Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Endus]

While I would prefer the bible out of the school library, its kind of hypocritical of me because one of my favourite books from the elementary school library was on Greek Mythology. I guess I'm not opposed to religious texts being available as long as its not promoted as facts.

It should be in school libraries, along with the Koran and various other religious texts. But I have no problem using these systems to ban it until chucklefuck Nazis stop trying to ban books.

[Breccia]

It should be in school libraries, along with the Koran and various other religious texts.

I took a class on this in college. My niece took a class on this in high school. Yes, Americans should learn there's more religions than just theirs.

[Edge-]

https://news.yahoo.com/lawmakers-dem...164232123.html

House Oversight Committee has questions for social media companies on how they're handling the increased threats against federal law enforcement. Fair question given the spike we've seen from Trump cultists and some Republican lawmakers/candidates recently.

[Endus]

I took a class on this in college. My niece took a class on this in high school. Yes, Americans should learn there's more religions than just theirs.

Like, if nothing else, a basic grasp of major world religions does wonders for understanding why some of our different views exist and how meaningless some of those distinctions really are.

[DarkTZeratul]

Like, if nothing else, a basic grasp of major world religions does wonders for understanding why some of our different views exist and how meaningless some of those distinctions really are.

I went to an (admittedly fairly progressive) Catholic highschool, and they offered a World Religions class to seniors. And I honestly think making such a course mandatory would not be such a bad idea.

[postman1782]

I took a class on this in college. My niece took a class on this in high school. Yes, Americans should learn there's more religions than just theirs.

Fun thing that was either on today or on last night on Newsmax from Rudy Guiliani. He was saying that Trump was just keeping them "safe" in Mar-a-lago. Which apparently is their new bullshit excuse for having them. And apparently taking the documents, isn't against the Espionage Act, destroying them, giving them to the enemy, or hiding them, is only against the Espionage Act, just not taking them. Even though all of it is against the Espionage Act.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-g...ping-them-safe
@Endus @ Edge-

Add this to the list that he had the standing order to declassify them.
They were planted.
They weren't there.
They weren't mine but I want them back.

[Cthulhu 2020]

https://twitter.com/CREWcrew/status/1560639138809843712

BREAKING: We won! We're going to get the secret memo Barr used to undercut the Mueller Report and claim it was insufficient to find Trump obstructed justice. And we're going to make it public.

I can't wait for that documentary on every corrupt thing Trump did. I assume someone's taking notes at least. But it'll probably be a full 52 episode series at this rate. All three hours long.

[Breccia]

But it'll probably be a full 52 episode series at this rate. All three hours long.

Are we talking about this?

Appeals court says DOJ improperly redacted memo to AG Barr on Trump obstruction

The Department of Justice (DOJ) improperly shielded portions of a memo to Attorney General William Barr that concerned whether former President Trump obstructed a special counsel probe into his campaign’s dealings with Russia during the 2016 presidential election, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled on Friday.

The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a federal judge’s May 2021 decision that the DOJ had improperly redacted parts of the Trump-era legal memo that should have been made public as part of a government watchdog’s records request lawsuit.

The memo at issue was prepared at Barr’s request by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in March 2019, ostensibly to provide legal advice that would go on to guide Barr’s decision not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice related to his alleged interference with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into his 2016 campaign’s contacts with Moscow.

The DOJ, responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking disclosure of the memo, argued that virtually the entire memorandum and related records should be shielded under a FOIA exemption that protects internal government deliberations.

But the D.C. Circuit Court panel on Friday, affirming the lower court’s decision, ruled that the DOJ had failed to prove that the so-called deliberative-process privilege justified keeping the records under wraps.

The panel said the OLC memo did not in fact contain a legal analysis of whether Barr should pursue charges against Trump, but rather what, if anything, Barr should say to Congress and the public about Mueller’s voluminous findings.

“Because the Department did not tie the memorandum to deliberations about the relevant decision, the Department failed to justify its reliance on the deliberative-process privilege,” Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote for the panel.

It seems like SCOTUS is going to have to decide this one. Simply put, if Barr illegally didn't tell Congress the actual findings, not only could he also be arrested for obstruction of justice himself, but Trump could as well, and the current DoJ owes Trump zero to negative favors.

[Rasulis]

Alan Dershowitz says every reputable attorney he's spoken with has told him their firms 'won't let them go anywhere near' Trump

Who are the lawyers brave enough to represent Trump?

Quoted from Vanity Fair.

Longtime confidants and advisers of Trump have grown extremely worried about Trump’s current stable of lawyers, noting that most of them have little to no experience in cases of this type, according to two people familiar with the internal discussions.… People familiar with the search for legal help said the effort includes Susie Wiles, a close adviser to Trump, and attorney Christina Bobb, who was present at Mar-a-Lago during the search and signed for the list of documents taken. Former campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn is taking a prominent role, and former White House aide Kash Patel is advising informally. Patel is raising money for a “legal offense” fund by selling merchandise such as tank tops and beanies emblazoned with the logo “K$H.”

Bobb was previously a host on the far-right, pro-Trump television network One America News.… Bobb’s prior legal experience at the federal level consists mainly of a handful of trademark infringement cases on behalf of CrossFit during a stint at a San Diego law firm. She did not respond to requests for comment. Trump’s other lawyer currently based in Florida is Lindsey Halligan, whose practice, according to a professional biography, focuses on insurance claims at residential and commercial properties. She was admitted to the Florida bar in 2014. A search of federal court records found no filings under her name. She did not respond to requests for comment. Trump is also being represented in the records dispute by Alina Habba, who leads a three-attorney firm with an office near Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, NJ. Her professional experience includes serving as general counsel to a parking garage company.

[postman1782]

Alan Dershowitz says every reputable attorney he's spoken with has told him their firms 'won't let them go anywhere near' Trump

Who are the lawyers brave enough to represent Trump?

Quoted from Vanity Fair.

Gucci Mane's lawyer apparently is stupid enough to represent him.

[Breccia]

Alan Dershowitz

Legit surprised he's volunteer this.

Speaking of: Giuliani.

Really, if you look at the Espionage Act, it’s not really about taking the documents. It’s about destroying them. Or hiding them. Or giving them to the enemy. It’s not about taking them and putting them in a place that’s roughly as safe as they were in in the first place.

Wanna see the video?

"Didn't the WH come to Trump and tell them the door had to be locked?"

Why, yes they did.

"So, they weren't safe enough?"

Apparently not, no.

"If the goal was to keep them safe, why not leave them with the WH or Archives?"

There's no reasonable answer. Anybody claiming Mar-a-Lago is as safe as the WH is just flat-out trolling and lying.

"Did Giuliani just flat-out admit on camera that Trump took classified or other important documents?"

It sure sounds like it.

- - - Uprated! - - -

Trump promises challenge to the warrant.

Yes, I am citing FOX News. At this point, I don't need the CNN points. It's just gratifying to show FOX News defend this fuckwit.

You know, the Fourth Amendment requires particularity. It requires narrowness to the intrusion on the person's home. And this warrant had language in it. And keep in mind, all we've seen is a warrant and an inventory. But the warrant has language in it about if you find a classified document, you can take the whole box around, it and you can take any boxes near it. And that's really the functional equivalent of a general search. There's just no limit to that kind of scope in the warrant.

A major motion pertaining to the Fourth Amendment will soon be filed concerning the illegal Break-In of my home, Mar-a-Lago, right before the ever important Mid-Term Elections. My rights, together with the rights of all Americans, have been violated at a level rarely seen before in our Country. Remember, they even spied on my campaign. The greatest Witch Hunt in USA history has been going on for six years, with no consequences to the scammers. It should not be allowed to continue!

I...don't see that working. Not that I need to. Trump promising to take legal action "very soon" means nearly nothing.

"Did Trump cite the six-year WITCH HUNT just a few scant hours before Barr got his ass handed to him in public for lying about the Mueller report?"

Oh, did he ever.

"Did he cite again the lie that his campaign was spied on?"

Yes.

"Well surely Trump's crack legal team--"

FOX News goes on to cite Trump's lawyers as "perplexed" that the FBI took lawyer-client privileged items, when Rudi Giuliani went through exactly that process and is sitting right fucking there. This comes off as grandstanding and PR, not actual legally-sound action. Also:

Trump's attorney also called for a "judicial intervention" at the district court level that "can help us vindicate the First Amendment rights of the president," adding "we're going to come out swinging."

Trusty called for a third party to get involved with the goal of stopping the Justice Department "in their tracks when it comes to inspecting these documents."

Begging for some random judge to step in on Trump's behalf is not how the legal system works. If you have cause, you file a motion and appear in court. You don't yell at the TV and hope a judge is listening. And calling for "someone to do something" sounds a lot like how the murderous insurrection started.

"Surely he knows the filter team--"

No.

They shouldn't have anybody filter team or not, looking at these materials right now because of the bla bla bla nonsense words

There are filter teams for this exact reason. Not to take the defendant of a criminal investigation, the Espionage Act in particular, at their Trumpian word.

Trump sitting on his toilet and screaming at his phone isn't a legal motion. It's a bowel motion. It should be treated as such.

[Endus]

FOX News goes on to cite Trump's lawyers as "perplexed" that the FBI took lawyer-client privileged items, when Rudi Giuliani went through exactly that process and is sitting right fucking there. This comes off as grandstanding and PR, not actual legally-sound action.

Like, how is attorney-client privilege even in play? The raid wasn't on his lawyer's offices. It was on Trump's offices. If you've got a copy of a contract in your own records, and the cops pick it up with a search warrant, it doesn't matter if your lawyer signed off on it or has another copy; there's no violation of privilege, since they picked the document up from the client's own records directly.

Attorney-client privilege doesn't exclude anything related to any matter you might have talked to your lawyer about. It only means your lawyer can't be forced to produce evidence or testify against you. If you talk to your lawyer about what to do about the guy you murdered, and the cops find the murder weapon on a search warrant of your house, your lawyer doesn't get to exclude that evidence on the basis of privilege. That's insane. And yet, that seems to be the argument they're making here.

[Kaleredar]

Like, how is attorney-client privilege even in play? The raid wasn't on his lawyer's offices. It was on Trump's offices. If you've got a copy of a contract in your own records, and the cops pick it up with a search warrant, it doesn't matter if your lawyer signed off on it or has another copy; there's no violation of privilege, since they picked the document up from the client's own records directly.

Attorney-client privilege doesn't exclude anything related to any matter you might have talked to your lawyer about. It only means your lawyer can't be forced to produce evidence or testify against you. If you talk to your lawyer about what to do about the guy you murdered, and the cops find the murder weapon on a search warrant of your house, your lawyer doesn't get to exclude that evidence on the basis of privilege. That's insane. And yet, that seems to be the argument they're making here.

I’m pretty sure their only real goal is to obfuscate and confuse the matter so much in the public eye that people aren’t sure whether trump did anything wrong or not, and if they don’t want to believe he did anything wrong they erroneously think that enough “experts” claim that he did nothing wrong or that the fbi mishandled justice or whatever, even though the people believing it don’t actually understand any of the things that happened, or why what trumps supposed “experts” said was nonsense.

These are the same people who will point to trump’s numerous lawsuits alleging fraud in the 2020 election as evidence that it happened, who aren’t aware or don’t care that every single lawsuit was thrown out or ruled against trump because they all had no merit.


Which might work with the general public to some degree, but doesn’t hold any legal weight. And Trump isn’t the one dispensing scurrilous and frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to batter an opponent down and if he fails the worst that happens is that the suit gets tossed out anymore; he’s on defense, where lying and otherwise ignoring the court means the other side gets to punish you. But he’s not used to that, so he has to resort to what he knows. Which won’t work.

[Redwyrm]

Once Trump was out of office, the DOJ should have changed the locks on the White House, revised all nuclear codes, and moved Area 51. I wouldn't have trusted Trump with any knowledge beyond the address to the White House.

[Breccia]

Like, how is attorney-client privilege even in play?

Your skepticism is almost certainly warranted and @Kaleredar is almost certainly correct. I've kept selling the idea that Trump had pretty normal stuff in his safe, like his will and the deed to the run-down motel where he bangs whores. It is possible some unrelated, non-secret, non-WH items were in there. Fine, but that's what the filter team is for. Which Team Trump is arguing shouldn't be used.

WH material doesn't fall under lawyer-client privilege. That's it.

[Redwyrm]

How much do you want to bet that the "super secure" safe was behind a giant picture of Trump.

[gondrin]

How much do you want to bet that the "super secure" safe was behind a giant picture of Trump.

With the safe code being "1 2 3 4 5". Probably has the same code on his matched luggage.

[Breccia]

How much do you want to bet that the "super secure" safe was behind a giant picture of Trump.

I'll take that bet. I still say it was in his wife's closet. And there's a zero percent chance she kept a portrait of Trump in there. Kushner maybe.

[postman1782]

So, fun thing going on with the GOP right now. At the height of their funding they had $173 million in the NRSC coffers. At the end of June though, they were down to $28.4 million. Guess who they put in charge of their funding? Rick Scott. The guy that is well known for defrauding Medicare when he was the Florida Governor.

About $34 million of the funding is missing or used for random unexplained payments to debt, consulting and credit card payments.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/repub...b0e323a255cb3c

“If they were a corporation, the CEO would be fired,” a national Republican consultant working on Senate races told the newspaper, referring to the committee.

“There needs to be an audit or investigation because we’re not gonna take the Senate now and this money has been squandered,” added the consultant, who spoke to the outlet on condition of anonymity. “It’s a rip-off.”

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who chairs the NRSC, has been attacked by Republicans for featuring himself in ads and releasing a policy agenda that caused trouble for the GOP, leading to quips that “NRSC” stands for “National Rick Scott Committee.”

[Breccia]

Two other articles I read both cited the same NYTimes article, so I'll lead with the different headlines they used:

Rolling Stone used Trump Left White House With ‘Roughly Two Dozen’ Boxes of Documents Meant for National Archives

Four days before the end of the Trump presidency, a White House aide peered into the Oval Office and was startled, if not exactly surprised, to see all of the president’s personal photos still arrayed behind the Resolute Desk as if nothing had changed — guaranteeing the final hours would be a frantic dash mirroring the prior four years.

In the area known as the outer Oval Office, boxes had been brought in to pack up desks used by President Donald J. Trump’s assistant and personal aides. But documents were strewn about, and the boxes stood nearly empty. The table in Mr. Trump’s private dining room off the Oval Office was stacked high with papers until the end, as it had been for his entire term.

Upstairs in the White House residence, there were, however, a few signs that Mr. Trump had finally realized his time was up. Papers he had accumulated in his last several months in office had been dropped into boxes, roughly two dozen of them, and not sent to the National Archives. Aides had even retrieved letters from Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, and given them to Mr. Trump in the final weeks, according to notes described to The New York Times.

Where all of that material ended up is not clear. What is plain, though, is that Mr. Trump’s haphazard handling of government documents — a chronic problem — contributed to the chaos he created after he refused to accept his loss in November 2020, unleashed a mob on Congress and set the stage for his second impeachment. His unwillingness to let go of power, including refusing to return government documents collected while he was in office, has led to a potentially damaging, and entirely avoidable, legal battle that threatens to engulf the former president and some of his aides.

RawStory used Trump and Mark Meadows planned to hand FBI file to conservative journalists three days before leaving office which funnily enough picks up at the very next paragraph.

Although the White House Counsel’s Office had told Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, that the roughly two dozen boxes worth of material in the residence needed to be turned over to the archives, at least some of those boxes, including those with the Kim letters and some documents marked highly classified, were shipped to Florida. There they were stored at various points over the past 19 months in different locations inside Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s members-only club, home and office, according to several people briefed on the events.

Many questions about the mishandling of the documents lead to Mr. Trump, who often treated the presidency as a private business. But people in his orbit also highlight the role of Mr. Meadows, who oversaw what there was of a presidential transition. Mr. Meadows assured aides that the harried packing up of the White House would follow requirements about the preservation of documents, and he said he would make efforts to ensure that the administration complied with the Presidential Records Act, according to people familiar with those conversations.

Yeah...that sounds like something that might come up on the stand. If Meadows told aides "we are going to comply with the law" some of them are going to testify against him out when he didn't.

Mr. Meadows’s immediate predecessors in that role — President Barack Obama’s last chief of staff, Denis McDonough, and President George W. Bush’s final chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten — had created teams to scrub West Wing offices of anything that belonged to the archives and made the stewardship of government records a priority.

It is unclear whether Mr. Meadows took the same measures, former aides said. But in the administration’s final weeks, the White House emailed all of its offices detailed instructions about returning documents and cleaning out their spaces. Mr. Meadows followed up on those notes and encouraged offices to comply, according to a person familiar with those conversations.

Mr. Meadows also assured White House staff members that he would talk to Mr. Trump about securing records, including ones stashed in the residence, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

Regardless of whether Mr. Meadows followed through on those promises, by early 2021, after Mr. Trump had left the White House, officials with the archives realized they were missing significant material.

In Mr. Trump’s last weeks in office, Mr. Meadows, with the president’s blessing, prodded federal law enforcement agencies to declassify a binder of Crossfire Hurricane materials that included unreleased information about the F.B.I.’s investigative steps and text messages between two former top F.B.I. officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who had sharply criticized Mr. Trump in their private communications during the 2016 election.

Yeah...this is one of the many reasons Trump shouldn't have classified material just lying around.

The F.B.I. worried that releasing more information could compromise the bureau, according to people familiar with the debate. Mr. Meadows dismissed those arguments, saying that Mr. Trump himself wanted the information declassified and disseminated, they said.

Just three days before Mr. Trump’s last day in office, the White House and the F.B.I. settled on a set of redactions, and Mr. Trump declassified the rest of the binder. Mr. Meadows intended to give the binder to at least one conservative journalist, according to multiple people familiar with his plan. But he reversed course after Justice Department officials pointed out that disseminating the messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page could run afoul of privacy law, opening officials up to suits.

Yep. It sure sounds like Mark Meadows needs to take the stand with everyone else. Trump declassifying material purely to let FOX News run a smear campaign would not technically be illegal, but something Trump should really never have considered: he lost the election, and Biden had everything on him. Once Trump opened the door, Biden would have his blessing to run him into the ground.

...not that the current situation is much better.

Few other quick additions:

Steve Bannon called Mike Pence a 'disgusting coward' after the former vice president criticized calls to defund the FBI

Don't think I need to add to that headline.

'Flailing financially': How Trump's legal woes may finally be taking their toll

Appearing on MSNBC on Saturday morning, former Donald Trump biographer Tim O'Brien suggested that Trump's legal woes are having a huge impact on his financial situation and that a trial slated for October could deal him a major blow.

"Weisselberg if he is found to have lied during that testimony, could face as much as 15 years in prison instead of a five-month sentence he will get otherwise," O'Brien reported. "So he is going to be mightily incented to answer every question that the prosecutors asked him about a wide range of financial issues in the Trump Organization."

"No one did anything substantial inside the Trump organization without having Donald Trump signing off on it," the Bloomberg editor added. "So there is no way this doesn't in some fashion land at Donald Trump's doorstep and I think the issue is what are the consequences going to be for Trump? I don't think the DA's investigation is as robust as it once was and that's a criminal probe that would've involved prison time. But the New York AG's investigation, which is a civil probe, could wind up with the Trump Organization being put out of business."

"It is already in a very vulnerable position," he continued. "Donald Trump is in the worst business you can imagine during the Covid era: urban real estate, and essentially tourism and hotel businesses and he's got a lot of debt against those businesses and he is personally going to need a substantial amount. He's also flailing possibly financially."

"I think a lot of this is going to come to a head in the fall," he concluded.

NYState could probably do exactly this. Corporations have laws they have to follow, and one of them is "pay taxes". Trump lost a lot of money running his businesses into the ground while proving on the world's largest stage he was the most deplorable human being alive. Forbes said he lost hundreds of millions every year. Trump Org being hit with all the fines they've earned, added to banks asking for their loan money back, remains a realistic way that Trump's claims of being a great businessman are debunked by a FOR SALE sign.