Sadly, I’m unable to post cat art today because WordPress has made it very difficult to resize images to manageable dimensions. Dakinikat seems to have figured out how to do it, but I’m still confused. I’m hoping I’ll be able to master the technique or learn to use one of WordPress’s other god-awful methods of posting. Today I’m reposting Tweets from Lorenzo the Cat.
(Dakinikat note: testing the images thing, so there are a few popping up here now.)
The death toll from the Hawaii wildfires has risen to 80, Maui county officials said in an update late Friday, as firefighters continued work to contain fires on the island. Government officials are launching a review of the state’s emergency response, as residents criticized relief efforts as insufficient and records indicated that emergency sirens weren’t activated at the state or county level during the wildfires, though alerts were sent to cellphones and broadcast networks.
Here’s what to know
Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez (D) said her department would begin a “comprehensive review of critical decision-making and standing policies leading up to, during, and after the wildfires.” Gov. Josh Green (D) told CNN that officials would investigate why sirens reportedly failed to warn residents in Maui, adding that the telecommunications lines that those sirens relied upon were “destroyed very rapidly” by the fast-moving flames.
The scale of the damage is becoming clearer, with an assessment from the Pacific Disaster Center estimating that more than 2,207 structures were damaged, and that the vast majority of buildings exposed to the fire were residential.
Authorities on Maui say more than 1,400 people are in emergency shelters, and urged residents to text rather than call as cell service resumes in affected areas, to ensure limited resources are shared.
Local officials also advised residents to exclusively drink bottled water, saying that local water systems could contain harmful contaminants. Structures in the Upper Kula and Lahaina water systems were destroyed by the fire, which may have caused benzene — a carcinogen — to enter the water system, they said.
The Lahaina fire that has surged through Hawaii is already one of the deadliest in U.S. history, and officials warn the toll is likely to rise. It is the second-deadliest fire in the last 100 years, after the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California that killed 85 people and consumed the town of Paradise.
Read more recent updates at the WaPo.
More info from Maui Humane Society and other orgs on how to help the displaced animals of the Maui fires. https://t.co/WCplDe3lxP
The disaster that erased the beloved West Maui town of Lahaina this week comes with the bitter taste of bewilderment. Brush fires met high winds whipped by a far-off hurricane, and overnight a historic town was gone, a pile of smoke and ashes. A lush watercolor landscape is redrawn in gray and black. At least 55 people are dead, and many more are missing.
A hurricane just burned down a town. It’s all so weird and horrifying.
Living in Hawaii long enough gives you a familiarity with sudden catastrophes, the kind that can obliterate a community in a week, a day or an instant. To live in my home state or to love it from a distance is to know the continual threat of hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanoes.
But a lethal wildfire? That was new for Hawaii. And everything is changed.
We may not get a definitive verdict on whether Lahaina died for humanity’s environmental sins, but we know that climate change is making Hawaii hotter and drier and that invasive grasses have been allowed to run rampant. Drought on Maui turned the grass into ready fuel and heightened the risk of wildfires, and then a hurricane brushed by.
The planetary crisis is hardly Hawaii’s fault, but like other island areas in our rising oceans, it is unusually imperiled, and it has to do something. And when wildfires swept over Maui and the Big Island, it was a brutal reminder that Hawaii needs to be a serious climate leader, to nurture and spread the environmental consciousness that too many other states lack.
Hawaii will surely find ways to lower the risk of wildfires and get better at fighting them. Lahaina will rebuild, and residents will return. But climate resiliency is a far bigger challenge than adding fire trucks and subduing invasive grasses. It’s an expensive mess of problems across the state.
Will the communities on Oahu’s North Shore be able to retreat from the rising ocean before they are washed away? How will flower and fruit growers on Maui and the Big Island cope with extended drought? What happens if or when the coral reefs die, the native trees and forest birds are gone, weather patterns shift and the cooling trade winds disappear?
All good questions, and we all must “do something.” Climate change is happening. We can see it all around us.
Pet bunny rescued from the Maui fires. Its whiskers and fur are singed but its fine and is now at the Maui Humane Society hoping to be reunited with its owners. pic.twitter.com/Q1maaWaRJJ
According to AFP, new research shows the limit, known as the “wet bulb temperature,” representing the maximum combination of heat and humidity before sweat no longer evaporates from the skin, leading to heatstroke, organ failure, and death.
While this threshold occurs at around 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit), recent research suggests it could be even lower.
Colin Raymond from NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the wet bulb limit of human survival has been breached only around a dozen times, primarily in South Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Although none of these occurrences extended beyond two hours, they effectively averted widespread mortality events associated with this critical threshold.
Nonetheless, specialists stress that fatalities resulting from intense heat are feasible even at less severe levels. Factors such as age, health, and socio-economic circumstances play a role in determining an individual’s susceptibility.
In Europe last summer, for instance, more than 61,000 fatalities were linked to heat, even in regions where the perilous wet bulb temperature range is seldom attained.
Scientists warn that dangerous wet bulb events will become more frequent as global temperatures continue to rise. The frequency of such events has doubled over the last four decades, driven by human-caused climate change.
According to Raymond’s research, wet bulb temperatures exceeding 35 degrees Celsius could become common worldwide if global temperatures rise by 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
To test the wet bulb limit, researchers at Pennsylvania State University evaluated young, healthy participants in a heat chamber. They found that the “critical environmental limit,” where the body can’t prevent further core temperature increase, was reached at 30.6 degrees Celsius wet bulb temperature, lower than previously theorized.
MARION — In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher’s home.
Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”
The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.
Meyer said he had never heard of police raiding a newspaper office during his 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal or 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois.
“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid.
A bit more:
Emily Bradbury, executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said the police raid is unprecedented in Kansas.
“An attack on a newspaper office through an illegal search is not just an infringement on the rights of journalists but an assault on the very foundation of democracy and the public’s right to know,” Bradbury said. “This cannot be allowed to stand.”
Meyer reported last week that Marion restaurant owner Kari Newell had kicked newspaper staff out of a public forum with LaTurner, whose staff was apologetic. Newell responded to Meyer’s reporting with hostile comments on her personal Facebook page.
A confidential source contacted the newspaper, Meyer said, and provided evidence that Newell had been convicted of drunken driving and continued to use her vehicle without a driver’s license. The criminal record could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license for her catering business.
A reporter with the Marion Record used a state website to verify the information provided by the source. But Meyer suspected the source was relaying information from Newell’s husband, who had filed for divorce. Meyer decided not to publish a story about the information, and he alerted police to the situation.
“We thought we were being set up,” Meyer said.
Police notified Newell, who then complained at a city council meeting that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents, which isn’t true. Her public comments prompted the newspaper to set the record straight in a story published Thursday.
Sometime before 11 a.m. Friday, officers showed up simultaneously at Meyer’s home and the newspaper office. They presented a search warrant that alleges identity theft and unlawful use of a computer.
The paper didn’t even publish the information, but a magistrate judge approved a search warrant! This is the kind of behavior by law enforcement that Trump would promote if he gets back into a position of power.
In honor of International Cat Day, let's celebrate this badass Ukrainian cat again who told Mr. Putin, "Screw you buddy, I still have eight lives left." pic.twitter.com/IuerlQDSdZ
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan set the tone for how she would preside over the election subversion against Donald Trump in a hearing Friday focused on what limits would be placed on how the former president can handle the evidence prosecutors will be turning over to him.
Chutkan kicked off the hearing – the first in the case before her and one that took place in her courtroom at DC federal court house – noting that while Trump’s rights as a criminal defendant would be protected, his First Amendment right to free speech was “not absolute.”
“In a criminal case such as this one, the defendant’s free speech is subject to the rules,” she said.
The judge closed the hearing with a promise that the case would advance like any normal proceeding in the criminal justice system, but warned that the more “inflammatory” statements were made by a party, the quicker she would need to move toward a trial to preserve a fair jury.
“It is a bedrock principle of the judicial process in this country,” she said, while quoting precedent, “that legal trials are not like elections, to be won through the use of the meeting hall, the radio and the newspaper.”
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan warned Donald Trump and his attorney Friday that repeated “inflammatory” statements about his latest criminal prosecution would force her to speed his trial on charges related to his bid to subvert the 2020 election.
“I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements about this case,” Chutkan told Trump lawyer John Lauro during a hearing. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”
Chutkan’s stark admonition came at the conclusion of her first courtroom session in the newest criminal case against the former president. The aim of the hearing was for special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors and Trump’s attorneys to hash out disputes about the handling of evidence in the case. Once Chutkan enters a so-called “protective order” governing evidence, prosecutors say they’re prepared to share millions of pages of documents with Trump’s team, jumpstarting the case and setting it on a path to trial.
But Chutkan, aware of the national spotlight on her oversight of the explosive case, repeatedly emphasized that she intended to keep politics out of the courtroom and treat Trump like any other criminal defendant. That included potential consequences if he makes statements that could be construed as harassing or threatening witnesses.
“The fact that he’s running a political campaign has to yield to the orderly administration of justice,” Chutkan said. “If that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say about witnesses in this case, that’s how it has to be.”
“Even arguably ambiguous statements from parties or their counsel, if they can be reasonably interpreted to intimidate witnesses or to prejudice potential jurors, can threaten the process,” Chutkan added later. “The more a party makes inflammatory statements about this case which could taint the jury pool … the greater the urgency will be that we proceed to trial quickly.”
Judge Chutkan has obviously grokked that a speedy trial would be Trump’s worst nightmare.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election rejected his request on Friday to be able to speak broadly about evidence and witnesses — and warned Mr. Trump she would take necessary “measures” to keep him from intimidating witnesses or tainting potential jurors.
The caution from the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, came during a 90-minute hearing in Federal District Court in Washington to discuss the scope of a protective order over the discovery evidence in Mr. Trump’s case, a typically routine step in criminal matters. Later Friday, Judge Chutkan imposed the order but agreed to a modification requested by the Trump legal team that it apply only to “sensitive” materials and not all evidence turned over to the defense.
She concluded the hearing with a blunt warning to Mr. Trump, and an unmistakable reference to a recent social media post in which he warned, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” — a statement his spokesman later said was aimed at political opponents and not at people involved in the case.
“I do want to issue a general word of caution — I intend to ensure the orderly administration of justice in this case as I would in any other case, and even arguably ambiguous statements by the parties or their counsel,” she said, could be considered an attempt to “intimidate witnesses or prejudice potential jurors,” triggering the court to take action.
“I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements in this case,” she added. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to protect the integrity of these proceedings.”
Breaking News: Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to oversee the Hunter Biden investigation.
Garland is making David Weiss special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. He says Weiss asked for this move on Tuesday. It means Weiss will write a report on his 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.
BREAKING: Judge Chutkan just ruled that she will issue a protective order over the handling of evidence in trump's election interference case.
She also said trump does have a right to free speech, but it's "not absolute," as far as threats of harm to witnesses and others.
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:
And away we go. Judge Tanya Chutkan is on the bench.
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.
New: US judge Tanya Chutkan appears to warn Trump at the end of the hearing: The more that a party makes inflammatory statements that could intimidate witnesses, the quicker she will want to go to trial to ensure an untainted jury pool
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.
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.
The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell on the expected Georgia indictments:
NEW: Fulton County DA Fani Willis has evidence to charge multiple Trump allies involved in the breach of voting machines in Coffee County with computer trespass felonies, per ppl familiar. @guardian exclusive + explainer https://t.co/APPck5113z
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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As usual, Trump steals the headlines. He’s good at this. As every toddler learns, not all attention is good attention. It’s also some of his worst schticks. He loves to attack strong women. He’s especially insecure about strong, brainy black women in powerful positions. I loved Mike Luckovich’s cartoon featured today. It’s easy to find the ongoing attack on these especially talented women.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Wednesday flatly denied that she had a relationship with a former client and other rumors spread by former President Donald Trump in a new campaign ad.
In an email to her colleagues, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Willis called the information in a television spot bankrolled by the Trump campaign “derogatory and false.” She urged her staff not to respond to any of the allegations.
“You may not comment in any way on the ad or any of the negativity that may be expressed against me, your colleagues, this office in the coming days, weeks or months,” Willis wrote in the email, sent early Wednesday. “We have no personal feelings against those we investigate or prosecute and we should not express any.”
In the minute-long ad, titled “The Fraud Squad,” the narrator refers to Willis as “Biden’s newest lackey.” It says that Willis presided over a sharp rise of violent crimes in Atlanta and highlights her office being disqualified from investigating Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in her long-running election interference case due to a political conflict of interest.
But the most incendiary allegation is that Willis “got caught hiding a relationship with a gang member she was prosecuting.” It cites as evidence a Jan. 25, 2023, article in Rolling Stone.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to seek more than a dozen indictments when she presents her case regarding efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia before a grand jury next week, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Willis, a Democrat, has been eyeing conspiracy and racketeering charges, which would allow her to bring a case against multiple defendants. Her wide-ranging criminal probe focuses on efforts to pressure election officials, the plot to put forward fake electors and a voting systems breach in rural Coffee County, Georgia.
Trump acolytes who took part in each of those schemes believe they will face charges in Georgia next week, people familiar with their thinking said. Trump also believes he will be charged in the case, CNN has reported.
Willis’ office declined to comment.
The witnesses Willis has subpoenaed when she presents her case include former Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, former Georgia Democratic state Sen. Jen Jordan and independent journalist George Chidi. All of them previously testified before a special purpose grand jury that was tasked with investigating the Trump case and heard from more than 75 witnesses.
Willis launched her investigation into Trump in early 2021, soon after he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and pressured the Republican to “find” the votes necessary for Trump to win the state.
At a campaign event Tuesday, Trump continued to insist it was a “perfect phone call.”
Willis has been reportedly weighing racketeering charges in the Trump case. RICO is a statute the district attorney has spoken fondly of and used in unorthodox ways to bring charges against teachers as well as musicians in the Atlanta area.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi is off the bench as former President Trump’s top adversary on Capitol Hill.
After stepping down as Speaker last year, Pelosi (D-Calif.) has flown largely under the radar in the Democratic caucus, allowing a crop of new leaders to take control of the group she steered for two decades.
But the California Democrat — now with the title of “Speaker Emerita” — resumed her role of top Trump antagonist following his latest indictment, landing blows on the former president, praising the charges, and showcasing her unique ability to get under the skin of the man with whom she went toe-to-toe during the four years he occupied the White House.
The bitter dynamics between the two leaders were on full display as Trump was indicted on charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol rampage — a day for which Pelosi has said she would “never forgive” Trump.
“I wasn’t in the courtroom, of course, but when I saw his coming out of his car and this or that, I saw a scared puppy,” Pelosi on Friday told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell of Trump arriving at his arraignment. “He looked very, very, very concerned about the fate.”
“I didn’t see any bravado or confidence or anything like that,” she continued. “He knows the truth — that he lost the election and now he’s got to face the music.”
Trump responded to the remarks on Tuesday, tearing into Pelosi — “She is a Wicked Witch” — while referencing last year’s violent attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi. An assailant looking for the then-Speaker entered the couple’s San Francisco residence and hit Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer, leaving him with serious injuries.
Trump at the time called the attack “a terrible thing” without remarking further.
Trump continues to hold a grudge against the U.S. Women’s World Cup Soccer Team. He especially hates the athletic and erudite Megan Rapinoe. This is also from The Hill as reported by Sarah Fortinsky. “Trump knocks ‘woke’ US women’s soccer team after World Cup departure.”
Former President Trump knocked the “woke” U.S. women’s soccer team after its loss in the round of 16 of the Women’s World Cup over the weekend.
“The ‘shocking and totally unexpected’ loss by the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team to Sweden is fully emblematic of what is happening to the our once great Nation under Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Sunday evening.
“Many of our players were openly hostile to America – No other country behaved in such a manner, or even close. WOKE EQUALS FAILURE. Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!! MAGA,” Trump continued, taking aim at 38-year-old midfielder Megan Rapinoe.
It is almost like Trump is begging to be thrown into custody. This is from The Rolling Stone.“Trump Promises to Violate Protective Order. The former president once again attacked Judge Chutkan, who is set to rule on a protective order requested by the Justice Department later this week.” Of course, his side thrill was to attack Judge Chutkan. This is reported by Nikki McCann Ramirez.
While speaking at a campaign event in New Hampshire, the former president told the crowd that prosecutors were attempting to take away his First Amendment rights through the protective order.
“Crooked Joe now wants the thug prosecutor, this deranged guy, to file a court order taking away my First Amendment rights so that I can’t speak…I will talk about it. I will. They’re not taking away my First Amendment right.”
Trump: I will talk about it. They are not taking away my first amendment right pic.twitter.com/HdFCWXbN12
At his arraignment on Thursday, the former president affirmed his understanding that — as explained by Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya — “it is a crime to try to influence a juror or to threaten or attempt to bribe a witness or any other person who may have information about your case, or to retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.”
Security has been increased around the federal judge overseeing the criminal case alleging Donald Trump used “unlawful means” in an effort to stay in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan was seen by NBC News Thursday walking into the cafeteria inside Washington’s E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse for a cup of coffee while accompanied by U.S. Marshals. Some of the marshals then accompanied her back to her chambers.
Judges typically do not receive such escorts when moving around the courthouse and Chutkan was observed as recently as last week walking around the building without security.
The heightened security for the judge was first reported by CNN.
The change comes after the former president complained about the judge on his social media platform, Truth Social, this past week.
“There is no way I can get a fair trial with the judge ‘assigned’ to the ridiculous freedom of speech/fair elections case. Everybody knows this and so does she! We will be immediately asking for recusal of this judge on very powerful grounds,” he wrote in all caps in one of the posts on Sunday.
His legal team has yet to file a motion asking the judge to recuse herself. Trump has pleaded not guilty in the case and maintains the charges are part of a political “witch hunt” aimed at derailing his 2024 presidential run.
PROVO, Utah (AP) — An armed Utah man accused of making violent threats against President Joe Biden was shot and killed by FBI agents hours before the president landed in the state Wednesday, authorities said.
Special agents were trying to serve a warrant on the home of Craig Deleeuw Robertson in Provo, south of Salt Lake City, when the shooting happened at 6:15 a.m., the FBI said in a statement.
Robertson was armed at the time of the shooting, according to two law enforcement sources who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of an ongoing investigation.
Robertson posted online Monday that he had heard Biden was coming to Utah and he was planning to dig out a camouflage suit and begin “cleaning the dust off the M24 sniper rifle,” a post that came after months of graphic online threats against several public figures, according to court documents. Robertson referred to himself as a “MAGA Trumper,” a reference to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, and also posted threats against top law enforcement officials overseeing court cases against Trump.
Neighbors described Robertson as a frail, elderly man — his online profile put his age as 74 — who walked with the aid of a hand-carved stick. Though he regularly carried guns, they said he didn’t seem a threat.
I really can’t wait to be rid of this all. Just lock him the fuck up already!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
I’m in a Ramones sorta mood.
I hear the bells of freedom chimin’ And inside my heart, I feel I’m dyin’ Wise guys never compromise Then they lose their rights and they act surprised Jail really cuts ya down to size
Let the punishment fit the crime The footprints on the sand of time The philosophy of the poet’s rhyme Makes a man humble in his prime
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As usual, I’m riveted to the coverage of Trump’s criminal cases. It’s not particularly surprising that he plans to follow his usual method of defense: delay, delay, delay. He hopes to delay the trials until after the 2024 election so that if he’s elected, he can dismiss the cases against him or pardon himself.
In Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon seems willing to help Trump slow down the stolen documents case as long as possible.
In DC, Judge Tanya Chutkan is less likely to accept his delay tactics in the January 6 case, but, at the moment, he has succeeded in slowing down the discovery process–probably for a couple of weeks.
Here’s the latest on the two cases.
On August 2, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked Judge Cannon for a Garcia hearing to evaluate a possible conflict of interest involving Walt Nauta’s defense attorney Stanley Woodward. Nauta is a co-defendant with Trump in the stolen documents case. NBC News: Special counsel cites potential conflicts for Mar-a-Lago defense attorney.
The special counsel prosecuting former President Trump for his alleged mishandling of government secrets has asked for a hearing to discuss whether the defense attorney for a co-defendant has a conflict of interest stemming from his multiple clients.
According to a court filing on Wednesday, attorney Stanley Woodward’s current and past clients include three people who could be called to testify against Walt Nauta, Trump’s aide who is charged with conspiring to obstruct the government’s efforts to reclaim classified documents.
Woodward’s clients include two aides who worked for Trump at the White House and into his post-presidency, and a Mar-a-Lago IT director identified as “Trump Employee 4” in the updated indictment. The Washington, D.C.-based lawyer also represents at least seven other people who have been questioned by prosecutors in the case. He declined to comment when reached by NBC News.
Trump’s Save America PAC has spent $20 million on legal fees in the first half of this year, according to FEC filings. Woodward’s firm was paid more than $200,000 in the first six months of the year.
In defending Nauta, Woodward may need to cross-examine a witness with whom he has had privileged discussions, which raises the risk of an “attorney’s improper use or disclosure of the client’s confidences during the cross-examination,” or “may cause the attorney to pull his punches during cross-examination, perhaps to protect the client’s confidences or ‘to advance the attorney’s own personal interest,’” the motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith’s office argues.
Woodward was previously defending Yuscil Taveras, who has now hired a new attorney and appears to be cooperating with the government.
“Employee 4, who is unnamed in the indictment but was identified by NBC News as Yuscil Taveras, secured a new lawyer in July, and did not waive the conflict, according to the motion. Roughly three weeks later, a grand jury charged Trump, Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira, a Mar-a-Lago property manager, over their efforts to have Taveras delete Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage.
Prosecutors told Woodward earlier this year that they believed Taveras had information that would incriminate Nauta, and that representing both clients at the same time raised a potential conflict of interest. Woodward said he advised both clients of the government’s position, but that he was unaware of anything the employee could say to incriminate Nauta and did not see a conflict, according to the filing.
Judge Cannon was unconvinced, and instead has revealed the existence of secret grand jury still investigating this case in DC., thus delaying the case for who knows how long.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Monday asked federal prosecutors to explain the use of grand juries in Florida and Washington in the classified documents case against Donald Trump even though charges were filed in South Florida.
Cannon, the federal judge in South Florida assigned to the case, posed the question in a court filing Monday and told federal prosecutors to respond by Aug. 22.
“The response shall address the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate and/or to seek post-indictment hearings on matters pertinent to the instant indicted matter in this district,” Cannon wrote.
Trump and two aides — Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira — were charged this summer in a 42-count indictment that accuses the former president of improperly retaining 32 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club, and seeking to thwart government attempts to retrieve them….
For many months, Justice Department prosecutors had questioned witnesses in the Florida case before a federal grand jury in Washington. The secret proceedings yielded much of the evidence at the crux of the case. But in May, the grand jury activity appeared to continue at a federal courthouse in Miami. Ultimately, prosecutors filed charges in a West Palm Beach courthouse — a courthouse in the same district as Miami and the area where Mar-a-Lago is located.
Prosecutors said in a court filing last week that they continued to use the grand jury in Washington after they initially charged Trump in June to investigate alleged instances of obstructing the investigation. The focus of the July superseding indictment was on obstruction, alleging that all defendants tried to delete security footage that the government wanted as evidence in the case.
“The grand jury in this district and a grand jury in the District of Columbia continued to investigate further obstructive activity, and a superseding indictment was returned on July 27, 2023,” prosecutors wrote in the filing.
Judge Cannon apparently disapproves, and decided to reveal the information the Special Counsel had given her under seal.
Prosecutors included that revelation in a motion asking the judge to consider holding a hearing to determine whether Nauta’s attorney has too many conflicts of interest to provide his client with adequate legal advice.
The government lawyers said Stanley Woodward — the Nauta attorney — has represented at least seven other clients whom prosecutors have interviewed about Trump’s alleged efforts to keep classified documents in defiance of the government’s demand they be returned. Two of Woodward’s clients could be called as government witnesses in the trial, the filing by the government said.
If that happens, Woodward may need to cross-examine his other clients as part of defending Nauta, said the prosecutors leading the Justice Department investigation.
The requested hearing — known as a Garcia hearing — is fairly common in legal proceedings. At the hearing, prosecutors said Cannon should inform Nauta and the two witnesses, whose names have not been made public, of their legal rights and the potential conflicts their attorney poses. Lawyers are generally required to flag to a judge any potential conflicts of interest they encounter.
Cannon said Nauta’s lawyers are expected to respond to the judge’s question about the two grand jury locations and the prosecutors’ request for the Garcia hearing.
So it’s a normal request, but Cannon is going to drag the process out as long as she can, and, instead of keeping the existence of the secret grand jury under seal, she decided to announce it to the world.
Today [August 7] in the Southern District of Florida’s version of United States v. Trump, Judge Aileen Cannon issued an order denying the Justice Department’s motion to seal and requesting supplemental briefing. While seemingly insignificant, today’s order raises troubling concerns regarding her administration of the case….
Judge Cannon became nationally known in August and September 2022, when, in a civil case brought by Donald Trump, she issued a series of unusual orders blocking the Justice Department from reviewing documents seized at Mar-a-Lago and appointing a special master to oversee the Justice Department’s work. The Eleventh Circuit reversed Judge Cannon’s ruling, holding that the court lacked jurisdiction to interfere with the Justice Department’s review of lawfully-seized documents.
Unikowsky argues that it is important in dealing with Trump’s cases to be scrupulous in following norms. He doesn’t yet see any basis for asking for Judge Cannon to be removed from the case. It isn’t unusual for Judges to have rulings reversed and still continue to preside in the cases. I hope you’ll read the whole post if you’re interested in Unikowsky’s views on the case, but for this post, I’ll just cut to the chase.
The Justice Department’s motion notes: “The Government has advised Mr. Woodward of its intent to file this motion requesting a Garcia hearing and its reasons for doing so. Mr. Woodward has indicated that as a general matter he does not oppose the Court informing his client of the client’s rights or inquiring into potential waivers, but that he will not consent to this motion without seeing it in advance, and he requests the opportunity to respond.” This is a reasonable position for Woodward to take—he can’t possibly object to a hearing intended to safeguard his own client’s constitutional rights, but he wants to see the motion before taking a position.
So, this motion is a hanging curveball for Judge Cannon. It’s obvious how Judge Cannon should respond to this motion. She should wait to hear Woodward’s position on it!
If Woodward agrees a Garcia hearing is warranted, Judge Cannon should hold the hearing to ensure that Nauta’s rights are protected. Maybe there’s some discretionary reason to deny the hearing even if everyone agrees it’s warranted? I can’t think of one, but maybe. But clearly, Judge Cannon should wait until she hears from Woodward before deciding what to do….
Instead, Judge Cannon does something intensely weird. Two things, actually.
First, she denies the Justice Department’s motion to seal.
Second, she requests that Nauta file a response brief to the Justice Department’s motion addressing, among other things, “the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate and/or to seek post-indictment hearings on matters pertinent to the instant indicted matter in this district.” She also says Trump and De Oliveira “may, but are not required to” file a brief addressing this issue.
First, the court denies the Justice Department’s motion to seal, and strikes the motion for leave to file under seal, as well as the secret information itself, from the docket.
Here’s the court’s rationale: “The Special Counsel states in conclusory terms that the supplement should be sealed from public view ‘to comport with grand jury secrecy,’ but the motion for leave and the supplement plainly fail to satisfy the burden of establishing a sufficient legal or factual basis to warrant sealing the motion and supplement.”
Seriously?
Grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret, and the Justice Department is disclosing the identity of grand jury witnesses and the substance of their testimony, so it wants to keep that information secret. That’s not a “legal or factual basis to warrant sealing the motion and supplement”?
There’s a lot more, and it’s pretty useful if you are interested in this case.
The January 6 Case – Judge Tanya Chutkan
I’m sure you’re familiar with what has happened so far. Trump has been threatening Jack Smith, President Biden, the DOJ, and Judge Chutkan on social media and in speeches, even after he was warned not to commit crimes or tamper with witnesses or the jury pool. Smith requested a protective order before turning over discovery to the Trump team. He is concerned–with good reason–that Trump will release secret grand jury material and other evidence to the public so he can try the case in the media.
Former President Donald Trump argued Monday that he should be allowed to share evidence in his latest criminal case with “volunteer attorneys” and other unpaid advisers as he prepares to defend himself against charges related to his effort to subvert the 2020 election.
“The government cannot preclude the assistance of those individuals, nor should President Trump be required to seek permission from the Court before any such individual assists the defense,” Trump’s attorney John Lauro wrote in a filing that seeks to govern the handling of the mountains of evidence prosecutors have gathered and are preparing to share with Trump’s team.
“Such a limitation or requirement would unduly burden President Trump and impede the efficient preparation of his defense,” Lauro continued.
In a Sunday email between Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors, appended to Trump’s filing, assistant special counsel Thomas Windom raised concerns about Trump’s plan to broaden the group of legal advisers who might be permitted to review evidence in the case, worrying that the language Lauro proposed was “boundless.”
The dispute is one of several between Trump’s legal team and the special counsel over the handling of evidence in the case and how significantly to restrict Trump’s ability to publicly disclose any of the evidence he receives. Prosecutors have proposed a so-called “protective order” that would prohibit Trump or his legal team from publicly sharing any evidence produced by prosecutors. They say that they can’t begin sharing evidence with Trump and his team until a protective order is in place.
The matter now falls to U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, who ordered Lauro to respond to prosecutors’ proposed protective order by Monday at 5 p.m. She may either rule on the matter or seek additional argument at a hearing in the case. Prosecutors are due to propose a trial date by Thursday.
Lauro said the blanket restriction on disclosing any evidence prosecutors provide is draconian and should be narrowed to limit the treatment only of materials deemed “sensitive” — such as those containing personally identifying information, grand jury subpoena returns, sealed search warrant returns and recordings or transcripts of witness interviews.
The government asked the judge to simply grant the protective order, which is usually a routine decision. But instead, she ordered the parties to hash it out in a hearing this week–probably on Friday. Again the upshot is more delay, which is just what Trump wants.
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team says that a protective order proposed by special counsel Jack Smith would infringe on Trump’s right to free speech.
Trump’s attorneys made the argument in their response Monday to the special counsel’s motion for a protective order over the discovery evidence in the case against Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election by enlisting a slate of so-called “fake electors” targeting several states; using the Justice Department to conduct “sham election crime investigations”; and trying to enlist the vice president to “alter the election results” — all in an effort to subvert democracy and remain in power.
The former president has denied all wrongdoing and has dismissed the probe as politically motivated.
Monday’s filing argues for narrower limits on the protective order, which Trump’s attorneys say would protect sensitive materials while ensuring Trump’s right to free speech.
“In a trial about First Amendment rights, the government seeks to restrict First Amendment rights,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in their filing. “Worse, it does so against its administration’s primary political opponent, during an election season in which the administration, prominent party members, and media allies have campaigned on the indictment and proliferated its false allegations.”
Of course, the trial is not about First Amendment rights. Trump is charged with three criminal conspiracy counts.
Smith asked the judge for the protective order on Friday, referencing a social media post Trump made Friday afternoon in which he said, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
The proposed protective order submitted by Smith does not seek to bar Trump from commenting on the case in its entirety, but would restrict Trump and his attorneys from disclosing evidence such as materials returned from grand jury subpoenas and testimony from witnesses and other exhibits shown to the grand jury. It does not limit Trump from discussing materials that were already available to the public separate from the government’s investigation.
Smith’s attorneys have said the proposed order is largely modeled after similar protective orders issued in other cases.
But in their filing on Monday, Trump’s attorneys accuse Smith’s team of asking Judge Tanya Chutkan to “assume the role of censor and impose content-based regulations on President Trump’s political speech that would forbid him from publicly discussing or disclosing all non-public documents produced by the government, including both purportedly sensitive materials, and non-sensitive, potentially exculpatory documents.”
This is the crap we are going to have to deal with, folks. None of these trials is going to be quick or easy.
Security for the federal judge assigned to oversee the criminal case against former President Donald Trump over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election has been increased in the federal courthouse in Washington, DC.
CNN has observed more security detailed to Judge Tanya Chutkan, and deputy US Marshals discussed security plans for the judge on Monday. The US Marshals Service handles security at the DC District Court and a spokesman for the service said it “take(s) that responsibility very seriously.”
“Ensuring that judges can rule independently and free from harm or intimidation is paramount to the rule of law, and a fundamental mission of the USMS,” spokesperson Drew J. Wade told CNN. “While we do not discuss our specific security measures, we continuously review the measures in place and take appropriate steps to ensure the integrity of the federal judicial process.”
The uptick in security inside the courthouse comes after security measures, including fencing and yellow tape, were taken down following Trump’s arraignment last week. That hearing, where Trump pleaded not guilty, was presided over by a magistrate judge. Chutkan takes the case from there.
Trump has already said he will be asking for Chutkan to recuse herself from the case, writing on social media in all caps: “There is no way I can get a fair trial with the judge ‘assigned’ to the ridiculous freedom of speech/fair elections case.”
So that’s what’s happening in the two federal cases against Trump. It’s going to be a long road, and there will be a lot of stupidity to deal with, but we can get through it together!
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The TV at Vaugh’s taunts us with this week’s highs. 101, 99, 99, 100,100, 100, and 98. I’m afraid to watch for the “feels like” temperatures.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s another week of incredible heat here. Temple and I arrived at Vaughn’s last night to discover their new window units blasting cold air. At least one corner of the bar was cold. I was told it’s not so good over there on the opposite side. It was pretty quiet but much cooler than my house. There were quite a few moments last night when Temple and I were alone in the bar while others went out to smoke whatever. I’ve never experienced that before.
I go for short, quick walks with Temple, then scurry her home. I’ve noticed how many of the usual dog walkers do the same. The National Weather Service tells us to stay inside. Plus, there’s a surge in Covid. The kids have just started school, and I hope they don’t have to isolate again. It’s not good for kids. I’ve started to wonder if isolation is a new reality. I already go to places where I’m least likely to find a raging Trumper or a Piety Performance. I’ve been talking to a long-time friend about how worn-out and anxious that makes us. It’s just safer alone or with close friends or family if they’re nearby.
I have to admit that loneliness is not something in my emotional range. I like that safe feeling of being by myself, knowing that I can’t be interrupted by any outbursts or nonsense. I know how to entertain myself for long periods of time. That was a skill my mother taught me. I do realize that we’re more isolated now and that it’s bound to have differing impacts on different people. It’s a long read. It’s also an interesting one.
The question that preoccupied me and many others over much of the past eight years is how our democracy became so susceptible to a would-be strongman and demagogue. The question that keeps me up at night now—with increasing urgency as 2024 approaches—is whether we have done enough to rebuild our defenses or whether our democracy is still highly vulnerable to attack and subversion.
There’s reason for concern: the influence of dark money and corporate power, right-wing propaganda and misinformation, malign foreign interference in our elections, and the vociferous backlash against social progress. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” has been of compelling interest to me for many years. But I’ve long thought something important was missing from our national conversation about threats to our democracy. Now recent findings from a perhaps unexpected source—America’s top doctor—offer a new perspective on our problems and valuable insights into how we can begin healing our ailing nation.
In May, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published an advisory, warning that a growing “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” threatens Americans’ personal health and also the health of our democracy. Murthy reported that, even before COVID, about half of all American adults were experiencing substantial levels of loneliness. Over the past two decades, Americans have spent significantly more time alone, engaging less with family, friends, and people outside the home. By 2018, just 16 percent of Americans said they felt very attached to their local community.
Prison Paintings 9 1972 Gulsun Karamustafa born 1946 Purchased with funds provided by the Middle East North Africa Acquisitions Committee 2019 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T15189
I feel very attached to my community, but recently, it’s just been easier to just stay home. Am I the only one here?
An “epidemic of loneliness” may sound abstract at a time when our democracy faces concrete and imminent threats, but the surgeon general’s report helps explain how we became so vulnerable. In the past, surgeons general have at crucial moments sounded the alarm about major crises and drawn our attention to underappreciated threats, including smoking, HIV/AIDS, and obesity. This is one of those moments.
The rate of young adults who report suffering from loneliness went up every single year from 1976 to 2019. From 2003 to 2020, the average time that young people spent in person with friends declined by nearly 70 percent. Then the pandemic turbocharged our isolation.
According to the surgeon general, when people are disconnected from friends, family, and communities, their lifetime risk of heart disease, dementia, depression, and stroke skyrockets. Shockingly, prolonged loneliness is as bad, or worse, for our health as being obese or smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Researchers also say that loneliness can generate anger, resentment, and even paranoia. It diminishes civic engagement and social cohesion, and increases political polarization and animosity. Unless we address this crisis, Murthy warned, “we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.”
What does all of this loneliness and disconnection mean for our democracy?
Murthy carefully connects the dots between increasing social isolation and declining civic engagement. “When we are less invested in one another, we are more susceptible to polarization and less able to pull together to face the challenges that we cannot solve alone,” he wrote in The New York Times.
It’s not just the surgeon general who recognizes that social isolation saps the lifeblood of democracy. So do the ultra-right-wing billionaires, propagandists, and provocateurs who see authoritarianism as a source of power and profit.
There have always been angry young men alienated from mainstream society and susceptible to the appeal of demagogues and hate-mongers. But modern technology has taken the danger to another level. This was Steve Bannon’s key insight.
Long before Bannon ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he was involved in the world of online gaming. He discovered an army of what he later described as “rootless white males,” disconnected from the real world but highly engaged online and often quick to resort to sexist and racist attacks. When Bannon took over the hard-right website Breitbart News, he was determined to turn these socially isolated gamers into the shock troops of the alt-right, pumping them full of conspiracy theories and hate speech. Bannon pursued the same project as a senior executive at Cambridge Analytica, the notorious data-mining and online-influence company largely owned by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. According to a former Cambridge Analytica engineer turned whistleblower, Bannon targeted “incels,” or involuntarily celibate men, because they were easy to manipulate and prone to believing conspiracy theories. “You can activate that army,” Bannon told the Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
Egon Schiele, Prisoner! (April 24, 1912). Courtesy of the Albertina.
Clinton’s analysis is just what you would expect. Full of research, examples, and elucidation of where this might lead. It’s a heavy read but fully worth it.
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a defamation counterclaim by Donald Trump against the writer E. Jean Carroll in her pending lawsuit that accuses the former president of defaming her after she wrote that he had raped her.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, in a separate order made public Monday, ruled that Carroll’s lawyers can give the Manhattan District Attorney’s office a videotape and transcript of their deposition of Trump that they took last fall for the lawsuit.
That order raises the chance that Trump’s sworn testimony in Carroll’s case could be used against the former president as part of the DA’s pending criminal prosecution.
DA Alvin Bragg Jr. charged Trump, 77, earlier this year with falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. That case, in which Trump has pleaded not guilty, is set to go to trial next May.
Trump’s counterclaim in the Carroll suit focused on what he argued were her false statements, which he alleged badly harmed his reputation, a day after a jury verdict in May in her favor for $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation in a related civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Carroll during a CNN interview said that she thought in her head, “Oh, yes, he did — oh, yes, he did” — after jurors in that case did not find that Trump had raped her.
In the same interview, Carroll described her encounter in court with Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina right after the jury verdict, when Tacopina shook hands with her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge.
“Well, Joe Tacopina is very likeable. He’s sort of like an 18th Century strutting peacock,” Carroll said on CNN. “So, he sticks out his hand — first he congratulated Robbie. And then, he was congratulating people on the team. And as I put my hand forward, I said, ‘He did it and you know it.’ Then we shook hands, I passed on.”
Judge Kaplan, in dismissing the counterclaim, wrote that Carroll’s statements repeating a claim that Trump had raped her were “substantially true” because the jury had found he digitally penetrated her, even if it did not find that he had penetrated her with his penis, as is required for a rape charge under New York law.
Many people in Fulton County are preparing for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to announce an indictment against former U.S. President Donald Trump for allegedly trying to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential Election in Georgia.
An Atlanta-area lawyer tells 11Alive he believes Willis could indict Trump this coming week. It would be a state indictment and could be the most significant out of all the indictments since someone can only be pardoned on federal charges.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”
That infamous phone call between the then president and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger happened on January 2, 2021. Almost three years later, bright barriers surround the perimeter of the Fulton County Courthouse in preparation for Trump’s possible indictment for election interference in Georgia.
“We’ve never had this happen before, so no one quite knows what’s going to happen,” attorney Darryl Cohen said.
Cohen is a former Fulton County assistant district attorney and said while there’s a lot we don’t know, there’s certain things that are likely to happen.
“There are going to be Trump supporters that love him. There’s going to be Trump haters that hate him, and we don’t know if they’re going to be together or if they’re going to clash,” Cohen said. “We don’t know how many people are going to turn out, so this could all be the beginning of a story that we cannot begin to understand until it unravels.”
Normally someone goes to Fulton County Jail after an arrest, but Cohen believes that’s unlikely for the former president.
“I think that he will be mug shot and fingerprinted at the Fulton County Courthouse. We have a serious, really serious security problem,” Cohen said.
Cohen said if Willis announced an indictment against Trump, it would be assigned to a Fulton County superior judge.
Barbara Ess, Fire Escape [Shut-In Series] (2018-19). Courtesy of Magenta Plains.
Donald Trump blared Sunday morning that his legal team would be “immediately asking for recusal” of U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan from his latest criminal case, proclaiming (but not revealing) “very powerful grounds” for the demand.
Hours later, his attorney John Lauro would publicly walk back that plan, saying Trump was speaking with a “layman’s political sense” and reacting primarily because Chutkan was nominated to the bench by a Democrat. (She was confirmed 95-0 by the Senate in 2014 after Barack Obama nominated her).
“We haven’t made a final decision on that issue at all,” Lauro said on a podcast hosted by Florida defense attorney David Markus. “I think as lawyers we have to be very careful of those issues and handle them with the utmost delicacy.”
On Monday morning, Trump was again hammering on the recusal issue, calling Chutkan “the Judge of [special counsel Jack Smith’s] ‘dreams’ (WHO MUST BE RECUSED!).”
The back-and-forth on public airwaves and social media underscores the familiar tension between Trump and his legal team, which has been rocked by infighting, departures and conflicting advice in recent months. All of it, however, is secondary to Trump’s own whims and instincts, which have served him politically but are grating against the rules and norms of behavior for those charged with serious federal crimes.
Paul Sérusier, Solitude, Huelgoat Landscape, c.1892, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, Rennes.
If former President Donald Trump committed a “technical violation of the Constitution,” it doesn’t mean he necessarily broke any criminal laws, John Lauro, Trump’s criminal defense attorney, argued Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Lauro appeared to signal how he’d defend the former president in a trial that will stem from the four-count criminal indictment returned last week by a federal grand jury that had been examining Trump’s possible role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd about Trump’s alleged pressure campaign to get former Vice President Mike Pence to reverse the election, Lauro claimed that Trump and Pence had merely disagreed over whether a vice president could constitutionally take actions that could lead to a presidential election’s being overturned.
“A technical violation of the Constitution is not a violation of criminal law,” Lauro contended, saying it was “just plain wrong” to suggest that Trump had pressed Pence to break the law.
“And to say that is contrary to decades of legal statutes,” he continued.
“These kinds of constitutional and statutory disagreements don’t lead to criminal charges,” Lauro said. “And one thing that Mr. Pence has never said is that he thought President Trump was acting criminally.”
In response to the latest indictment, Pence said he believes “that anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.” He said Wednesday that Trump surrounded himself after the 2020 election with “crackpot lawyers” who told him only what his “itching ears” wanted to hear.
My thought is that’s a very good way to get all those unindicted co-conspirators on the people’s side because it sure looks like they’re getting the fickle finger of blame from the Trump Team
Anyway, I’m going to go eat a fresh peach and yogurt with some honey in the coldest spot in the house.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The Atlanta-area D.A. is expected to “seek more than a dozen indictments” according to CNN. This certainly leads to the question of how many will gladly turn on Trump.
Trump returns to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi for his latest move in the Small Penis Energy category. This is from The Hill as reported by Mychael Schnell. “Pelosi reemerges as top Trump adversary.” 
Trump continues to hold a grudge against the U.S. Women’s World Cup Soccer Team. He especially hates the athletic and erudite Megan Rapinoe. This is also from The Hill as reported by Sarah Fortinsky. “Trump knocks ‘woke’ US women’s soccer team after World Cup departure.”
And here’s the result of his verbal threats as reported by NBC News today. “Security bolstered for judge overseeing Trump election case. The increase in security around U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan comes as the former president has been criticizing her on social media.
How many people does Orange Caligula need to threaten and how many of his droogs have to be caught in plots to follow through for someone to do something? Here’s the latest incident as reported by the AP. “Utah man suspected of threatening President Joe Biden shot and killed as FBI served warrant.”
Good Afternoon!!
Woodward was previously defending Yuscil Taveras, who has now hired a new attorney and appears to be cooperating with the government.
Judge Cannon apparently disapproves, and decided to reveal the information the Special Counsel had given her under seal.
So it’s a normal request, but Cannon is going to drag the process out as long as she can, and, instead of keeping the existence of the secret grand jury under seal, she decided to announce it to the world.
The January 6 Case – Judge Tanya Chutkan
The government asked the judge to simply grant the protective order, which is usually a routine decision. But instead, she ordered the parties to hash it out in a hearing this week–probably on Friday. Again the upshot is more delay, which is just what Trump wants.
Meanwhile, because of Trump’s threats, Judge Chutkan needs more protection. CNN: Security increases for the judge assigned to Donald Trump’s January 6 criminal case.
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