June 20, 2024
580 days ago, on November 18, 2022, special counsel Jack Smith was appointed by AG Garland.
138 days until 2024 election. #Trump, #Insurrection#Fascism#2024Election
“Timothy Mellon, a reclusive heir to a Gilded Age fortune, donated $50 million to a super PAC supporting Donald J. #Trump the day 👉🏼after the former president was convicted of 34 felonies👈🏼, according to new federal filings, an enormous gift that is among the largest single disclosed contributions ever.”
"The judge overseeing former President Donald Trump's classified documents case will hear arguments Friday about whether special counsel Jack Smith should be removed from the prosecution."
When Judge #AileenCannon presides over a hearing on Fri in #Trump’s #ClassifiedDocuments case, she will spend the day considering well-trod arguments about an arcane #legal issue in an unorthodox manner.
The issue that will be discussed…is a motion by the defense to dismiss the charges…on the grounds that #SpecialCounsel#JackSmith was improperly funded & appointed.
It will be the latest example of how her unusual handling of the case has now become business as usual.
Over the past several months, Judge #AileenCannon, who was appointed by #Trump in his final days in office, has made a number of decisions that have prompted second-guessing & criticism…. Many of her rulings, on a wide array of topics, have been confounding…, often evincing her willingness to grant a serious hearing to far-fetched issues that Trump’s lawyers have raised in his defense.
…while the subject of the hearing may seem rather technical, what is most unusual is that it is happening at all.
Reaching back to the early 1970s, courts have repeatedly rejected efforts like #Trump’s to question the legality of #independent#prosecutors. Those have included #SCOTUS upholding the appointment of Leon Jaworski, one of the special prosecutors who investigated the #Watergate scandal, in a decision that was largely focused on the issue of #Nixon’s claims of #ExecutivePrivilege. #law
Judges have also tossed efforts to invalidate the work of special counsels like Robert #Mueller, who examined connections between #Russia & #Trump’s 2016 campaign, & David C. Weiss, who has brought 2 #criminal cases against Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.
Despite this record, however, Judge #AileenCannon has decided to consider the constitutionality of #JackSmith’s appointment anew —& not on the merits of written briefs, but rather at an expansive hearing that will spill across 2 days.
It's really amazing to me how many of you think winning a political debate is about preparing, knowing more information, having better knowledge or being better at "debate."
Reagan knew Carter would crush him like the bug that he was. Their only debate was a week before the election and the race was deadlocked.
Reagan's strategy was to let Carter mop the floor with him and then say, "There you go again," playing the kind old man against the uppity liberal
Every day that goes by on Trump’s absolute immunity claim w/o a decision, is a victory for #Trump. His strategy is to #delay. That way he can dismiss all federal charges against him if he wins.
My name is Denver Riggleman, former Rep and senior technical advisor to the J6 committee. Anyone who states the J6 investigation was a sham is a conspiracy theorist, stupid, a liar or a spineless sycophant— maybe all of the above. J6 was an investigation into the sacking of the Capitol and efforts by #Trump and those around him to overturn an election through coordinated disinformation, legal maneuvering, financial flows, #radicalization and #violence — Denver Riggleman #quotes#quote#Jan6th#Insurrection#Criminal
😫Judge in #Trump#Documents Case Rejected Suggestions to Step Aside
Two federal judges in South #Florida privately urged Aileen M. #Cannon to decline the case when it was assigned to her last year, according to two people briefed on the matter. She chose to keep it.
Shortly after #AileenCannon drew the assignment in June 2023 to oversee #Trump’s classified documents case, 2 more experienced #Florida#judges on the federal bench urged her to pass it up & hand it off to another jurist.
The judges who approached Judge #AileenCannon —incl the #ChiefJudge in the So Dist of #Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga— each asked her to consider whether it would be better if she were to decline the high-profile case, allowing it to go to another judge.
But Cannon, who was appointed by #Trump, wanted the case & refused the #judges’ entreaties.
#AileenCannon has broken, acc/to lawyers who operate there, w/a general practice of federal #judges in the Southern District of #Florida of delegating some pretrial motions to a magistrate — in this instance, Judge #BruceReinhart. While he is [technically] subordinate to her, Judge Reinhart is an older & much more experienced jurist. In 2022, he was the one who signed off on an #FBI#warrant to search #Trump’s #MarALago …for highly sensitive govt files that Trump kept after leaving office.
Since, #AileenCannon has exhibited #hostility to #prosecutors, handled pretrial motions slowly & indefinitely postponed the #trial, declining to set a date for it to begin even though both the prosecution & the defense had told her they could be ready this summer.
#Trump’s attys have urged her to #delay any trial until after the #election, & her handling of the case has virtually ensured that they will succeed in that strategy. Should Trump…[win], he could order the #DOJ to drop the case.
As Judge #AileenCannon’s handling of the case has come under intensifying scrutiny, her critics have suggested that she could be in over her head, in the tank for #Trump — or both.
Against that backdrop, word of the early efforts by her colleagues on the bench to persuade her to step aside — & the significance of her decision not to do so — has spread among other federal #judges & the people who know them.
“What today’s bill does is return things to the status quo set by Trump, saying bump stocks are dangerous & should be prohibited,” Sen ChuckSchumer…said Tues. “#Senate#Republicans …supported #Trump’s ban on bump stocks back then, so they should support this bill today.”
Democrats are seeking to overhaul an 1873 federal #law that #bans abortion-related materials from being sent through the mail, worried that a future Trump admin could invoke the #ComstockAct to crack down on #AbortionAccess or effectively #ban the procedure altogether.
"Donald Trump vowed at a rally Tuesday that if reelected, he’ll cut funding to every school with a vaccine mandate ― even though all 50 states have such laws on the books.
If he followed through on that, no school in the United States would receive federal funding."
"All 50 states and Washington, D.C., have laws requiring specific vaccines for students, including measles, rubella, chickenpox, tetanus, pertussis and polio. Exemptions to the rule vary by state, with California, New York and a handful of other states maintaining the strictest mandates.
Public health experts credit those vaccine requirements with eradicating diseases that once killed thousands of people a year."
"Polio, a disease that infected, paralyzed or killed nearly 60,000 American children in 1952 alone, has been completely wiped out in the U.S. thanks to mass vaccination programs."
The Supreme Court on Thurs rejected a challenge to an obscure provision of rump’s 2017 tax package.
The one-time tax on offshore earnings helped fund the massive tax cut permitted under #Congress’s limited powers of #taxation.
Some viewed the lawsuit as an effort to preemptively block Congress from creating a #WealthTax.
Ruh-roh. Someone was paying attention when J.D. Vance went after Trump repeatedly in the past, and that someone is, of all folks, Bret Baier at Fox News. He has the goods. Vance's jabs range from musing that Trump might be "America's Hitler" to calling him "cultural heroin" and "noxious" and "reprehensible."
Now that he lusts after the v-p slot, Vance is singing a different tune, of course.
Republican Voters Against Trump gathers up Vance's slurs of Trump in a convenient list on Instagram, from "I'm a never-Trump guy" to "Idiot if you voted for him."