Thursday, March 24, 2022

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

As the January 6th Committee continues to investigate the seditious conspiracy that led to the attack on the US Capitol, we learn today that Trump's former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was in direct contact with Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, with text messages supporting the Trump coup attempt to overthrow the Biden administration through both legal trickery and violence.

Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The messages – 29 in all – reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.

On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

When Meadows wrote to Thomas on Nov. 24, the White House chief of staff invoked God to describe the effort to overturn the election. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”

It is unclear to whom Thomas was referring.

The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results – and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

The text messages were among 2,320 that Meadows provided to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The content of messages between Thomas and Meadows – 21 sent by her, eight by him – has not previously been reported. They were reviewed by The Post and CBS News and then confirmed by five people who have seen the committee’s documents.

Meadows’s attorney, George Terwilliger III, confirmed the existence of the 29 messages between his client and Thomas. In reviewing the substance of the messages Wednesday, he said that neither he nor Meadows would comment on individual texts. But, Terwilliger added, “nothing about the text messages presents any legal issues.”

Ginni Thomas did not respond to multiple requests for comment made Thursday by email and phone. Justice Thomas, who has been hospitalized for treatment of an infection, did not respond to a request for comment made through the Supreme Court’s public information office.

It is unknown whether Ginni Thomas and Meadows exchanged additional messages between the election and Biden’s inauguration beyond the 29 received by the committee. Shortly after providing the 2,320 messages, Meadows ceased cooperating with the committee, arguing that any further engagement could violate Trump’s claims of executive privilege. Committee members and aides said they believe the messages may be just a portion of the pair’s total exchanges.

A spokesman for the committee declined to comment. The revelation of Thomas’s messages with Meadows comes three weeks after lawyers for the committee said in a court filing that the panel has “a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States” and obstruct the counting of electoral votes by Congress.
 
 To recap, the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice was smack in the middle of a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States in Joe Biden, and wanted to help Donald Trump to illegally stay in office, telling Trump's Chief of Staff that Trump should not concede.

Surely if Trump's coup would have been heard by the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas would have been directly involved.
 
And let's remember, Thomas was the only SCOTUS Justice to vote to block the release of the January 6th evidence from the House Committee.  Not only did Thomas not recuse himself where his own wife was directly involved in evidence in question, he voted against its release.

A whole lot of people need to end up in prison, folks.  And a Supreme Court justice and his wife need to be among them.

Speaking of that, where is Clarence Thomas, anyway? Nobody seems to know.

The Supreme Court has remained silent on the condition of 73-year-old Justice Clarence Thomas since it announced his hospitalization earlier this week and said he was on the mend.

Thomas was admitted to Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. Friday night where he was being treated for an infection, the court said in a statement released Sunday.

The statement also said Thomas’ “symptoms are abating” after receiving antibiotics and he expected to “be released from the hospital in a day or two.”

But the court hasn’t provided an update since Sunday, and didn’t respond to multiple messages seeking comment Thursday.
 
Justice Thomas vanishing the same week his wife's text messages putting her square in the crossfire of the January 6th Committee end up being public?
 
There's way too many coincidences here.

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Oliver Willis reports that this week's new jobless claim numbers are the lowest since 1969.


The Department of Labor announced on Thursday that initial unemployment claims for the week ending March 19 had decreased by 28,000 from the previous week to 187,000. That figure is the lowest number of applications since 1969, and lower than at any time during the four-year presidency of former President Donald Trump.

"This morning, we learned that new unemployment claims are now at a level not seen since 1969. America's historic economic recovery is strong. Americans are getting back to work," President Joe Biden wrote on Twitter in response to the news.

The number of unemployment claims was below the 210,000 predicted by a Bloomberg survey of economists. Additionally, continuing claims for state unemployment benefits numbered 1.35 million, the lowest that figure has been since the 1970s.

During Trump's time in office, Republicans in Congress praised his leadership for levels of unemployment claims that were above those reported under Biden.

In May 2018, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy touted jobless claims for being at their "lowest level since 1973" and argued that the figure was evidence that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed under Republicans in 2017 was working. That policy significantly added to the national deficit, overwhelmingly benefitted large corporations, and failed to prevent an economic downturn after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the country.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) praised the level of jobless claims under Trump in April 2019, while Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) hailed "good economic news" in response to jobless claims reports in November 2017.

In contrast to their years of praise for Trump, as of this writing, Republican members of Congress were silent on the latest unemployment claims.
 
Republicans are silent because them admitting that Biden and the Federal Reserve are actually getting positive results out of this economy and not just inflation rampant corporate greed and profit taking would destroy the "worst economy in your lifetime" idiocy. Gallup finds that Americans believe the economy is as bad now as it was during the Trump Recession last year and a vast majority, 71%, expect the economy to get worse.

That's not the truth, but nobody seems to care about that.

The Case Against Trump

Last month, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg all but killed the state's criminal investigation into Donald Trump, halting grand jury procedures and resulting in the two lead prosecutors to resign in protest. Bragg thought the case could not possibly be won because the evidence wasn't there.
 
This looks like a case where Bragg said that he wasn't going forward with the case after the previous DA, Cy Vance, empaneled a grand jury.  The lead prosecutors obviously wanted to continue. Whatever the conflict was, it's gotten so bad that both lead prosecutors have resigned.

This reeks. All of it. No wonder then that the NY state case against Trump has moved into a much more aggressive phase. Tish James's office would have been working with the Manhattan DA on this. Surely they got wind that Bragg was going to all but shut the federal case down.
 
I don't know who got to Bragg, or to Justice, but both lead prosecutors resigning means that can't be swept away easily.  There's a lot more to this story.

How much of it we'll ever know, I have no idea.
 
Now we know: A month later, we find out exactly why the lead prosecutors resigned, because they absolutely had a criminal case and it was scuttled by Bragg himself.

One of the senior Manhattan prosecutors who investigated Donald J. Trump believed that the former president was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable, according to a copy of his resignation letter.

The prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, submitted his resignation last month after the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, abruptly stopped pursuing an indictment of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Pomerantz, 70, a prominent former federal prosecutor and white-collar defense lawyer who came out of retirement to work on the Trump investigation, resigned on the same day as Carey R. Dunne, another senior prosecutor leading the inquiry.

Mr. Pomerantz’s Feb. 23 letter, obtained by The New York Times, offers a personal account of his decision to resign and for the first time states explicitly his belief that the office could have convicted the former president. Mr. Bragg’s decision was “contrary to the public interest,” he wrote.

“The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did,” Mr. Pomerantz wrote.

Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne planned to charge Mr. Trump with falsifying business records, specifically his annual financial statements — a felony in New York State.


Mr. Bragg’s decision not to pursue charges then — and the resignations that followed — threw the fate of the long-running investigation into serious doubt. If the prosecutors had secured an indictment of Mr. Trump, it would have been the highest-profile case ever brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and would have made Mr. Trump the first American president to face criminal charges.

Earlier this month, The Times reported that the investigation unraveled after weeks of escalating disagreement between the veteran prosecutors overseeing the case and the new district attorney. Much of the debate centered on whether the prosecutors could prove that Mr. Trump knowingly falsified the value of his assets on annual financial statements, The Times found, a necessary element to proving the case.

While Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz were confident that the office could demonstrate that the former president had intended to inflate the value of his golf clubs, hotels and office buildings, Mr. Bragg was not. He balked at pursuing an indictment against Mr. Trump, a decision that shut down Mr. Pomerantz’s and Mr. Dunne’s presentation of evidence to a grand jury and prompted their resignations.


Mr. Bragg has said that his office continues to conduct the investigation. For that reason, Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor and deputy New York State attorney general who became district attorney in January, is barred from commenting on its specifics.
 
Not much at the core has changed: I told you then that Bragg decided there was no case and no prosecution, and that part remains. What's new is that we now have confirmation that at least one of the lead prosecutors believed Trump has committed a felony and were going to charge him.
 
I've laid out my reasons why Bragg killed the investigation, because there's no reason to believe his office is pursuing charges anymore, despite the office saying "they are continuing" the probe. It's as dead as Richard Nixon.
 
Bragg is probably right about not being able to get a conviction, and that's because while finding 12 people in Manhattan who would send Trump to Mars in a coffin is easy, finding 12 people who want to risk being hunted down like dogs by corrupt NYPD Trumpers is going to be next to impossible. The Trumpies will do everything they can to threaten the jurors and end the trial.

Do we really think Trump wouldn't order the jurors harmed or worse? C'mon. He wouldn't have to.

But the fact remains Trump is facing corporate fraud. Here's hoping that AG Tish James and her civil case can get the goods still.