Fani Makes A Deal, Or, Sidney's Kraken Up

Looks like Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis played Let's Make A Deal again, and I told you she would. Her contestant: Former Trump lawyer and oceanic cryptid enthusiast Sidney Powell, who just flipped on Trump in Fani Willis's Georgia election interference case.

 

Sidney Powell, a GOP lawyer who briefly represented Donald Trump, has flipped on the former president, striking a plea deal with Georgia prosecutors ahead of her trial on a slew of criminal charges.

According to court filings, Powell pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy to interfere with election duties.

She was one of over a dozen co-defendants — including Trump himself — in the Fulton County DA's office's RICO case, which accused Trump and his allies of violating the state's racketeering statute while working to overturn Georgia's 2020 presidential election results.

As part of the plea agreement, Powell — who pushed several conspiracy theories about the 2020 election results and vowed to release the "Kraken," purported evidence of widespread election fraud that never materialized — will have to testify at future trials and write a letter apologizing to Georgia citizens.

Powell's plea deal was announced at a court hearing on Thursday. As part of the agreement, she will also have to pay $2,700 in restitution to replace election equipment, as well as a $6,000 fine. She faces a maximum sentence of six years probation.

Powell was set to go to trial on Monday, along with co-defendant and former Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Chesebro.

 

I don't use this language often, but Trump is fucked. 

 

We'll see if Kenny Cheseboro flips before his trial on Monday, but does Willis really need him at this point? The only bigger fish on this seafood buffet are Rudy, Mark Meadows, and the king marlin himself, Trump. At this point, unless Meadows or Rudy flips, the window for a deal has closed.

Expect another tirade as Trump gets closer and closer to prison.

Hizzonerless, Mayor Adams

This should be the immediate end of NYC Mayor Eric Adams's career.

 

In a sharp escalation over the migrant crisis, Mayor Eric Adams claimed in stark terms that New York City was being destroyed by an influx of 110,000 asylum seekers from the southern border and said that he did not see a way to fix the issue.

“Let me tell you something New Yorkers, never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to — I don’t see an ending to this,” the mayor said on Wednesday night in his opening remarks at a town hall-style gathering in Manhattan. “This issue will destroy New York City.”

Mr. Adams, a Democrat in his second year in office, has clashed with leading members of his party as New York City has struggled to provide housing and services to the migrants. For months, Mr. Adams has criticized President Biden and Gov. Kathy Hochul for failing to help the city handle the asylum seekers and pleaded for additional funding and expedited work permits.

But the mayor’s comments on Wednesday were his most ominous yet. He pointed to new projections that the city’s budget gap could grow to nearly $12 billion — the same amount that city officials estimate that the migrants could cost the city over three years.

“Every community in this city is going to be impacted,” Mr. Adams said at the meeting. “We have a $12 billion deficit that we’re going to have to cut — every service in this city is going to be impacted. All of us.”

The surge of migrants crossing the southern border has overwhelmed the city, with nearly 60,000 occupying beds in traditional city shelters and in more than 200 emergency sites. As New York City students returned to school on Thursday, city officials said that about 20,000 migrant children were expected to join them.

The financial and logistical burden has caused the mayor to repeatedly press Mr. Biden for help this summer, saying last week that the city’s requests were still mostly “unaddressed” and calling for a federal emergency and a national “decompression strategy at the border.”

 

To recap, the Democratic mayor of the largest, most populous, most diverse city in America sounds precisely like a Republican politician and blames President Biden for having too many migrants coming to the Big Apple, and blames him for yet another round of social services cuts that will "have to happen."

As much of a bonehead that de Blasio was, as much as a corrupt asshole that Bloomberg was, Eric Adams is the most anti-New Yorker that ever got into Gracie Mansion in my lifetime (yes, even Rudy didn't go this far) and NYC cannot get rid of this guy quickly enough.

Last Call For A Rudy, Awakening Con't

The hammer falls again on Rudy Giuliani, and by the time all the construction tools of justice get done with him, he's going to be spending his golden years spitting out chunks of drywall.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Rudy Giuliani is legally liable for defaming two Georgia election workers who became the subject of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election that were amplified by Donald Trump in the final weeks of his presidency.

In an unsparing, 57-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell said Giuliani had flagrantly violated her orders to preserve and produce relevant evidence to the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, resulting in a “default” judgment against him. She is also ordering him to pay Freeman and Moss “punitive” damages for failing to fulfill his obligations.

“Just as taking shortcuts to win an election carries risks — even potential criminal liability — bypassing the discovery process carries serious sanctions,” Howell ruled.

Giuliani spent weeks accusing Freeman and Moss of manipulating ballots during Georgia’s vote counting process after the 2020 election, despite repeated investigations that debunked and discredited the allegations.

The harassment that Freeman and Moss endured as a result of these conspiracy theories is at the heart of some of the criminal charges now facing several of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia racketeering case brought by Fulton County prosecutors. Giuliani is charged in that case, in part, for “false statements” to Georgia legislators related to his attacks on Freeman and Moss.

Howell has now ordered the case to proceed to a trial purely to determine the amount of damages Giuliani will now be forced to shoulder on charges of defamation, civil conspiracy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

It’s unclear how much money the pair will seek in the trial, either in direct compensation for the damage to their reputations and other harms they faced or in terms of punitive damages–which can range to several multiples of the direct damages. The total might be influenced by what Giuliani does next.

Howell has given the former mayor until Sept. 20 to produce documents about his net worth, which she said he has dragged his feet on producing so far, as well as records from his companies related to the revenue produced by his “Common Sense” podcast.

 

Understand that Rudy fucked around so much, the judge ordered him directly into the Find Out phase, to determine solely how many millions he's going to fork over to the two Georgia election workers he made MAGA targets of.  He's guilty, It's just how much the damage will be.

And this will only be the beginning.

A Rudy Awakening, Con't

Remember that both Arizona and Michigan, with Democrats as each state's AG and Governor, are investigating their own slates of fraudulent 2020 electors in addition to Georgia, and many of the players at the national level, Trump's inner circle f criminals, are mostly the same. Arizona's AG Kris Mayes in particular would like to have a few words with one Rudolph Giuliani.

 

PROSECUTORS IN ARIZONA are “aggressively” ramping up their criminal probe into the 2020 fake electors plot aimed at keeping then-President Donald Trump in power. They’re not just looking at the fake electors, though. Rudy Giuliani is also now high on their list.

Two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone that in the past several weeks, state prosecutors have been asking questions about the former New York mayor who became a ringleader in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Investigators assigned to the case by Arizona’s Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes have recently asked potential witnesses and other individuals specific questions not only about Giuliani’s behind-the-scenes conduct, but that of other key Trump lieutenants at the time, as well.

Prosecutors appear particularly interested in a number of notable meetings and phone calls, including a late November 2020 meeting with members of Arizona’s state legislature convened by the Trump legal team, which aired bogus claims of voter fraud and lobbied lawmakers to “take over” the state’s selection of electors, the sources say.

Arizona’s attorney general has publicly referred to the case as an investigation into “fake electors,” but the questions about Giuliani suggest that investigators may be interested in probing pro-Trump figures who were higher up on the food chain in addition to the 11 Republicans who falsely claimed to be the state’s legitimate electors.

In public comments following the Fulton County, Georgia, indictment of Trump and his associates earlier this month, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes called for patience, saying “we are doing a thorough and professional investigation and we’re going to do it on our timetable as justice demands.”

State investigators have also at times inquired about Trump’s level of personal involvement in the Arizona-focused pressure campaign, one of the people with knowledge of the situation says. The campaign was part of a multi-state fake elector scheme, which along with other aspects of Trump’s crusade to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate 2020 victory has figured prominently into multiple federal and state-level criminal probes.

Giuliani’s attorney and a Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on this story. The Arizona attorney general’s office declined to comment.

Arizona law enforcement officials have also been looking into the activities of former Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward and her role as a fake elector. As Rolling Stone reported last week, prosecutors have asked possible witnesses about a December 2020 signing ceremony where Ward and 10 other Republicans signed documents falsely attesting to be Arizona’s legitimate electors.

 

Going after ward, and God willing, Kari Lake as well, would go a long way towards people in the Grand Canyon State getting a big dose of The Find Out Phase. 

We'll see if Arizona is as gung-ho as Fani Willis is.

Orange Meltdown: A Rudy Awakening Edition

Rudy Giuliani faces the music in Georgia today for his role in Trump's election-theft conspiracy to defraud the state.

Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer who championed the former president’s bogus election fraud claims, said he will turn himself in to authorities in Georgia on Wednesday to face racketeering charges alleging he meddled in the state’s 2020 presidential election.

"I’m going to Fulton County to comply with the law, which I always do," he told reporters before leaving for Georgia. "I don’t know if I plea today but if I do I plead not guilty."


Giuliani and Trump both face 13 counts, more than the other 17 defendants in the case.

The former New York City mayor has maintained his innocence, and claimed the only thing he’s guilty of was zealously advocating for his client.

“I never thought I’d ever get indicted for being a lawyer,” Giuliani said on his radio show last week.

Trump has said he will surrender at the Atlanta jail Thursday.

Giuliani is being represented by New York-based attorney John Esposito, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney.

After their arrival, they will go to his local counsel’s office, where Giuliani will remain as the attorneys go to District Attorney Fani Willis’s office to negotiate a bail amount and sign documents.

Once a judge approves those documents, Giuliani will head to the Fulton County Jail, where he will be fingerprinted and photographed. His arraignment is expected in the next week or two and may take place virtually.

"I get photographed, isn’t that nice? A mugshot for the mayor who probably put the worst criminal of the 20th century in jail," Giuliani complained to reporters when he left his apartment.

The indictment in Fulton County alleges that Giuliani was a key part of a criminal conspiracy, pressing election officials in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania to act on voting fraud claims that he was repeatedly told were false. Giuliani was also charged with promoting false claims that voting machines were rigged, and making false claims in sworn legal filings.

Additionally, the indictment singles out false claims Giuliani made about Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, who was targeted with death threats and harassed as a result of the phony allegations.

The main charge against Giuliani — racketeering — is similar to a federal law he used with great success when he was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Giuliani predicted Wednesday that he will be vindicated. “This will be proven to be like all the rest, a complete hoax and a lie,” he said.

 

I predict Rudy Giuliani will spend the rest of his life behind bars, completing his fall from grace as NYC's Hizzoner to Georgia inmate. Of course, during that meeting with Fani Willis today, he could always cut a deal.

 

We'll see.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The right-wing noise machine is blasting bullshit at full volume over Trump's fourth set of indictments.

“Stalin would be proud” of the Fulton County indictment, claimed right-wing radio host Mark Levine during a Monday night appearance on Fox News. (Not mentioned during the broadcast: emails from the January 6 committee show Levin chatting with John Eastman, a Trump attorney who was also charged in the Georgia racketeering case.)

Other commentators suggested that prosecutors were setting off a potentially catastrophic backlash against the left.

“Civil war,” tweeted media personality Tim Pool (who, in fairness, has authored similar posts for years).

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich also took to Fox News to warn that “we are drifting towards the greatest constitutional crisis since the 1850s,” Media Matters reported. Gingrich also opined that the latest criminal charges against Trump represent “a desperate last ditch effort by a corrupt machine to destroy their most dangerous opponent.”

Some conservative voices claimed the indictment of some of Trump’s attorneys on election interference crimes foretold a crackdown on lawyers writ large.

“How are all the lawyers in America feeling today?” tweeted Dilbert creator-turned-wingnut Scott Adams. “Safe?”

Jenna Ellis, a Trump lawyer indicted in Fulton County for alleged racketeering offenses, tweeted that “the Democrats and the Fulton County DA are criminalizing the practice of law. I am resolved to trust the Lord and I will simply continue to honor, praise, and serve Him.”

Other Trump fans claim the indictment imperils even more Americans for innocuous activities.

“Apparently illegal in America now,” tweeted former One America News Network personality Liz Wheeler, listing out activities mentioned in the indictment like “Telling people to watch TV,” “Asking for phone numbers,” “Renting rooms at the Capitol,” “Advocating for signature verification,” and “Tweets.”

“It’s not just Trump they’re coming after,” Wheeler wrote. “They’re coming next for our free speech if we dare dissent.”

The indictment does not claim that tweeting is illegal. It claims that Trump and allies used Twitter during an extensive effort to overturn a presidential election. Nevertheless, Wheeler and other figures on the right have repeated the refrain that the indictment might criminalize watching television.

“Everyone should read the Georgia indictment to discover how nonsensical it is,” tweeted conservative columnist Gary Abernathy. “This is actually one of the counts—apparently, sending a tweet encouraging people to watch TV is a crime.”

That is not true, as the indictment (or even the screenshot Abernathy posted) reveals. The indictment describes Trump’s promotion of an election-denying OANN segment. Trump’s hyping of the segment is not described as a crime, but as an overt act in furtherance of a conspiracy, much as renting a car is not illegal, but might be relevant to a criminal case if the rental car is used in a series of bank robberies.

Some talking heads suggested radical action to block a Trump conviction. “I think this is so dangerous to the very survival of the republic that it has to be stopped,” Gingrich said on Fox.

Another Monday night Fox guest, Mike Davis, pointed to the difficulty of securing a pardon in Georgia. If convicted on the state’s RICO statute, Trump could neither be pardoned by a president nor Georgia's governor.

“Under the Georgia law, there is a statute that limits the Republican governor’s ability to pardon, and I think that the legislature in Georgia needs to amend that statute and give Governor Kemp the ability to pardon in this situation because this is clear election interference,” Davis said.

“It is clear Democrat lawfareby Democrat prosecutors where they are trying to have Democrat prosecutors, Democrat judges and Democrat juries and Democrat hellholes decide the next presidential election instead of the American people.”

 

I'd say as a layman that the RICO laws make it pretty clear that doing things like "tweeting to watch TV is a crime" when it's used to further a criminal conspiracy like when "criminalizing sending mail" is illegal when it's mail fraud but these are, ostensibly, actual lawyers making these idiotic comparisons. 

You know who should be well-versed in RICO law? Former US Attorney for Manhattan, Rudolph Giuliani, who is now facing...RICO charges.

Mr. RICO just got RICO-ed.

In the 1980s Rudy Giuliani all but reinvented an underused 1970 law against racketeering. He made it his mission in a two-year stint as the No. 3 official at the Justice Department to hire prosecutors across the country who would ferret out and prosecute criminal enterprises of all shapes and sizes. Then, as Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, he wielded the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act with huge success against Mafia dons, corrupt politicians and 1980s Masters-of-the-Universe financiers like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.

Now Giuliani, 79, is on the other side of the law that was the essential scaffolding of his own career. He was accused alongside former President Donald Trump and 17 others in an indictment late Monday of operating a criminal enterprise that sought to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory in Georgia, in violation of Georgia’s RICO Act, which is modeled on the federal law he once championed. He was also charged with other counts, including soliciting public officials to violate their oaths, making false statements and conspiracy.

“I’m the same Rudy Giuliani that went after the Mafia,” Giuliani said Tuesday afternoon on the Greg Kelly Show on WABC radio. “The same quest for justice. Gosh almighty, if Donald Trump committed a crime, love him though I do, I’d put him in jail.”

The indictment punctuates a remarkable fall from grace for Giuliani, who parlayed his success taking on the mob and Wall Street miscreants into two high-profile terms as New York City’s first Republican mayor in decades. His dramatic efforts in reducing crime were widely copied elsewhere, and his resolute response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks earned him the nickname “America’s mayor.”

 

How far these clowns have fallen, indeed.

Fani Flagged The Whole Gang In Georgia

Apparently today's planned testimony was either moved up to yesterday or it was a rope-a-dope worthy of Ali in his prime, because Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis got a true bill of indictment for not just Trump, but his whole Georgia gang late last night.

Former President Donald Trump and 18 allies were charged on Monday with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

In a sweeping 98-page indictment handed up by a Fulton County grand jury, Trump was charged with racketeering and a dozen other felonies, such as solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree and false statements and writings. The indictment contained 41 criminal counts.

It marks the fourth time that Trump has been criminally charged ― and the second time this August the former president has been indicted for his attempts to cling to power.

The Georgia case is unique because in addition to Trump, it also charges a cast of supporting players— from former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to then White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer.

The long-anticipated indictment, which came after the grand jurors heard roughly 10 hours of testimony on Monday, will place Atlanta at the center of an historic legal battle that could be bitterly waged in court as Trump campaigns to return to the White House. He has strongly denied any wrongdoing in Georgia after the 2020 election.

Also indicted Tuesday were Trump co-defendants: state Sen. Shawn Still; attorneys John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Bob Cheeley, Ray Smith III and Kenneth Chesebro; former assistant U.S. attorney general Jeffrey Clark; GOP strategist Michael Roman; former Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton; former Coffee County GOP chairwoman Cathy Latham; Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall; publicist Trevian Kutti; Illinois pastor Stephen Cliffguard Lee; and Harrison Floyd, who briefly ran for a suburban Atlanta U.S. House seat before serving as director of Black Voices for Trump.

The charges are the culmination of a 2 1/2-year criminal investigation launched by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis shortly after Trump’s leaked Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Brad Raffensperger, during which he asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find” him 11,780 votes.

Fani Willis didn't just throw the book at Trump and his co-conspirators, she put the entire Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System in a railgun and set the dial to 41.

PS: Georgia's RICO statue alone is five to twenty in the state pen, and Trump is facing the rest of his life in prison if convicted. And turns out GOP Gov. Brian Kemp can't actually pardon Trump, either. The state is one of the few that has an independent pardon and parole commission, as some of you have pointed out. Trump would have to serve at least five years before even being eligible.

And on top of all that, Georgia state courts regularly broadcast proceedings.

It'll be must-see TV.

Fani, Flagged In Georgia, Con't

With Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis expected to bring her case to a grand jury this week as several witnesses to Trump's efforts to interfere with the 2020 Georgia election have been informed they will need to testify stating Tuesday, we're starting to see what kind of evidence Willis may present, including messages from Trump's inner circle that they were directly involved in the January 2021 voting system breach in a Georgia county elections office.

Atlanta-area prosecutors investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia are in possession of text messages and emails directly connecting members of Donald Trump’s legal team to the early January 2021 voting system breach in Coffee County, sources tell CNN.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to seek charges against more than a dozen individuals when her team presents its case before a grand jury next week. Several individuals involved in the voting systems breach in Coffee County are among those who may face charges in the sprawling criminal probe.

Investigators in the Georgia criminal probe have long suspected the breach was not an organic effort sprung from sympathetic Trump supporters in rural and heavily Republican Coffee County – a county Trump won by nearly 70% of the vote. They have gathered evidence indicating it was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, according to people familiar with the situation.

Trump allies attempted to access voting systems after the 2020 election as part of the broader push to produce evidence that could back up the former president’s baseless claims of widespread fraud.

While Trump’s January 2021 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and effort to put forward fake slates of electors have long been considered key pillars of Willis’ criminal probe, the voting system breach in Coffee County quietly emerged as an area of focus for investigators roughly one year ago. Since then, new evidence has slowly been uncovered about the role of Trump’s attorneys, the operatives they hired and how the breach, as well as others like it in other key states, factored into broader plans for overturning the election.

Together, the text messages and other court documents show how Trump lawyers and a group of hired operatives sought to access Coffee County’s voting systems in the days before January 6, 2021, as the former president’s allies continued a desperate hunt for any evidence of widespread fraud they could use to delay certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

 Last year, a former Trump official testified under oath to the House January 6 select committee that plans to access voting systems in Georgia were discussed in meetings at the White House, including during an Oval Office meeting on December 18, 2020,  that included Trump. 

Six days before pro-Trump operatives gained unauthorized access to voting systems, the local elections official who allegedly helped facilitate the breach sent a “written invitation” to attorneys working for Trump, according to text messages obtained by CNN.

Investigators have scrutinized the actions of various individuals who were involved, including Misty Hampton, a former Coffee County elections official who authored the letter of invitation referenced in text messages and other documents that have been turned over to prosecutors, multiple sources told CNN.

They have also examined the involvement of Trump’s then attorney Rudy Giuliani – who was informed last year he was a target in the Fulton County investigation – and fellow Trump lawyer Sidney Powell as part of their probe, according to people familiar with the matter.

A spokesperson for Willis’ office declined to comment.

The letter of invitation was shared with attorneys and an investigator working with Giuliani at the time, the text messages obtained by CNN show.

 

Remember, the entire Coffee County voting system mess was the justification Trump's team wanted for seizing voting machines across the country. The fact that it was all criminal activity on the part of Trump's followers was beside the point.

 

We lucked out because Trump's people lacked the fortitude to accept the consequences in January 2021.

 

We won't get a second chance to stop them if he is allowed back into office again. 

Last Call For Orange Meltdown: 3rd Strike Edition

A big, big day in Trump conspiracy fraud legal news today, not one, not two, but three big stories. First, former Georgia Republican state Sen. Jen Jordan is on the list for Fulton County DA Fani Willis's grand jury.

 

Former Georgia Democratic state Sen. Jen Jordan received subpoenas to testify before a Fulton County grand jury later this month, she told CNN.

The subpoenas to Jordan and independent journalist George Chidi are the strongest indication yet that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis intends to seek indictments in her criminal probe into efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Two grand juries with the power to issue indictments meet regularly in Fulton County, and Willis is expected to go before one of them this month to present her case. The presentment will likely take two days, according to people familiar with the matter.

The witnesses are expected to shed light on different aspects of Willis’ case. While Chidi can share information about the fake GOP electors that convened in Georgia, Jordan witnessed the election presentation Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies made before Georgia state lawmakers in 2020.

On December 3, 2020, Jordan was at the Georgia Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about election integrity during which Giuliani, then a Trump lawyer, and other supporters of the former president spread conspiracy theories about widespread irregularities and fraud in the state.

At the hearing, Trump’s team presented a video of what they claimed was evidence of fraud from election night ballot tabulating in Fulton County, allegations that were investigated by the FBI, Department of Justice and state election officials – and proven to be erroneous.

The subpoenas for grand jury testimony call on the witnesses to appear before the grand jury during the month of August and state that witnesses will get 48 hours notice when they are required to appear.

 

As Willis warms up the band in Georgia, the state of Michigan is making its move in its own elector fraud conspiracy case against Mango Mussolini and friends.

A former Republican attorney general candidate and another supporter of former President Donald Trump have been criminally charged in Michigan in connection with accessing and tampering with voting machines after the 2020 election, according to court records.

Matthew DePerno, a Republican lawyer who was endorsed by Trump in an unsuccessful run for Michigan attorney general last year, was charged with undue possession of a voting machine and conspiracy, according to Oakland County court records.

Daire Rendon, a former Republican state representative, was charged with conspiracy to commit undue possession of a voting machine and false pretenses. A lawyer listed on court documents as representing Rendon could not be immediately reached for comment by phone.

Both were arraigned remotely Tuesday afternoon, according to Richard Lynch, the court administrator for Oakland County’s 6th Circuit.

A special prosecutor, D.J. Hilson, has been reviewing the investigation and considering charges since September. He convened a grand jury in March to determine whether criminal indictments should be issued, according to court documents.

In a statement, Hilson said the charges were authorized by “an independent citizens grand jury,” and that his office did not make any recommendations.

Those charged in Michigan are the latest facing legal consequences for alleged crimes committed after embracing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

 

Now, if this was all the bad news Trump's legal team got today, it would still be a hell of a bad way to start the month.

 

But then Jack Smith showed up with the third strike.

A grand jury indicted former president Donald Trump on Tuesday for a raft of alleged crimes in his brazen efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — the latest legal and political aftershock stemming from the riot at the U.S. Capitol two and a half years ago.

The four-count, 45-page indictment accuses Trump of three distinct conspiracies, charging that he conspired to defraud the U.S., conspired to obstruct an official proceeding and conspired against people’s rights.

“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment charges, saying Trump unleashed a blizzard of lies about purported mass voter fraud, and then tried to get state, local, and federal officials to act to change the vote results.

“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. In fact, the Defendant was notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue — often by the people on whom he relied for candid advice on important matters, and who were best positioned to know the facts — and he deliberately disregarded the truth,” the indictment states.

“The attack on our nation’s capitol on Jan. 6 2021 was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy," special counsel Jack Smith said in announcing the indictment. "It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant.”

Smith also praised the law enforcement officers who defended the U.S. Capitol, saying they “did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it. They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and a people.”

In broad strokes and particular conversations with officials around the country, the indictment recounts much of what was already known about Trump’s efforts to stay in the White House despite losing the election. But the indictment frames that conduct as a destructive criminal conspiracy that attempted to demolish a bedrock function of American democracy.

While no one else is charged alongside Trump, the indictment describes six unnamed and so far uncharged co-conspirators, who also appear to be in significant legal jeopardy. Some of the individuals are easily identifiable, such as Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer.

Giuliani and a number of the other uncharged co-conspirators are identifiable based on details in the indictment and previous reporting by The Washington Post and other outlets. Co-conspirator 2, described as “an attorney who devised an attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding” is John Eastman, a law professor.

The indictment describes co-conspirator 3 as an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud Trump himself said sounded “crazy” — and the description of that person matches Trump ally Sidney Powell. Co-conspirator 4 is described as a then-Justice Department official who “attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations." Other details of that person’s actions match Jeffrey Clark, whom Trump considered appointing as attorney general in the final days of his administration.

Co-conspirator 5 is described in the indictment as a lawyer who tried to implement a plan "to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding,” — a reference that appears to match Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump attorney who worked on the scheme to enact false presidential electors.

Lawyers for the uncharged co-conspirators did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

 

All the ketchup just hit the walls at Mar-a-Lago tonight.  Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and Kenny Chesebro are all going down with him.

It will only get worse for Trump from here.

The Big Lie, Con't

Why yes, Republicans in Georgia tried to steal elections, not just the presidential contest but the Senate race in 2020 as well where Jon Ossoff beat David Perdue.

In mid-January 2021, two men hired by former President Donald Trump’s legal team discussed over text message what to do with data obtained from a breached voting machine in a rural county in Georgia, including whether to use it as part of an attempt to decertify the state’s pending Senate runoff results.

The texts, sent two weeks after operatives breached a voting machine in Coffee County, Georgia, reveal for the first time that Trump allies considered using voting data not only to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, but also in an effort to keep a Republican hold on the US Senate. 

“Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close hold,” Jim Penrose, a former NSA official working with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to access voting machines in Georgia, wrote in a January 19 text to Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, a firm that purports to run audits of voting systems.

In the text, which was obtained by CNN and has not been previously reported, Penrose references the upcoming certification of Democrat Jon Ossoff’s win over Republican David Perdue.

“We only have until Saturday to decide if we are going to use this report to try to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we hold it for a bigger moment,” Penrose wrote, referring to a potential lawsuit.

The plot to breach voting systems in Coffee County, coordinated by members of Trump’s legal team including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, is part of a broader criminal investigation into 2020 election interference led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Willis’ office is weighing a potential racketeering case against multiple defendants and is actively deciding who to bring charges against, sources tell CNN. Willis has subpoenaed a number of individuals involved in the Coffee County breach, including the two men who carried it out who were in touch with Penrose and Logan.

Willis has also subpoenaed Giuliani and Powell as part of her probe. Giuliani has been told he’s a target in the Fulton County probe, CNN previously reported. The special grand jury convened for the case recommended issuing multiple indictments in its final report completed in February, according to the jury foreperson.    

A source familiar with Willis’ investigation tells CNN that Willis and her team have in their possession evidence that Trump allies planned to use the breached voting data from Georgia to try to decertify the state’s senate runoff election. Emails obtained by CNN show Penrose and Powell arranged upfront payment to a cyber forensics firm that sent a team to Coffee County on January 7, 2021.

The Coffee County breach is also under investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

 

Alvin Bragg's case in Manhattan is big, but the entire Georgia election racketeering conspiracy is enormous. I fully expect Willis to be removed from office by Georgia Republicans before she can indict them.

Watch.

Orange Meltdown: Merry Indictmas!

 The Trump indictment has arrived, and Alvin Bragg is not fooling around.

Largely consistent with original anonymously sourced accounts, the 34-count indictment charges former President Donald Trump with falsifying business records related to payoffs to — and compensation for — hush money to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump, who appeared in a Manhattan courtroom to face the charges, pleaded not guilty.

“The defendant repeatedly made false statements on business records,” Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg said at a press conference following the arraignment. “These are felony crimes in New York state, no matter who you are. We cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct”

Under New York law, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor that only becomes a felony when an alleged violator acts “with intent to defraud” in the commission of another crime. Bragg called it the “bread and butter” of his office’s white collar crime work.

“We have charged falsifying business records for those receiving to cover up sex crimes,” he told reporters. “And we have brought this charge for those who committed tax violations. At its core, this case today is one with allegations like so many of our white-collar cases. Allegations that someone lied again and again, to protect their interests and evade the laws to which we are all held accountable.”

The $130,000 that Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen funneled to Daniels wasn’t a simple check.

In the weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Cohen took out a home equity line of credit from First Republic Bank and steered it through his then-newly formed shell company Essential Consultants LLC, which in turn paid Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson, according to federal records. Federal prosecutors said that Trump Organization executives devised an equally convoluted system of making Cohen whole: Cohen tacked on $60,000 for “tech services” and an equivalent amount for a bonus, then the Trump Organization grossed up that amount to $420,000, paid out in monthly intervals of $35,000. The difference accounted for what Cohen would have to pay in taxes on the original payment.

Cohen produced checks signed by the former president and his son Donald Trump Jr. to Congress.

In early February 2017, Trump and Cohen met in the Oval Office to confirm this repayment arrangement, prosecutors say.

The federal investigation didn’t answer Trump’s bookkeeping for those payments, whether he was compensated by his company for them, and if so, how he reported them.

Manhattan prosecutors’ charges provide some clarity from the company’s side, saying that the Trump Organization recorded the $35,000 checks as a “legal expense.” The check stubs were allegedly falsely marked as “Retainer” payments. Trump allegedly paid nine of the checks personally.

Needless to say, Bragg's case is depending heavily on the Trump camp deliberately misleading tax officials, and then deliberately creating false records in order to cover up the crime. A cinvicted former CFO on fraud charges isn't going to help. And again, note that nobody's disputing the facts of the case, we've gone immediately to "does this count as felony fraud by deliberately misleading?"

Of course, as I've said, it'll be well into 2024 before this goes to trial.

By then, Trump will most likely have bigger issues.

Mr. Smith Comes For Washington

Special Counsel Jack Smith is getting to work here in the new year with a federal subpoena of Rudy Giuliani over Trump's 2020 Save America PAC slush fund mess.

 

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has subpoenaed Donald Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, asking him to turn over records to a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into the former president’s fundraising following the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the subpoena.

The subpoena, which was sent more than a month ago and has not been previously reported, requests documents from Giuliani about payments he received around the 2020 election, when Giuliani filed numerous lawsuits on Trump’s behalf contesting the election results, the person said.

Prosecutors have also subpoenaed other witnesses who are close to Trump, asking specifically for documents related to disbursements from the Save America PAC, Trump’s primary fundraising operation set up shortly after the 2020 election, according to other sources with insight into the probe.

Taken together, the subpoenas demonstrate prosecutors’ growing interest in following the money after the 2020 election as part of their sweeping criminal probe around Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss of the presidency.

Save America was part of broader fundraising efforts by Trump and the Republican Party that raised more than $250 million after the election. Since then, the political action committee has compensated several lawyers who now represent Trump and his allies in January 6-related investigations.

The subpoenas to other witnesses in addition to Giuliani were sent in late December, according to the other sources.

The information the prosecutors seek is still being collected, the sources said. With Giuliani, the investigators have prioritized getting financial information from him, one person said.

The inquiry to Giuliani came from David Rody, a former top prosecutor in New York who specializes in gang and conspiracy cases and is assisting Smith with examining a broader criminal conspiracy after the election, according to some of the sources.

 

Rudy escaped prosecution on his earlier Ukraine lobbying legal problems, but he's now facing a host of new potential charges. We'll see how far these get.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Rudy Edition

The federal probe into Rudy Giuliani's lobbyist chicanery in Ukraine has been officially closed with no charges brought. 

Federal prosecutors investigating Rudy Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine have closed their investigation after more than two years and said no criminal charges will be brought.

Prosecutors with the office of US Attorney for the Southern District of New York have been investigating Giuliani, the former personal attorney to former President Donald Trump, for possible violations of foreign lobbying laws since early 2019.

On Monday, they informed a judge overseeing the investigation that they were closing the case.

The notification came in a court filing with prosecutors asking the judge to terminate the special master who was appointed to oversee a review of documents obtained when the FBI executed a search warrant on the former New York City mayor’s home in April 2021.

“The Government writes to notify the Court that the grand jury investigation that led to the issuance of the above-referenced warrants has concluded, and that based on information currently available to the Government, criminal charges are not forthcoming,” prosecutors wrote.

A spokesman for the US attorney’s office declined to comment.

“It’s wonderful, long-expected news,” said Robert Costello, an attorney for Giuliani. “Unfortunately, Mayor Giuliani had to spend two and a half years to three years with this cloud over his head.”

Ted Goodman, a spokesperson and political adviser to Giuliani, said: “The mayor has been completely and totally vindicated. We hope this will help bring an end to the unwarranted attacks on the mayor - a man who is quite literally the most successful prosecutor of the most dangerous criminals over the past fifty years. I challenge someone to find a more successful crime fighter than Rudy Giuliani, a man who cleaned up city government and took down the mafia."

 

This is astonishing. Are you telling me as incompetent as Giuliani was, all the mistakes made, all the clear foreign lobbyist violations he made, that the investigation is over without a single charge being filed? 

You couldn't find a way to make charges stick to this idiot?

Any charges at all?

The Special Master on this case, Judge Barbara Jones, is moving on to become the Independent Monitor of the Trump Organization NY state case.

Make of that what you will, all I see is red and green.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Sore Losers Edition

So, yeah, turns out the Trump regime was absolutely at the head of the "grassroots movement" conspiracy to defraud the US with fraudily fraud fraudulent electors, and coordinated the effort with the GOP's cadre of election deniers in key swing states by sharing stolen election data and absolutely breaking the law.

Sensitive election system files obtained by attorneys working to overturn President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat were shared with election deniers, conspiracy theorists and right-wing commentators, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post.

A Georgia computer forensics firm hired by the attorneys placed the files on a server, where company records show they were downloaded dozens of times. Among the downloaders were accounts associated with a Texas meteorologist who has appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show; a podcaster who suggested political enemies should be executed; a former pro-surfer who pushed disproved theories that the 2020 election was manipulated; and a self-described former “seduction and pickup coach” who claims to also have been a hacker.

Plaintiffs in a long-running federal lawsuit over the security of Georgia’s voting systems obtained the new records from the company, Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler, under a subpoena to one of its executives. The records include contracts between the firm and the Trump-allied attorneys, notably Sidney Powell. The data files are described as copies of components from election systems in Coffee County, Ga., and Antrim County, Mich.

A series of data leaks and alleged breaches of local elections offices since 2020 has prompted criminal investigations and fueled concerns among some security experts that public disclosure of information collected from voting systems could be exploited by hackers and others people seeking to manipulate future elections.

Access to U.S. voting system software and other components is tightly regulated, and the government classifies those systems as “critical infrastructure.” The new batch of records shows for the first time how the files copied from election systems were distributed to people in multiple states.

Marilyn Marks, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance, which is one of the plaintiffs in the Georgia lawsuit, said the records appeared to show the files were handled recklessly. “The implications go far beyond Coffee County or Georgia,” Marks said.

In a statement to The Post, SullivanStrickler said the attorneys who hired the firm directed it “to contact county officials to obtain access to certain data” from Dominion Voting machines in Georgia and Michigan.

“Likewise, the firm was directed by attorneys to distribute that data to certain individuals,” the statement said. The firm said that it “had [and has] no reason to believe that, as officers of the court, these attorneys would ask or direct SullivanStrickler to do anything either improper or illegal.”

Dominion Voting Systems has been the target of baseless claims from Trump, his advisers and allied news organizations that its machines were hacked and were programmed to flip votes from one candidate to another. The Colorado-based company has filed a host of defamation lawsuits over the statements.

Dominion declined to comment on ongoing investigations but in a statement said: “What is important is that nearly two years after the 2020 election, no credible evidence has ever been presented to any court or authority that voting machines did anything other than count votes accurately and reliably in all states.”

The Post reported on Aug. 15 that an earlier set of records released in response to the subpoena showed SullivanStrickler was hired in late November 2020 to conduct a multistate effort to copy software and other data from county election systems. The effort was more successful than previously known, accessing equipment in Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.

That same day, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) opened “a computer trespass investigation” regarding an elections server in Coffee County, bureau spokeswoman Nelly Miles said. Under Georgia law, knowingly using a computer or network without authority and with the intention of deleting, altering or interfering with programs or data is computer trespass, a felony.

 

Not that it was ever in doubt as the Trump regime crack squad of legal eagles said on multiple occasions that they were in fact coordinating to share data in order to "prove election fraud", but we now know that they coordinated the sharing of illegally obtained election data, which makes this a giant goddamn criminal conspiracy to boot. 

On top of all that, they defamed Dominion Voting Systems and they are going to take these clowns for every dollar they have. Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, all of these bozos are going to prison, flipping evidence on Trump, or both.

It's going to get amazing in the weeks ahead.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Two major developments in the Fulton County, Georgia case against Trump for election interference, first, a federal judge in Atlanta has ruled that Sen. Lindsey Graham must testify under oath about his role in the possible GOP interference in the 2020 Georgia elections.

A federal judge in Atlanta has denied GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham's motion to quash a subpoena, ruling that he must testify before a Fulton County grand jury investigating former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. 

In her written decision on Monday, US District Judge Leigh Martin May sent the case to the Superior Court of Fulton County to hear further proceedings on the US Constitution's "Speech or Debate" clause, the centerpiece that Graham's attorneys argued immunized the US senator from South Carolina from having to testify in this case. 

"Because the record must be more fully developed before the Court can address the applicability of the 'Speech or Debate' clause to specific questions or lines of inquiry, and because Senator Graham's only request in removing the subpoena to this Court was to quash the subpoena in its entirety, the Case is REMANDED to the Superior Court of Fulton County for further proceedings," May wrote in the ruling. 

The South Carolina Republican is scheduled to appear as a witness in Atlanta in front of the special grand jury on August 23. 

In her ruling, May wrote that there are "considerable areas of inquiry" that are not "legislative in nature" and said that the District Attorney's office has shown "extraordinary circumstances and a special need for Senator Graham's testimony on issues relating to alleged attempts to influence or disrupt the lawful administration of Georgia's 2020 elections." 

Five other attorneys who worked with Trump and spoke with Georgia election officials in the aftermath of the 2020 election have also received subpoenas to testify before the special purpose grand jury, and at least three of the lawyers are trying to fight their subpoenas in state courts this week. 

 

A federal judge absolutely believes ol' Huckleberry Graham here has testimony germane to a grand jury and this case is moving quickly. 

The second major development is that Rudy Giuliani and several other Trump/GOP officials are now direct targets of the Georgia investigation.

Former President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has been informed that he is considered a "target" of the Georgia criminal investigation probing the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election in that state, according to sources familiar with the matter.

An attorney for Giuliani received a call Monday informing them that he is a "target" of the investigation, the sources said.

The move comes just two days before Giuliani is set to testify before the Fulton Country special grand jury probing the case, as the investigation appears to be ramping up.

Giuliani is still expected to testify on Wednesday, the sources said.

Last week, an attorney for Giuliani said in court that Giuliani's legal team had been asked the district attorney "whether or not Mr. Giuliani is a target of this investigation," but had "not yet received a response."

The judge in the case, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, said he "would implore" the DA to "at least address that before [Giuliani] gets here."

Earlier, 16 so-called "alternate electors" in the state were informed that they are also considered "targets" of the probe.

 

So yes, we're liable to see Giuliani indicted and soon.

Last Call For The Coup-Coup Birds, Con't

The Trump regime knew their conspiracy to try to defraud the United States with fake electors was illegal and wouldn't work, so they cooked up an insurrection to get Mike Pence and stop the electoral vote count. We know this because they kept taking notes on a criminal fuckin' conspiracy.

 

 

Previously undisclosed emails provide an inside look at the increasingly desperate and often slapdash efforts by advisers to President Donald J. Trump to reverse his election defeat in the weeks before the Jan. 6 attack, including acknowledgments that a key element of their plan was of dubious legality and lived up to its billing as “fake.”

The dozens of emails among people connected to the Trump campaign, outside advisers and close associates of Mr. Trump show a particular focus on assembling lists of people who would claim — with no basis — to be Electoral College electors on his behalf in battleground states that he had lost.

In emails reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who had worked with the Trump campaign at the time, one lawyer involved in the detailed discussions repeatedly used the word “fake” to refer to the so-called electors, who were intended to provide Vice President Mike Pence and Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress a rationale for derailing the congressional process of certifying the outcome. And lawyers working on the proposal made clear they knew that the pro-Trump electors they were putting forward might not hold up to legal scrutiny.

“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix-based lawyer who helped organize the pro-Trump electors in Arizona, wrote in a Dec. 8, 2020, email to Boris Epshteyn, a strategic adviser for the Trump campaign.

In a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” adding a smiley face emoji.

The emails provide new details of how a wing of the Trump campaign worked with outside lawyers and advisers to organize the elector plan and pursue a range of other options, often with little thought to their practicality. One email showed that many of Mr. Trump’s top advisers were informed of problems naming Trump electors in Michigan — a state he had lost — because pandemic rules had closed the state Capitol building where the so-called electors had to gather.

The emails show that participants in the discussions reported details of their activities to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and in at least one case to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff. Around the same time, according to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, Mr. Meadows emailed another campaign adviser saying, “We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states.”

Many of the emails went to Mr. Epshteyn, who was acting as a coordinator for people inside and outside the Trump campaign and the White House and remains a close aide to Mr. Trump

Mr. Epshteyn, the emails show, was a regular point of contact for John Eastman, the lawyer whose plan for derailing congressional certification of the Electoral College result on Jan. 6, 2021, was embraced by Mr. Trump.

 

Season Two of the January 6th hearings will be a showstopper. 

 

Watch. 

And as I've said, the entire point of the January 6th hearings was to make the case for Trump's prosecution by the Justice Department. This evening, we've learned that Donald Trump is indeed being investigated by the Justice Department.

The Justice Department is investigating President Donald Trump’s actions as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury — including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence — have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won, according to two people familiar with the matter. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The prosecutors have asked hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 and January 2021; his pressure campaign on Pence to overturn the election; and what instructions Trump gave his lawyers and advisers about fake electors and sending electors back to the states, the people said. Some of the questions focused directly on the extent of Trump’s involvement in the fake-elector effort led by his outside lawyers, including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, these people said.

In addition, Justice Department investigators in April received phone records of key officials and aides in the Trump administration, including his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to two people familiar with the matter. That effort is another indicator of how expansive the Jan. 6 probe had become, well before the high-profile, televised House hearings in June and July on the subject.

The Washington Post and other news organizations have previously written that the Justice Department is examining the conduct of Eastman, Giuliani and others in Trump’s orbit. But the degree of prosecutors’ interest in Trump’s actions has not been previously reported, nor has the review of senior Trump aides’ phone records.

A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Justice Department spokesman and a lawyer for Meadows both declined to comment.

 

Trump is now a target of the investigation, as I told everyone he would be. The question of actual charges remains. But Trump himself being a grand jury target means that Merrick Garland's very plain actions indicating that the DoJ's policy on investigating sensitive political actions only if it is warranted not only remains in place, but that the evidence against Trump warrants that investigation. 

We'll see now what, if any, charges are leveled against these conspirators...including Trump.

Last Call For Hearing Aides For America, Con't

Day two of the January 6th Committee Hearings got underway today, as the panel focused on key members of Trump's inner circle: Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr.

Barr, who served as U.S. attorney general until late December 2020, emerged as a main character in making the committee’s case that Trump had been repeatedly told there was no evidence for the claims of fraud that he was peddling.

In his interviews with the committee’s investigators, the former head of Trump’s Department of Justice repeatedly slammed those election-fraud conspiracy theories as “bulls---” and “crazy,” among other terms. He testified that he said as much to the then-president’s face.

In one clip, Barr recounted an Oval Office meeting a few weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, in which he had to tell Trump that the DOJ “is not an extension of your legal team” and can’t be used to “take sides in elections” by investigating fraud claims.

“We’ll look at something if it’s specific, credible, and could have affected the outcome of the election, and we’re doing that and it’s just not meritorious, they’re not panning out,” Barr recalled saying to Trump.

The former head of the DOJ also said he told Trump “that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public was bulls---. I mean, that the claims of fraud were bulls---. And he was indignant about that.”

“I reiterated that they’d wasted a whole month on these claims on these Dominion voting machines, and they were idiotic claims,” Barr said.

Barr said he found those claims, that Dominion voting machines were rigged to flip votes to Biden, “disturbing” in that “I saw absolutely zero basis” for them. But “they were obviously influencing a lot of members of the public” even though they were “complete nonsense,” Barr said.

He added: “I told him that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that and it was doing a grave disservice to the country.”

Barr said Trump gave him a copy of a report filled with election fraud claims. Trump said the report showed that he would get a second term, but “to be frank, it looked very amateurish to me,” Barr said.

“I was somewhat demoralized, because I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with — he’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr said.

When Barr would tell Trump how “crazy” some of these claims were, “there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” the former attorney general said, laughing.

 

Aww, Orange Guy is funny!

 

Not as funny as Rudy, though.

 

In another clip of witness interviews, ex-Trump campaign aide Jason Miller said that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was “definitely intoxicated” on Election Night 2020 when he said at the White House that Trump should simply declare victory.

Miller said that he noticed Giuliani was inebriated when he and other officials, including former campaign manager Bill Stepien and then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, gathered at the White House to listen to what Giuliani wanted to tell Trump to say.

“The mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I did not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president, for example,” Miller said as part of an interview with the select committee, clips of which were played in the hearing.

“There were suggestions by, I believe it was Mayor Giuliani, to go and declare victory and say that we’d won it outright,” Miller said. Giuliani was effectively saying, ”‘We won it, they’re stealing it from us, where’d all the votes come from, we need to go say that we won,’ and essentially anyone who didn’t agree with that position was being weak,” Miller told the investigators.

Trump, in the early hours of Nov. 4, 2020, falsely claimed, “frankly, we did win this election.”

A spokesperson for Giuliani, who also sent along a conspiracy theory and typo-ridden statement from the former Trump lawyer, denied Giuliani was drunk on Election Night.

 

Seems to me that Rudy should stick to the drunk defense.

 

We'll see who gets prosecuted.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

It seems Rudy Giuliani has finally given a deposition before the January 6th Committee, and if the information gleaned makes even one Republican in Congress cough up names, it'll be worth it.

Rudy Giuliani, former President Donald Trump's onetime personal attorney and a lead architect of his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results, on Friday met with the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection, two sources told CNN. 

Giuliani's original deposition with the committee had been postponed after the former New York City mayor asked to record the interview, with both audio and video. At the time, Giuliani's attorney Robert Costello said the committee rejected that request. 

Despite Giuliani backing out of the original deposition, the two sides continued to negotiate an appearance, which led to a virtual appearance Friday that lasted for more than nine hours, sources said. 

Costello declined to comment Friday. A spokesperson for the select committee also declined to comment on Giuliani's deposition. 

A central figure in Trump's failed bid to overturn the 2020 election, Giuliani was subpoenaed by the committee in January and has been engaging with lawmakers, through his lawyer, about the scope of the subpoena and whether he may be able to comply with some requests.
In its subpoena, the committee alleges that Giuliani "actively promoted claims of election fraud on behalf of the former President and sought to convince state legislators to take steps to overturn the election results." The subpoena also states that Giuliani was in contact with Trump and members of Congress "regarding strategies for delaying or overturning the results of the 2020 election." 

Several high-profile individuals from Trump's inner orbit have voluntarily spoken with the committee in recent weeks and months. In early May, Donald Trump Jr. met with the committee. And Trump's daughter and former senior White House adviser, Ivanka Trump, was interviewed for nearly eight hours last month; her husband and former White House senior adviser, Jared Kushner, has met with the panel as well.

 

The January 6th committee has heard from Trump's kids and now several of his consiglieres. We know Merrick Garland has requested evidence that the January 6th committee has, and the Justice Department investigation is continuing, even if the Manhattan case is dead and the NY state case is moving very slowly.

I still believe justice is coming, but actual justice has to be delivered by the voters.

The Huntering For The No-Prize

With Hunter Biden's laptop back in the news thanks to the NY Times, which turned "yes, some emails on the laptop were legit copies of emails" into "BIDEN'S UKRAINE SCANDAL!11!!", Washington Post reporter Philip Bump reminds us all why the laptop was at best a fantasy nothingburger, and at worst a deliberate Russian plant designed to sink Joe Biden.

When the New York Post reported on Oct. 14, 2020, that it was in possession of emails between a Ukrainian businessman and Hunter Biden, son of the then-Democratic presidential nominee, it would have been hard to predict what followed. This was less than three weeks before the election itself, and the content of the report was soon subsumed to the odd way in which the paper obtained the information. Mainstream outlets and social media companies balked at elevating the story’s claims, triggering frustrations on the right that remain to this day.

New reporting has re-elevated questions about how the story emerged and was handled. In light of that resurrection, it seems useful to articulate exactly why there was suspicion about the story’s origins — suspicion that itself has not entirely been resolved.

There are at least four questions that arose from the initial report. Those are:

• How did the information published by the New York Post purportedly get from Hunter Biden to the paper?
• Was that information legitimate?
• Was the media’s skepticism about the chain of custody and the information warranted?
• Was the social media blackout of the Post’s story warranted?

In this article, we’ll only look at the overlap of the first and third questions: Was the sourcing for information sufficiently dubious to justify caution by mainstream outlets? The answer, it seems clear, is yes.

You’ll remember the story. Hunter Biden allegedly showed up at a computer repair shop with three water-damaged laptop computers. According to John Paul Mac Isaac, the proprietor of that shop, one of the three computers was beyond repair, one simply needed an external keyboard and one required data recovery. Mac Isaac recovered the data, but no one ever came to pick the machine up. Eventually the data from the computer made its way to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney. It was Giuliani that gave it to the Post.

That summary excludes a lot of detail, some known at the time the Post story broke, some that only emerged afterward. Here, in the form of a timeline, is detail that seems salient to our current consideration of how the Post got the material from the laptop as well as what was known at the time.

The 2016 election. It’s critical to remember what happened in the 2016 election cycle. Then WikiLeaks published two large clusters of documents stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee’s network and from John Podesta, a top aide to the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The Podesta material in particular was released in tranches for days beginning Oct. 7, 2016. It was real information, understood even then to have been a product of Russian efforts, that became fodder for criticism of Clinton.

After the election, we learned the full scope of Russia’s involvement in the election. Suddenly, the coverage of the WikiLeaks material took on a new light: It was stolen by a foreign government to try to influence U.S. politics. Media companies reconsidered their coverage; should there have been more caution about playing into the hands of a foreign influence campaign?

This question was very much on people’s minds in the months before the 2020 election — particularly given indications that Russia was again hoping to aid Trump’s election.

 

Bump's timeline does make it clear that the source of the story has a massive credibility problem: a laptop that was never picked up from the shop made its way to Rudy Giuliani, the only taker. 

And Rudy Giuliani is not exactly the most reliable source for anything other than laughs.

We still don't know anything about the laptop's journey some 18 months later. Nothing at all. It was complete bullshit then, and it's complete bullshit now. I could put copies of emails on my 8 year old laptop and then drop it off somewhere and never pick it up, yeah. Scandal!

Idiocy is what it is.

The Big Lie, Con't

Yes, Donald Trump absolutely wanted to send in local and state police, Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and/or the US military to seize voting machines in several key states in order to declare the 2020 election fraudulent, and to then declare victory.

Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.

Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Giuliani to make that inquiry after rejecting a separate effort by his outside advisers to have the Pentagon take control of the machines. And the outreach to the Department of Homeland Security came not long after Mr. Trump, in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, raised the possibility of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a previously undisclosed suggestion that Mr. Barr immediately shot down.

The new accounts show that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the episodes.

The existence of proposals to use at least three federal departments to assist Mr. Trump’s attempt to stay in power has been publicly known. The proposals involving the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security were codified by advisers in the form of draft executive orders.

But the new accounts provide fresh insight into how the former president considered and to some degree pushed the plans, which would have taken the United States into uncharted territory by using federal authority to seize control of the voting systems run by states on baseless grounds of widespread voting fraud.

The people familiar with the matter were briefed on the events by participants or had firsthand knowledge of them.

The accounts about the voting machines emerged after a weekend when Mr. Trump declared at a rally in Texas that he might pardon people charged in connection with the storming of the Capitol last Jan. 6 if he were re-elected. In a statement issued after the rally, Mr. Trump also suggested that his vice president, Mike Pence, could have personally “overturned the election” by refusing to count delegates to the Electoral College who had vowed to cast their votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The new information helps to flesh out how the draft executive orders to seize voting machines came into existence and points in particular to the key role played by a retired Army colonel named Phil Waldron.

According to people familiar with the accounts, Mr. Waldron, shortly after the election, began telling associates that he had found irregularities in vote results that he felt were suggestive of fraud. He then came up with the idea of having a federal agency like the military or the Department of Homeland Security confiscate the machines to preserve evidence.

Mr. Waldron first proposed the notion of the Pentagon’s involvement to Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, whom he says he served with in the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The plans were among an array of options that were placed before Mr. Trump in the tumultuous days and weeks that followed the election, developed by an ad hoc group of lawyers like Sidney Powell and other allies including Mr. Flynn and Mr. Waldron. That group often found itself at odds with Mr. Giuliani and his longtime associate Bernard Kerik, as well as with Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and his team.

Around the same time that Mr. Trump brought up the possibility of having the Justice Department seize the voting machines, for example, he also tried to persuade state lawmakers in contested states like Michigan and Pennsylvania to use local law enforcement agencies to take control of them, people familiar with the matter said. The state lawmakers refused to go along with the plan.

Once again the only reason we're not in a Trump authoritarian regime right now is because his people got cold feet: Mike Pence huddling in his office, Rudy Giuliani screaming on the phones, Bill Barr being stonefaced at Justice, Chris Miller at the Pentagon, all of these folks too cowardly to pull the trigger.

We have a democracy still because Trump surrounded himself with spineless hacks. 

The next time America falls into the abyss.