djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Jan 29, 2023 13:55:39 GMT -5
PS- next he will claim that Donald Trump does't really exist.
you know. like those sovereign people?
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billisonboard
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Post by billisonboard on Jan 29, 2023 14:11:09 GMT -5
I think the following from the link offers the best explanation: The lawsuit does, however, repeatedly make general reference to the Trump Organization, doing so more than 300 times as a "collective" name for the former president's $3 billion real-estate and golf resort company — and it's on this that Trump and his fellow defendants stake their protest.
The attorney general's many references to the umbrella company in her lawsuit "improperly group Defendants together, without regard to the nature or discrete legal identity of each Defendant," Thursday night's filings repeatedly complain, "without regard to the nature or discrete identity of each Defendant." The government needs to precisely identify who/what they are bringing their case against. Silly legal nitpicking here but does make a certain sense.
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Cheesy FL-Vol
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Post by Cheesy FL-Vol on Jan 29, 2023 14:23:29 GMT -5
So, does that mean that any contracts signed with the organization are not legally obliged to be fulfilled and anyone owing money to the organization no longer has to pay up? does that mean all of his tax filings are fraudulent? he really should reason it though before he makes these stupid claims. Reason and Trump do not belong in the same sentence.
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djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Jan 29, 2023 17:50:41 GMT -5
does that mean all of his tax filings are fraudulent? he really should reason it though before he makes these stupid claims. Reason and Trump do not belong in the same sentence. yeah. he SHOULD do that. but he can't. i know that. you know that. what i don't get is how he keeps getting away with it.
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Post by Tennesseer on Jan 31, 2023 14:30:26 GMT -5
Long article but interesting. It's a Washington Post article so behind a pay wall. I will post some of the article below and the rest behind the SPOILER to save space. A conservative judge helped stop Trump on Jan. 6. He wants to finish the job.Michael Luttig, one of the most celebrated legal minds of his generation, never ascended to the Supreme Court. But many think the retired jurist played a far more consequential role for the nation. Now he envisions ‘the beginning of the end of Donald Trump.’ Late one night in the spring of 1994, a 40-year-old federal judge was startled awake by loud pounding at the front door of his home in Vienna, Va. The sound was so jarring, so insistent, so out of character for his quiet Washington suburb that it unnerved J. Michael Luttig, a product of Northeast Texas who had put down deep roots in Beltway power circles. Luttig told his wife, Elizabeth, to call the police. “Keep the line open,” he added. Baffled, anxious, annoyed, Luttig opened the door just a crack. There stood a stocky man with thick black eyebrows. Antonin Scalia. Associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. Scalia had driven through the night at the request of Luttig’s mother, who wanted him to be the one to break the news: Luttig’s 63-year-old father, John, had been killed in a carjacking outside his Tyler, Tex., home barely an hour earlier. And so the judicial legend showed up to sit with his former clerk as he placed one grim phone call after another, Luttig recalled in a recent interview, sharing the story publicly for the first time. It had to be Scalia on this most awful night of their lives. Bobbie Luttig, who was seriously injured in the attack, knew how her son looked up to him. For a generation of conservative law students, Scalia was a paragon of a judicial philosophy centered on reverence for the original text of the Constitution. Luttig had clerked for him at the federal appeals court in Washington and later held one of the posts Scalia had occupied on his own path to the bench, in the Office of Legal Counsel, an obscure but influential cadre of brainy attorneys who provide legal guidance to the president. Theirs had evolved into something more than a mentor-mentee relationship, more than a friendship. They were integral parts of a movement, the keepers of the conservative banner in Washington’s clubby legal circles, where bright, young aspirants could be tapped by their elders and set on a path toward the most important legal jobs in the nation. Reared in the Ford and Reagan administrations, ascendant in George H.W. Bush’s, Luttig became the protege and eulogist of one chief justice, Warren Burger; a groomsman for another, John Roberts. (In a recent interview, Luttig repeatedly turned to phrases like “one of my best friends in life” to describe some of the most prominent judges, lawyers, business leaders and journalists in America.) By the time Scalia stood in his doorway, the young law students were looking up to Luttig, too. His obsessively precise written opinions for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond had marked Luttig as one of the leading conservative intellectuals in the legal system — the most conservative judge on the most conservative court in America. More than a quarter-century later, it was Luttig (pronounced LEW-tig) who would get a late-night call to come to the aid of his tribe: Mike Pence, in his final days as vice president, would seek out Luttig’s legal advice on the night of Jan. 4, 2021, as Donald Trump pressured him to help overturn the results of the 2020 election. But Pence and his allies would need more from Luttig than his private counsel. They needed his imprimatur. What began as a late-night phone call has turned into the quest of a lifetime for Luttig, the pinnacle of a long and storied career, highlighted last summer by his stirring appearance before the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6 uprising at the U.S. Capitol and by the committee’s final report released in late December, which mentions his name more than 25 times. “Donald Trump and his supporters and allies are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig told the committee on live television. But Luttig wasn’t just condemning Trump and Trumpism. He was trying to bring a nation to its senses. “We Americans no longer agree on what is right or wrong, what is to be valued and what is not, what is acceptable behavior and not, and what is and is not tolerable discourse in civilized society,” he said. “America is adrift.” Months removed from that star turn, Luttig’s worries have begun to ebb ever so slightly. He now envisions a nation one day disentangled from Trump’s influence, even as the former president launches a new campaign. It’s a future Luttig is trying to shape in court cases, in legislative chambers where he’s helped craft election law changes and in professorial public appearances where he explains in painstaking detail how American democracy, though imperiled, can still be preserved. Luttig can think of only one reason he would have been wrested out of quiet semiretirement for this mission. It was, he’s concluded, nothing less than “divine intervention.” The books are always by his side, wherever Michael Luttig sits down to think. Massive dictionaries, writing manuals, anything that can inform his fixation with words, with the intricacies of their meanings and the ways they can be deployed. Even by the standards of the legal profession, he can seem like a walking, talking thesaurus, with an affection for words like “charlatanic,” “obeisantly” and “annihilative.”
At 68, Luttig is ruddy-faced and thickset in a way that might be expected from a man who has a home in Vail but doesn’t ski. In conversation, he can appear pained as he searches for an appropriate phrase. He’ll press his fingers against his forehead, staring at the ground, starting and stopping, self-narrating (“Part One … Part Two…”) in his faintly nasal Texas twang, editing himself in real time — a waterfall of words and ideas, but in super slow-mo. One might as well get comfortable because it’s going to take awhile. It’s also unlikely to be boring.
During his 15 years on the federal bench, from 1991 to 2006, he became legendary for his voluminous and intricately detailed writing, both periodically piquant and staunchly conservative. Once, in a case that outraged women’s groups, he wrote a 214-page opinion declaring that a portion of the Violence Against Women Act allowing rape victims to sue their attackers for violating their civil rights was unconstitutional. The law, he concluded, couldn’t be “reconciled with the principles of limited federal government upon which this nation is founded.” (The Supreme Court affirmed his ruling, with Sandra Day O’Connor writing the majority opinion.)
“He was out there articulating a set of legal principles that were moving the law in a conservative direction,” said Noel Francisco, who clerked for Luttig and would later serve as solicitor general in the Trump administration. “A sharp focus on rules when it comes to separation of powers, a healthy skepticism of the administrative state, upholding laws that reflect more culturally conservative viewpoints. It was very much of a pro-law-and-order approach to the law, very much in favor of holding criminals accountable for their conduct.”
He was just 37 years old when the first president Bush tapped him for the bench, the youngest federal appeals judge in the country, but already a veteran of the political world. His specialty: screening and prepping the Supreme Court nominees of Republican presidents. His home served as the so-called “safe-house” lodging for future justice David Souter, the night before Bush interviewed him for the job in 1990. After Clarence Thomas’s 1991 nomination was imperiled by sexual harassment allegations, Luttig was urgently summoned from a Hawaii vacation to help. His involvement was criticized by some legal ethicists since Luttig, though not yet sworn in, had already been confirmed as a judge.
Years earlier, Luttig had even encouraged his first mentor, Chief Justice Burger, to retire while Reagan was still in office to replace him with a like-minded jurist; Luttig says he hosted a dinner in which Burger could bond with Fred Fielding, the powerhouse White House counsel who would steer that selection.
On the appeals court, Luttig was considered such a reliable vote on abortion that attorneys arguing for restrictive measures — parental notification rules, “partial-birth” abortion bans — would angle to steer their cases to him. He strongly supported the second Bush White House’s controversial post-9/11 policy of declaring terrorism suspects “enemy combatants” so that they could be held by the military without charges. He was also viewed as a surefire supporter of capital-punishment sentences. Yet some well-informed members of the legal community had no idea about his father’s murder. When Francisco interviewed for his 1996 clerkship with Luttig, they had a long, “very earnest and very heartfelt conversation” about their opposing takes on the death penalty — but Luttig never mentioned his father.
Luttig at that time was urging the courts to uphold the death penalty for his father’s killer, Napoleon Beazley. In an interview with The Post, Luttig says he would have been open to prosecutors seeking a lesser sentence if the killer’s family had apologized on behalf of their son, who was 17 at the time of the murder, and if he hadn’t perceived a “coldness” from them. Beazley’s case reached the Supreme Court, where fully one-third of the court — Scalia, Thomas and Souter — recused themselves because of their close ties to Luttig; he was executed by lethal injection in 2002.
For all his perceived reliability as a conservative bulwark, Luttig could befuddle the political right. He ruled that Title IX protected a female place-kicker on an all-male football team from gender discrimination. He upheld a Black defendant’s right to exclude a White juror who had displayed the Confederate flag. And in 2000 he declared that the constitutional right to abortion established with Roe v. Wade had achieved the status of “super-stare decisis” — a term of his coining — because the Supreme Court said it had repeatedly upheld the case and that it was irrefutably embedded in the law at the time.
He famously kept his clerks — the “Luttigators” — working for hours as he fastidiously pored over each sentence of the draft opinions they helped him write. Luttig’s desk had a computer monitor and a keyboard so he could tweak and re-tweak; the clerks sat at a round mahogany table with computer screens but no keyboards. Occasionally he would invite them to his house on weekends, ostensibly to watch football, only to flip the channel to C-SPAN.
If they devoted themselves to him for a year, he would tell them, “I’ll devote myself to you for the rest of your career.”
Almost all of his clerks — more than 40 over the years — went onto clerkships at the Supreme Court.
“That was eye-popping to everyone,” says fellow former federal judge, Thomas Griffith, a classmate of Luttig’s at the University of Virginia law school. “For Mike, that was a badge of honor.”
The one person Luttig couldn’t get a job at the Supreme Court was J. Michael Luttig. He was long considered by many to be almost a shoo-in but was passed over in 2005 in favor of Roberts and Samuel Alito. He left the federal bench the following year for a lucrative but low-profile job as general counsel at Boeing, noting the looming cost of his children’s college tuition.
And so it was that one of the most celebrated legal minds of his generation failed to ascend to the highest court in the land — freeing him to play another, perhaps more consequential role.
Just ask Neal Katyal, a former deputy solicitor general in the Obama administration who found himself crossing the aisle to work with Luttig in an ongoing legal battle against a theory from the Trumpian fringe of the GOP that would essentially let state legislatures decide national elections.
“There’s a good argument,” says Katyal, who teared up twice during an interview, “that Judge Luttig, by not being on the Supreme Court, did more for our democracy than most any sitting Supreme Court justice or past one.”
On the night of Jan. 4, 2021, Luttig was eating dinner with his wife at their home in Vail when the phone rang. It was Richard Cullen, a longtime friend and former U.S. attorney in Virginia who was then serving as an outside attorney for Pence.
Cullen was desperate for intel. An attorney he’d never heard of but who had represented Trump in lawsuits challenging the presidential election results was going around saying Pence had the authority to block certification of the 2020 election results. Cullen learned that it was a man named John Eastman, and that in a previous life he had clerked for Luttig.
Luttig, puzzled, told Cullen that Eastman is “brilliant.”
“You don’t know why I’m calling, do you?” Cullen said.
Once Cullen explained what Eastman was up to, Luttig told Cullen to advise Pence he simply could not block the certification. When Luttig hung up, his wife turned to him: “Oh my god, you have to stop this.”
Luttig was at a loss. He said he didn’t think there was anything he could do beyond offering his legal opinion. Retired from Boeing, he’d been out of the public eye for years, avoiding partisan politics.
But Cullen called again in the morning, and again pushed Luttig to say something publicly before Pence sat down for a planned lunch with Trump. They finally agreed that Luttig would post something on Twitter.
The problem: This man of many, many words couldn’t imagine confining his remarks to 280 characters — and he had no idea how to string multiple tweets into a Twitter thread. His very first tweet, barely two months earlier, had taken him five hours to compose; he ended up posting a photo of the lengthy statement he’d printed out. But feeling the “gravity of this moment,” as he put it, Luttig called his son, who sent him a tutorial on how to construct a thread.
His 7-tweet thread, posted early on Jan. 5, offered Pence both legal and political cover. Luttig explained — as if speaking to first-year civics students — that, no, the vice president couldn’t just change the vote total. And, no, refusing to do so didn’t mean he was disloyal to the president.
Luttig’s close friend, William P. Barr, had been a Trump-enabling attorney general until quitting a month earlier, fed up by the president’s false election claims. Luttigators had been sprinkled throughout the administration, including Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Courtney Elwood, the general counsel of the CIA and Kate Comerford Todd, who was deputy White House counsel. Another led the Trump-acolyte wing of the Republican Party: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Luttig’s comments resonated with a certain segment of Republicans because he had assiduously avoided taking public political stances over the years. He was still Judge Luttig — emphasis on judge.
“He couldn’t be dismissed as a Never-Trumper,” says Bill Kristol, the prominent conservative commentator. “His emergence was a big deal.”
Luttig’s spotlight appearance, a year and a half later, before the congressional committee investigating Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, was an even bigger deal — so highly anticipated that the text of his remarks was considered a news scoop. He’d refused to give an advance copy to the committee because he feared it would be leaked. He wanted to reserve the option to make tweaks up to the last minute and didn’t want a version out there that was even one syllable different from the remarks he delivered.
Instead he leaked it himself to CNN, for release moments before his appearance. (Earlier that year he’d leaked to CNN his endorsement of Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, who he differed from on judicial interpretations but thought would benefit the solidly conservative court by adding much-needed diversity because she is an African-American woman.)
In his testimony, Luttig spoke soooooo slowly that social media lit up with speculation that he was recovering from a stroke, a baseless theory amplified by the crimson complexion of his face that day. He was simply sunburned, it turned out — and intentionally spoke so deliberately because he wanted Americans to absorb e-v-e-r-y single word that he spent nearly 18 months writing and rewriting at his homes in Chicago, Vail and coastal South Carolina.
“I’ve never seen him as simultaneously focused and at peace,” Cullen says. “It’s almost a religious experience for him.”
When Luttig was a young, lowly staffer in the Ford White House, he worked on a book meant to bolster the president’s ill-fated 1976 campaign.
Part of that effort involved explaining Ford’s rationale for pardoning predecessor Richard M. Nixon for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Luttig has concluded Ford made the right decision, in the interest of not prolonging the national upheaval. He has been thinking a lot about those days, now that the Justice Department is faced with deciding whether to indict Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection and his hoarding of classified documents after leaving office.
“What Nixon did was just an ordinary crime,” Luttig says. “What Trump has done is quite arguably the worst crime against the United States that a president could commit.”
Luttig sees “ample evidence” of criminal activity and believes Trump will be indicted. But he has been judicious about not calling for an indictment. Instead, in his professorial manner, he’s been laying out the factors that he believes should be considered by Attorney General Merrick Garland (yet another close acquaintance, of course, from their time as federal judges).
When he posts them on social media, he’s come to expect that his friend, renowned liberal legal scholar, Laurence Tribe, will retweet or reply with exactly what Luttig has been careful not to say — that Trump should be indicted. The ideological opposites struck up a correspondence, bonded by their mutual resolve that Trump is a threat to democracy, Tribe says. (They’re also working together on a multibillion-dollar tax case for Coca-Cola, where Luttig is a special adviser to the board.)
As Luttig sees it, the decision about indicting Trump should also take into account whether it would “split the nation,” given the certainty that Trump would put up a years-long fight against any charges and the worldwide “spectacle” that would ensue.
Even if an indictment never materializes, Luttig now believes the nation is ready to relegate Trump and Trumpism to irrelevancy. The former president’s political future was dealt triple blows, Luttig says, by his recent assertion that parts of the Constitution should be “terminated” to return him to office, the criminal referrals by the Jan. 6 committee and the failure of his favored candidates in the 2022 midterm elections. He calls it “the beginning of the end of Donald Trump.”
Still, he says, the mission of vanquishing Trump — and thus, in Luttig’s mind, saving American democracy — is not entirely complete. “Donald Trump has proven that the only thing that can stop him is the law,” he says.
But if there’s anything J. Michael Luttig places faith in, it’s the law. A conservative judge helped stop Trump on Jan. 6. He wants to finish the job.
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djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Jan 31, 2023 16:54:44 GMT -5
“What Nixon did was just an ordinary crime,” Luttig says. “What Trump has done is quite arguably the worst crime against the United States that a president could commit.”
agree completely. he is not just another president, or even another criminal. his crimes are so egregious that they can't be ignored.
hopefully, he is right in his faith in the law. so far, he has been.
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djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Jan 31, 2023 17:11:08 GMT -5
i should note that i think his judicial philosophy sucks. jmho. but i DO agree with him in this case.
Trump has been acting well outside the law, and must be stopped.
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happyhoix
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Post by happyhoix on Jan 31, 2023 21:18:20 GMT -5
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Jan 31, 2023 22:18:10 GMT -5
Let's keep piling lawsuits on trump. Well deserved.
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djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Feb 1, 2023 11:54:56 GMT -5
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Feb 1, 2023 12:22:35 GMT -5
Legal expert offers tantalizing theory why prosecutors hit ‘restart’ on Stormy Daniels caseFormer President Donald Trump has found himself in new potential legal trouble as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has rebooted the investigation into the hush payments he arranged to adult film star Stormy Daniels to cover their alleged affair — a deal which sent his former attorney Michael Cohen to prison, but that legal experts had presumed Trump himself had escaped any punishment for. It is not entirely clear why Bragg has decided at this time to pursue this case so seriously after years. However, wrote columnist Jen Rubin for The Washington Post, one former federal prosecutor has a theory. As former prosecutor Barbara McQuade explained to Rubin, "the best explanation I can think of for a restart like this would be new evidence, rather than simply a reconsideration of the same evidence that caused Bragg to decline charges previously." "It appears that [former Trump lawyer] Michael Cohen is a key witness," McQuade added. "In light of his prior convictions, prosecutors would want to corroborate his testimony with documentary evidence. Perhaps they have been able to obtain that corroborating evidence." This comes after reports earlier this month that Cohen met with prosecutors in Manhattan. It also comes as Trump has faced a barrage of more indirect legal setbacks, including his company being convicted of fraud. The upshot, said Rubin, is that "Those demanding that Trump face consequences for his misdeeds should breathe a sigh of relief that Bragg might be willing to bring a charge against the former president. Bragg might have concluded that proving Trump’s knowledge and criminal intent in the broader financial probes was too daunting a task, but that it is doable in the context of the hush payment." Legal expert offers tantalizing theory why prosecutors hit ‘restart’ on Stormy Daniels caseHmmmmm.
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dondub
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Post by dondub on Feb 1, 2023 13:00:09 GMT -5
Legal expert offers tantalizing theory why prosecutors hit ‘restart’ on Stormy Daniels caseFormer President Donald Trump has found himself in new potential legal trouble as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has rebooted the investigation into the hush payments he arranged to adult film star Stormy Daniels to cover their alleged affair — a deal which sent his former attorney Michael Cohen to prison, but that legal experts had presumed Trump himself had escaped any punishment for. It is not entirely clear why Bragg has decided at this time to pursue this case so seriously after years. However, wrote columnist Jen Rubin for The Washington Post, one former federal prosecutor has a theory. As former prosecutor Barbara McQuade explained to Rubin, "the best explanation I can think of for a restart like this would be new evidence, rather than simply a reconsideration of the same evidence that caused Bragg to decline charges previously." "It appears that [former Trump lawyer] Michael Cohen is a key witness," McQuade added. "In light of his prior convictions, prosecutors would want to corroborate his testimony with documentary evidence. Perhaps they have been able to obtain that corroborating evidence." This comes after reports earlier this month that Cohen met with prosecutors in Manhattan. It also comes as Trump has faced a barrage of more indirect legal setbacks, including his company being convicted of fraud. The upshot, said Rubin, is that "Those demanding that Trump face consequences for his misdeeds should breathe a sigh of relief that Bragg might be willing to bring a charge against the former president. Bragg might have concluded that proving Trump’s knowledge and criminal intent in the broader financial probes was too daunting a task, but that it is doable in the context of the hush payment." Legal expert offers tantalizing theory why prosecutors hit ‘restart’ on Stormy Daniels caseHmmmmm. Maybe this will get spooky for the grandiose pumpkin:
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Icelandic Woman
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Post by Icelandic Woman on Feb 3, 2023 16:25:26 GMT -5
LMAO!!!
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dondub
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Post by dondub on Feb 3, 2023 18:52:06 GMT -5
LMAO!!!
Outrageous!😎
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Feb 3, 2023 20:07:14 GMT -5
LMAO!!!
All for little ol' it.
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Feb 15, 2023 13:25:49 GMT -5
Trump spent $600,000 to be told he's wrong about voter fraudAn independent report showing no widespread election fraud in 2020 would have gotten in the way of the Trump campaign's fundraising. Former President Donald Trump is a man who has been sued dozens of times for allegedly refusing to pay his bills in full. So he must have really hated that his campaign spent over $600,000 to be told he was wrong. According to The Washington Post, the Trump campaign commissioned an outside firm to try to substantiate the claims of widespread fraud Trump was peddling. Employees of Berkeley Research Group, you may be shocked to learn, discovered no irregularities that would have swung the election. he research got shoved into a drawer rather than released, either to the public or in court filings, including the campaign’s last-ditch bid to the Supreme Court. That fits neatly with how much Trump had already gained at that point from insisting that the election had been stolen. But unfortunately for him and his enablers, their continued efforts to defraud the American people makes criminal charges all the more likely. In late November 2020, Berkeley Research Group was brought in “to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts,” the Post reported. “Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won.” The findings from the roughly dozen researchers were reportedly shared with Trump, then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and others in a December 2020 conference call. Rather than bow to the evidence, Meadows “showed skepticism” of the firm’s conclusions, the Post reported, and Trump and his team did nothing to slow their deluge of efforts to overturn the election. In the process, the Berkeley subsidiary contracted for the project got paid over $600,000 for its work, labeled “recount: legal consulting” in related Federal Election Commission filings. That’s a lot of money — but a drop in the bucket compared to how much Trump had already made pushing the lie to his supporters. The blitz of fundraising appeals that went out in the month after Election Day drew in $207.5 million from donors. His leadership PAC alone raked in around $31 million from Nov. 24 to Dec. 31. It’s honestly incredible that over two years later we’re still learning the myriad ways Trump and his advisers were aware that his claims of fraud were fabricated. Just this month, The Associated Press published tapes of Trump campaign staffers in Wisconsin acknowledging defeat but still preparing, in the words of Trump’s lead operative in the state, to “fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election.” And last year, the House Jan. 6 committee presented testimony from multiple witnesses documenting times they had told Trump — or had been told by Trump — that he’d lost. Yet the fundraising appeals flowed via emails and text messages and Facebook posts, and the cash flowed back to the campaign. The big question that remains is how much of that cash grab was fully aboveboard. A former FEC lawyer told NPR last year that there’s not necessarily anything illegal about campaign donations’ going to some political activity other than the one disclosed to donors. But last summer, in its second public hearing, the Jan. 6 committee revealed that the “legal defense fund” donors were supposedly donating to never actually existed. That opens the door to a potential charge of wire fraud, according to some legal experts, including fellow MSNBC columnist Barb McQuade. While the committee opted to focus on Trump himself in the bulk of its final report, its so-called Green Team tracking the money provided its findings in the report’s third appendix. The massive influx of money to Trump’s PAC, in particular, resulted in some very questionable spending documented in the appendix’s pages. And evidence continues to mount that the Trump campaign was well aware of the deception it was undertaking. The biggest potential layup for special counsel Jack Smith continues to be charges related to the classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent lies and obstruction Trump undertook to cover up his hoarding. But the Berkeley Research Group’s report could show the intent required to prosecute Trump, his campaign staff or both for ripping off the American people. Like many of the charges Smith could bring, it would be nearly unprecedented, especially against a former president and current candidate — but just because it would be a heavy lift doesn’t mean he shouldn’t try. Trump spent $600,000 to be told he's wrong about voter fraud
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djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Feb 15, 2023 16:04:19 GMT -5
i could have told him that for half the amount.
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dondub
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Post by dondub on Feb 15, 2023 16:14:42 GMT -5
Trump spent $600,000 to be told he's wrong about voter fraudAn independent report showing no widespread election fraud in 2020 would have gotten in the way of the Trump campaign's fundraising. Former President Donald Trump is a man who has been sued dozens of times for allegedly refusing to pay his bills in full. So he must have really hated that his campaign spent over $600,000 to be told he was wrong. According to The Washington Post, the Trump campaign commissioned an outside firm to try to substantiate the claims of widespread fraud Trump was peddling. Employees of Berkeley Research Group, you may be shocked to learn, discovered no irregularities that would have swung the election. he research got shoved into a drawer rather than released, either to the public or in court filings, including the campaign’s last-ditch bid to the Supreme Court. That fits neatly with how much Trump had already gained at that point from insisting that the election had been stolen. But unfortunately for him and his enablers, their continued efforts to defraud the American people makes criminal charges all the more likely. In late November 2020, Berkeley Research Group was brought in “to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts,” the Post reported. “Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won.” The findings from the roughly dozen researchers were reportedly shared with Trump, then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and others in a December 2020 conference call. Rather than bow to the evidence, Meadows “showed skepticism” of the firm’s conclusions, the Post reported, and Trump and his team did nothing to slow their deluge of efforts to overturn the election. In the process, the Berkeley subsidiary contracted for the project got paid over $600,000 for its work, labeled “recount: legal consulting” in related Federal Election Commission filings. That’s a lot of money — but a drop in the bucket compared to how much Trump had already made pushing the lie to his supporters. The blitz of fundraising appeals that went out in the month after Election Day drew in $207.5 million from donors. His leadership PAC alone raked in around $31 million from Nov. 24 to Dec. 31. It’s honestly incredible that over two years later we’re still learning the myriad ways Trump and his advisers were aware that his claims of fraud were fabricated. Just this month, The Associated Press published tapes of Trump campaign staffers in Wisconsin acknowledging defeat but still preparing, in the words of Trump’s lead operative in the state, to “fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election.” And last year, the House Jan. 6 committee presented testimony from multiple witnesses documenting times they had told Trump — or had been told by Trump — that he’d lost. Yet the fundraising appeals flowed via emails and text messages and Facebook posts, and the cash flowed back to the campaign. The big question that remains is how much of that cash grab was fully aboveboard. A former FEC lawyer told NPR last year that there’s not necessarily anything illegal about campaign donations’ going to some political activity other than the one disclosed to donors. But last summer, in its second public hearing, the Jan. 6 committee revealed that the “legal defense fund” donors were supposedly donating to never actually existed. That opens the door to a potential charge of wire fraud, according to some legal experts, including fellow MSNBC columnist Barb McQuade. While the committee opted to focus on Trump himself in the bulk of its final report, its so-called Green Team tracking the money provided its findings in the report’s third appendix. The massive influx of money to Trump’s PAC, in particular, resulted in some very questionable spending documented in the appendix’s pages. And evidence continues to mount that the Trump campaign was well aware of the deception it was undertaking. The biggest potential layup for special counsel Jack Smith continues to be charges related to the classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent lies and obstruction Trump undertook to cover up his hoarding. But the Berkeley Research Group’s report could show the intent required to prosecute Trump, his campaign staff or both for ripping off the American people. Like many of the charges Smith could bring, it would be nearly unprecedented, especially against a former president and current candidate — but just because it would be a heavy lift doesn’t mean he shouldn’t try. Trump spent $600,000 to be told he's wrong about voter fraud But, but, but “Berkeley”. No way that could be anything legit.😎
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happyhoix
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Post by happyhoix on Feb 16, 2023 13:50:31 GMT -5
Disappointed in the GA release today - I thought they were going to release the names of the people who are suspected of lying in their testimonies. Instead it just says that the jurors felt like they were lied to by some witnesses.
Fani Willis needs to get a move on.
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Feb 16, 2023 14:56:51 GMT -5
Judge rejects Trump's late offer to provide DNA in rape accuser Carroll's lawsuitNEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge on Wednesday rejected Donald Trump's offer to provide a DNA sample as part of a defamation lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a writer who said the former U.S. president raped her in the mid-1990s. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said Trump's sudden willingness after years of resistance to provide a sample, but only in exchange for pages missing from a DNA lab report he obtained from Carroll in January 2020, came too late. Kaplan said Trump's offer would "almost certainly" delay a scheduled April 25 trial and unduly harm Carroll, who has long accused Trump of stalling. Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, is 79, which Kaplan noted in his decision. "Granting Mr. Trump's request would be only the first step in introducing a complicated new subject into this case that both sides elected not to pursue," the judge wrote. "And Mr. Trump has given the court no reason to believe that pursuing that course would be likely to yield any admissible evidence, let alone a guarantee that anything important would come of it." Trump has denied raping Carroll. Joseph Tacopina, who joined Trump's legal team two weeks ago, and Carroll's lawyer Roberta Kaplan declined to comment. Carroll originally sought Trump's DNA to compare against a dress she said she wore when the alleged rape occurred. She decided late last year to go to trial without the DNA. Judge Kaplan's decision came in the second of Carroll's two defamation lawsuits against Trump. Both concern their alleged encounter in a dressing room at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan, which Carroll described in a June 2019 New York magazine excerpt from her memoir. Carroll sued Trump five months later, after Trump told a reporter at the White House that he did not know Carroll, that "she's not my type," and that she concocted the rape claim to sell her book. The second lawsuit came in November after Trump repeated his denial, using similar language, in a social media post the prior month. That lawsuit also includes a battery claim under New York's Adult Survivors Act, which gives sexual abuse victims a one-year window to sue their attackers even if statutes of limitations have run out. Both sides are awaiting a decision from a Washington, D.C. appeals court on whether Trump is immune from Carroll's first lawsuit, but not her second, because he was acting as president when he spoke. The case is Carroll v. Trump, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 22-10016. Judge rejects Trump's late offer to provide DNA in rape accuser Carroll's lawsuit
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djAdvocate
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only posting when the mood strikes me.
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Post by djAdvocate on Feb 16, 2023 15:52:14 GMT -5
has anyone ever noticed that "she is not my type" doesn't actually speak to the charge?
so, if she WERE Trump's type, THEN he would rape her?
see what i mean?
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happyhoix
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Post by happyhoix on Feb 16, 2023 16:06:12 GMT -5
Fani Willis has been described as a pit bull in the court room.
And Trump smells like bacon.
Crosses fingers that one of the two black female district attorneys investigating Trump will be the one to lower the axe - that will infuriate Trump. Will he be able to refrain from racist, misogynistic tirades on social media if one of them does?
I think we all know the answer to that.
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happyhoix
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Post by happyhoix on Feb 16, 2023 18:24:10 GMT -5
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NastyWoman
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Post by NastyWoman on Feb 17, 2023 3:32:42 GMT -5
i could have told him that for half the amount. I COULD have told him that for $0.50 but would gladly take $600k to tell him so. I would have donated the excess charge to the NAACP since I don't want any money tainted by the LOSER
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pulmonarymd
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Post by pulmonarymd on Feb 17, 2023 6:23:52 GMT -5
It’s funny you think he paid them
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Opti
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Post by Opti on Feb 17, 2023 7:41:11 GMT -5
has anyone ever noticed that "she is not my type" doesn't actually speak to the charge? so, if she WERE Trump's type, THEN he would rape her? see what i mean? It's Trump's way of feeding into the lie that only attractive women get raped and not answer the question.
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Feb 17, 2023 11:28:25 GMT -5
Trump Outlandishly Claims Georgia Grand Jury Excerpts Are 'Total Exoneration' Of HimDonald Trump baselessly boasted Thursday on his Truth Social site that released excerpts of a Georgia special grand jury investigation into attempts by the former president and his allies to upend his 2020 election loss in the state was a “total exoneration” of him. Trump even thanked the grand jury for its “patriotism” and “courage,” adding, “The USA is very proud of you.” The former president claimed that he was in the clear because his name was not mentioned. But no individuals were named in the five-page section of the report released Thursday, as ordered by Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney. The excepts don’t reveal what specific charges the 23-member panel has recommended be filed against which individuals. But most members believe that “perjury may have been committed by one or more” of the 75 witnesses who appeared before them and recommended “appropriate indictments” for lying on the witness stand, according to the documents. Trump did not testify before the panel. McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury and ordered release of the excerpts, honored Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ request that no names or various other details be publicly revealed at this time. The rest of the panel’s findings remained private — including what McBurney has described as “a roster of who should (or should not) be indicted, and for what, in relation to the conduct (and aftermath) of the 2020 general election in Georgia.” Willis has said in court that charging decisions were “imminent.” The grand jury determined that there was “no evidence” of widespread election fraud — as Trump still claims, more than two years after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Despite the lack of evidence of election fraud in the state, Trump told Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in a recorded phone call after all votes had been tallied and rechecked to “find him” just enough votes to beat Biden after the fact. “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes,” Trump said on the call, which included the state’s general counsel. “Give me a break.” Rest of article here: Trump Outlandishly Claims Georgia Grand Jury Excerpts Are 'Total Exoneration' Of Him
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djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Feb 17, 2023 12:44:38 GMT -5
he loves them today. he will hate them tomorrow.
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Feb 17, 2023 17:07:28 GMT -5
From the Washington Post. Fulton County adds to high-profile rebukes of Trump’s ‘stolen’ electionThose awaiting a potential blockbuster report from the Fulton County special grand jury’s investigation of Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election are apparently going to have to keep waiting. A judge released a rather minimal excerpt of the report Thursday and left the rest under seal. To the extent we learned anything, it’s that the grand jury thinks one or more witnesses might have committed perjury — though we don’t know who. Beyond that, the report states that the grand jury voted unanimously that there was no voter fraud sufficient enough to overturn Georgia’s tight 2020 presidential election results. “The grand jury heard extensive testimony on the subject of alleged election fraud from poll workers, investigators, technical experts, and State of Georgia employees and officials, as well as from persons still claiming that such fraud took place,” the report reads. “We find by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.” Why is the grand jury weighing in on this? Some surmised the jurors could be establishing a threshold question when it comes to whether any actions related to efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results were corrupt, or whether any statements made were false. If it’s determined the evidence just wasn’t there, perhaps certain actions become more legally problematic. Georgia State University law professor Clark D. Cunningham didn’t necessarily see it that way, though, saying, “In terms of potential charges, I don’t think it was necessary for them to make that finding.” Regardless, the fact that this finding was noted and unanimous (two dozen grand jurors heard evidence from 75 witnesses, including those claiming the existence of voter fraud) reinforces Trump and his allies’ failure to substantiate claims of a stolen election — claims that persist. The Fulton County special grand jury report lands on top of a growing pile. Just last week, we learned that a similar conclusion was reached by a firm hired by Trump’s own campaign. Below are some of the major such findings to date, which are worth remembering as candidate Trump continues to push his false narrative. The firm Trump hiredThe Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported last week that, at the end of 2020, Trump’s campaign paid researchers from the Berkeley Research Group to study six states, in search of evidence to highlight in public and in court. But it came up empty. A person familiar with the group’s findings told The Post: “None of these [areas of inquiry] were significant enough. Just like any election, there are always errors, omissions and irregularities. It was nowhere close enough to what they wanted to prove, and it actually went in both directions.” The Arizona GOP auditA GOP-commissioned review of 2.1 million ballots — which Trump hyped extensively in advance — confirmed the accuracy of Joe Biden’s win in Maricopa County. State Senate President Karen Fann (R) noted that the review “matches Maricopa County’s official machine count.” She added, “This finding therefore addresses the sharpest concerns about the integrity of the certified results in the 2020 general election.” Pima County also conducted its own review of 151 potential voter-fraud incidents, declining to file criminal charges in any of them. The Michigan SenateA GOP-led state Senate committee released a report in mid-2021 that debunked many of the most popular claims lodged by Trump and his allies — on Antrim County, on dead people voting, on the Detroit “ballot ,” etc. — point by point. “This Committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election,” the report said. It added of the Antrim County claims: “The Committee finds those promoting Antrim County as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election place all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility.” The GOP-ordered Wisconsin investigationA Wisconsin judge last summer said that the taxpayer-funded investigation, ordered by Republicans in the State Assembly, found “absolutely no evidence of election fraud.” Eight prominent conservativesThe conservative heavyweights, including former senator John Danforth (R-Mo.), election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg and other prominent legal minds, including former judges, released a detailed 70-page report on the various claims, lawsuits and audits last summer called “Lost, Not Stolen.” “There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole,” the report stated. “In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct.” The large-scale media investigationsAn extensive Associated Press investigation from late 2021 found a “review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.” “The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not,” the AP reported. The New York Times conducted a similar review, contacting elections officials of both parties across dozens of states, and found much the same thing. William P. Barr and other Trump alliesTrump’s own attorney general told the AP in December 2020 that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Barr has since stood by that assessment, and also said he told Trump about the lack of evidence for widespread fraud — including under oath in testimony to the Jan. 6 committee. Various other Trump aides and allies, including those tasked with rooting out supposed fraud, told the committee similar things. The courtsDespite Trump’s continued claims that the legal system didn’t evaluate his claims on the merits of the evidence, many courts did. PolitiFact found that, across 64 cases, 30 included hearings on the merits, while 20 were dismissed before they got to that point, and 14 were dropped by Trump and his allies before they could get to the merits. Virtually none of these efforts were successful in any way. Fulton County adds to high-profile rebukes of Trump’s ‘stolen’ election
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Feb 17, 2023 17:12:42 GMT -5
Also from WaPo. Proud Boys move to subpoena Trump in seditious conspiracy trial
Some of the Proud Boys have argued that the former president should be on trial, not them Leaders in the far-right Proud Boys group, accused in federal court of plotting to use violence to keep Donald Trump in power, are asking the Justice Department to help them force the former president to testify. “At all times relevant, Trump was president of the United States, and it’s the government’s obligation to produce him,” attorney Norm Pattis said in court Thursday. His client, Joseph Biggs, is one of five defendants accused of engaging in a seditious conspiracy to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Pattis did not explain what defendants hope to learn from Trump, only that he was joined in the subpoena effort by attorneys for co-defendant Dominic Pezzola. He said he needed help from the government to serve a subpoena on Trump because the U.S. Secret Service continues to protect the former president. In opening statements last month, an attorney for longtime Proud Boys Chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio argued that the former president was the one responsible for the deadly riot. Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. In a debate with presidential candidate Joe Biden in September 2020, Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” In an encrypted chat from after the election, produced in court, Tarrio told a top deputy that the Trump campaign wanted them to keep showing up at rallies but not wear “colors” identifying themselves as Proud Boys. “President Trump told these people that the election was stolen,” defense attorney Sabino Jauregui told jurors. “Trump told them to go there on January 6th, and it was Trump who in his speech on January 6th unleashed that mob over there at the Capitol.” The former president wasn’t on trial, Jauregui said, because “it’s too hard to blame Trump, it’s too hard to put him on the witness stand with his army of lawyers.” The subpoena effort is almost certain to fail. Duke University law professor Lisa Kern Griffin, who studies constitutional criminal procedure, noted that the defendants face multiple obstacles to putting Trump on the stand. “We’re not going to be seeing testimony from the former president,” Griffin said. Judge Timothy J. Kelly would have to rule Trump’s testimony admissible at trial. Judge Reggie B. Walton, in a different Jan. 6 criminal case in which the defendant sought to put Trump on the stand, ruled last year that the former president’s intent was “irrelevant” to how an individual supporter responded. “The probative value of such testimony is substantially outweighed by the danger of confusing the issues and misleading the jury,” Walton wrote. Unlike most other Jan. 6 defendants, the Proud Boys did have connections to people close to Trump. But they would still have to explain to the court “why they believe there are potential pieces of information that could emerge from the presidential testimony that would make a difference to their case,” Griffin said. “That seems to me far-fetched.” Should Kelly allow the testimony, itself unlikely, Trump could claim executive privilege over any conversations he had while president. If that failed, Trump could assert his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, given that he is also under investigation for his actions around Jan. 6. When Trump was subpoenaed last year by lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6 attack, he fought the demand on separation of powers grounds; it was dropped when the House special committee disbanded after Democrats lost their House majority. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III decided not to subpoena Trump in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, instead accepting documents and written responses from the president. Other federal judges in Washington have ruled that defendants could not defend themselves by arguing that Trump authorized their actions on Jan. 6. That “would require this Court to accept that the President may prospectively shield whomever he pleases from prosecution simply by advising them that their conduct is lawful,” Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled in one case. Proud Boys move to subpoena Trump in seditious conspiracy trial
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