Finally Friday Reads: Jack is Back

Posted: January 23, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: #We are so Fucked, Elections, FARTUS, GOP Crimes Against Humanity, ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE raids | Tags: , , , , | 6 Comments

“Jack Smith returns to Washington to testify publicly in front of Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Yesterday, the entire news cycle was dedicated to the testimony of former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who prosecuted the rotter in the White House for his election interference scheme. Many of the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee were far from up to the task of diminishing Smith’s appearance and the merits of the case. At one point, Democratic Ranking Member Jamie Raskin and Republican Darrel Issa got into a shouting match.

PBS had this headline yesterday, along with a tick-tock of the day’s events. It was a strange thing to see that Republicans were part of what was a look at Trump’s Election crimes, which appeared to be less daunting to them than dealing with the Epstein Files. Anyone paying attention surely took the event and the testimony as yet another way Trump defies our Constitutionally defined form of government.

Jack Smith is set to testify in a House Judiciary hearing Thursday. It’s an opportunity for the career prosecutor to offer his inside perspective on the investigations into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The president was indicted in two federal cases, but both were scuttled once it was clear that Trump would return to the Oval Office, due to DOJ policy that prevents prosecution of a sitting president.

One of the things we learned is that the manner in which the case was dismissed lets a future Congress and DOJ go after him again. This was yesterday’s New York Times’ conclusion. “In Testimony, Jack Smith Defends Decision to Prosecute Trump. The former special prosecutor argued a case he was never allowed to in court: that President Trump “engaged in criminal activity” that undermined democracy.”  The leded is shared by
By Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer.

But the hearing also provided Mr. Smith with what was likely to be his best opportunity to challenge, in an official forum, Mr. Trump’s justification for ordering the Justice Department to pursue his enemies: that he was persecuted for his politics, not prosecuted for his alleged misdeeds.

“Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6, that it was foreseeable to him and that he sought to exploit the violence,” Mr. Smith said, sitting alone at the witness table with a water bottle, legal pad and white ballpoint pen.

He appeared wan and tired, speaking so softly at times his voice did not register with voice transcription apps. Before sitting at the witness table, Mr. Smith greeted four law enforcement officers who were attacked by the pro-Trump mob at the Capitol — Michael Fanone, Daniel Hodges, Aquilino Gonell and Harry Dunn.

Republicans repeatedly accused Mr. Smith of participating in a Democratic conspiracy to destroy Mr. Trump by investigating his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as well as his handling of classified documents after he left office.

Mr. Smith and his team interfered in the “democratic process by seeking to muzzle a candidate for a high office,” Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in his opening statement, quoting from an editorial in The Washington Post.

But Republican lawmakers offered no new evidence to support that claim, and spent much of their time rehashing political arguments and grilling Mr. Smith about his decision to seek a court order for metadata about phone calls Mr. Trump and his allies made to nine Republican lawmakers as they sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

This may seem like more rehashing of old news, but remember, Trump is angling to interfere with the 2026 midterms. It’s a good refresher as to the criminal lengths he will go to retain power. The news today still reflects the regime’s abuse of constitutional rights. ICE is still in the headlines. The abuse is on full display in Minneapolis. This analysis of the last Constitutional Crisis nightmare can be found on Joy Vance’s SubStack, Civil Discourse. “Breaking the Fourth Amendment.”

Last night, we learned from a report in the Associated Press that ICE, contrary to longstanding Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, is taking the position that it can enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant. Instead, they believe that an administrative warrant suffices. An administrative warrant is a form signed by an “authorized immigration official,” which means an executive branch employee who can be fired if they displease the president. It’s not difficult to see the problem here.

The Fourth Amendment provides that: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” It’s the reason your home can’t be searched by the police without a search warrant that has been supported with probable cause to believe that evidence or fruits of a crime will be found there.

ICE seems to be arguing that if they think a non-citizen for whom there is a final order of deportation is in a house, they can blow right past the Fourth Amendment, take the doors off the house if they aren’t admitted voluntarily, and go right in. But the Fourth Amendment doesn’t change just because ICE says so.

The Supreme Court has made it clear that a search warrant must be signed by a “judicial officer” or a “magistrate.” Their signature on the warrant says that they have reviewed the evidence that the agents believe constitutes probable cause to justify a search, and they agree that it is sufficient to breach the wall otherwise established by the Fourth Amendment and allow law enforcement into a private home (or car, or private areas of a business, etc.). The idea is that a detached, neutral judge—not someone involved in investigating a case or “on the same side” as law enforcement—should evaluate the evidence before a search warrant or an arrest warrant is issued.

As the Supreme Court explained in Johnson v. U.S., in 1948: “The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime.”

This report by The Washington Post shows how utterly evil, cruel, and lawless the agency has become. “ICE detains four children from Minnesota school district, including 5-year-old. Columbia Heights Public Schools district officials accused ICE officers of using the 5-year-old “as bait.” A 10-year-old and her mother were also detained.” Andrew Jeong provides the report.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota have detained at least four children from the same school district this month, including a 5-year-old boy, school officials in a Minneapolis suburb said Wednesday.

The events have inflamed tensions between residents and ICE officers, sparked by the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renée Good by an ICE officer this month. The Trump administration has sought to justify the presence of ICE personnel by saying that the officers are detaining immigrants convicted of violent crimes.

“Why detain a 5-year-old?” Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of the Columbia Heights Public Schools district, located just north of Minneapolis, said at a news conference. “You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, whom the Department of Homeland Security identified as Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias in an emailed statement, were detained in their driveway Tuesday afternoon, just as they were returning from the child’s school, according to a news release from Columbia Heights Public Schools.

The father fled on foot when ICE officers approached him, DHS said. “For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias,” it added.

After detaining the father, ICE officers then asked Liam to knock on the door to see if any other people were inside the home, “using a 5-year-old as bait,” according to the school district.

Another adult living in the home, who was outside at the time, “begged the agents” to leave the child with them, the school district said. ICE agents refused.

Liam’s middle-school-age brother returned home 20 minutes later to find that his younger brother and father had been taken away.

Liam and his father are now in San Antonio in the custody of Homeland Security authorities, the family’s lawyer, Marc Prokosch, said in an email. They are not U.S. citizens but “have been following the legal process perfectly, from presenting themselves at the border to applying for asylum and waiting for the process to go through,” he said.

The Substack Strength in Numbers of G. Elliott Morris has this true and frightening headline. “The consent of the governed has been withdrawn. One year into his second term, Trump has suffered the largest approval collapse of any modern president (except the one who resigned in disgrace). He is underwater on every major policy area.”  He’s so underwater that the numbers are worse than during the worst of the COVID pandemic.

One year ago this week, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States. He entered office with a net approval rating of +5 in the FiftyPlusOne.news approval rating aggregate. Despite a tumultuous first term — which ended with the president posting his worst-ever numbers after the January 6 insurrection — voters, it seemed, were willing to give him another shot.

They are no longer willing to give him that chance. Trump sits at an -16 net job approval on average today, down from +5 on his first day in office. His 21-point drop is the worst first-year performance, in the eyes of public opinion, of any president’s first term going back to at least 1948. If you compare the last year to other second-term presidencies, Trump’s is still the worst first-year performance of any president in the modern polling, with one exception: Richard Nixon (who was consumed by Watergate and other national crises at this point in his term).

Either way, Trump is in historically bad company.

As The New York Times reported this week, Trump’s support among key groups he persuaded to vote for him in 2024 — notably, young, Black, and Latino voters — has now sunk below levels measured in the run-up to the 2020 election (which Trump lost to Joe Biden by 4.5 points in the national popular vote)

Let’s hope that turns into some momentum to get rid of Republicans in Congress. As noted before, the Trump Regime, plus many Republican Congress Critters, are truly afraid of what’s coming for them. Don Moynihan has this to say at his Substack. “Can We Still Govern? Past the breaking point. The violent occupation of an American city is more than a warning.”

We use words like “police state.” Then we see it happen. To watch is not the same as to experience it, of course. Of being afraid to leave your house. Or having a classmate, co-worker, or family member disappear. But the images make it more real. It removes any illusion that it could not happen here. It is happening here. We see it happening here, if we are willing to look.

In recent weeks, the paramilitary occupation of the Twin Cities has moved us past some invisible breaking points. About how we expect our government to treat us. And about what might be done about the government agencies that fail those expectations.

Lets step back: the primary purpose of this occupation is the selective use of government power to establish federal dominance over blue states or cities that President Trump dislikes. Thats it. Trump thinks Minnesota is the enemy, and so he unleashed an armed and masked paramilitary upon its people. There is no serious case that this is about the number of immigrants, or some level of violent crime not seen elsewhere. It is about the Department of Homeland Security, in the form of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Patrol, developing their skills as the President’s stormtroopers. It is about making an example of a community.

To make matters worse, Congress did not defund ICE thanks to a handful of turncoat Democrats. This is from Newsweek. “Seven Democrats Just Voted to Approve ICE Funding: Full List.”  This news is reported by Gabe Whisnant.

Seven House Democrats broke with much of their party to vote in favor of funding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), helping advance a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending measure in committee despite strong opposition from progressives.

The votes came during a markup of the DHS appropriations bill, with Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky casting the lone Republican vote against the funding, which passed 220-207 and will fund ICE as well as FEMA through September 30.

“Right now we are about to take a vote and that vote is on DHS and whether or not we will give more funding to ICE. Right now I am willing to shut it down. I am going to do what it takes instead of just kind of being a go-along to get-along lawmaker,” Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, told Newsweek ahead of the vote.

The seven Democratic representatives who voted yes to approve ICE funding were:

  • Tom Suozzi (New York)
  • Henry Cuellar (Texas)
  • Don Davis (North Carolina)
  • Laura Gillen (New York)
  • Jared Golden (Maine)
  • Vicente Gonzalez (Texas)
  • Marie Glusenkamp Perez (Washington)

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

 

 

 

All Three Branches of Government are Broken

Posted: April 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, Media, New Orleans, POTUS, Psychopaths in charge, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 35 Comments

Over the past 2-1/2 years, we’ve seen how broken the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government are. We have a president who refused to stand up to the minority party while his party had historic majorities in both houses of Congress. Thanks to this president’s weak-kneed fealty to “bi-partisanship” and his predictable willingness to cave to the Republicans on just about any issue, he no longer has a supermajority in Congress.

Blue Texan at FDL makes a very good case for why Obama and the Democrats lost in 2010.

Democrats lost because they lost independents by 15 points, and independents don’t care what liberals think.

So why did Democrats lose independents?

Because the economy hadn’t improved enough because the stimulus bill was inadequate. It didn’t help matters that the Affordable Care Act was stripped of its most popular feature [a public option] or that HAMP was a total failure or that the Democrats punted on immigration and host of other progressive goals — but it was mostly about the economy.

The lesson, then, is…that Democrats need to deliver — especially when they promised CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN — and when they don’t, they lose elections.

For the past few weeks, we’ve seen the House Republicans and the White House bicker over cutting the budget when what we really need to do is raise taxes on the richest Americans. If Obama had any guts at all, he would have refused to extend the Bush tax cuts period. But, because he’s a lily livered wimp, he caved.

Today, Nicholas Kristof said the Congresspeople are acting like junior high school children.

It’s unclear where the adults are, but they don’t seem to be in Washington. Beyond the malice of the threat to shut down the federal government, averted only at the last minute on Friday night, it’s painful how vapid the discourse is and how incompetent and cowardly our leaders have proved to be.

Kristof doesn’t specifically chide Obama, but come on. If he weren’t so focused on getting “bipartisan support” for every initiative, he could have accomplished much more and gotten more respect from the Republicans at the same time. He was and is still simply too inexperienced to do the job of POTUS.

Tonight I want to put the spotlight on the third branch of government. Our judicial system is broken too. We have an epidemic of wrongful convictions in our justice system, and we have an ultra-right wing majority in the Supreme Court that refuses to do anything about it.

As of February 4, 2011, 250 wrongly convicted people had been exonerated by DNA testing, according to The Innocence Project,

There have been 268 post-conviction DNA exonerations in United States history. These stories are becoming more familiar as more innocent people gain their freedom through postconviction testing. They are not proof, however, that our system is righting itself.

The common themes that run through these cases — from global problems like poverty and racial issues to criminal justice issues like eyewitness misidentification, invalid or improper forensic science, overzealous police and prosecutors and inept defense counsel — cannot be ignored and continue to plague our criminal justice system.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, more than 130 people have been released from death row because they were exonerated based on evidence that proved they were innocent. The chart below shows those exonerations state by state. The chart comes from a fact sheet (PDF) produced by the Death Penalty Information Center.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that about 70% of the people who have been exonerated are members of minority groups–mostly African Americans. One of the most frequent causes of false convictions is prosecutorial misconduct. For more information on this problem, see this report (PDF) by the Innocence Project. In late March, the Supreme Court basically gave carte blanche to dishonest prosecutors by deciding that a wrongfully convicted man who had spent 14 years on death row has no right to sue for damages. From the LA Times:

John Thompson

A bitterly divided Supreme Court on Tuesday tossed out a jury verdict won by a New Orleans man who spent 14 years on death row and came within weeks of execution because prosecutors had hidden a blood test and other evidence that would have proven his innocence.

The 5-4 decision delivered by Justice Clarence Thomas shielded the New Orleans district attorney’s office from being held liable for the mistakes of its prosecutors. The evidence of their misconduct did not prove “deliberate indifference” on the part of then-Dist. Atty. Harry Connick Sr., Thomas said.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized her disapproval by reading her dissent in the courtroom, saying the court was shielding a city and its prosecutors from “flagrant” misconduct that nearly cost an innocent man his life.

“John Thompson spent 14 years isolated on death row before the truth came to light,” she said. He was innocent of the crimes that sent him to prison and prosecutors had “dishonored” their obligation to present the true facts to the jury, she said.

Besides Justice Ginsburg, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan also dissented from the majority opinion.

The Supreme Court has consistently shielded prosecutors from accountability for misconduct in the past, but Thompson had sued the New Orleans District Attorney’s office, claiming the office had demonstrated a “pattern of wrongdoing” and had failed to ensure that its attorneys obeyed the law. Now the Supremes have eliminated another check against willful misconduct by prosecutors.

Here from NPR is a brief summary of the case against Thompson:

In December of 1984, Raymond Liuzza Jr., the son of a prominent New Orleans business executive, was shot to death in front of his home. Police, acting on a tip, picked up two men, Kevin Freeman and John Thompson.

Thompson denied knowing anything about the shooting, but Freeman, in exchange for a one-year prison sentence, agreed to testify that he saw Thompson commit the crime.

Prosecutors wanted to seek the death penalty, but Thompson had no record of violent felonies. Then, a citizen saw his photo in the newspaper and implicated him in an attempted carjacking — and prosecutors saw a way to solve their problem. John Hollway, who wrote a book about the case, said the solution was to try the carjacking case first.

A conviction in the carjacking case would yield additional benefits in the subsequent murder trial, Hollway observes. It would discredit Thompson if he took the stand in his own defense at the murder trial, so he didn’t. And the carjacking would be used against him during the punishment phase of the murder trial.

It all worked like a charm. Thompson was convicted of both crimes and sentenced to death for murder.

Harry Connick, Sr.

Ten years later, after Thompson’s appeals were exhausted and he was days from be executed, an investigator for his attorneys found that the blood of the perpetrator had been left at the scene of the murder. The lab report showed that Thompson had a different blood type than the person who committed the crime. The DA had deliberately concealed this information from the defense.

At a new trial, more exculpatory evidence that had been suppressed by the DA was presented–10 pieces of evidence in all–and the jury acquitted Thompson in half-an-hour. Thompson then sued and won a $14 million judgment against Connick and the NOLA DA’s office. But, now the right wingers on the Court have nullified that judgement.

On March 31, the editors of The New York Times wrote that a lack of empathy led to this injustice.

The important thing about empathy that gets overlooked is that it bolsters legal analysis. That is clear in the dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her empathy for Mr. Thompson as a defendant without means or power is affecting. But it is her understanding of the prosecutors’ brazen ambition to win the case, at all costs, that is key.

After detailing the “flagrant indifference” of the prosecutors to Mr. Thompson’s rights, she makes clear how critically they needed training in their duty to turn over evidence and why “the failure to train amounts to deliberate indifference to the rights” of defendants.

The district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., acknowledged the need for this training but said he had long since “stopped reading law books” so he didn’t understand the duty he was supposed to impart. The result, Justice Ginsburg writes, was an office with “one of the worst” records in America for failing to turn over evidence that “never disciplined or fired a single prosecutor” for a violation.

One thing about conservatives, they rarely show any empathy or compassion for anyone who isn’t just like them.

Today John Thompson himself contributed an op-ed to the NYT. Please read the whole thing, but here is just a bit.

I SPENT 18 years in prison for robbery and murder, 14 of them on death row. I’ve been free since 2003, exonerated after evidence covered up by prosecutors surfaced just weeks before my execution date. Those prosecutors were never punished. Last month, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to overturn a case I’d won against them and the district attorney who oversaw my case, ruling that they were not liable for the failure to turn over that evidence — which included proof that blood at the robbery scene wasn’t mine.

Because of that, prosecutors are free to do the same thing to someone else today.

[….]

The prosecutors involved in my two cases, from the office of the Orleans Parish district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., helped to cover up 10 separate pieces of evidence. And most of them are still able to practice law today.

Why weren’t they punished for what they did? When the hidden evidence first surfaced, Mr. Connick announced that his office would hold a grand jury investigation. But once it became clear how many people had been involved, he called it off.

According to NPR, former DA Harry Connick Sr. “feels vindicated” by the SCOTUS decision.

“I think that he committed … a murder, and I think that obviously we thought we had enough evidence to gain a conviction,” he says. “So I was delighted that the Supreme Court ruled in our favor.”

Never mind the ten pieces of exculpatory evidence that his prosecutor covered up in order to convict Thompson. And, by the way, the prosecutor confessed what he had done to a friend, so it was no accident. Relatives of the murdered man, Ray Liuzza, still believe Thompson is guilty. Liuzza’s sister

Maurine Liuzza said she has reviewed all of the evidence in the case and still believes that Thompson is guilty.

“Just because you are found not guilty does not make you innocent,” she said.

It’s time for radical change in all three branches of our broken government.