Trump 62: Jack Smith Is Hot On Grandpa Ranty's Case

[47of74]

1 hour ago, Xan said:

Donald is the one with the mind of a first grader.

First grader?  Sorry, first graders are more mature than fuck face.  All three of my nieces are more mature than him.

[fraurosena]

Do not mess with Ms. Willis. Repeat, do NOT mess with Ms. Willis.

Last bit of the text:

If convicted in Georgia, Trump will be ineligible to run for office in 2024.

 

[livinginthelight]

53 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Do not mess with Ms. Willis. Repeat, do NOT mess with Ms. Willis.

Last bit of the text:

If convicted in Georgia, Trump will be ineligible to run for office in 2024.

 

I love this! But...how does this not fall under free speech, and play into Trump's accusation that his free speech is being stifled?

[GreyhoundFan]

Delay, delay, delay…

 

[Xan]

3 minutes ago, livinginthelight said:

I love this! But...how does this not fall under free speech, and play into Trump's accusation that his free speech is being stifled?

It's free speech if you say something you think might be true or is a harmless opinion.  If you are impugning someone's character and messing with their reputation, though, the law can go after you for defamation.  He tried to sue E. Jean Carroll for saying he raped her when the jury determined that it was sexual abuse.  The judge said that penetration equals rape so the case was dismissed.  But Trump went after her for defamation.  He knows the difference exactly.

[47of74]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Do not mess with Ms. Willis. Repeat, do NOT mess with Ms. Willis.

Last bit of the text:

If convicted in Georgia, Trump will be ineligible to run for office in 2024.

 

I didn't see that in the news anywhere and the tweet didn't have a link to a news story.  I checked Google and didn't see anything.  I would have loved if Willis had actually done that because the ketchup stains would be epic but I would need some more evidence.

What I did see is that Fani acknowledged the allegations were false and defamatory but told her staff not to sink to fuck face's level by responding to them.

Quote

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Wednesday flatly denied that she had a relationship with a former client and other rumors spread by former President Donald Trump in a new campaign ad.

In an email to her colleagues, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Willis called the information in a television spot bankrolled by the Trump campaign “derogatory and false.” She urged her staff not to respond to any of the allegations.

 

And yes, do not fuck with Ms. Willis.

Edited August 10, 2023 by 47of74

[fraurosena]

 

Edited August 10, 2023 by fraurosena

[CTRLZero]

1 hour ago, 47of74 said:

I would have loved if Willis had actually done that because the ketchup stains would be epic but I would need some more evidence.

I’d love to see this, too, but I’d also like to see the alleged gang member file a defamation suit against Trump.  The more lawsuits, the merrier! 

In the other case, I love that Jack Smith is filing for a very quick trial date, and also that he mentions how many media interviews Trump’s attorney(s) are giving.  Let the games begin! 

[47of74]

5 minutes ago, CTRLZero said:

I’d love to see this, too, but I’d also like to see the alleged gang member file a defamation suit against Trump.  The more lawsuits, the merrier! 

In the other case, I love that Jack Smith is filing for a very quick trial date, and also that he mentions how many media interviews Trump’s attorney(s) are giving.  Let the games begin! 

Multiple people have fuck face by the short hairs, that is if there’s any actual hair on his body. 

[fraurosena]

Jack Smith just keeps on giving...

 

[fraurosena]

But of course he won't. Trump only knows how to demand loyalty, not give it.

 

[fraurosena]

[Xan]

I think somebody just hacked Julie Green's Alexa.  Either that or her refrigerator has started talking to her.

Donny is stewing again this afternoon.  The country's most corrupt president is accusing the current president of being corrupt.  How terribly on brand that is!

Spoiler

I gather he's heard that Smith wants the trial to start in January.  Now comes the great pushback for every reason they can think of to delay this until after the election.  I hope Smith holds firm.

[KSmom]

5 hours ago, livinginthelight said:

I love this! But...how does this not fall under free speech, and play into Trump's accusation that his free speech is being stifled?

Free speech is not a right without limits. Slander, which is speech that is false and damages a person’s reputation, is not a first amendment right.

[GreyhoundFan]

I’m glad I don’t have to be anywhere near him:

 

[Xan]

And now he's moved onto Pence again.  I'm not sure why he thinks "Liddle" is such a great insult.

[Xan]

Jack Smith's response to court and discussion of trial date.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.23.0_1.pdf

Smith's proposed schedule:

• September 25, 2023: Rule 12 and other dispositive motions

• October 16, 2023: Oppositions to Rule 12 and other dispositive motions

• October 25, 2023: Replies in Support of Rule 12 and other dispositive motions

• TBD: Motions Hearing

• November 13, 2023: Motions in Limine

• November 27, 2023: Oppositions to Motions in Limine

• December 4, 2023: Replies in Support of Motions in Limine

• December 8, 2023: Final Pretrial Conference

• December 11, 2023: Jury Selection

• January 2, 2024: Trial

He isn't messing around.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump now adds ‘my opinion’ and ‘what I think’ to stolen-election claims"

Quote

Donald Trump and his most loyal allies have spent the better part of three years falsely claiming that not only was the 2020 election stolen, but that this was proved.

After his federal indictment over attempts to overturn the election, however — and with another indictment potentially headed his way in Georgia — the former president has seemingly undergone a subtle shift in his messaging.

He has begun to say that this is his opinion.

During a Newsmax interview Wednesday night, Trump added such a qualifier no fewer than six times in the space of 30 seconds.

“I’m telling them that, in my opinion, the election was rigged,” Trump said of the Jan. 2, 2021, call in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to “find” just enough votes to overturn Trump’s deficit.

“I believe I won that election by many, many votes, many, many hundreds of thousands of votes,” Trump said. “That’s what I think.”

“That’s my opinion, and it’s a strong opinion,” he added. “And I think it’s borne out by the facts, and we’ll see that.”

To recap: “In my opinion.” “I believe.” “That’s what I think.” “That’s my opinion.” “It’s a strong opinion.” “I think.”

Trump’s rhetoric is, in one way, a reflection of his legal strategy. Special counsel Jack Smith devoted much of his 45-page indictment to the idea that Trump knew better about his wild claims of voter fraud in Georgia and elsewhere. In each of six key states, Smith pointed to Trump’s being told that a specific claim was false and then continuing to lodge it anyway, including in all six cases on Jan. 6 itself.

Smith’s argument will seemingly be that this helps prove that the entire effort was corrupt. Trump’s lawyers have signaled that they’ll argue, in turn, that Trump actually somehow believed these things. Trump allies have assisted in pushing that line.

But Trump’s legal team has also signaled that it intends to use the proceedings to re-litigate these claims. (Whether it actually does so is another matter; Trump’s claims were in many cases so laughable that few Republicans would echo them.) And Trump is hardly a shrinking violet when it comes to stating false things as unassailable fact.

It’s rare for Trump to couch his views of the 2020 election in this manner. He did so at one point on the then-private Jan. 2 call, but it was narrowly about the idea that ballots were being destroyed. “They are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I’ve heard,” he said on that call.

And even as Trump was saying this, he was floating actual criminal charges for Georgia officials such as Raffensperger if they didn’t go along with what he wanted.

“It is more illegal for you than it is for [the supposed perpetrators] because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it,” Trump said. “That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan [Germany], your lawyer.”

While we should hardly expect Trump to back off his stolen-election claims, it’s a notable development in a long-running evolution for the GOP on these matters.

Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly disowned their own specific stolen-election claims in the face of legal pressure. Trump’s 2024 GOP opponents are increasingly saying, contrary to his claims, that he in fact lost the 2020 election. And while as many as 7 in 10 Republicans continue to tell pollsters that President Biden’s win was illegitimate, the share who say there is “solid evidence” of that has declined. About half of election deniers now say they’re going on “suspicion only.”

And Trump wasn’t the only one adding such caveats on Wednesday night. At the end of the interview, Newsmax, the Trump-loyal network which has been sued over its coverage of such claims and has repeatedly offered awkward disclaimers, added another one to the pile.

“All right folks, now just a note,” host Eric Bolling said immediately after the interview aired. “Newsmax has accepted the election results as legal and final.”

In other words: Even if they’re just Trump’s beliefs, we’re not endorsing them.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump insults D.C. to get his trial moved. The city rolls its eyes."

Quote

The dark imagery invoked by Donald Trump during his brief visit to the nation’s capital last week — “the filth and the decay … broken buildings” — renewed the stereotype of collapsing American cities as a means of calling for his federal indictment to be moved out of the District. It also reignited his hostile relationship with a city he said needed to be taken over by the federal government when he occupied the White House.

Trump rarely ventured out into the District during his four years as president, other than to travel to the downtown hotel that bore his name at the time, and he did not attempt to win the hearts and minds of D.C.’s overwhelmingly Democratic voters through political rallies or meetings with city leaders. He received less than 5.5 percent of D.C.’s popular vote in 2020, and 4 percent in 2016. He and his lawyers cite such numbers in floating the idea of a change of venue for his trial on charges of trying to subvert the 2020 election, as well as his idea for a federal takeover of the District, which he again raised on Truth Social in recent days.

“No way I can get a fair trial, or even close to a fair trial, in Washington, D.C.,” the 77-year-old Florida man who summers in New Jersey said last week. “There are many reasons for this, but just one is that I am calling for a federal takeover of this filthy and crime ridden embarrassment to our nation.”

The former president also falsely claimed that homicides in D.C. “just shattered the all-time record” and “other violent crimes have never been worse.”

D.C.’s downtown is still rebounding from the pandemic, and it has been a violent year in the city. August has so far been a particularly brutal month for killings, and the homicide total this year is on pace to top last year’s total of 203. Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8), while not directly addressing Trump’s statements, said this week that the National Guard was needed to reduce crime.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” he said.

But Trump’s claim of a record being shattered is untrue. D.C. recorded at least 360 homicides every year from 1988 to 1996 — far above the current pace, at a time when the city had a smaller population.

Judges in the D.C. federal court, and federal legal precedent dating to the Watergate prosecutions of the 1970s, have weighed strongly against changing venues, both locally and across the country. And longtime city residents say the former president is just wrong about D.C.

For Trump’s first appearance in federal court last week, he flew from New Jersey to Reagan National Airport. He then rode up the tree-lined George Washington Memorial Parkway, over the 14th Street Bridge, where he would have seen the reinvigorated waterfront and Wharf development, then through the Third Street Tunnel, leading him almost directly to the federal courthouse.

“It was also very sad driving through Washington, D.C.,” Trump told reporters upon his return to the airport, “and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti.”

“It looks like he spent most of his time in a tunnel,” responded Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.). “A tunnel isn’t the best way to see D.C. I take real umbrage as to the work I’ve done on the Wharf. I’d like to invite him to see the real D.C. I can’t imagine what he’s talking about. The city’s doing very well.”

Chef José Andrés, who refused to open a restaurant in Trump’s former Pennsylvania Avenue hotel, said, “Washington, D.C. is a beautiful city that needs nobody to defend its good name from ignorant smears. I know that Mr. Trump likes to live in gold-plated towers, but if he stepped out of his bubble he would see that Washington D.C. is no different from other cities in this amazing country. It’s full of hard-working people trying to look after their families and build better neighborhoods for their children.”

Andres noted that he and his wife moved to the District 30 years ago. “When we first came to D.C., some people thought the downtown was broken forever,” Andres said. “They were wrong then, and Mr. Trump is wrong now.”

D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2) said that Trump’s comments “underscore how critical it is that the District achieve full and complete statehood.” She noted that, unlike any other state, D.C. “is beholden to the federal government to approve local legislation, including its budget, and appoint judges to our courts. In no other state could a criminal defendant and presidential candidate plausibly threaten a federal takeover as retribution for his prosecution — prosecution that is pursued by federally appointed attorneys. Yet, that is the case in the District until we achieve statehood.”

As president in 2020, Trump floated the idea of taking control of the D.C. police department during the demonstrations and vandalism that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. Ultimately the federal government did not take such steps but did use its broad powers over the District to send the National Guard onto the streets, along with military helicopters that flew over the city and menaced demonstrators.

Though D.C. has its own mayor and council, it is not a state, and the federal government plays an outsize role in its affairs. Congress can block local legislation, as lawmakers of both parties did when the city recently attempted to overhaul its criminal code. Adults accused of crimes such as murder, rape and robbery are prosecuted by the presidentially appointed U.S. attorney, rather than by a locally elected or appointed prosecutor.

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and D.C. Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb (D) declined to comment. But Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) called Trump’s comments “a cheap shot, not based on fact,” and said any graffiti the ex-president saw wouldn’t have been new. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) said, “It’s unfortunate that the twice-impeached, three-time indicted former president would take cheap shots at the city.”

The decision on whether to move Trump’s trial on charges that he conspired to obstruct the 2020 election will come down to federal judges, starting with U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, and then possibly the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then the U.S. Supreme Court.

At least a dozen Jan. 6, 2021, defendants requested that their trials be moved out of D.C., citing the prejudicial impact on jurors of both media coverage of the Capitol riot and the investigation of the House Select Committee, which held televised hearings on the insurrection. All such motions were rejected. The practice in federal court has been to try to pick a jury first, and only if the voir dire process fails to produce a fair jury does the judge then consider the change of venue motion.

The legal affairs publication Lawfare noted that at least 11 judges on the D.C. federal bench have denied such motions in 15 rulings related to Jan. 6 cases. In one motion before the first Oath Keepers trial, a defense lawyer argued that “the Court can take judicial notice that, with few exceptions, potential District jurors loathe Donald Trump and, by extension, his supporters. The antipathy towards Trump and his supporters in the District is obvious.”

But the D.C. judges have rejected that argument, and the pretrial publicity argument, in part by citing the D.C. circuit appeals court’s ruling in the case of H.R. Haldeman, a top aide to President Richard M. Nixon who wanted his trial moved out of the District. The court said in 1976 it would be incorrect for lawyers, or judges, to presume a juror’s political views will prevent them from fairly analyzing the evidence in a courtroom.

In one recent Jan. 6 case, a D.C. judge wrote that “Defendant’s assumptions concerning party affiliation in the District are not an appropriate basis for changing venue. Jurors’ political leanings are not, by themselves, evidence that those jurors cannot fairly and impartially consider the evidence presented and apply the law as instructed by the court.”

That judge was Chutkan, who will preside over Trump’s case.

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Xan]

Judge Chutkan said (from "Politico")"

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan warned Donald Trump and his attorney Friday that repeated “inflammatory” statements about his latest criminal prosecution would force her to speed his trial on charges related to his bid to subvert the 2020 election.

“I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements about this case,” Chutkan told Trump lawyer John Lauro during a hearing. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”

For the time being, Trump has stopped the inflammatory remarks on Truth Social.  He's cleverly re-posting others' nasty comments but not adding his own.  I'll give him about 48 hours before he cracks and calls someone crooked, deranged, or a thug.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

She’s not messing around 

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump says, ‘I’m coming after you.’ We should take him at his word."

Quote

“If you go after me, I’m coming after you.”

Loyalists of former president Donald Trump have rushed to play down that message, posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, as the very definition of political speech — nothing more than a response to groups opposed to his presidential campaign. We have been here before. The country ignores such threats at its peril. History teaches that when Trump cloaks himself in martyrdom and political victimhood, bad things — violent, ugly and bloody — can happen.

Remember the Trump-inspired insurrection and assault on the Capitol? Recall Trump exhorting the Jan. 6, 2021, crowd to stop what he falsely described as an unlawful congressional transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden? “We fight like hell,” he said. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Remember Trump directing his adoring MAGA fans to head to the Capitol, leaving them to believe that he was going with them and telling them to give Republicans in Congress “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country”?

Rid yourselves of any thought that only a handful of extremists were on hand to be goaded by Trump into behaving dangerously. Let’s do some stocktaking, courtesy of the Justice Department:

• Some 140 police officers were assaulted at the Capitol — about 80 from the Capitol force and about 60 from the D.C. police.
• About 370 people have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees. That includes about 110 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
• Roughly 630 people have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, including some 200 to felonies and about 430 to misdemeanors.
• A total of 110 people have been found guilty at contested trials, including three in D.C. Superior Court.
• About 600 federal defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences.

Let’s be clear: Jan. 6 was a call to arms. And Trump’s people responded by the hundreds.

So when Trump, on Aug. 3, the day he pleaded not guilty to charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, resorts to self-pity — “It’s a very sad thing to see it. When you look at what’s happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America” — America should consider itself on notice.

And when Trump, at a South Carolina Republican fundraiser on Aug. 5, returns to casting himself as a martyr — “Every time the radical-left Democrats do this and the Marxist, communist fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor, because I’m being indicted for you” — I suggest it’s time to mount the barricades.

Do you think it was pure coincidence that Trump’s “If you go after me, I’m coming after you” threat came one day after he was arraigned in federal court in Washington?

Trump’s rhetoric cultivates anger and resentment. It is rhetoric that mercilessly attacks and seeks to intimidate, whether it’s directed at prosecutors, witnesses and judges, or is aimed at poisoning a jury pool. Political speech? It’s the same cynical calculation that stoked the angry mob to storm the Capitol.

The people in that mob were determined to keep Trump in power. Might there be others equally fixated on impairing or obstructing trials set to begin against Trump in court?

Let’s not repeat the mistakes of Jan. 6. Get on high alert now. Double security around the courts. Take seriously any threats against special counsel Jack Smith and U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan (who on Friday warned Trump not to say things that put the safety of witnesses in the case at risk — we’ll see how that goes).

The same applies to courts and prosecutors in New York and Georgia.

Yes, this is our nation’s capital. Don’t forget that Trump’s rabid supporters came to town and left in their wake more than 100 assaulted police officers and nearly $3 million in damage.

“I’m coming after you.” This time, let America be waiting.

 

[47of74]

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

She’s not messing around 

 

 

I saw this too.  I wonder how long fuck face will be able to keep his fat orange mouth shut before he violates his order.  Because it's pretty much a given that if he goes to a GQP bund meeting rally, has a rally, or engages in some good ol' rage tweeting on (un)Truth Social he'll do something to violate the order.  Question is how long.