Trump 63: Fani Makes It Four (Indictments)

[WatchingTheTireFireBurn]

I'm sure he would throw Melania under the bus if it would help him. He's not loyal at all.

I don't know why any of them wouldn't plea. How stupid do you have to be at this point to believe that Trump will protect you or look out for you in any way whatsoever? 

Maybe the coffee county people are that stupid. I can't understand what part of your "election official" training included "sure let non official/ non government people in to make copies of all the data and have access to the machines and what not." I mean the election people at my polling spot get a little testy if you stand to close to the next person in line before they  show IDs or go up to the voting machine.

Have they not seen all the Jan 6th people going to jail?  Do they not know that even if you win, going to court is very very expensive? 

Trump's poison has had just an unbelievable amount of spread.

 

 

 

[Xan]

Today he's reposting fan slogans.  To be honest, it feels ominous.  I think he's gearing up to try to get his followers to start a civil war.  I think the speech he has planned for Monday is exactly for that purpose.  Donny sees the writing on the wall and he's decided that he's not going to jail or going to be held to account for anything he's done.  He'll burn the whole country down first.

Spoiler

3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 17, 2023 by Xan

[GreyhoundFan]

I wonder how much crushed up Adderall he’s snorting these days.

[Xan]

This one was inadvertently funny:

How dare Fox show unflattering pictures!  

And he absolutely needs for the trials to be after the election because he can get everything stopped.  His dictatorship will handle it.  All he needs is to be able to get to the election -- which he will declare that he won -- and he can just take over the country.

Somebody needs to put his ass in jail -- quick.

[fraurosena]

Completely unsurprising and utterly predictable.

 

[fraurosena]

It also turns out it's just grandstanding. No surprise either.

 

Edited August 17, 2023 by fraurosena

[Alisamer]

5 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I wonder how much crushed up Adderall he’s snorting these days.

Where the heck is he getting the Adderall to snort, is what I want to know! It took a week to get my prescription filled for the immediate release kind, and the slow release kind is in so much of a shortage they didn't even bother trying to prescribe it. They even specifically instructed me how to handle having them switch the pharmacy the prescription goes to WHEN (not if) I couldn't find it at the closest one. My friend's daughter was off her meds all summer! 

Also, aren't most government employees subject to occasional surprise drug screenings? Those should be required all the way up, and on candidates before their name goes on the ballot. 

[GreyhoundFan]

This will upset TFG. Good!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

He's sounding very tired. I guess the 2AM frantic screeds are interrupting his beauty sleep.

 

[Xan]

The Monday "news conference" is off.  I guess Donald's lawyers were able to talk some sense into him.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump follows tested ‘counterpuncher’ playbook in face of indictments"

Quote

An hour before the public release of an indictment that alleges the former president of the United States led a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of a national election, Donald Trump was already on the offensive.

The Georgia prosecutor who aimed to put him in prison was a “rabid partisan,” part of “a dangerous effort by the ruling class to suppress the choice of the people,” Trump’s campaign announced. Not 12 hours after he was indicted Monday by a Fulton County grand jury, Trump declared on his Truth Social platform that he will hold a “major news conference” next Monday to reveal “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT” on his disproven election fraud claims that he vowed would lead to “a complete EXONERATION!”

The fourth felony indictment this year of the nation’s 45th president produced not a hint of humility or regret. Rather, Trump reverted to the playbook that has guided his actions through six decades of investigations, lawsuits, bankruptcies, impeachments and titanic waves of allegations of wrongdoing. He went on the attack, taking the battle to his most comfortable venue, the public square.

Conceding error or seeking a compromise was never in the cards — not now and not at any point in Trump’s long life of huge successes, frequent failures and endless public drama.

“He was always, ‘Fire a gun at me, and I’ll drop a nuclear bomb on your head,’” recalled Barbara Res, an engineer and attorney who ran Trump’s construction operations in the 1980s and is now a sharp critic of her former boss. “It was always, ‘We’re going to sue’ whoever he thought was against him. He enjoyed it. He liked to make people suffer.”

Trump himself has described his way of responding to adversity in blunt terms: “I’m a counterpuncher,” he told Fox News’s Megyn Kelly in 2016. “I then respond times maybe 10. … I mean, I respond pretty strongly.”

Even when he knows he did something wrong, Trump said, “you have to go forward. And, you know, you can correct a mistake, but to look back and say, ‘Gee whiz, I wish I didn’t this or that,’ I don’t think that is good, and I don’t think in a certain way that is healthy.”

What counts as healthy for someone facing 91 felony allegations, four criminal trials and a host of civil proceedings varies from person to person, but Trump is the rare figure who has lived his life driven by the conviction that the proper response to, say, the threat of imprisonment is a frontal assault on the people in charge of determining his future.

Trump has long said he lives by two hard and fast rules: Never back down, his father, Fred Trump, taught him. And always hit back, 100 times as hard as you got hit, his lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn taught him. Never retreat, never apologize.

Or, as he put it to Jimmy Fallon on NBC’s “Tonight Show” in 2015, “I fully think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong. … I will absolutely apologize, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m ever wrong.” The crowd and the host roared with laughter.

Trump has made a career of saying the outrageous things out loud. From “Lock her up!” to “Crazy Joe Biden” to the latest labels he has attached to the prosecutors who have charged him — calling special counsel Jack Smith “deranged,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg an “animal,” and Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis a “racist” — Trump has long ignored admonitions from judges and his own lawyers to lower the temperature.

“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” the former president posted on Truth Social earlier this month.

After Trump posted his all-caps threat, the federal judge in the case in Washington, Tanya S. Chutkan, rejected his lawyers’ contention that, as a presidential candidate, Trump needed complete freedom to speak his mind. “He can’t say exactly what he wants to say about witnesses in this case,” nor can he seek to prejudice potential jurors at his trial, she said, ordering Trump and his lawyers to take “special care” with their public comments or she would “take whatever measures are necessary” to ensure the integrity of the trial.

Very little in Trump’s life is etched in stone; he has always taken pride in his ability to pivot and in his skepticism about ideology and principles. He views himself as a master improviser, so he changed his party registration seven times — Democrat, Republican, Reform Party, independent and back again — before he finally ran in 2016 as a Republican. He was for abortion rights, and then he was opposed.

What stays the same, however, are the personality traits and acquired attitudes that add up to the combative, roguish, outsider approach that makes him anathema to people inside the system and attractive to those who feel they’ve been excluded from it.

A big part of that renegade personality is Trump’s willingness — no, his eagerness — to slam and destroy anyone he perceives as an attacker.

“It is 100 percent deliberate,” Res said. “He’s trying to scare whoever is coming after him. He always believed no one could touch him because he’d attack them publicly.”

Trump and his businesses filed more than 1,900 lawsuits over the course of three decades before he entered politics. He sued people who questioned his wealth or even his taste. He once filed a $500 million defamation suit against a Chicago Tribune critic who had described his Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue as a “kitschy shopping atrium of blinding flamboyance.” A judge dismissed the complaint.

As a child, Trump got into trouble so often that his father finally put his foot down. According to Washington Post interviews with Trump’s childhood friends in 2016, the last straw was Fred Trump’s discovery that Donald and his friend Peter Brant had secretly been sneaking across the bridge from their Queens home to Manhattan on Saturdays. Hungry for autonomy, the boys explored Central Park, gawked at Times Square panhandlers and savored egg creams at diners. They went to see “West Side Story” on Broadway; inspired by its portrayal of street gangs, they cooked up a game they called “Land,” in which they traded turns throwing switchblades into the ground and twisting their bodies to mimic the knives’ flight paths.

When Fred Trump found out about the knives, Donald admitted nothing, maintaining his innocence. The father decided his son needed a radical change. He pulled Donald, then in eighth grade, out of his Queens private school and shipped him off to New York Military Academy, a boarding school near West Point known for strict discipline.

By 1973, when Trump, then 27, crossed the bridge into Manhattan to launch his own real estate business, beyond the outer-borough limits of his father’s realty empire, he was eager to join a higher social echelon. He joined Le Club, a members-only nightspot frequented by social climbers and political and business leaders. There, he met Cohn, a storied figure in New York who had prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies and served as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man during the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.

Cohn took a shine to Trump, who sought the older man’s counsel: Federal prosecutors had filed a racial discrimination suit against the Trumps, and Donald wanted to know if he and his father should take the government’s offer to admit wrongdoing and settle the case.

No way, Cohn advised. “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court,” he said — and counterattack with bias accusations against the prosecutor who was handling the case, and then countersue the Justice Department. The advice, which Trump recounted in his book, “The Art of the Deal,” reminded Trump of his father’s admonitions throughout his childhood to never retreat, to hit back harder than you’ve been hit, and above all, to never be a loser.

Trump did as Cohn suggested and still was forced to settle with the government. But he came to depend on Cohn — for legal advice and for the tactics that would from then on define Trump’s approach to business: Never admit fault. Never express regret. When criticized, hit back 10 times as hard. Use the news media to attack and thereby build your personal brand.

Trump saw from even before his 2016 campaign began that social media had helped segregate the nation into cultural camps. As a candidate, Trump blasted the country with a torrent of frustration and hate — the kind of angry talk that many people had only spewed anonymously or among close friends and relatives.

Trump’s impulsiveness, quickness to hit back when criticized and tendency to lash out at enemies morphed into a verbal barrage that proved to be catnip to voters who scanned the political landscape and saw in other leaders only inauthenticity and inaction.

In the 2016 election, Trump sensed that his outrageous behavior and readiness to fight back cemented his reputation — honed for many Americans on his reality TV show, “The Apprentice” — as a decisive truthteller who gets things done. He had spent almost 40 years cultivating an image as a guy so rich, so enamored of himself, so audacious and unpredictable that he would take action no matter what the powers that be said.

“I think he has such an ego, he couldn’t stand to fail,” Mary Vesley, a Trump voter in Mechanicsville, Va., said on Election Day of Trump’s first run. What might be a disqualifying fault in a more traditional candidate was, to Vesley and many others, a warranty that Trump would stay on the attack regardless of what the elites threw at him.

True to his promise, Trump did not apologize after he called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.” Nor when he slammed Sen. John McCain, the late Republican from Arizona, as a “loser” who could not be a war hero “because he was captured” in Vietnam.

Even his rare admissions of wrongdoing are often diluted with a dose of mischievous doubling down on the original misdeed. When Trump retweeted a description of Fox’s Kelly as a “bimbo,” and Kelly confronted him over the incident, Trump in mock horror said, “Oooh, okay, excuse me,” and then added, “you’ve been called a lot worse.”

As president, Trump would not cleanly denounce the antisemitic, white-supremacist marchers who in 2017 terrorized Charlottesville. Instead, he condemned “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”

Two days later, he seemed to back down, repeating the same condemnation but without the “on many sides” bit. But the next day, at a news conference, Trump reapplied his time-tested formula of insult, grudging apology and doubling down: “I think there is blame on both sides. … Nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now.”

Then, as now, the country’s standard tools for addressing excesses and misdeeds not only failed to diminish Trump’s appeal, but also seemed to enhance the loyalty his followers felt toward him. Publicity, political opposition, the marshaling of facts and now a flood of legal actions — all seemed only to strengthen his bond with his core supporters.

Trump ran in 2016 against accusations that he’d groped, insulted and acted boorishly toward women, and that, too, made little if any difference. The day after The Post revealed video showing Trump explaining how he would grab women by the crotch, a Trump supporter in Syracuse, N.Y., Shannon Barns, said the video had only deepened her belief that he should be president.

“This just put a human face on the guy for me,” she said. “I was worried that he was a billionaire and didn’t know about the lives of people like me. This showed me that he’s a man. You know in your heart every man talks like that.”

As a novice candidate, Trump promised that, if elected, he would suddenly act more “presidential,” reining in some of the rhetorical excesses that his advisers were telling him would be inappropriate for a chief executive. But when a federal judge in San Diego handling class-action lawsuits against Trump’s for-profit college ordered the release of documents detailing predatory marketing practices by Trump University, Trump lashed out at the Indiana-born judge, who is of Mexican American descent, calling him a “Mexican” and a “hater.”

Amid the firestorm of controversy over that attack, Trump turned to another set of advisers who would “let Trump be Trump,” as the candidate put it.

Once in office, Trump quickly made it clear that he would for the most part stick to the style that got him to the White House.

Two weeks into his term, when another federal judge, James Robart, blocked Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries, the new president denounced Robart as a “so-called judge.”

Trump always saw publicity as his best defense against investigations and allegations of wrongdoing, Res said, and he always relished using the courts against those he believed had insulted or hurt him. In 2005, when Timothy O’Brien, then a New York Times reporter, wrote a book revealing that Trump’s net worth was not the $4 billion or $5 billion he claimed, but rather “somewhere between $150 million and $250 million,” Trump sued the author for $5 billion.

Then, after a court dismissed Trump’s suit and a higher court rejected his appeal, Trump called the author “a low-life sleazebag” and told The Post that he enjoyed suing O’Brien “because I cost him a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of money.”

 

[Xan]

He was never even planning to be part of the debate.  He's afraid, deep down, that Chris Christie will embarrass him.  

"Extremely high intelligence" -- good grief.  Also, "I'm your man".  That sounds like something out of a country song.

[fraurosena]

They may think by asking for a date 3,5 years from now is clever (it's clearly Trump's idea, along the lines of "they had 3,5 years to investigate me, so now I want just as much time to build a defence" as he's been saying at his rallies) but it's not clever at all, even if they think that the judge might meet them half way between this proposterous proposal and Jack Smith's expeditious one, which would still put the trial date firmly after the elections. I don't believe Judge Chutkan will grant a trial date after november 2024. If my preditions are worth anything (they're not) I think the trial date will be set for March/April next year.

 

Edited August 18, 2023 by fraurosena
Forgot to add the link to shit-- err X

[fraurosena]

And it's wet too!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

LOL

[GreyhoundFan]

Every day is a new grifting opportunity:

"Trump's New Grift: Endorsement 'Seal of Approval"

Quote

Trump has just announced that he will now be issuing a gold "Seal of Approval" to candidates who he endorses, for use in fundraising solicitations and ads.

In a letter explaining the new seal, he claims that this will be "a powerful signal to President Trump's loyal donors that the sender is on Team Trump."

He further notes that use of the Trump 'Seal of Approval' is revocable by him at any time.

What we don't know yet is how much these candidates have to pay for the privilege of using the Trump 'Seal of Approval,' or what percentage of the proceeds raised by them will be funneled to his PAC.

There is a 0.0% chance that this isn't a new money grab by the ultimate huckster who has been hemorrhaging cash on legal bills.

There is always a new scam and scheme right around the corner with Trump.

Series 3 of his Trump Superhero NFTs should be out any time now.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Apparently TFG is going on Tucker's twitter show at the same time as next week's GQP debate on Faux. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Good grief:

 

[fraurosena]

Things are ramping up in Arizona. Will this eventually become indictment number 5 or 6...?

Arizona Investigators ‘Aggressively’ Looking at Top Trump Ally Kelli Ward

Spoiler

ARIZONA’S CRIMINAL PROBE into the 2020 fake electors plot is heating up and investigators are now asking plenty of questions about a key Donald Trump ally involved in it: former state GOP chair Kelli Ward.

The Arizona probe has been accelerating in the past several weeks, two sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone, with prosecutors gathering evidence and speaking with individuals with knowledge of how the fake electors scheme was carried out in the state. The fake electors plot was a core component of the then-president and his aligned lawyers’ plans to overturn his 2020 election defeat and stop the legitimate transfer of power to his Democratic successor Joe Biden.

The sources add that Ward — once one of the state’s most prominent Republicans — and her potential contacts and private activities following Election Day 2020 have been of particular interest to investigators as of late. One of these sources describes Arizona investigators as “moving aggressively” on this stage of the inquiry into the state’s pro-Trump fake electors, which included Ward, a Trump hardliner and then-chair of the Arizona Republican Party.

Ward did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ward, her husband, Michael, and nine other Arizona Republicans signed a document falsely attesting that they were the state’s legitimate electors casting Arizona’s Electoral College votes for Trump. 

According to the January 6 Committee report, Ward was “unusually active” in her advocacy for President Trump after the election. She spoke with the former president and participated in a Trump-backed pressure campaign to get the state to stop counting votes and delay certification of the tally showing Biden’s victory.

After Arizona certified its vote tally, Ward, her husband Michael, and 9 other Republicans in the state convened to falsely represent themselves as Arizona’s legitimate slate of electors during a signing ceremony recorded and shared on social media. 

In an email from Trump–aligned attorney Kenneth Chesebro to colleagues on the Trump team, the attorney relayed concerns from Ward and Republican state senator Kathy Townsend about the legality of the ploy. 

“Ward and Townsend are concerned it could appear treasonous for the AZ electors to vote on Monday if there is no pending court proceeding that might, eventually, lead to the electors being ratified as the legitimate ones,” Chesebro wrote in an email obtained by The New York Times. 

Investigators have started asking questions about any potential contacts between false electors such as Ward, then-President Trump, and other out-of-state officials and lawyers working on his behalf to steal the election, one of the sources tells Rolling Stone. In recent discussions with possible witnesses and others, some investigators have asked or requested information related to a video — tweeted by the Arizona GOP in December 2020 — where Ward and other Trump allies sign documents falsely claiming to be the state’s legitimate electors.  

“They actually have themselves on video doing it,” says one of the people familiar with the stage of the investigation. “It is as if Ward and everyone else were thinking: How do we make this a walk in the park for [the prosecutors]?”

A spokesperson for the Arizona attorney general’s office declined to comment and referred Rolling Stone to public comments made by Attorney General Kris Mayes on Wednesday following the Trump indictment in Fulton County, Georgia.

“We are investigating the fake electors situation. I understand why folks want to know what is happening in our investigation. That is a natural desire given what just happened in Georgia and in Michigan,” Mayes said. “But we are doing a thorough and professional investigation and we’re going to do it on our timetable as justice demands.”

Ward has already drawn the attention of the federal special counsel’s office related to a 2020 lawsuit alleging “misconduct” by election officials and a mass of “illegal votes.” In May, prosecutors from the special counsel subpoenaed the Arizona secretary of state’s office asking for records related to both Ward’s suit and a suit from the Trump campaign alleging that election machines in the state had erroneously rejected ballots from voters. Arizona courts ultimately tossed both suits. 

In July, former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers also told CNN that he was interviewed by FBI agents as part of the special counsel’s investigation into the 2020 election. Trump and senior advisers pressured Bowers to decertify the state electors for Biden, a move Bowers refused. 

Reached on Friday, Bowers declined to answer questions. “I am under counsel to not discuss anything at this time, so I must … [decline to comment],” he tells Rolling Stone.

Before Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate the attempt to overturn the election, both Ward and her husband received subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the fake electors scheme in the state. 

Ward also fought an unsuccessful legal battle to shield her phone records from the January 6 Committee. The committee questioned Ward under subpoena but she invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer.

 

[fraurosena]

Oh, and New Mexico is ramping up too.

New Mexico attorney general working with Jack Smith to investigate fake elector scheme

Spoiler

The New Mexico Attorney General’s Office has been tight-lipped about the progress of their investigation into former President Donald Trump’s allies in New Mexico.

Following Trump’s federal indictment on charges that he illegally sought to overturn the 2020 election, the attorney general’s office has revealed it is working with special counsel Jack Smith’s team to gather evidence related to the investigation.

Lauren Rodriguez, director of communications for New Mexico’s attorney general, said in a statement that the previous Attorney General Hector Balderas referred the fake elector case to the Department of Justice.

Current AG Raúl Torrez opened a separate state investigation into the scheme. The office has been in regular contact with the federal department of justice regarding New Mexico’s fake electors, Rodriguez said.

“That inquiry is ongoing and now that Special Counsel Jack Smith has unsealed a federal indictment referencing specific conduct in New Mexico, we will work with his office to obtain any and all evidence relevant to the state’s inquiry,” Rodriguez said in the statement.

Rodriguez did not respond to questions seeking additional information about the status of those cases.

The allegations related to New Mexico in Smith’s federal indictment of Trump center around the fake elector scheme, a last-ditch effort by Trump and his alleged co-conspirators to submit fraudulent electoral votes falsely claiming that he, and not Joe Biden, had won the election.

Trump and his allies sought to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to use the fake electoral votes as a basis for throwing out the legitimate election results and declaring Trump the victor during Congressional proceedings on Jan. 6, 2021, according to the indictment.

Central to the fake-elector plot, according to the federal indictment as well as the Jan. 6 Commission’s final report and Georgia’s newly-unveiled state charges against Trump and 18 others, was Santa Fe-based attorney John Eastman.

“As January 6th approached, John Eastman and others devised a plan whereby Vice President Pence would, as the presiding officer, declare that certain electoral votes from certain States could not be counted at the joint session,” the Jan. 6 Commission wrote in their report. “John Eastman knew before proposing this plan that it was not legal.”

On Monday, Fulton County, Ga. District Attorney Fani Willis announced charges against Eastman, Trump and 17 others, accusing Eastman of forming part of an organized criminal enterprise dedicated to subverting American democracy.

Eastman faces nine charges under Georgia state law, including filing false documents and conspiracy to commit forgery.

Eastman’s name is not mentioned in the special counsel’s federal indictment of Trump, but he is repeatedly referenced under the moniker “Co-Conspirator 2.” He is not charged with any crimes in that case, but the indictment asserts that he knew his fake-elector scheme violated the Electoral Count Act.

Eastman is also facing the prospect of losing his license to practice law in California, and has sought to delay the disbarment proceedings against him in that state until his criminal charges are resolved. He is a resident of Santa Fe, but has never been licensed to practice law in New Mexico.

Eastman could not be reached for comment, but he has denounced Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump on social media.

Two attorneys representing Eastman, Harvey Silverglate and Charles Burnham, sent a statement to Source NM calling the Georgia prosecution “a legal cluster bomb” and vowing that Eastman will fight the charges.

Trump’s false claims about election fraud have found widespread purchase in the Republican Party of New Mexico.

GOP Secretary of State candidate Audrey Trujillo, who lost her election last year, centered her campaign around false claims that the election was stolen from Trump, and county commissioners in several New Mexico counties refused to certify election results last year, citing false claims of possible election fraud.

Failed NM House of Representatives candidate Solomon Peña has been charged with allegedly orchestrating a shooting spree targeting New Mexico democrats. Prosecutors allege those shootings were motivated by false election-fraud conspiracy theories.

Georgia’s indictment of Trump and his allies includes three of the 16 fake electors from that state.

Michigan’s attorney general recently announced charges against all 16 of that state’s fake electors.

The charges against Eastman and other states’ fake electors have raised the question among many New Mexicans of whether the Attorney General will charge Eastman or the state’s five fake electors.

In the statement provided to Source NM, Rodriguez of the AG’s office did not provide a timeline for the investigation, or say when New Mexicans might expect charging decisions to be announced.

“Our paramount concern is to gather a complete factual record before making any formal decision in this matter and to coordinate our efforts with our federal law enforcement partners in a manner that best secures the public’s faith in the integrity of the electoral process,” she said.

 

[fraurosena]

What's this then? 

Larger image under spoiler.

Spoiler

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

25 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Ah, more evidence I see, for Ms. Willis. 

[CTRLZero]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

What's this then? 

Status conferences are usually the start of creating the schedule heading towards trial.  In easy (non-complex) cases, it might be accomplished in one conference call.  In this case, I’m sure there will be a lot of tantrums objections, so this process might take awhile.  

[GreyhoundFan]

He's nuttier than a fruitcake.