Rafael Struve was eating dinner at his parents’ home in Houston when the mug shot flashed on his cellphone.
Wow, he thought, staring at Donald Trump’s face. This is it.
“It’s one thing to anticipate it, but to actually see it,” said Struve, 31, who works in business development and is a spokesman for Texas Young Republicans. “ … I don’t think it bodes well for our party if we keep this as the center.”
This first booking photo of an American president — of Fulton County, Ga., Inmate No. P01135809 — is proving a Rorschach test of our political moment. If we see the world not as it is, but as we are, the same appears true for what’s shaping up to be the most divisive image of the 2024 election.
Some Americans see a criminal facing 91 charges across New York, Florida, Washington, D.C. and Georgia, a man whom the law is treating like anyone else. Others see a wrongly accused champion, the likely Republican presidential nominee facing off against a biased justice system conspiring to bench him. Still others see an experienced showman working the camera….
Struve, a two-time Trump voter who now supports Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, considered the jailhouse portrait over a plate of steak with guacamole and yucca.
Trump’s scowl? Calculated, he thought — “part of the game he’s trying to play long-term, this sort of grievance politics.”
In Atlanta, Anthony Michael Kreis dismissed the image as an outdated ritual of the criminal justice system.
To Kreis, an assistant law professor at Georgia State University, mug shots have devolved from an identification tool to a vehicle for shaming. Consider the galleries of arrestees that newspapers once commonly published. Even without a conviction, such photos can haunt someone for life.
“It’s a skeevy thing we do as a society,” Kreis said.
Yet he acknowledged that it might have been just as skeevy to grant a special pass to an enormously powerful man. The mug shot has “a certain degree of symbolism,” he noted, signaling “that no person is above the law.”
Mostly Monday Reads: License to Kill
Posted: July 21, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #We are so Fucked, Crimes against Children, Criminal Justice System | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, coastal restoration, Florida ICE Jails: American Hell Realms, Gaza Massacre, Trump Administration ignores Judges, Trump AI bandit 7 Comments
“There you go.!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
No one could possibly have any more doubts about the addled and deranged brains of#FARTUS. (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist of the United States) He’s devised another distraction from the Epstein files, and it’s a doozy. Good luck to Congressional Republicans in the attempt to normalize this beahavior. This comes from this morning’s New York Times. Matthew Mpoke Bigg has the story. “Trump posts a fake video of Obama being arrested in the Oval Office.” When in doubt, return to the scene of the original crime.
President Trump reposted a fake video showing former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, as Trump administration officials continue to accuse Mr. Obama of trying to harm Mr. Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election, and the president seeks to redirect conversation from the Epstein files.
The short video, which appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence and posted on TikTok before being reposted on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account on Sunday, comes days after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration trying to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Mr. Trump.
The video appears to be manipulated footage of an Oval Office meeting that took place in November 2016 between Mr. Obama, then the president, and Mr. Trump, who days earlier had defeated Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, in the election.
The fake video purports to show F.B.I. agents bursting into the meeting, pushing Mr. Obama into a kneeling position and putting him in handcuffs as Mr. Trump looks on smiling, while the song “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People plays. Later, the fake video shows Mr. Obama in an orange jumpsuit pacing in a cell. The start of the video shows a compilation of actual footage of Democratic leaders, including Mr. Obama and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr, saying, “no one is above the law.”
Mr. Obama’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the video.
Mr. Trump regularly reposts A.I.-generated or mocked-up videos and photographs on his Truth Social account.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said last week that the latest report released by her offices showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump. She said she would make a criminal referral to the F.B.I. based on recently released documents.
A link to real video footage from an interview that Ms. Gabbard gave to Fox News on Sunday on the subject was also posted to Mr. Trump’s social media.
Democrats have denounced the administration’s effort to discredit Mr. Obama as politically motivated and riddled with errors, and contradicting previous reviews of the assessment.
The latest document, issued last week, did not show Russian manipulation of the election, and instead reinforced the view of intelligence officials who found no evidence that Russia hacked voting systems to change votes.
Democrats have cited reports by intelligence agencies and Senate investigators who found that, while Russian hackers probed election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes and extracted voter registration data in at least two states, there was no evidence that they attempted to change votes.
The Obama administration’s assessment also did not say that Russian hackers manipulated votes.
Mr. Trump has been trying to change the conversation among his supporters, after the Justice Department walked back its promise to release the full collection of files about Jeffrey Epstein, a multimillionaire financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019.
That decision angered some of the president’s most ardent supporters. Some have questioned Mr. Trump’s judgment on the matter, causing strife within the MAGA movement that powered Mr. Trump to two presidential election victories.
“Oops!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Tulsi is still trying to get out of the doghouse, so she’s even reaching back for stale, old conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, there are enough disgusting stories about ICE going around that we hardly need anything totally invented out of a bunch of the brains of sickos. This is from The Guardian. “Migrants at Ice jail in Miami made to kneel to eat ‘like dogs’, report alleges. Incident in which migrants were shackled with hands tied one of succession of alleged abuses at jails in Florida.” If it’s news about something creepy, sadistic, and inhumane, it’s got to be from either Florida or Texas. The story comes from Richard Luscombe in Miami.
Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.
The incident at the downtown federal detention center is one of a succession of alleged abuses at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) operated jails in the state since January, chronicled by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South from interviews with detainees.
Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.
“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.
Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers, or adequate food.
The jail was so far beyond capacity, some transferring detainees reported, that they were held for more than 24 hours in a bus in the parking lot. Men and women were confined together, and unshackled only when they needed to use the single toilet, which quickly became clogged.
“The bus became disgusting. It was the type of toilet in which normally people only urinate but because we were on the bus for so long, and we were not permitted to leave it, others defecated in the toilet,” one man said.
“Because of this, the whole bus smelled strongly of feces.”
When the group was finally admitted into the facility, they said, many spent up to 12 days crammed into a frigid intake room they christened la hielera – the ice box – with no bedding or warm clothing, sleeping instead on the cold concrete floor.
There was so little space at Krome, and so many detainees, the report says, that every available room was used to hold new arrivals.
“By the time I left, almost all the visitation rooms were full. A few were so full men couldn’t even sit, all had to stand,” Andrea, a female detainee, said.
At the third facility, the Broward transitional center in Pompano Beach, where a 44-year-old Haitian woman, Marie Ange Blaise, died in April, detainees said they were routinely denied adequate medical or psychological care.
Some suffered delayed treatment for injuries and chronic conditions, and dismissive or hostile responses from staff, the report said.
In one alleged incident in April at the downtown Miami jail, staff turned off a surveillance camera and a “disturbance control team” brutalized detainees who were protesting a lack of medical attention to one of their number who was coughing up blood. One detainee suffered a broken finger.
All three facilities were severely overcrowded, the former detainees said, a contributory factor in Florida’s decision to quickly build the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” jail in the Everglades intended to eventually hold up to 5,000 undocumented migrants awaiting deportation.
Immigration detention numbers nationally were at an average of 56,400 per day in mid-June, with almost 72% having no criminal history, according to the report.
The daily average during the whole of 2024 was 37,500, HRW said.
The groups say that the documented abuses reflect inhumane conditions inside federal immigration facilities that have worsened significantly since Trump’s January inauguration and subsequent push to ramp up detentions and deportations.
“The anti-immigrant escalation and enforcement tactics under the Trump administration are terrorizing communities and ripping families apart, which is especially cruel in the state of Florida, which thrives because of its immigrant communities,” said Katie Blankenship, immigration attorney and co-founder of Sanctuary of the South.
“The rapid, chaotic, and cruel approach to arresting and locking people up is literally deadly and causing a human rights crisis that will plague this state and the entire country for years to come.”
These are the kinds of stories that make me think my country has been flushed down a dirty toilet. I can’t imagine any previous modern president doing this. The closest thing from history that was this barbaric was when Andrew Jackson sent the Cherokee to Oklahoma via The Trail of Tears. There was also Wounded Knee, where hundreds of the Lakota people were murdered for their land. We think that the Civil War ended slavery and that we began making a better Union for all of us. It’s so alarming that it’s been dismantled so quickly by so few. Wounded Knee happened in 1890. The last horrid act of attempted mass termination of our indigenous nations was in 1956.
The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 was one law among others through the 1940s and 1950s that are referred to as Indian Termination. It was an effort by the U.S. government to hasten the assimilation of American Indians. Some scholars have characterized the law as an attempt to encourage people to leave Indian reservations for urban areas, which resulted in poverty, joblessness, homelessness for many in the new urban environment.
The next major ICE assault on an American city will happen in New York. Politico reports that “ICE will ‘flood the zone’ in NYC. Trump administration officials said they’d increase staffing after getting blocked from opening an office in the city’s jails.” If this doesn’t feel like living under Hitler’s SS, I don’t know what would. What group of people will be on their next assault?
The Department of Homeland Security will “flood the zone” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in New York City after the City Council blocked federal law enforcement agencies from opening an office in the city jails, President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said Monday morning.
Homan joined DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other Trump administration officials to deliver that message at One World Trade Center after an off-duty federal customs officer was shot by an undocumented immigrant in an attempted robbery Saturday night, Noem said.
“You don’t want to let us in the jails to arrest a bad guy in the safety and security of a jail. You want to release him into the street, which makes it unsafe for the alien, because anything can happen in an on-street arrest,” Homan said. “So what are we gonna do? We’re gonna put more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy. So sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want: more agents in the community.”
The alleged shooter entered the country illegally in 2023 during then-President Joe Biden’s tenure and had been arrested and released four times in the years since, Noem said. She blamed the shooting on New York’s sanctuary city policies that limit the city’s cooperation with civil immigration enforcement and Mayor Eric Adams for not changing the policies, despite his good relationship with the Trump administration.
Adams has said he wants to cooperate with federal authorities on immigration more but blamed the left-leaning City Council for not letting him. “I have nothing to do with the rules that are put in place. I just carry out the rules,” Adams said at an unrelated press conference Monday when asked to respond to Noem.
Adams said he welcomes more ICE agents in the city if they’re going to help the city go after “dangerous people” like the alleged shooter, but said that “if it’s going to be to go after everyday individuals who are trying to complete the path, who are trying to be a citizen, I don’t think we should do that.”
I still don’t understand how property crimes can be lumped in with major crimes like sexual assault, murder, or battery, but then I don’t consider my car an extension of my genitalia. I also don’t understand how any American president can get away with defying judicial orders. Again, it seems we are on a fast, downward spiral to banana republic status. This is from the Washington Post. “Trump officials accused of defying 1 in 3 judges who ruled against him. A comprehensive analysis of hundreds of lawsuits against Trump policies shows dozens of examples of defiance, delay, and dishonesty, which experts say pose an unprecedented threat to the U.S. legal system.” Justin Jouvenal has the lede.
President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance withAmerica’s legal system.
Plaintiffs say Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent aresnubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to carry out actions that have been blocked.
Judges appointed by presidents of both parties have often agreed. None havetaken punitive action to try to force compliance, however, allowing the administration’s defiance of orders to go on for weeks or even months in some instances.
Outside legal analysts say courts typicallyare slow to begin contempt proceedings for noncompliance,especially while their rulings are under appeal.Judges alsoare likely to be concerned, analysts say, that the U.S. Marshals Service — whose director is appointed by the president — might not serve subpoenas or take recalcitrant government officials into custodyif ordered to by the courts.
The allegations against the administrationare crystallized ina whistleblower complaint filedto Congress late last monththat accused Justiceofficials of ignoring court orders in immigration cases, presenting legal arguments with no basis in the law and misrepresenting facts. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor also chided the administration, writing that Trump officials had “openly flouted” a judge’s order not to deport migrants to a country where they did not have citizenship.
The Post examined337 lawsuits filed against the administration since Trump returned to the White House and began a rapid-fire effort to reshape government programs and policy. As of mid-July, courts had ruled against the administration in 165 of the lawsuits. The Post found that the administration is accused of defying or frustrating court oversight in 57 of those cases — almost 35 percent.
Legal experts said the pattern of conductis unprecedented for any presidential administration and threatens to undermine the judiciary’s role as a check on an executive branch asserting vast powers that test the boundaries of the law and Constitution. Immigration cases have emerged as the biggest flash point, but the administration has also been repeatedly accused of failing to comply in lawsuits involving cuts to federal funding and the workforce.
Ed Maza, writing for HuffPo, has this story. “‘Reeks Of A Cover-Up’: Ex-Trump Official Suspects ‘Embarrassing’ Info In Epstein Files. Miles Taylor predicted that Trump will create distractions to keep people from talking about the Epstein case.”
President Donald Trump has backtracked on his promise to release files related to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and one former official from his first term thinks he knows why.
There might be “embarrassing” details about Trump in those documents, according to Miles Taylor, who served as Homeland Security chief of staff in 2019.
MSNBC’s Alex Witt asked Taylor about a report that Attorney General Pam Bondi pressured FBI Director Kash Patel into getting 1,000 employees to sort through 100,000 Epstein records and flag any mention of Trump.“This data point, to me, reeks of a cover-up,” Taylor said Sunday.
If the report is true, he said, that doesn’t necessarily mean there was criminal behavior, but the agents could have uncovered information that the president doesn’t want made public.
“Again, it doesn’t have to be criminal,” he said. “It could just be embarrassing.”
He pointed to a report in The Wall Street Journal of a strange birthday letter Trump allegedly sent to Epstein as an example of something that’s not criminal but “very embarrassing.”
Trump has denied sending the latter and is suing over it.
“The keyword searches looking for Trump’s name, I think, strongly suggest that somewhere, something could have been found that has affected his behavior in this case,” he said, and warned that the case could consume the president in the same way that the Russia investigation did during his first term.
The good news, he said, is that it might keep Trump distracted and unable to follow through on some of the most extreme parts of his agenda.
“The bad news is it’s going to make Donald Trump desperate to create other distractions because he doesn’t want people to focus on this,” he said.
The AP reports that Israeli forces are pushing farther and farther into Gaza. “Israeli forces push into parts of a central Gaza city that the war had largely spared.” It appears that Netanyahoo is using the massive amount of chaos created by Trump’s irrational Foreign Policies to conquer the country and expel its rightful citziens. This area is also a staging ground for groups providing aid. Trump has lost interest in the region since he’s so involved with Epstein reports.
Israeli ground troops for the first time Monday pushed into areas of a central Gaza city where several aid groups are based, in what appeared to be the latest effort to carve up the Palestinian territory with military corridors.
Deir al-Balah is the only Gaza city that has not seen major ground operations or suffered widespread devastation in 21 months of war, leading to speculation that the Hamas militant group holds large numbers of hostages there. The main group representing hostages’ families said it was “shocked and alarmed” by the incursion, which was confirmed by an Israeli military official, and demanded answers from Israeli leaders.
Israel says the seizure of territory in Gaza is aimed at pressuring Hamas to release hostages, but it is a major point of contention in ongoing ceasefire talks.
The U.N. food agency, meanwhile, accused Israeli forces of firing on a crowd of Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid over the weekend. Gaza’s Health Ministry called it one of the deadliest attacks on aid-seekers in the war that has driven the territory to the brink of famine.
Well, they’ve got a lot of days left to kill off more of us. Let’s see how it goes. Down here in Lousyana, they’re just killing us off with not much excuse at all. A large Coastal restoration project that was funded by the Gulf Oil Spill settlement has been shut down by our crazy governor and the swampbillies in the legislature. There’s an incredible heatwave here for the next three days, and I’m just trying to stay as dry and cool as possible, but I have a feeling I’ll be cold, bathtub-bound for most of that time. This is from our local TV station, WDSU. “Louisiana officially cancels state’s largest coastal project.” Just write death by MAGA’s love of oil in my obit if I don’t make it.
Louisiana has officially canceled the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.
The project was the largest single ecosystem restoration effort in U.S. history and the cornerstone of the state’s own Coastal Master Plan.
Gov. Jeff Landry has been a critic of the project, saying it’s costing taxpayers $30 to $50 million a year, claiming it’s destroying Grand Isle, and impacting drinking water for several parishes.
Supporters of the program say it is crucial to restoring the coast.
Restore the Mississippi River Delta issued the following statement:
“In a complete abandonment of science-driven decision-making and public transparency, Governor Jeff Landry and his administration have pulled the plug on a fully funded, permitted, and under construction project designed to rebuild tens of thousands of acres of our collapsing coast. The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion represents decades of research, public engagement, and bipartisan support.
Thursday’s announcement by the TIG was the culmination of a year-and-a-half-long campaign of misinformation and political arm-twisting by Gov. Jeff Landry and his coastal team to undermine and finally kill the state’s largest ecosystem restoration project.
Mid-Barataria is more than a project — it represents a generational investment, paid for with the penalties of an environmental disaster. These dollars were meant to restore the coast, not settle a cancellation of contracts behind closed doors. The project’s cancellation means the state is throwing away more than $618 million intended to be spent to protect the coast’s culture, residents, and businesses.
The state has recently resurrected the idea of a smaller diversion near Myrtle Grove as a substitute, but that project was previously dropped from the state’s master plan years ago due to poor performance in early modeling.
A stopgap project with no data is not a solution. We need diversion designs backed by science — not politics.
Coastal Louisiana is still in an accelerated land loss crisis, and the science remains clear: sediment diversions are essential to building and sustaining wetlands at scale. Any alternative must be grounded in rigorous evaluation, transparent public engagement, and a commitment to outcomes — not opinions and optics.
I think they want all of us dead. It’s the only explanation I have.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action List today?
Extra Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: August 26, 2023 Filed under: cat art, caturday, Crime, Criminal Justice System, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: 14th amendment, folk art, Trump mugshot, Twitter aka X, two-tier justice system 8 Comments
Miné Okubo, American artist
Happy Caturday!!
Now that Trump has been indicted and arrested repeatedly, I’m feeling a bit calmer about possibilities for the the future of democracy in America. It will still be a long fight, but the opening battles have been won by the good guys.
Trump reportedly tried to avoid having a mug shot taken, and then used it to fundraise. But, let’s face it, the man is in deep legal trouble. He’s been exposed as a common criminal–the first former president ever to be indicted. I have to believe that most Americans are not going to want to vote for an accused and/or convicted felon for president in 2024.
On the mugshot, The Washington Post looked for reactions: Hero, showman, scoundrel: What Americans see in Trump’s mug shot.
Claudia Olivos, ‘Cats in Love’
The WaPo writers managed to find one Democrat to quote in their article, which mostly focused on Trump voters.
Some 1,400 miles north, in the village of Ephraim on Wisconsin’s northeastern thumb, Monique McClean looked at her Apple watch and thought: What is that?
Without comment, her husband had texted Trump’s mug shot, which she initially mistook for some kind of illustration. “It looked like a Marvel supervillain to me,” she said.
McClean, 61, the owner of Pearl Wine Cottage on Green Bay’s shoreline, felt her mood turn gloomy when she considered the image more closely. A Democrat, she’d been horrified by the way Trump accused poll workers in Georgia of scheming against him. Two women had been forced into hiding.
“I just thought of all the lies he has told for years,” she said.
Trump is back on Twitter AKA X, but he hasn’t made much of a splash so far. At Politico, Jack Shafer argues that: Trump Can’t Go Home Again. Twitter is not the site that it used to be. And he’s not the same man.
After surrendering on Thursday at an Atlanta jail to be booked on state felony charges alleging his involvement in a criminal conspiracy to void the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump sat for a mug shot in which he scowls like a psychopath out of a Stanley Kubrick film. Trump’s next grand act of surrender was to post the picture on his Twitter account — now called X by owner Elon Musk, pedants and copy desks but by nobody who uses it — marking his first appearance there since being reinstated in November, after being booted by the service 958 days ago following the Jan. 6 riots.
Trump’s post, which garnered a healthy 1.3 million likes and 305,000 retweets, essentially concedes that his plan to build his own social media empire under the Truth Social banner is a bust. Aside from Trump’s regular posts there, Truth Social is a wasteland of brimstone and salt whose finances and corporate structure make a Rube Goldberg machine look like a Swiss watch. Except for when journalists repeat his Truth Social outbursts or report on them, that Trump account goes unnoticed. By returning to the social media outlet that helped make him “great,” Trump’s post may presage an attempt to restart the media fire of his 2016 campaign and his presidency.
Man with black cat, by Gea Zwanink
But no man ever steps in the same river twice — it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man, as the sage said. Twitter is not the same and neither is Trump, and the media watershed that allowed Trump to politically prosper doesn’t drain the way it once did. Thanks to inertia, changing technology, fickle tastes and Musk’s determination to wreck it, the site has lost its cachet. What does that mean for Trump? [….]
The environment that so nurtured Trump’s nuttism has degraded since he filled our silos with his opinions and policy statements. Many journalists still use Twitter, but the site has lost its cultural and political primacy. During his vacation from Twitter, TikTok became the world’s most popular domain, and his comments on Truth Social or at rallies no longer carried instant weight now that he was an ex-president. Even since announcing his candidacy and leading the polls, Trump has often failed to make himself Topic A in the political conversation (except for during his spurt of indictments). Even Fox News, which pampered him like a pet pig during his presidency, now gives him the cold shoulder.
Read the rest at Politico.
At The Daily Beast, attorney Shan Wu writes: Trump’s Arrest in Georgia Shows a Two-Tier Justice System.
LaShawn Thompson shared something in common with former President Donald J. Trump. Both were defendants charged in Fulton County, Georgia, and booked at the Fulton County Jail—known as “Rice Street.” But that is their only shared commonality with the criminal justice system.
On Thursday, with TV cameras overhead and behind his motorcade following every moment of his journey, Trump arrived with an armed U.S. Secret Service escort, and sped through the process of paperwork and having his fingerprinting and mug shots taken like a VIP being let into a night club. It took only 24 or so minutes for him to be booked and leave the jail. His height was logged at 6-foot-3, his weight at 215 pounds, and his hair color as “blond or strawberry.”
The newly minted Inmate No. Po1135809 was back on his private jet within a matter of moments, after claiming again he had done “nothing wrong.”
Dama Con Gato, 2009, by Pescador
But LaShawn Thompson never got to leave after his booking at Rice Street. He died there at the age of 35.
Thompson died at the Fulton County Jail after being held there for three months. According to his autopsy, contributing factors to his death included dehydration, malnutrition, untreated schizophrenia, and severe insect infestation on his body from lice and bed bugs.
His family’s attorney said he “was eaten alive by insects and bedbugs.” Thompson was charged with a misdemeanor.
By contrast, Trump is charged with racketeering crimes in a 41-count felony indictment and facing a total of four different criminal cases brought by prosecutors at the U.S. Department of Justice, Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and now the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office. But the Fulton County case is the first time that Trump will experience the normal booking procedures of fingerprinting and likely be photographed for his “mug shot.” He also has release conditions that include bail.
Food for thought. Read the rest of this sickening story at The Daily beast.
As Trump faces legal jeopardy, the fight to use the 14th Amendment to disqualify him from public office is gaining steam.
ABC News: 14th Amendment, Section 3: A new legal battle against Trump takes shape.
Separate from the criminal cases, over the past few weeks a growing body of conservative scholars have raised the constitutional argument that Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election make him ineligible to hold federal office ever again.
That disqualification argument boils down to Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which says that a public official is not eligible to assume public office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States, or had “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” unless they are granted amnesty by a two-thirds vote of Congress.
Advocacy groups have long argued that Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election fits those criteria. The argument gained new life earlier this month when two members of the conservative Federalist Society, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, endorsed it in the pages of the Pennsylvania Law Review.
“If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency,” the article reads.
Since then, two more legal scholars — retired conservative federal judge J. Michael Luttig and Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe — made the same case in an article published in The Atlantic.
By Andrie Martens
“The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation,” they wrote. “The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.”
The argument even got raised on the Republican presidential debate stage in Milwaukee this week.
“Over a year ago, I said that Donald Trump was morally disqualified from being president again as a result of what happened on January 6th. More people are understanding the importance of that, including conservative legal scholars,” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said, eliciting a mix of cheers and boos from the audience. “I’m not going to support somebody who’s been convicted of a serious felony or who is disqualified under our Constitution.”
This is from Shan Wu at The Daily Beast: Trump Can and Should Be Disqualified From Running for President Under the 14th Amendment.
The “Disqualification Clause” found in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment fits Donald J. Trump like a glove.
Or as political podcaster Allison Gill asked on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter: “if section 3 of the 14th amendment wasn’t designed for him, who was it designed for?”
The historical answer to Gill’s query is, of course, that it was designed for Confederates trying to get back into the federal government after losing the Civil War. And that very same historical context draws a direct analogy to Trump’s efforts to get back into the presidency after losing the 2020 election.
Three black cats, by Tacha, Toronto
Here’s what the Disqualification Clause says:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
The plain language of this obviously encompasses Trump’s actions to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. These actions include but are not limited to asking the Georgia Secretary of State to find additional votes for him, conspiring to put forth slates of unelected “fake” electors for the electoral college, and his call for “wild” protests on Jan. 6 that led to the attack on the Capitol.
But while these actions have resulted in Trump being charged criminally both by the U.S. Justice Department and the State of Georgia, his disqualification does not depend upon him being convicted in either of those cases.
Yu quotes from the piece by Tribe and Luttig mentioned in the previous article along with other experts:
Tribe and Luttig are hardly outliers in their view. A forthcoming law review article written by Federalist Society conservative law professors—William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas—not only agrees that the disqualification is self-enforcing but also makes the case that numerous others who supported Trump’s efforts also may be disqualified.
Baude and Paulsen note that this could include people like former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn (who proposed a plan to seize voting machines), the “fake electors,” Jeffrey Clark of the Justice Department, and “at least one member of Congress” (that would be Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA)) who had supported Clark’s plans—and even lobbied for removal of senior DOJ officials who opposed Clark’s scheme.
Head over to The Daily Beast to read some counterarguments.
All in all, I think things are looking better for the efforts to keep Trump from getting back into power.
That’s it for me today. Have a nice weekend everyone!
Tuesday Reads: The Latest Trumpy Legal News
Posted: August 22, 2023 Filed under: Crime, Criminal Justice System, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: Georgia election interference case, Jack Smith, January 6 case, Jeff Clark, John Eastman, Judge Tanya Chutkan, Mark Meadows 9 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Now that Trump has been indicted and arrested 3 times, the 4th arrest on Thursday seems sort of old hat. Ho hum . . . Trump will surrender at Fulton County Jail in Georgia on Thursday; his bail has been set at $200,000.
Associated Press: Trump says he will surrender Thursday on Georgia charges tied to efforts to overturn 2020 election.
Former President Donald Trump says he will surrender to authorities in Georgia on Thursday to face charges in the case accusing him of illegally scheming to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.
“Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED,” Trump wrote on his social media network Monday night, hours after his bond was set at $200,000.
It will be Trump’s fourth arrest since April, when he became the first former president in U.S. history to face indictment. Since then, Trump, who remains the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has had what has seemed like an endless procession of bookings and arraignments in jurisdictions across the country. His appearances in New York, Florida and Washington, D.C., have drawn enormous media attention, with news helicopters tracking his every move.
Trump’s announcement came hours after his attorneys met with prosecutors in Atlanta to discuss the details of his release on bond. The former president is barred from intimidating co-defendants, witnesses or victims in the case — including on social media — according to the bond agreement signed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Trump’s defense attorneys and the judge. It explicitly includes “posts on social media or reposts of posts” made by others.
This morning, two of Trump’s co-defendants surrendered in the Georgia election interference case.
Atlantic News First, via NBC29 VA:
ATLANTA (Atlanta News First/Gray News): First co-defendants in Trump indictment surrender at Fulton County jail.
The first co-defendants in a sweeping indictment out of Fulton County, Georgia, has surrendered to the jail.
Shortly before 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, former President Donald Trump’s attorney John Eastman turned himself in. A bond agreement for $100,000 was reached Monday in his case.
Eastman, prosecutors say, was deeply involved in some of his efforts to remain in power after the 2020 election. He wrote a memo arguing that Trump could remain in power if then-Vice President Mike Pence overturned the results of the election during a joint session of Congress where electoral votes would be counted. That plan included putting in place a slate of “alternate” electors in seven battleground states, including Georgia, who would falsely certify that Trump had won their states.
In a social media statement, Eastman said he was surrendering “to an indictment that should never have been brought.”
“It represents a crossing of the Rubicon for our country, implicating the fundamental First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances,” Eastman said. “As troubling, it targets attorneys for their zealous advocacy on behalf of their clients, something attorneys are ethically bound to provide and which was attempting here by ‘formally challeng[ing] the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means.’ An opportunity never afforded them in the Fulton County Superior Court.”
A $10,000 bond agreement was reached Monday for Scott Hall, the Atlanta-area bail bondsman who was allegedly involved in commandeering voting information that was the property of Dominion Voting Systems from Coffee County in south Georgia.
On Tuesday, just before 9 a.m., Hall surrendered to authorities, and was booked and processed on charges that include conspiracy to commit a felony, conspiracy to commit election fraud, conspiracy to defraud the state of political subdivision, and violation of the Georgia Racketeer Influenced And Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
Jeff Clark, the DOJ official who wanted to send letters to the swing states saying that the DOJ believed there was significant voter fraud in their states, is trying to avoid going to Atlanta to be booked.
https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1694008924863602918?s=20
Jeff Clark on the morning his house was searched by the FBI:
This is going to enrage Trump. The New York Times just posted an article on Mark Meadows, another of Trump’s co-defendants in Georgia: How Mark Meadows Pursued a High-Wire Legal Strategy in Trump Inquiries.
This winter, after receiving a subpoena from a grand jury investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Mark Meadows commenced a delicate dance with federal prosecutors.
He had no choice but to show up and, eventually, to testify. Yet Mr. Meadows — Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff — initially declined to answer certain questions, sticking to his former boss’s position that they were shielded by executive privilege.
But when prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, challenged Mr. Trump’s executive privilege claims before a judge, Mr. Meadows pivoted. Even though he risked enraging Mr. Trump, he decided to trust Mr. Smith’s team, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Meadows quietly arranged to talk with them not only about the steps the former president took to stay in office, but also about his handling of classified documents after he left.
The episode illustrated the wary steps Mr. Meadows took to navigate legal and political peril as prosecutors in Washington and Georgia closed in on Mr. Trump, seeking to avoid being charged himself while also sidestepping the career risks of being seen as cooperating with what his Republican allies had cast as partisan persecution of the former president.
His high-wire legal act hit a new challenge this month. While Mr. Meadows’s strategy of targeted assistance to federal prosecutors and sphinxlike public silence largely kept him out of the 45-page election interference indictment that Mr. Smith filed against Mr. Trump in Washington, it did not help him avoid similar charges in Fulton County, Ga. Mr. Meadows was named last week as one of Mr. Trump’s co-conspirators in a sprawling racketeering indictment filed by the local district attorney in Georgia.
Interviews and a review of the cases show how Mr. Meadows’s tactics reflected to some degree his tendency to avoid conflict and leave different people believing that he agreed with them. They were also dictated by his unique position in Mr. Trump’s world and the legal jeopardy this presented.
Read all the juicy, gossipy details at the NYT link.
There’s also news about the January 6 case against Trump in DC.
The Washington Post: Justice Dept. pushes back against Trump’s bid for a 2026 trial in D.C.
The Justice Department pushed back Monday on former president Donald Trump’s claims that he cannot be ready to go to trial in January on charges that he illegally sought to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
That’s it for me today. I guess I’m still mainly obsessed with seeing Trump tried, convicted, and imprisoned. I’ll add more links in the comment thread.
Tuesday Reads: Trump Indictment #4
Posted: August 15, 2023 Filed under: 2020 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, Crime, Criminal Justice System, Donald Trump | Tags: conspiracy, Fani Willis, Georgia grand jury, Mark Meadows, racketeering, RICO laws, Trump 4th indictment 7 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
As you know, the Georgia grand jury handed down multiple indictments of Trump and many of his cronies for a conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election. He has now been indicted 4 times for a total of 91 criminal charges. I tried to stay up until the bitter end last night, but I fell asleep before Fani Willis finally made her announcement.
David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo: Fani Willis Lowers The Boom On Donald Trump In Massive Indictment.
After a marathon session Monday, a Georgia grand jury returned a monster 41-felony-count, 97-page indictment against a total of 19 defendants, including former President Donald Trump; Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis; and Trump DOJ official Jeff Clark.
It was a strange day of uncertainty and expectation, with moment-by-moment reporting from the Fulton County courthouse. The duty judge would poke his head into the courtroom of waiting reporters to do check-ins. Grand jury witnesses scheduled to testify today made public that they had been called in a day early and offered regular updates as to where they stood in the line of witnesses paraded before the grand jury. The presentation of the indictment to the duty judge was televised live. Reporters were taking photographs from the inside of the clerk of court’s office as they waited an agonizing couple of hours for the paperwork to be processed and the indictment made public.
The day was punctuated by what appeared to be the accidental posting then quick takedown from the clerk’s website of a document seemingly related to the case that listed Trump as a defendant. That sparked an initial round of excitement and panic, then confusion. The clerk’s office later issued a statement calling the document “fictitious.” But it remained unclear exactly what had happened and why.
As the drama stretched deep into the evening, it became increasingly clear that District Attorney Fani Will was pushing to finish the indictment the same day. The duty judge kept the courtroom open late to accept the indictment, should it come. It finally did, just before 9 p.m. ET. The indictment became public just before 11 p.m. ET.
Read more of the basic facts at the TPM link.
From Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice, Lisa Needham breaks down the charges: Trump’s Fulton County indictment, unpacked.
The latest Trump indictment is out, and it’s a blockbuster. Let’s start with the numbers, shall we? A grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, returned an indictment that has:
- 19 defendants, including the former president of the United States and 6 lawyers in his orbit
- 41 criminal counts across all defendants
- 13 criminal counts against the former president himself
- 8 types of manners and methods used to further a criminal enterprise
- 161 overt acts of racketeering activity
Many of the defendants are already familiar. Rudy Guiliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Sidney Powell are all attorneys who are likely some of the unindicted co-conspirators in the federal January 6 case. Others are people whose names have surfaced repeatedly during the various 2020 election investigations, such as Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, and attorney Ken Chesebro, who wrote the first memo suggesting the fake elector scheme. Others, like fake electors Shawn Still and David Shafer, aren’t household names….
If you’ve ever watched a mob movie set after 1970, when the law was first passed, you’ve probably heard of the federal RICO Act. It was designed to charge people for acting in concert with one another in furtherance of a criminal act. This was a big breakthrough because in sprawling criminal enterprises, people at the top — gang leaders, mob capos, etc. — could insulate themselves from criminal liability by having other people do their dirty work. But the advent of RICO meant that if you helped mastermind the heist but didn’t do the burglary, for example, you could still be held liable. The law isn’t just used against the Mafia but has also formed the basis for prosecuting people who run Ponzi schemes and gangs, among other things….
According to the indictment, Trump and his co-defendants used at least eight methods to try to undermine the election: (1) Making false statements to members of state legislatures, including Florida, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia; (2) Making false statements to high-ranking state officials in Georgia, such as the secretary of state and the governor; (3) creating a slate of fake electoral voters; (4) harassing and intimidating a Fulton County election worker; (5) soliciting high-ranking members of the United States Department of Justice to make false statements to government officials in Georgia; (6) soliciting Mike Pence to reject electoral college votes properly cast by Georgia’s electors; (7) unlawfully accessing voter equipment and voter data; and (8) making false statements and committing perjury to cover up the conspiracy.
The first public act in furtherance of the conspiracy started the day after the election when Trump gave a speech falsely declaring victory. Trump had discussed a draft speech to that effect three days before the election, in which he planned to declare victory and claim voter fraud. In other words, Trump was already prepared to attempt to overturn the election before election night even happened.
Read the rest at Public Notice. It’s a very good summary of the case.
For a quick summary of the various kinds of charges in the indictment, check out this uncharacteristically short post by Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel: The Various Kinds of Georgia Crimes in the RICO indictment.
I was very happy to see that Mark Meadows was among the Trump allies who were indicted. Insider: Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, will face his first post-2020 election-related indictment in Georgia.
Mark Meadows, a Freedom Caucus conservative who rose to become Donald Trump’s final chief of staff, will face a criminal indictment in Georgia alongside former president.
Fulton County District Attorney Fanni Willis unveiled her sprawling indictment late Monday evening, ending Meadows’ run thus far of successfully ducking some of the legal serious legal liability that others in Trump’s orbit have faced stemming from their actions that took place during the waning weeks of his presidency.
It means Meadows may soon join HR Haldeman, Nixon’s self-dubbed “son of a bitch,” in infamy among those who held one of the most powerful posts in the federal government, Chief of Staff. Haldeman, of course, faced prison time over his role in trying to cover up the Watergate break-in.
According to the indictment, Meadows, like each one of his fellow co-defendants, is facing a violation of Georgia’s RICO law. He is also facing an additional count related to his participation in Trump’s January 2, 2021 call with George Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during which Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” enough votes so he could win.
Meadows’ other conduct is mentioned throughout the indictment. In particular, Willis zeroed in on Meadows’ efforts to reach state lawmakers in Pennsylvania. Willis later told reporters that the grand jury believed conduct outside of her jurisdiction helped furthered the conspiracy she alleged.
Meadows was not one of the unindicted co-conspirators in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment related to conduct after the election, leading to speculation that the former chief of staff could be assisting the federal investigation.
Of course, Trump can’t keep his big mouth shut. He announced on Truth Social that he has proof of election fraud in Georgia which he will announce next Monday.
It’s not clear why he didn’t reveal this information before he was indicted.
One more article on Trump’s obvious first delay tactic in the Georgia case:
Kyle Cheney at Politico: An early test for Georgia prosecutors: Trump’s likely bid to take the case to federal court.
One of the first big battles in the new racketeering case against Donald Trump is likely imminent: Should the former president face a jury in state or federal court?
Although the charges were filed in state court in Fulton County, Ga., Trump is sure to attempt to “remove” the case to federal court, where he would potentially have a friendlier jury pool and the chance of drawing a judge whom he appointed to the bench.
To try to get the case into federal court, Trump is expected to argue that much of the conduct he’s been charged with was undertaken in his capacity as an officer of the federal government, because he was still president during the critical period when he and his allies attempted to subvert the 2020 election results. A federal law, known as a “removal statute,” generally allows any “officer of the United States” who is prosecuted or sued in state court to transfer the case to federal court if the case stems from the officer’s governmental duties.
Trump has already attempted to make this move in New York, where he’s facing state charges for falsifying business records to cover up an affair with a porn star. A federal judge there rejected the effort and directed the case back to state court, noting that the charges there didn’t really implicate Trump’s powers as president.
“There is an ‘outer perimeter’ to a President’s authority and responsibilities beyond which he engages in private conduct,” U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled, sending the case back to New York state court. Trump is appealing the ruling.
But Georgia could be different: Most of the charges Trump is facing — sweeping allegations of using his office to corrupt the 2020 election — involve his presidential authorities and his efforts to manipulate the federal processes he was charged with overseeing. That makes removal a more viable option in Georgia than New York.
The judge in the case has even less experience than Aileen Cannon.
Those are the basics on the Georgia indictments. We will learn much more in the days ahead.
Friday Reads: Breaking News!
Posted: August 11, 2023 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Afternoon Reads, Criminal Justice System, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: David Weiss, Fani Willis, Hunter Biden, Jack Smith, John Lauro, Judge Tanya Chutkan, Merrick Garland, racketeering case, Special Counsel 5 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Breaking News: Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to oversee the Hunter Biden investigation.
Associated Press: Attorney General Garland appoints a special counsel in the Hunter Biden probe.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday he is appointing a special counsel in the Hunter Biden probe, deepening the investigation of the president’s son ahead of the 2024 election.
Garland said he is naming David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware who has been probing the financial and business dealings of the president’s son, as the special counsel.
Garland said on Tuesday that Weiss told him that “in his judgment, his investigation has reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a Special Counsel, and he asked to be appointed.”
“Upon considering his request, as well as the extraordinary circumstances relating to this matter, I have concluded it is in the public interest to appoint him as special counsel,” Garland said.
The move is a momentous development from the typically cautious Garland and comes amid a pair of sweeping Justice Department probes into Donald Trump, the former president, and President Joe Biden’s chief rival in next year’s election. It comes as House Republicans are mounting their own investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
Jim Jordan must be celebrating.
Also Breaking News: The hearing with Judge Tanya Chutkan on the prosecution’s request for a protective order in January 6 case has just wrapped up. Chutkan made it pretty clear that Trump had better not intimidate witnesses or pollute the jury pool, or he will be in big trouble. She alsBo told the defense to stop talking about politics. This is a criminal case, and she will not allow the politics to interfere with her decisions. Trump must follow the conditions he was given at his arraignment. If that causes him to have to keep his big fat mouth shut in some instances, that’s just too bad (my words). If you want a good, detailed thread on the hearing, I recommend this one by Brandi Buchman:
Read it on Twitter. And here is Buchman’s story at Law and Crime: Trump lawyers, special counsel square off in court on limits for pretrial evidence in Jan. 6 indictment.
A report from CNN: Judge Chutkan says Trump’s right to free speech in January 6 case is ‘not absolute.’
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan said that she plans to put serious limits over how sensitive evidence is handled in the Donald Trump 2020 election interference case, in a dramatic hearing Friday in Washington, DC, that could set the tone for the upcoming trial.
The former president has a right to free speech, but that right is “not absolute,” Chutkan said. “Mr. Trump, like every American, has a First Amendment right to free speech, but that right is not absolute. In a criminal case such as this one, the defendant’s free speech is subject to the rules.” [….]
Whether or not Trump’s public statements are covered by the protective order that’s issued, she said, if they result in the intimidation of a witness or the obstruction of justice, “I will be scrutinizing them very carefully.”
Trump’s lawyer John Lauro said: “President Trump will scrupulously abide by his conditions of release.”
Chutkan adopted restrictions proposed by prosecutors that would bar Trump from publicly disclosing information from interview transcripts and recordings from the investigation, including from witness interviews with investigators that took place outside of the grand jury….
Chutkan and Lauro had several pointed exchanges about what the 2024 presidential contender should be allowed to say about the evidence that is turned over to him in the case.
“No one disagrees that any speech that intimidates a witness would be prohibited, what we are talking about is fair use of information,” Lauro said at one point, putting forward a hypothetical that Trump is publicly remarking on something from his personal memory that is also evidence in the case.
“The fact that he is running a political campaign currently has to yield to the administration of justice,” the judge said. “And if that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say in a political speech, that is just how it’s going to have to be.”
Lauro put forward a hypothetical of Trump making a statement while debating his former Vice President Mike Pence – who is also running for the White House now and is a key witness in the criminal case – that overlapped with what’s in discovery.
The judge wasn’t sold.
“He is a criminal defendant. He is going to have constraints the same as any defendant. This case is going to proceed in a normal order,” Chutkan said.
From The Daily Beast: Jack Smith Wants Trump Convicted by Super Tuesday.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office wants to put former President Donald Trump on trial for his attempted coup in January next year—a move that, if approved by a judge, could brand him a felon before the biggest GOP presidential primaries.
In a filing on Thursday, the special counsel’s office proposed a trial date of January 2, 2024, which they say would take “no longer than four to six weeks.”
Should U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya approve that date, Trump’s trial could be done and dusted before the GOP’s primaries in South Carolina and Michigan, with plenty of time before the delegate-rich slate of Super Tuesday states in March.
Trump already faces two other separate criminal trials in March and May in New York and Florida, respectively. However, those trials have been delayed enough that Trump still managed to snag key elections before risking the embarrassing reality of being convicted of felonies while asking voters to make him the Republican nominee.
Prosecutors working on these different cases all wanted earlier dates, but judges gave into Trump’s demands for more time. While his lawyers cited the sheer amount of overwhelming work required to sort through millions of pages of evidence, the former president has used political rallies and online posts to accuse prosecutors of trying to derail his re-election campaign. In the end, judges gave Trump a little extra time.
Also at The Daily Beast, Jose Pagliery has a story on Judge “loose” Cannon and another big mistake: Inside One ‘Egregious’ Mistake From Trump’s Florida Judge Aileen Cannon.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, whose pro-Trump bias and head-turning errors have raised questions about whether she should be overseeing former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Florida, made what appears to be another surprising mistake last year.
Now, a defense lawyer is seizing on her misstep to try freeing his client from prison—even though he was caught on tape violently throwing a courtroom chair at a prosecutor and threatening to kill him.
The blunder was simple and entirely avoidable. The federal judge told jurors they could find the man, Christopher Wilkins, “guilty or not guilty.” But then she handed jurors a verdict form that didn’t even have those options.
“How far does somebody have to go to school to say that a verdict form is supposed to say guilty and not guilty?” asked defense lawyer Jeffrey Garland. “That would be one of the more egregious versions of jury instruction error… it’s such a rare error.”
Garland formally filed an appeal on Thursday and hopes to overturn a case that’s as black-and-white as they come—on a technicality.
“This is the judge’s deal. This is nobody else’s deal. I’m gonna tell ya, I’ve done a lot of appeals, and I’ve got a pretty good winning record. This is a great issue,” he said. “For a guy who’s on tape throwing a chair in court, it’s pretty ‘not good’ behavior. It would have been simple. You have a trial, properly instruct a jury, give them a form, and the jury’s gonna do what the jury’s gonna do.”
Cannon’s short and controversial history on the bench is under a microscope, given that she is presiding over such an historic criminal trial: that of a former president facing prison time for mishandling classified records at Mar-a-Lago and lying to the feds in a coverup. Trump himself appointed her in his final months in office, yet she has not recused herself from the case.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
Trump allies face potential charges in Georgia over voting machine breaches.
The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia has evidence to charge multiple allies of the former president involved in breaching voting machines in the state, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The potential charges at issue are computer trespass felonies, the people said, though the final list of defendants and whether they will be brought as part of a racketeering case when prosecutors are expected to present evidence to the grand jury next week remain unclear.
To bring a racketeering case under Georgia state law, prosecutors need to show the existence of an “enterprise” predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes, of which computer trespass is one. The Guardian has reported that prosecutors believe they have sufficient evidence for a racketeering case.
The statute itself prohibits the intentional use of a computer or computer network without authorization in order to remove data, either temporarily or permanently. It also prohibits interrupting or interfering with the use of a computer, as well as altering or damaging a computer.
Prosecutors have taken a special interest in the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, Georgia, by Trump allies because of the brazen nature of the operation and the possibility that Trump was aware that his allies intended to covertly gain access to the machines.
In a series of particularly notable incidents, forensics experts hired by Trump allies copied data from virtually every part of the voting system, which is used statewide in Georgia, before uploading them to a password-protected website that could be accessed by 2020 election deniers.
Read the rest at the link above.
I’m going to end there. This post is mostly breaking news. I’ll update in the comments if I hear more about these stories.
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