Finally, Friday Reads: Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s been a week! At least New York State is going after #DeadbeatDon and his millions of dollars owed. However, the Trump Syndicate’s stall tactics are making it more unlikely we will see any kind of federal trial before the election season in the stolen documents or insurrection trials. The weirdest news on all the Trump trials is today’s headline about the Georgia Courts having a hacker ransom on the Election Interference Case. This headline is from Business Insider. “Hackers threaten to release Trump documents from Georgia case if they don’t get a ransom by Thursday.” This looks like there is likely more interference from Russia with Trump Chaos Love. Jacob Shamsian reports on what details we have at the moment.

The hacking group responsible for taking down Fulton County’s websites in Georgia is threatening to publish documents from the state’s court system — including ones related to the criminal case against Donald Trump — unless it gets paid a ransom.

In a message posted online Saturday, in both English and Russian, the hacking group called LockBit said the stolen documents “contain a lot of interesting things and Donald Trump’s court cases that could affect the upcoming US election.”

Initially, LockBit set a Saturday, March 2, deadline for the payment, according to the cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs.

It has since moved up that deadline to 8:49 a.m. ET on Thursday, February 29, LockBit’s restored website shows.

It’s not clear how much money the group is demanding. The hacking group’s demands are often negotiated in private, Dan Schiappa, the chief product officer at the cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, said.

The group — led by a hacker using the pseudonym LockBitSupp — appeared to become operational again over the weekend after a February 20 law-enforcement raid. A group of agencies, including the FBI and the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, took down 34 of its servers and changed its website to a series of messages bragging about the law-enforcement operation. The same day, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment accusing two Russian nationals of being involved in the group’s hacking operations.

By Saturday, LockBit was back.

On a new website, the group posted a message claiming it had backup copies of documents taken from the Fulton County government’s website. It also renewed its ransom demands.

The post claimed that the FBI acted quickly because the leak of documents in Trump’s criminal case could affect the 2024 presidential election — although court documents show that the FBI’s investigation into LockBit and coordination with international law-enforcement agencies has been ongoing for years. It characterized LockBit’s relationship with the FBI as a sort of romantic rivalry and promised that the group would hack more government websites in the future.

“Personally I will vote for Trump because the situation on the border with Mexico is some kind of nightmare, Biden should retire, he is a puppet,” the message said.

Joyce Vance provided this depressing analysis on her Substack Civil Discourse. “We’re Going To Need More Coffee.”

The legal landscape in three of the four criminal cases against Trump continues to shift in his favor this week, following the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the presidential immunity appeal in the D.C. election interference case, creating at least a two-month delay for Trump. Today, requests for trial dates emerged in the Mar-a-Lago case, giving rise to concerns that the scheduling Trump requested, if adopted by Judge Aileen Cannon, would effectively block the D.C. case from going to trial before the election, even if the Supreme Court rules against Trump.

That’s only one of the important things that happened today. E. Jean Carroll filed a stinging response to Donald Trump’s efforts to get out of filing an appeal bond, pointing out that his appeal to the court to trust him was worth about as much as a promise to pay up written on a paper napkin. A transcript released of Hunter Biden’s testimony on the Hill yesterday shows him sparring with Matt Gaetz, suggesting that Gaetz wasn’t the right person to lay into Biden about drug use. A federal judge in Texas halted enforcement of a new state law that would allow Texas police to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the border because immigration enforcement is the job of the federal government under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. In other words, it wasn’t exactly a slow news day. But we’ll focus tonight on the scheduling issues in the Mar-a-Lago case.

Today, Donald Trump, “on behalf of all of the defendants,” filed a proposed schedule for the Mar-a-Lago case. He led with the claim that, “As the leading candidate in the 2024 election, President Trump strongly asserts that a fair trial cannot be conducted this year in a manner consistent with the Constitution, which affords President Trump a Sixth Amendment right to be present and to participate in these proceedings as well as, inter alia, a First Amendment right that he shares with the American people to engage in campaign speech.”

But his lawyers note that since the Judge wants them to propose a trial schedule, they will, although it’s clear that their real request is for a trial after the election. Trump and his co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira propose an August 12 trial date, which means jury selection will start that day, and trial commences after the jury has been seated. Interestingly, their co-defendant Walt Nauta doesn’t want the trial to start until September 9. This is likely because his trial counsel is unavailable between August 5 and August 23, 2024, for “personal reasons.” It’s not unheard of for a judge to direct lawyers to change their vacation plans, if that’s what’s going on here. But if the government wants to try all defendants together and the Judge doesn’t intervene, then this is really a request for trial to start September 9 at best but really, never.

The government’s counterproposal, also filed today, was for a July 8 start. That seems to suggest that Jack Smith believes the Supreme Court won’t be sending the D.C. case back to Judge Chutkan in time for a trial in July or perhaps even in August.

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed Thursday afternoon by MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on her first week back from 3 months of maternity leave. This wasn’t the only interview she had that shows the world and the nation’s lawyers are worried about Trump’s return to the White House. Some scariest thoughts came from Conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig, a former Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney had this to say at The New Republic. As reported by Greg Sargent. “Liz Cheney Nukes the Supreme Court Over Trump Delay—and Hands Dems a Weapon. What percentage of voters know that Trump can cancel prosecutions of himself if he wins back the White House?”

In the wake of the Supreme Court agreeing to hear Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity from prosecution—potentially delaying his insurrection-related trial until after the election—Democrats should take careful note of Liz Cheney’s response to the decision:

The court’s decision is terrible news, to be sure, but it gives Democrats an opportunity to clarify a few crucial points, and they should seize it.

First, Democrats should stress that voters need to know before the election whether Trump committed crimes—and this is due to them as a matter of right. Second, Trump is seeking these delays to end all prosecutions of himself if he regains the White House—to corruptly place himself above the law by pardoning himself or having his handpicked lickspittle attorney general do it. Democrats must say clearly that if the court helps delay the trial until after the election, it will be enabling him to do that.

As many have noted, the Supreme Court didn’t have to agree to review an appeals court ruling against Trump, who is demanding immunity from prosecution for conspiring to obstruct the official electoral count and defraud the United States, among other charges. The high court could have simply let the lower court ruling stand, given that Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed judges unanimously ruled that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election don’t constitute official acts—and thus don’t get immunity—a clear-cut legal case.

“This is not a difficult legal question,” Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor, told me. “All the Supreme Court has done is to introduce several months of gratuitous delay right before the presidential election.”

Speculation is rampant about that “gratuitous delay.” I don’t care much for Nikki Haley and her endless head fakes, but I agree. This is from NBC News. “Nikki Haley calls for all Trump legal cases to be ‘dealt with’ before November. The Republican presidential candidate’s comments came in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in Virginia. I’m not a big fan of Kristen Welker, but at least there was a discussion.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said that all of former President Donald Trump‘s legal cases should be “dealt with” before the presidential election.

“I think all of the cases should be dealt with before November,” she said Thursday in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in Falls Church, Virginia, where voters will cast their primary ballots Tuesday.

“We need to know what’s going to happen before it, before the presidency happens, because after that, should he become president, I don’t think any of it’s going to get heard,” she continued.

Haley spoke a day after the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether Trump could claim presidential immunity in response to criminal charges. It could take months for the high court to reach a decision, pushing back the potential timeline for his election interference trial.

“I just think a president has to live according to the laws, too. You don’t get complete immunity,” she said, addressing the Supreme Court’s decision to take the case. She added that presidents should not get “free rein to do whatever they want to do.”

This headline from The Rolling Stone says it all. “Trump’s Team’ Literally Popping Champagne’ Over Supreme Court Taking Up Immunity Claim. The former president is unlikely to stand trial in the Justice Department’s election interference case before November.”

Various Trump advisers and sources close to the former president and 2024 GOP frontrunner were jubilant about the Supreme Court’s decision, with all of them now viewing it as highly unlikely that a federal election interference trial will happen before Election Day. Though a Trump criminal trial in New York is expected to begin next month, the former president’s team had long viewed a Jan. 6-related trial as more politically damaging. For months, Trump’s lawyers expected the federal trial to start this summer, and they have actively prepared for that scenario. Now, they likely don’t have to worry about that timeline.

The Trump 2024 campaign was fundraising off the court’s latest move hours after it happened. “BREAKING FROM TRUMP: My case is going to the SUPREME COURT!” the campaign texted supporters. “Presidents NEED IMMUNITY.” (This is, however, a position that Trump doesn’t actually hold when it comes to President Joe Biden, who he wants prosecuted.)

Trump has long been campaigning on the idea that presidents, particularly himself, should have free rein to commit crimes while in office — including crimes that “cross the line,” as he wrote on Truth Social in January.

Yes, Trump is doing his usual KKK rally speech wherever he goes. This time, it was at the US/Mexico border. This is from Raw Story. “‘Visible cringe’: Serviceman scowls amid Trump rant on ‘people who don’t speak languages.'” We all know the answer to the question: does Trump have no decency. Nope! None at all! This is reported by Kathleen Culliton.

Trump’s visit to Eagle Pass, Texas, was capped with a press conference to discuss U.S. border patrol policies likely to be at the heart of the 2024 presidential campaign.

“Nobody can explain to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages,” Trump said in a fragment sentence. “They’re truly foreign languages — nobody speaks them.”

Meanwhile, Chris Hayes had this to say on Threads.

Colorado votes on March 5th.   I really feel that we’ve already lost our democracy in so many ways that something significant needs to be done NOW. At least the Democratic Majority in the Senate is trying to legislate. Today,  Senators Durbin, Warnock, Schumer, Booker, Blumenthal, and Butler reintroduce the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would update and restore critical safeguards of the original Voting Rights Act. Another necessary action to Stop the Runaway Supreme Court. Don’t even get me started on all this hoopla on the border when Ayatollah Mike is blocking a bi-partisan bill led by a Conservative Republican Senator that would pass. This is from the Brookings Institute. William A Galston writes, “The collapse of bipartisan immigration reform: A guide for the perplexed.

Last October, Senate Republicans made it clear that they would not back additional aid for Ukraine without a bill that would help secure the southern border of the United States. With the blessing of both Senator Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, a bipartisan team of senators began negotiations to produce a bill that enough members of both parties could accept to overwhelm objections from progressive Democrats and America First Republicans.

The team negotiated for four months to produce this bill. It took less than four days for its support among Republicans to collapse. Why?

The easiest explanation is that Republicans in both the House and Senate yielded to objections from their all-but-certain presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump. Once the House Speaker stated publicly that he would not allow the Senate bill to reach the House floor for a vote, Republican senators were unwilling to run the political risk of supporting a measure that would not become law.

However, there are deeper reasons for the deadlock over immigration. The last comprehensive immigration reform was enacted almost four decades ago, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. This bill represented a grand bargain between elected officials who sought to extend legal protection to millions of migrants who had entered the U.S. illegally and officials who were most concerned about stemming the flow of such migrants. The bill accomplished the former but had no discernible impact on the latter, leading many conservatives to denounce it as an “amnesty” bill.

This failure to launch legislation, along with the complete inability to pass a budget for a fiscal year about half-gone, is misgovernance on the part of the MAGA cult.

So, this has been a rough week. I hope we can relax some this weekend. It just kills me that so many of our institutions have given Trump impunity. That’s more appropriate than this entire fakery of presidential immunity. The Constitution says no one is above the law. You don’t need a fancy schmancy law degree to know that. You should learn it in Civics class sometime in your secondary education. No one should be able to walk away from the rule of law in this country.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?