Trump's Present and Future possible indictments

[Sixties Fan]

The serially indicted, disgraced ex-president did himself no favors when he finally admitted on live TV that the riot he incited on January 6, 2021, was in fact an "insurrection."

 

[Sixties Fan]

Jack Smith Demands Trump-Appointed Judge ‘Correct Clear Error’ To Protect Witnesses From ‘Trump World’ Threats In New Filing

Jack Smith demanded Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon "correct clear error" in rulings that he says expose witnesses to "Trump world" threats.

www.mediaite.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

Today, Thursday February 8, 2024, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the 14th Amendment disqualification case. Donald Trump, the petitioner, asked the Court to restore his place on Colorado’s primary ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court removed him from it in December, finding Trump had engaged in insurrection, which made him ineligible under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

The argument did not occur in a vacuum, but in the context of rising concern over what a second Trump term would look like. Tomorrow was supposed to be the day the jury selection process started in the federal election interference prosecution in Washington, D.C. Instead, that case is on hold, as Trump appeals to the Supreme Court over whether he’s immune from prosecution because he’s a former president.

In Letters from an American, the historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote last night, after detailing the environment of threats and coercion that led Republicans to back off of the immigration deal that gave them virtually everything they wanted, that “there is a method behind the madness. Trump’s actions are not those designed to win an election by getting a majority of the votes. They are the tools someone who cannot win a majority uses to seize power.” She then pointed at that “Yesterday, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) introduced, and more than 60 House Republicans co-sponsored, a resolution denying that Trump had engaged in insurrection in his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” Republicans live in a world where the 91 felony counts pending against Mr. Trump simply do not matter.

The 14th Amendment Takes Center Stage

Today, Thursday February 8, 2024, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the 14th Amendment disqualification case. Donald Trump, the petitioner, asked the Court to restore his place on Colorado’s primary ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court removed him from it in December, finding Trump had...

joycevance.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

Also today, the report written by Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating the classified documents Joe Biden turned over to the National Archives last year, was made public. He wrote: “We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter. We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.” He should have stopped there, but he did not. Although Hur conceded that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” and that “his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake,” Hur took some shots at Biden that lined up remarkably well with political arguments Republicans are making against his candidacy, alleging that the President is starting to slip.

Hur, who was appointed by Trump to be the U.S. Attorney in Maryland, claimed Biden saw himself as a “historic figure” and “collected papers and artifacts” along the way so he could write about his career. He details Biden’s disagreements with Obama over Afghanistan policy—absolutely unnecessary and certainly beyond the bounds of what DOJ makes public when it declines to indict a case.

Hur repeatedly intimated Biden had memory issues. He details his unsuccessful search to find evidence Biden’s possession of classified material was willful before concluding that “In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.” That should have been game over, but then Hur delivered his political shot: “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Biden was righteously indignant in a hastily called press conference this evening. My former DOJ colleague Andrew Weissmann called it “Comey 2.0”—a reference to then FBI Director Jim Comey’s excessive comments about Hillary Clinton, made when DOJ prosecutors declined to indict her, and widely viewed as influencing the outcome of the 2016 election.

The 14th Amendment Takes Center Stage

Today, Thursday February 8, 2024, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the 14th Amendment disqualification case. Donald Trump, the petitioner, asked the Court to restore his place on Colorado’s primary ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court removed him from it in December, finding Trump had...

joycevance.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

That takes us back to today’s argument about the Trump candidacy before the Supreme Court. The bottom line is, it’s almost a certainty that Trump will stay on the ballot in Colorado. There were at least seven votes, and possibly nine, for that result—even if the Justices end up taking different paths to get there.

The most likely consensus or near-consensus path for the Justices to reverse the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision is one that rejects the business of a single state to decide a candidate isn’t eligible to hold a federal office. There was lots of technical legal argumentation around this point, but it was Justice Kagan who put it into plain English, telling the lawyer for the Colorado voters that he needed a persuasive argument for why Colorado should get to decide the issue for the country. He didn't have one.

The Court seemed inclined to gloss over the question of whether Trump is an insurrectionist in favor of other escape hatches. At one point, Justice Amy Coney Barrett churlishly asked if the Court was supposed to watch videos of the speeches on the Ellipse. Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed out that Trump has never been charged with insurrection under federal law.

There was also serious discussion of whether Trump is covered by Section 3. This is the argument that caused the trial court in Colorado to conclude that even though he was an insurrectionist, he could remain on the ballot because a president is not an officer of the United States. It resurfaced here with force, and with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in the same camp with some of the conservative justices. Her reasoning seemed to be that the law doesn’t explicitly reference the presidency and that reflects the concerns when the 14th Amendment was adopted, which revolved around preventing former confederates from infiltrating state government and legislatures and reclaiming power.

Trump’s lawyers also argued that the 14th Amendment is a constitutionally imposed requirement about a person’s eligibility to take office, not one about whether they could appear on a ballot. Early in the argument, they seemed to suggest that it would be premature to rule Trump couldn’t appear on the ballot now and that the issue would only be live if Trump were elected, at which point, and if two-thirds of both houses of Congress didn’t vote to “remove the disability” and permit him to take office, the Court could consider whether he was eligible to become president again.

That is the worst of all possible worlds. It’s the kick the can down the road and take the country into full-blown chaos approach. Surely, the Court must reject it in favor of a decision that covers all states and both the primary and general elections, along with Trump’s eligibility to hold office. Certainty is critical in this time of uncertainty in the country. The Colorado voters’ lawyer noted that while Congress might vote for forgiveness for Trump down the road, that didn’t make him eligible to hold office now, comparing him to someone who is convicted of a crime. Although that person might, theoretically, be pardoned down the road, from the time of conviction they are subject to the consequences of that decision, unless and until they’re pardoned. The Supreme Court owes the country certainty on all of these matters.

Now, we wait on the Court.

In the meantime, the country will continue to discuss the matter. But, imagine a presidential election where the Democratic candidate had engaged in insurrection. A Clinton, or Obama, or Biden. Republicans would be demanding their removal from the ballot in every state in the country. There would be no hand-wringing over removing a choice from the voters, no talk about preferring a democratic process that lets voters make the call. No Republican would express concern that removing their Democratic opponent from the ballot would let them talk about what a victim they were and incite their base to further violence.

The courts will do what the courts will do, and they will do it at their own pace. The jury is still out on whether the institution the country has always turned to to decide its most divisive, difficult issues is up to dispensing justice when it comes to Donald Trump. On the one hand, the courts performed magnificently in the wake of the 2020 election, when Trump bombarded them with challenges to its outcome. Despite the Supreme Court’s debacle of public confidence and rulings in cases like Dobbs, which took away 50 years of women’s rights, they have consistently applied the rule of law to Trump, as they did, for instance, when his tax records were subpoenaed for the criminal case in Manhattan. But, on the other hand, they move at a slow, sometimes ponderous pace while the clock continues to race towards the 2024 election.

The 14th Amendment Takes Center Stage

Today, Thursday February 8, 2024, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the 14th Amendment disqualification case. Donald Trump, the petitioner, asked the Court to restore his place on Colorado’s primary ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court removed him from it in December, finding Trump had...

joycevance.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

What we do know for certain is that the Court has a number of options:

• The speediest one would involve denying any further stay, treating Trump’s request as one to grant certiorari and denying that request, affirming the Court of Appeals' decision against Trump, and sending the case back to Judge Chutkan to prepare for trial.
• The outcome that would signal the case is on a slow boat would involve granting the stay and ordering briefing on whether the Court should hear the dispute (grant cert), pushing that decision off for weeks or longer, and then issuing a lengthy briefing schedule and not deciding the case until so late in the term that a trial before the election is completely off the table.
• The Court also has intermediate options; for instance, keeping the stay in place but expediting briefing and oral argument, like they did with the 14th Amendment case, and then rendering a prompt decision. This approach seems more reasonable, but again, we just don’t know where the votes are on the Court right now. A process like this could still consume a couple of months, but it would still leave Judge Chutkan with the ability to complete discovery and pre-trial motions and schedule the case for trial this summer. She previously intimated to attorneys in another case that she might cancel summer vacation plans to hold this trial. This kind of timeline would see the Manhattan DA’s case go to trial as scheduled in late March, and slot the federal election interference case in after it concluded.

Trump’s primary goal here continues to be (and I know you’re going to be shocked) delay. He not only wants the stay that prevents any further preparation for trial to remain in place, he asked SCOTUS to do something else that would afford him an extra measure of delay. When the three-judge panel at the Court of Appeals ruled, they explicitly told Trump that if he sought rehearing en banc from the full court, the stay would be lifted, and Judge Chutkan could get back to work. Trump has asked the Supreme Court to countermand that decision so he can go the en banc route before he goes to SCOTUS, giving him more time before he has to face the piper—a jury of his peers. Look for Jack Smith to push back sharply on this request and to ask the Court to act quickly and treat Trump’s request as one to decide whether to take the case on appeal instead of just resolving the stay issue to get everything in motion.

In his filing, Trump was dismissive of Smith’s argument that the people—all of us—have the right to a speedy trial in this matter. This is an argument Smith has made before, and it is well supported by precedent from other cases. Trump’s lawyers didn’t really offer a response. They just made light of the fact that the people of the United States could have rights here, too. They suggested other priorities were more important. It’s an interesting strategy and consistent with Trump’s constant whine that he’s the subject of a witch hunt, although this argument is made at a lower pitch, suggesting that this important case deserves plenty of time for consideration and shouldn’t be rushed. So the Court will have to squarely decide whether, as citizens, we have a right to see the criminal trial of a former president proceed on a timely basis.

Trump is asking the Court to decide whether the doctrine of presidential immunity is an absolute bar to any criminal prosecution and also whether his prosecution is barred because he was acquitted on the articles of impeachment. The answers to these questions seem to be clearly no, at least if the Supreme Court wants to continue the American experiment with democracy. If the answer is yes to democracy, then it's imperative to move this case forward without undue delay.

There is also some movement in the Mar-a-Lago case, although we don’t know much about what’s happening beyond the fact that Judge Cannon held hearings on classified discovery, CIPA §4 hearings, on Monday. Because they’re ex parte, with each side meeting separately with the Judge and no public record of the hearing being released, we don’t know what decisions were made. But today, Judge Cannon did make minute entries on her docket that reflect that the hearings took place and identify who was present for each side.

(full article online)

Mr. Trump goes to the Supreme Court

On Monday, Donald Trump filed an application with the Supreme Court, asking them to keep the stay on further proceedings in the trial court in place while he prepares his writ of certiorari—his request to SCOTUS to reverse the decision by the Court of Appeals that his prosecution isn’t barred by...

joycevance.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Tonight, I want to refocus our attention on the Manhattan DA’s case. It has garnered less attention over the past months, as we discussed in our “The Week Ahead” edition Sunday night. But this hearing seems to have caught Trump’s attention—there are multiple reports he intends to be in court in person (there are also conflicting reports suggesting he will be in Georgia). That may suggest this case is finally getting real for the former president. Judge Juan Merchan is set to rule on key pre-trial issues, including Trump’s motions designed to put an end to the prosecution. If the Judge denies them, he will finalize the trial schedule, currently set to begin March 25. That would make the New York case the first of the four criminal cases against Trump to go to trial.



You can review our discussion from last April of the charges against Trump in Manhattan. But here it is in brief: The indictment charged Trump with 34 felony counts of business records fraud. Some commentators have dismissed this as a case that is “only” about Trump’s payments of hush money to Stormy Daniels to conceal their sexual liaison. That, of course, ignores the context. In the wake of the release of the Access Hollywood tape, where Trump talked cavalierly about grabbing women by the p*ssy and forcing himself upon unwilling women, he feared the impact if the public learned on the eve of the election that he’d been having sex with a porn star while his wife was home with their baby. This case is about Trump’s effort to unlawfully influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Had Joe Biden or Barack Obama done this, Republicans wouldn’t be dismissing it as an unimportant recordkeeping error, and it isn’t. Far from that, these are serious felony charges.

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, has characterized the case as “a clear-cut instance of election interference, in which a candidate defrauded the American people to win the White House in 2016.” Bragg has said that “The case — the core of it — is not money for sex,” and that “it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up. That’s the heart of the case.”

For each count, the government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump had:

• an intent to defraud that involved the intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission of that other crime
• and that he did one of the following:
  • made or caused a false entry in business records
  • altered, erased, deleted, etc., a correct entry in the records
  • omitted to make a true entry in violation of a legal duty he knew he had
  • prevented a true entry from being made or caused an omission

(full article online)

The Manhattan DA's Case

This is the first week where we’ve had major activity in each of the criminal cases against Donald Trump. If you’re having difficulty keeping up, welcome to what’s on tap for us for the remainder of 2024. On Thursday, there is a hearing on the conflict of interest allegations against Fulton...

joycevance.substack.com

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

This case will cripple Trump financially.

 

[Sixties Fan]

https://eddsa.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/public/452564_2022_PEOPLE_OF_THE_STATE_OF_v_PEOPLE_OF_THE_STATE_OF_DECISION_AFTER_TRIAL_1688.pdf

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

Very good. Those who support Hamas and the Arabs is a state of denialism.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

Those who support Hamas and the Arabs are in a state of denial.

Hamas must die before the war ends.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ He cannot leave the dead alone. And thinks that as the worst US President out of all of them, he would beat the best of them ]

 

[Sixties Fan]