Last Call For Lake Of Fire, Con't

The "election fraud" fraud is coming apart in Arizona, and Kari Lake's legal team is now facing the first of many sanctions and punishments in the months ahead as the hammers drop.

 

Republican Kari Lake’s lawyers were sanctioned $2,000 Thursday by the Arizona Supreme Court in their unsuccessful challenge of her defeat in the governor’s race last year to Democrat Katie Hobbs.

In an order, the state’s highest court said Lake’s attorney made “false factual statements” that more than 35,000 ballots had been improperly added to the total ballot count. The court, however, refused to order Lake to pay attorney fees to cover the costs of defending Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in Lake’s appeal.

Chief Justice Robert Brutinel cited Lake’s challenge over signature verification remains unresolved.

Hobbs and Fontes said Lake and her attorneys should face sanctions for baselessly claiming that over 35,000 ballots were inserted into the race at a facility where a contractor scanned mail-in ballots to prepare them for county election workers to process and count.

When the high court first confronted Lake’s challenge in late March, justices said the evidence doesn’t show that over 35,000 ballots were added to the vote count in Maricopa County, home to more than 60% of the state’s voters.

Lawyers for Hobbs and Fontes told the court that Lake and her lawyers misrepresented evidence and are hurting the elections process by continuing to push baseless claims of election fraud. Attorneys for Fontes asked for the court to order Lake’s lawyers to forfeit any money they might have earned in making the appeal, arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to benefit from their own misconduct.

Lake’s lawyers said sanctions weren’t appropriate because no one can doubt that Lake honestly believes her race was determined by electoral misconduct.

Lake, who lost to Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes, was among the most vocal 2022 Republican candidates promoting former President Donald Trump’s election lies, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign. While most other election deniers around the country conceded after losing their races in November, Lake did not.

 

The good news for Kari Lake is that her claim of voter signature discrepancies is being sent back to a lower state court for review. 

The bad news for Kari Lake is also that her claim of voter signature discrepancies is being sent back to a lower state court for review.

 

When that ruling goes against her, that's going to open her up to yet more sanctions and worse.

 

Stay tuned as this Lake of Fire is going to get torched.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Proud Boys terrorists arrested and charged in the January 6th insurrection are now official seditious conspirators, guilty of conspiring against the United States of America.

 

AFTER A TRIAL that stretched nearly four months, four Proud Boys have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy in connection to the insurrection of Jan. 6.

The jury delivered guilty verdicts for Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of Proud Boys; Ethan Nordean, who was the leader on the ground in Washington; Zachary Rehl, a top Proud Boy from Philadelphia, and Joseph Biggs, one of the best known militants, with a big social media following.

A fifth Proud Boy, Dominic Pezzola — who smashed out a window — at the Capitol was found guilty, along with the other four, on a secondary charge of obstructing Congress.

In one of the last, major high-profile cases stemming from the insurrection, prosecutors succeeded in proving the Proud Boys defendants engaged in sedition. The verdict builds on the previous convictions of numerous Oath Keepers on the same seditious conspiracy charge.

The verdict was a partial one, and before it was entered, the judge urged the jurors to continue working for unanimity on the remaining counts.

The Proud Boys are a far-right drinking and fighting club that promotes “Western Chauvinism” — which they define as a refusal “to apologize for creating the modern world.” The Associated Press dubs them “a neofacist group” and they are deemed a terrorist entity by the government of Canada.

The Proud Boys are infamous for brawling with antifa activists during street protests. At the bitter end of the Trump era, the group had become increasingly militia-like in its M.O., and staunchly backed the MAGA president. Trump even said during a debate ahead of the 2020 election that the group should “stand back and stand by.” Tarrio’s lawyer said during closing arguments on Tuesday that the directive led the Proud Boys to “grow so large that vetting became difficult.”

 

This should be the end of a number of Republican careers, starting with MTG, Lauren Boebert, and Donald Trump.  It won't be, all three will run on overturning the convictions and Trump in particular will promise to pardon them.

Republicans supporting convicted seditious conspirators should be grounds for expulsion from Congress and the end of Trump's campaign, but sadly, it will only benefit them as they rally around these new MAGA martyrs and ensure that yet more domestic terrorist attacks will continue.

Walker, Georgia Arranger

Former Georgia GOP Senate loser Herschel Walker is in real trouble this week as the Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger has broken what looks like a huge campaign finance fraud scandal, if not outright embezzlement.

 

When Herschel Walker emailed a representative for billionaire industrialist and longtime family friend Dennis Washington in March 2022, he seemed to be engaging in normal behavior for a political candidate: He was asking for money.

But unbeknownst to Washington and the billionaire’s staff, Walker’s request was far more out of the ordinary. It was something campaign finance experts are calling “unprecedented,” “stunning,” and “jaw-dropping.” Walker wasn’t just asking for donations to his campaign; he was soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal company—a company that he never disclosed on his financial statements.

Emails obtained by The Daily Beast—and verified as authentic by a person with knowledge of the exchanges—show that Walker asked Washington to wire $535,200 directly to that undisclosed company, HR Talent, LLC.

And the emails reveal that not only did Washington complete Walker’s wire requests, he was under the impression that these were, in fact, political contributions.

In the best possible circumstances, legal experts told The Daily Beast, the emails suggest violations of federal fundraising rules; in the worst case, they could be an indication of more serious crimes, such as wire fraud.

But Walker—who had been schooled on campaign finance rules since his campaign launched in August 2021, according to a person involved in those conversations—appears to have dismissed the Washington team’s concerns that the money may have gone to the wrong place. When a third party informed a Washington Companies executive that the money couldn’t be used for political purposes, they raised the issue with Walker, asking at one point whether the funds should be redirected to a super PAC supporting his candidacy.

Walker never contributed any of his own money to his campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and it’s unclear what happened to these particular funds. Walker may have ultimately returned the money to Washington, but he did not reroute the money to the super PAC, according to FEC filings and a person with direct knowledge of the events.

“It was good talking with you today,” Tim McHugh, executive vice president for the Washington Corporations, wrote to Walker last November. “After our call, [redacted] reached out to me and said [a person] clarified with you that any funds sent to the HR Talent account cannot legally be used for political purposes. Political contributions must go to either the Team Herschel or 34N22 accounts.”

34N22 was a super PAC supporting Walker. Walker was not allowed to solicit donations for the super PAC in excess of federal limits, which this amount of money explicitly was. But that was not McHugh’s concern; he was worried about the hundreds of thousands of dollars his boss had wired to HR Talent in March.

“We will need your assistance to get the prior contributions made to the HR Talent account in March corrected,” McHugh concluded in the email.

While Walker’s campaign was battered from the jump by a hurricane of controversies, this situation stands out.

According to the legal experts who spoke to The Daily Beast for this article, this scheme appears to not just be illegal—it appears to be unparalleled in its audacity and scope. The transactions raise questions about a slew of possible violations. In fact, these experts all said, the scheme was so brazen that it appears to defy explanation, ranking it among the most egregious campaign finance violations in modern history.

Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at Campaign Legal Center, called the arrangement “jaw-dropping.” Jordan Libowitz, communications director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said if Walker “used the campaign to funnel money into his own business, that’s one of the biggest campaign finance crimes I’ve ever heard of.” Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director of Documented, remarked that the exchanges were “stunning and, to my knowledge, without parallel in recent history.”

“Campaign finance laws are designed to prevent massive under-the-table payments like those described here,” Fischer said. “While we don’t have all the facts, these emails point to highly illegal, potentially even criminal activity.”

 

I'm hoping this means the feds come knocking and Merrick Garland has a few surprises for him, as this looks like the most slam dunk campaign fraud scam in recent history.

We'll see how this going, but my question is would we ever have known about this if Walker had won five months ago?

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Another pair of numbing, soul-rending mass shootings in Gunmerica, and they will keep happening until we stop them, which is to say, never. First in Oklahoma, an apparent murder-suicide by a convicted rapist claimed six lives after which the gunman shot himself.

 

A convicted rapist on trial for child pornography charges is believed to have fatally shot six people, five of them teenagers, before taking his own life at the rural Oklahoma property where the kids were having a sleepover last weekend, authorities said Wednesday.

All of the victims were shot in the head, said Joe Prentice, chief of the Okmulgee Police Department and spokesman of a violent crime task force overseeing the investigation into the killings outside the small town of Henryetta.

The suspected shooter, Jesse McFadden, 39, also died of a gunshot wound to the head, Prentice said.

Prentice identified the victims as Ivy Webster, 14; Brittany Brewer, 15; Michael Mayo, 15; Tiffany Guess, 13; Rylee Allen, 17; and Holly McFadden, 35.

Holly McFadden’s mother, Janette Mayo, identified her daughter on Tuesday as Holly Guess. She married Jesse McFadden last year, Okmulgee County records show.

Their bodies were found in two groups on the large property where the McFaddens rented a home, Prentice said.

 

No motive as of yet, and no motive in another mass shooting in an Atlanta hospital waiting room that killed one and injured four as the suspect was caught after a citywide manhunt.

A man accused of opening fire in an Atlanta medical facility waiting room Wednesday, killing one woman and wounding four others, is in custody, police said.

Atlanta police announced the apprehension of 24-year-old Deion Patterson at around 8 p.m., almost eight hours after the deadly shooting.


The shooting occurred shortly after noon, police said. Patterson fled in a vehicle he carjacked and later abandoned, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum told reporters.

The suspect and that stolen vehicle were seen by Department of Transportation cameras in Cobb County, northwest of Atlanta, around 12:30 p.m., county police Sgt. Wayne Delk said.

The shooting happened around 12:08 p.m. in an 11th floor waiting room of a Northside Hospital medical facility in Midtown Atlanta, Schierbaum said.

The suspect, later identified as Patterson, was able to flee the area as law enforcement descended on the shooting scene in Midtown, he said.

The victims, all of whom are women, have not been publicly identified.

The victim who was killed was 39. The four people who were wounded were ages 71, 56, 39 and 25, Schierbaum said. It wasn't immediately clear if the victims were patients or hospital employees.

"It's still too soon to know why these individuals were chosen," Schierbaum said of the victims.

 

Dead teenagers, a dead woman in a hospital waiting room.

 

The price Republicans remind us we should be willing to pay for "freedom". 

Welcome to Gunmerica.