Update on American Eichmann, Jeffrey Clark

The DC Bar Association Ethics Committee is investigating whether to take disciplinary action against Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s most loyal DOJ employee, a lawyer who was willing to send a letter from DOJ to multiple states asserting lies in order to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Ruth Marcus writing in yesterday’s Washington Post describes Clark’s response to the disciplinary committee.

The document reads like something the Federalist Society would submit if it had created an artificial intelligence program to draft legal pleadings. The bar doesn’t have authority to discipline Clark because that “would intrude on the President’s exclusive and unreviewable authority over federal criminal and civil investigations occurring during his term of office.” The bar can’t act “because the President has an absolute right to seek legal and other forms of advice as to the discharge of his responsibilities under the Take Care Clause.”

Disciplining Clark “would intrude on the President’s exclusive and unreviewable authority to remove and appoint senior officials of the Department of Justice.” It would violate the separation of powers, the supremacy clause, the confrontation clause, the equal protection clause, the due process clause and the prohibition against bills of attainder.

Also, he argues, it would trample on executive privilege, law enforcement privilege, the major questions doctrine, the political question doctrine, Clark’s “official immunity” and his freedom of speech. The Senate’s acquittal of Trump at his second impeachment bars the charges. Even Hunter Biden’s laptop makes a surprise appearance.

https://wapo.st/3dobVYg1

DeSantis and Abbott need to be prosecuted for this malicious taxpayer funded PR stunt

Texas governor, MAGA Man Greg Abbott and Florida strongman governor, MAGA man Ron DeSantis, are the new MAGA Abbott and Costello. Their latest hilarious prank was sending 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers from Texas to Florida, and then, at $12,000 a head, flying them to Martha’s Vineyard, with a film crew to document the libs of Martha’s Vineyard being owned by their own hypocrisy.

Leave aside the Florida taxpayer money DeSantis spent on this stunt, more than half a million dollars, leave aside the transparent cruel mockery of sending a film crew to get campaign footage, leave aside that these two fucks waited until they were within the DOJ’s 60 day no announcements of Investigations into political candidates period.

To get these people legally fleeing violence and oppression in Venezuela on to the airplanes for their publicity stunt, DeSantis promised them work, food, living places and help with their asylum applications. Instead they were sent to an island off the coast of Massachusetts where they would be unable to appear for their scheduled asylum hearings in various faraway locations.

Nazi comparisons are odious, of course, even when talking about the inhuman hijinks of our modern-day MAGA Abbott and Costello. However it’s hard not to think about the postcards Jews were forced to write to their families about how good everything was and how happy they were, before being loaded into cattle cars for transport to the death camps. Or even comparisons to our own murderous racists who, in the early 1960s sent southern Blacks to northern cities with similar false promises of work, new homes and freedom. When they arrived in the northern cities they were met by nobody, they were simply fucked. This happened here 60 years ago, and it happened right here the other day. Check this shit out:

The fool actually brought this lawsuit

F POTUS brought yet another lawsuit to obstruct justice, on bogus, frivolous, murky, dubious, ambiguous, unsworn legal claims. Claims in equity, actually, fairness harm that can’t be adequately remedied at law, according to F POTUS’s hand picked MAGA judge.

Check out the title of this transparent operation to block an ongoing criminal and national security investigation. You can’t make this shit up.

How to start to heal from trauma

Here in the home of the brave, the rugged, macho, eternally prevailing individual in a winner/loser culture where a real man will shoot you in the face to take what you have, as long as the law allows it, you might as well pack it in if you’re weak, or squeamish, or traumatized.

In playing the game as it is laid out here and trying to compete as though this culture of indifference, addiction and exploitation is “normal,” you can easily lose the thing that makes us humans in the best sense of the word — empathy. The quality that makes people rush into a fire to save a crying baby they never met.

Dr. Gabor Maté, who has made his life’s study the effects of trauma and various addictions, drugs, junk food, work, exercise, avoidance, danger, self-destruction, recently wrote a book called The Myth of Normal. Some of the craziest, most damaged and destructive people I’ve ever met have been obsessed with the idea that they are the most normal people in the world. They are so normal that they will kill you before they will ever look at their own behavior, their own pain, their own trauma. Maté quotes James Baldwin “not everything that’s faced can be healed, but nothing that’s not faced can be healed.”

You can hear an excellent interview with Gabor Maté here:

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/9/16/myth_normal_gabor_mate_trauma_mental

DR. GABOR MATÉ:  Well, the key here is trauma. Trauma is a psychological wound that people sustain. And I’m saying that in this society, most of us, because of the nature of the culture, the way we raise children, the way we have to relate to each other, the very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people, so that it’s false to say that some people are normal and others are abnormal. In fact, we’re all on a spectrum of woundedness, which has great impact on how we relate to each other and on our health.

And when you isolate people, atomize them, you make them feel guilty or weak for their illness, and tell them to get over their trauma, you’re just shaming them more, you’re isolating them more, and you’re entrenching them more in a traumatic imprint.

What people need is community, contact, compassion, safety. That’s what allows people to work through their traumas. And unfortunately, that’s not really available.

MAGA has one move

MAGA always doubles down, no matter what. They double down so much that the compulsive gambler’s term is now part of everybody’s vocabulary in this great land. Doubling down is their signature move, since they never back down or reconsider any position, although they change public positions quite nimbly because they’re “transactional” like their fearsome leader.

When MAGA was in the White House and had the bully pulpit, which they took quite literally, their other signature move was to angrily accuse others of the same malice and self-dealing corrupt intent that they had, and then to double down on the attacks. The DOJ under Sessions and then, to an even greater extent, under Barr, was weaponized to protect F POTUS’s friends and intimidate his enemies. They did this quite publicly. Now, of course, they accuse the current Department of Justice of having been weaponized by radical leftists, like AG Merrick Garland.

As their mad leader was being forced from office by majoritarian tyranny, (another thing they hate in MAGA world), Mitch McConnell made sure to ram through a few last Federalist Society judges. One he got appointed after F POTUS lost reelection was the extremist who’d sit on the federal bench in F POTUS’s new district when he relocated to South Florida.

I suppose Aileen Cannon, a lawyer with no experience as a judge, was chosen specifically for her Federalist Society orthodoxy, brazenness and willingness to do whatever fucking F POTUS might need her to do in the future. So far, so good.

She doubled down yesterday on her completely unsupportable ruling in Donald J. Trump v United States, a hare-brained civil suit Trump brought to block prosecutors from investigating his criminal acts in relation to stolen government property, much of it classified and very valuable/dangerous. She also halted the FBI’s review of illegally retained classified and top secret documents found five weeks ago pursuant to a legal search warrant.

Canon doubled down yesterday, as if nothing was wrong with her first decision, although it was mocked and harshly criticized by lawyers of every political orientation. (“Did they not also mock our Lord and Savior?” she’s probably thinking — the Federalist Society cult is dominated by extreme right wing Catholics.)

Yes, she notes, the government argues that they classified the materials that F POTUS illegally took, but you can’t trust the government, and their extreme bias against F POTUS is well-known! So-called National Security means nothing compared to the reputation of one of the greatest of American brands.

She has surely consulted with experienced judges and lawyers in her cult. She knows that federal trial court judges are given great deference in the finding of fact. She also knows that the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, where she sits, has a majority of judges also appointed by F POTUS. Clarence Thomas, naturally, oversees the 11th Circuit. So why not roll the goddamn dice, she figures, what better way to get to the top of the short list to join Amy Coney Barrett and her fellow frat members on the highest court of the most powerful country in the world?

And it’s not as if anything in her extreme opinion could lead to her impeachment from her lifetime post. It’s called a judicial opinion, asshole, so sue me! Oh, right, you can’t sue me for my opinion as a federal judge since we are presumed to act in good faith and you won’t be able to show corrupt intent or any kind of quid pro quo. Even if you could, we’d just double down. It’s not like you can prove that I deliberately aided the president in his transparent obstruction of justice attempt . Y’all have a blessed day!

Do Not Forget — sometimes the narrator is unreliable

If a deeply damaged person, a huckster or a psychopath, tells you a story, from their point of view and in a way that seems to make perfect sense, don’t forget Boof Kavanaugh’s mother’s sound advice for judges:  what comports with common sense, what sets off your sniff detector, what does the storyteller have to gain, and lose, by telling the story the way he told it?

If you steal boxes of classified documents, some of which are eventually seized in a legal search by the FBI, proving that you have been lying in your negotiations with DOJ and that your lawyers swore, incorrectly/falsely, months earlier, that everything had been returned, although they prevented agents at that time from checking.   Not a promising scenario in court — unless you change the story to one that makes more sense to your needs.  

Here’s one: the FBI is lying, because of personal and political animus, another smelly, baseless partisan witch hunt, these people are vicious monsters who illegally stole MY stuff and won’t give it back.  Protecting my good name means much more than a bunch of spies being killed, or nuclear secrets of the US or our allies being sold, and the irreparable harm to ME is the most terrible thing ever, nobody’s ever seen harm like that before.

Or, in the case of a person no longer speaking to you:  YOU stopped speaking to me when you deliberately ended our friendship for no reason, you vicious, relentless fuck.

Take the sniff test on each of these scenarios.  Blow your nose.  Smell something you like.  Forget about it, but, of course, do not forget that many times when we are told a dodgy story, the narrator is unreliable.