rights, home rule, local sovereignty! Here’s a beautiful short summary of the basic idiocy of the “States’ Rights” position.
Law in a democracy, (while tilted towards the wealthy and politically powerful, who can employ armies of lawyers to negotiate, wheedle and delay on their behalf, and also hire expert lobbyists to rewrite laws that are disadvantageous to them), is the final word on what is legal or illegal and who is accountable to the rest of us. That’s why we often hear “the rule of law” used as a synonym for democracy.
Clearly there are multiple tiers to our justice system, and the rich and powerful are not generally debased by being subjected to the strict laws that are generously applied against the lower and criminal classes. Here, we make no distinction between… you know the rest. Still, our laws, and justice system, which apply to all citizens, residents and non-diplomatic visitors, are what protect our American experiment in democracy.
In autocracy, the autocrat can change and bend the law at will. Crooks that help the autocrat are given positions of power, immunity from prosecution, sprung from jail if convicted, pardoned and restored to positions of power. Autocracy, as scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat points out, is always enabled by a conspiracy of powerful criminals who ruthlessly serve the autocrat. Note that the rule of law applied in Nazi Germany also, though every judge, prosecutor, and defense lawyer was required to be a Nazi party member and the law was whatever the Führer said it was on any given day.
Here in the USA, even a judge vetted for loyalty to a political philosophy (membership in a legal fraternity with a strict view of how the law needs to be changed) and appointed by a president with a bent toward authoritarianism, will not be able to rule for his benefactor without evidence. The courts, (until you reach the Supreme Court, constrained by neither ethical rules nor weighing of actual evidence, and where a medieval scholar can be cited as unappealable proof that abortion is murder), are bound by the rule of law, limited in their decisions by the weight of the actual evidence presented.
In a case I followed, Trump, et al v. Boockvar [1], one of hundreds of lawsuits brought by Trump for President, Inc. and the RNC prior to the 2020 election, in a concerted attempt to suppress Democratic mail-in and drop box votes, a young Federalist Society judge, J. Nicholas Ranjan, appointed for life by the plaintiff himself, ruled that evidence of massive potential voter fraud and “vote dilution” and all the rest of the claims Trump made against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Boockvar must be presented. He then ruled that the evidence presented, hundreds of pages of printouts of opinion pieces by Breitbart, FOX and the like, did not satisfy the legal definition of evidence of concrete harm. In dismissing the case, he wrote more than a hundred additional pages explaining the legal rationale for every one of his decisions and detailing the authorities he relied on, for the benefit of the federal appeals court he wrote was likely to get the case. He made his decision appeal-proof, basically.
A great day for the rule of law and the burden of proof. Here’s a link to the case https://casetext.com/case/donald-j-trump-for-president-inc-v-boockvar-3 and I suspect you’ll be as shocked as I was to scan, at the top of the judge’s long decision, the list of hundreds of people involved in litigating a case that went on for months before being dismissed for lack of evidence. There is also, naturally, a scary wink at the Federalist Society’s best hope for changing the nature of our multi-racial democracy, another seed of the Independent State Legislature “Doctrine” [2]. This “doctrine” is teed up for a 6-3 decision next term on whether state legislatures have the ultimate authority to decide who won federal elections in their state, no matter what “majoritarian tyranny” might have to say at the so-called voting booth.
In a court of law (outside of the current Supreme Court), you need proof of yourlegal injury or your case gets dismissed. In the court of public opinion, proof is not necessary for angry partisans who believe the worst of their enemies automatically. You need to keep righteous outrage boiling and have people willing to physically threaten those who insist on the, like totally unfair, “rule of law.” What to make of an outrageously unfair law like the one below? Makes you want to holler, if you support the man millions are vindictively hoping will be finally prosecuted for it, and many other crimes he appears to have serially committed:
18 U.S. Code § 793 – Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information
(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
(g) If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.
and, most unfair of all, if you make money by legitimately selling so-called national security documents, that you honestly believed you owned and had every right to sell, or do whatever else you wanted with, they try to “legally” confiscate the money you made! On top of fines and prison time!
(h) (1) Any person convicted of a violation of this section shall forfeit to the United States, irrespective of any provision of State law, any property constituting, or derived from, any proceeds the person obtained, directly or indirectly, from any foreign government, or any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, as the result of such violation.
Take names (agents who conducted the partisan search and illegal seizure, the judge who allowed it, and their families!) and… let’s just say “kick ass”. Shame if anything happened to this nice little democracy of yours. If you’re thinking of weaponizing the Secret Service (SS) innocently not informing members of Congress of on-line chatter calling for their murder, by name (hi, Nancy), on January 6, until hours into the riot — think again!
[1]
In Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Boockvar, No. 2:20-cv-966, 2020 WL 5997680 (W.D. Pa. Oct. 10, 2020), the Western District of Pennsylvania dismissed a legal challenge to election guidance given by the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania regarding manned security near absentee drop boxes, performing of signature comparisons for mail-in ballots, and a county-residency requirement for poll watchers.
[2] from Ranjan’s decision:
But the job of an unelected federal judge isn’t to suggest election improvements, especially when those improvements contradict the reasoned judgment of democratically elected officials. See Andino v. Middleton , ––– U.S. ––––, 141 S.Ct. 9, 9–10, 208 L.Ed.2d 7, (Oct. 5, 2020) (Kavanaugh, J. concurring) (state legislatures should not be subject to “second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary,” which is “not accountable to the people”) (cleaned up).
Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Boockvar, 493 F. Supp. 3d 331, 343 (W.D. Pa. 2020)
New reporting, Trumpie reached out to Merrick Garland to inform him that the country is on fire and wanting to know what he could do to turn down the heat — outside of turning over evidence, being truthful, not doxxing traitors online, or calling on the most violent of his followers to stop threatening violence against Trump’s ever-expanding group.of enemies, thethe ones whose home addresses, names of spouses and children and where the kids go to school has been posted on Trump’s Truth Socialnetwork.
Trumpie’s larger point is that he controls 90% of the country’s most volatile, unreasonable, violent assholes, and 100% of our enraged racists, and the other side may well have 90% of the more reasonable, less violent citizens, but we can all agree that it would be a shame if anything happened to this great divided burning country,Merrick, my friend.You know what I’m sayin’, Merrick? Merrick?
Trump-appointed transparent liar and obstructionist DHS Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari continues to lie and obstruct Congress. His aim is Trumpian — delay, deflect, mislead, omit, preventproduction of evidence at all costs. Congressis considering their options for this lying sack of shit, who recently replied with this raft of crap:
He said he has published one review of the Jan. 6 attack and is working on two others. “When those two ongoing reviews are complete, we will be happy to provide briefings about them,” he wrote. . .
. . .“Sharing information about ongoing criminal investigations could impact potential witnesses or others who may be involved in the investigative process,” Cuffari wrote. “To protect the integrity of our work and preserve our independence, we do not share information about ongoing matters, like the information you requested in your letters.
“Similarly, we do not authorize our staff to sit for transcribed interviews with your committee about these ongoing matters,” he wrote. “Once these matters are complete, we will consider a renewed request for documents, briefings, or transcribed interviews.”
This transparently corruptasshole, smuglyaping the legitimate concerns of DOJ in its ongoing criminal investigations,serves at the pleasure of the sitting president. Biden should immediately dismiss Cuffari and have himplacedin the stocks, within sight of Congress, next to Trump megadonor/postmaster general Louie DeJoy. Make them grim examples for the rest of MAGA world. Do it, Joe.
Rand Paul (R-Ky) is an immense, reeking pile of excrement, and I say that with all due respect to prickly, eternally aggrieved Doctor Paul. He asked today how we know the FBI isn’t busy planting evidence, adding incriminating evidence to the boxes seized at Mar-a-Lago, how do we know the DOJ isn’t a bunch of liars? That said, his recent attack on the 1917 Espionage Act is not nearly as crazy as, say, his ongoing personal war with Anthony Fauci, orhis generally paranoiac worldview.
The Espionage Act, as Paul points out, criminalizes certain forms of dissent in a way that offends the Constitution, the First Amendment specifically. The strict wartime law certainly needs to be looked at carefully and rewritten much better than its current form. The same could be said about Nixon’s 1970 Controlled Substances Act and other laws that are still on the books, laws that were made primarily for political purposes and that we can fairly conclude outlived their ugly origins.
So fine, Rand, let’s not prosecute Mr. Trump pursuant to the Espionage Act. Obstruction of justice fits Trumpie and his gang much betteranyway.
Fair and balanced, two equally strong opposing spins on every story. Particularly when an honest former president is totally cooperative with every ugly partisan witch hunt. Chuck Grassley for the totally innocent former president.
