1. #81281
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/u...s-lawyers.html

    A top Justice Department official told former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the department believes he has not returned all the documents he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter.

    The outreach from the official, Jay I. Bratt, who leads the department’s counterintelligence operations, is the most concrete indication yet that investigators remain skeptical that Mr. Trump has been fully cooperative in their efforts to recover documents the former president was supposed to have turned over to the National Archives at the end of his term.

    It is not clear what steps the Justice Department might take to retrieve any material it thinks Mr. Trump still holds.

    And it is not known whether the Justice Department has gathered new evidence that Mr. Trump has held onto government material even after the court-authorized search in August of his private club and residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, and 18 months of previous efforts by the federal government to convince the former president to return what he had taken on leaving office.

    The Justice Department declined to comment.
    Will the government ever get everything Trump appears to have stolen, back? Probably not.

  2. #81282
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    Quote Originally Posted by Edge- View Post
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/u...s-lawyers.html



    Will the government ever get everything Trump appears to have stolen, back? Probably not.
    I'm not sure how we'd retrieve them from Moscow and Riyadh.
    Quote Originally Posted by Crissi View Post
    Quit using other posters as levels of crazy. That is not ok


    If you look, you can see the straw man walking a red herring up a slippery slope coming to join this conversation.

  3. #81283
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    Quote Originally Posted by Edge- View Post
    Will the government ever get everything Trump appears to have stolen, back? Probably not.
    This NYTimes article brings up some of the same stuff, but also, new insight on Kise's role.

    Justice Department officials and representatives of Mr. Trump have held a number of discussions in recent weeks. After the call from Mr. Bratt, who has led the Justice Department’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of the documents, Mr. Trump initially agreed to go along with the advice of one of his lawyers, Christopher M. Kise, who suggested hiring a forensic firm to search for additional documents, according to the people briefed on the matter.

    But other lawyers in Mr. Trump’s circle — who have argued for taking a more adversarial posture in dealing with the Justice Department — disagreed with Mr. Kise’s approach. They talked Mr. Trump out of the idea and have encouraged him to maintain an aggressive stance toward the authorities, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    It is unclear at which property Mr. Kise wanted a voluntary search by an outside group to be conducted. Along with his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump frequently spends time at his club in Bedminster, N.J., and an office in Manhattan.
    This does feed into the "Kise was benched" theory.

    The disagreement among the lawyers about how to respond to the Justice Department helped create a fissure within Mr. Trump’s legal team and led, in part, to the minimization of Mr. Kise’s role in Mr. Trump’s legal team in recent weeks.
    I applaud Kise's efforts towards some semblance of resolution, but Team Trump was never going to admit they'd acted improperly, which is what hiring an outside team would be (in their eyes).

    An expert the NYTimes consulted suggested the next DOJ move would be to ask Trump, in court, if Trump has given back everything. Trump's statements outside the reach of perjury are meaningless. He would have to either say "Yes, this is everything, here is my signature on an official form" or the refusal to do that would be enough evidence to get more warrants. This highly aggressive move would most likely be done if the missing documents were highly sensitive.

    They may not be. This ABC News article takes statements from John Solomon, who said them in public. The story details a messy pile of random-ass documents that Trump basically said "I want some of this declassified" to a room filled with people who didn't know what he was talking about.

    Solomon claims that an 18-inch stack was related to the FBI's total Witch Hunt Hoax investigation into Trump's known, proven dealings with Russia. He also claims he looked them over and Trump said he would one day be able to publish them.

    But:

    "I had a brief interview with Trump in which he told me unequivocally he had signed the order completing the [declassification] and that I would be getting a set of the declassified documents to post online for the public," Solomon told ABC News in a statement this past week. "Later that same day, I was allowed, on two occasions, to briefly review a stack of documents that I was told were the declassified documents. I wasn't allowed to keep the documents either time, but was told I would get a full set later in the day."

    Shortly after 9 p.m. ET that day, Solomon appeared on Fox News and said he had "been through all the documents at least one time now."

    He told ABC News the documents he reviewed had redactions, cross-outs and other “markings on them indicating they had been declassified” – though at least some of them were not stamped “declassified,” as formally-declassified documents often are.

    Nevertheless, on the same day Solomon met with Trump and reviewed the documents, the Justice Department and U.S. intelligence community "were trying to get the documents back" from the White House,” Solomon said in a subsequent interview on Fox Business Network.
    That sounds a lot like someone who knew he wasn't allowed to keep government property.

    At the time, Solomon basically publicly promised a big bombshell story that, of course, never happened.

    Solomon is trying to stay clear of the Mar-a-Lago search and seizure, and instead is playing the role of a reporter who just so happens to want to reveal information about Trump in a bunch of documents that seem to have vanished, despite law enforcement demanding them back. Instead, he's managing to unintentionally present a story of petty, petty little Trump whose widdle feewings were hurt, and got so mad about it, that he lost what he wanted to say was evidence of his innocence in a giant Pile of Crazy even he couldn't dig through.

  4. #81284
    I really have to wonder what the lawyers that want Trump be more 'adversarial' are smoking. Being adversarial is what got Trump into the mess in the first place. If he had just returned everything there would likely have been no desire to charge him.
    It ignores such insignificant forces as time, entropy, and death

  5. #81285
    Quote Originally Posted by Gorsameth View Post
    I really have to wonder what the lawyers that want Trump be more 'adversarial' are smoking. Being adversarial is what got Trump into the mess in the first place. If he had just returned everything there would likely have been no desire to charge him.
    They're telling Trump what he wants to hear. If he's already hired them, it's because they want to keep that job. If he hasn't, it's probably because they think getting that job would be great for their career.

  6. #81286
    Ted Cruz admitted to colleagues that all 'one hundred senators' knew Trump committed an impeachable offense: report Politico's Rachel Bade and the Washington Post's Karoun Demirjian report that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) warned his GOP colleagues that there was no doubt by anyone in the Senate that the former president had engaged in at least one impeachable offense.

    And there's more: NEWS: DOJ ‘closing in’ on Trump: bombshell NYT report suggests indictments are likely to ‘start flying’

    Hmf...believe it when I see it.

  7. #81287
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2198106.html

    So no Kari Lake, GOP candidate for governor in AZ, has used stock footage of Russian troops in her latest ad focused on border security.

    Man, sure is weird/curious that Republicans keep using the Russian military when trying to virtue signal how much they say they care about the US military.

    - - - Updated - - -

    https://lawandcrime.com/trump/specia...ssible-crimes/

    The special master tapped to oversee a review of documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort has agreed to ship a tranche of the seized material to a U.S. Department of Justice or FBI “case team.” That move came after the former president’s attorneys failed to assert several forms of privilege over the subset of paperwork in question.
    Man, all this discussion about privilege and shit and none of it matters because Trump and his legal team have never even attempted to exert it because, as repeatedly stated, he can't. Because he is not POTUS and consequently has none of the authorities of the office.

    Sure his legal team has implied that he was asserting privilege repeatedly, but that's all it was. It's like a hint or privilege, just a bit of the rind for flavor.

    The “case team” is made up of “law enforcement personnel conducting this investigation,” earlier documents indicate; in essence, it is tasked with reviewing whether any violations of law occurred. Before it can review all of the material seized from Mar-a-Lago, a separate “privilege team” was tasked with reviewing the documents. The goal of that process is to ensure that criminal investigators won’t see any material they are legally not permitted to examine or to use should a criminal case be filed.
    Otherwise fairly boring, standard stuff when it comes to criminal investigations and the investigators ensuring that they're following the rules.

  8. #81288
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    Quote Originally Posted by Edge- View Post
    Man, all this discussion about privilege and shit and none of it matters because Trump and his legal team have never even attempted to exert it because, as repeatedly stated, he can't.
    I will say, again, if there was proof that Trump had asserted privilege at the time it would have to be given appropriate weight. But, no such proof exists, because Trump was apparently using telepathy which famously leaves a very slim paper trail.

    Oh, and anything lawyer-client is, of course, not WH property. I think the filter team removed about 500 out of 200,000 pages that were not WH property, including Trump's taxes and medical records.

    But again, you and everyone who isn't the dang poster who kept bringing it up are right. Trump didn't asssert privilege when he could (or didn't document it which counts as "pics or it didn't happen") and he can't now. None of it changes WH property from being WH property Trump wasn't allowed to have. Privilege is a non-issue here.

  9. #81289
    https://jezebel.com/dr-oz-stood-in-f...ndr-1849630627

    WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS GOING ON WITH DR. OZ AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY? There isn't dogwhistles anymore, these are fucking fog horns.

    Apparently Matt Gaetz's in-laws threw a fundraiser for Dr. Not from Pennsylvania Oz, in front of one of the cars seized from Adolf Hitler. They literally had the little stage with the little podium and the NRSC logo on a screen right next to it. They had the $5000 a plate event at Lyon Air Museum, but they chose to put it in front of Hitler's car, they could have done it anywhere else in the museum, but chose that?

    The chair of the event Palmer Luckey, the Billionaire founder of Oculus VR, so no Oculus for me ever, is a Trump supporter, that was photographed with known fascist white supremacist Chuck C. Johnson and that greaseball piece of shit Steve Bannon, they flashed the white power OK hand gesture. He knew what he was doing.

    Oh, and don't forget, they had that fucking moron Jordan Peterson call in on a zoom call.

  10. #81290
    At least it looks like Peterson cleaned his room before dialing in.

    Though it appears they sure knew about the car. In the side-by-side header image you see the swastika flag removed from the side of the vehicle while Oz is on a podium in front of it.

    I mean like...how many times do Republicans and Nazi imagery need to "coincidentally" appear in the same place before we start asking if the Republican party has a Nazi problem?

  11. #81291
    Quote Originally Posted by postman1782 View Post
    https://jezebel.com/dr-oz-stood-in-f...ndr-1849630627

    WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS GOING ON WITH DR. OZ AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY? There isn't dogwhistles anymore, these are fucking fog horns.

    Apparently Matt Gaetz's in-laws threw a fundraiser for Dr. Not from Pennsylvania Oz, in front of one of the cars seized from Adolf Hitler. They literally had the little stage with the little podium and the NRSC logo on a screen right next to it. They had the $5000 a plate event at Lyon Air Museum, but they chose to put it in front of Hitler's car, they could have done it anywhere else in the museum, but chose that?

    The chair of the event Palmer Luckey, the Billionaire founder of Oculus VR, so no Oculus for me ever, is a Trump supporter, that was photographed with known fascist white supremacist Chuck C. Johnson and that greaseball piece of shit Steve Bannon, they flashed the white power OK hand gesture. He knew what he was doing.

    Oh, and don't forget, they had that fucking moron Jordan Peterson call in on a zoom call.
    The legacy of Trump. He showed them they no longer need to hide, but can be open about it and actually get praised for it.
    It ignores such insignificant forces as time, entropy, and death

  12. #81292
    Void Lord Breccia's Avatar
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    Well. It has not been a great 24 hours for Donald Trump.

    By now, everyone knows the FBI is interested in the rest of Trump's properties. As Cohen said, it just seems likely that he put stuff there, too.

    Federal investigators have asked multiple witnesses if they knew whether Donald Trump had stashed any highly sensitive government documents at Trump Tower in Manhattan or at his private club in Bedminster, New Jersey, a person familiar with the matter and another source briefed on the situation tell Rolling Stone.

    The FBI, according to these sources, had also asked in recent months whether the ex-president had a habit of transporting classified documents from his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago to the other Trump properties. The feds specifically discussed both the New York City and Bedminster locations with certain witnesses.

    “It was obvious they wanted to know if this went beyond just Mar-a-Lago,” the first source says.

    On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department informed Trump’s legal team it believes the former president may have taken more documents than the ones the FBI returned to the National Archives after its August Mar-a-Lago search. Trump attorney Christopher Kise reportedly suggested that the former president voluntarily conduct a search for any further missing documents at another unnamed Trump property, according to the Times.

    The FBI has been quietly interviewing a number of former Trump associates as part of its inquiry into his retention of classified documents. In August, Rolling Stone reported that FBI agents had interviewed former Trump National Security Council staff and asked them whether they were aware of the so-called standing declassification order that Trump’s office has claimed the former president put in place for classified materials taken from the West Wing.

    The increased law enforcement scrutiny since the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago has prompted Trump to wonder aloud who in his circle could be helping the Justice Department’s investigation. In exchange with associates, Trump has asked whether anyone in MAGA world could be “wearing a wire” or if his phones are “tapped.” In private, associates of the former president told Rolling Stone that Trump remains focused on getting back “all” of the documents — even classified ones — taken by the FBI back, referring to them as “mine.”
    Multiple articles I read had experts suggesting that, the FBI already "knows" there's stolen property there, they just want a witness to get the search warrants as airtight as Mar-a-Lago's were.

    Of course, there's one person who keeps insisting Trump took WH property: Trump. As the NYTimes reports:

    Late last year, as the National Archives ratcheted up the pressure on Trump to return boxes of records he had taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago club, he came up with an idea to resolve the looming showdown: cut a deal.

    Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims.

    In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.

    Mr. Trump’s aides never pursued the idea. But the episode is one in a series that demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show.
    Not surprised his lawyers never went to the feds and said "Our client would like to announce his guilt". I'm sure Trump announcing he had hostages was going to work exactly as planned.

    In a related story, did you know there was a Trump rally in DC Friday? No? Neither did anyone else. Twenty-seven people showed up and two of them were hired security guards.

    Invited speaker Deborah Weiss had an interesting take: the mysterious "they" sent all the invites to email junk folders. Yep, some mysterious dude who runs all of email stopped to redirect just her emails.

    Speaking of "nobody showed up" I could have sworn someone posted on this but I didn't see it. There's a MAGA dating app called "The Right Stuff" that launched on Oct 4 that advertised itself as a straight-only conservative dating site. Turns out, it's just men.

    The app currently sits at a 1.9-star rating from 367 reviews, an overwhelming amount of which are one star.

    “These days it’s hard to find a woman who values my patriotism,” one reviewer said. “But the weird thing is, I couldn’t find any women on it. I don’t know, maybe the app is bugged?”

    Others believed the app wasn’t conservative enough, with one saying: “I was surprised to see that this app is actually more liberal than I could imagine. There are conservatives out there who aren’t Christian. I hate this app.”

    One user even called it a “socialist app in wolves clothing,” claiming it was storing photos in a database that would be used to “exterminate all of us conservative Christians.”

    And if that wasn’t bad enough, others have claimed that various questions on the app’s registration page have put them in trouble with the FBI.
    Ah, yes, that's the stuff we had seen before.

    Well you didn't come to one of my posts without expecting me to dig further. Sure enough, at time of posting, the app has a 1.9 rating but it's out of 429 reviews now. Naturally, I picked a few:

    If i could give this app zero stars, i would. i read all the reviews, and figured there are probably a lot of Liberal trolls, and i wanted to try it for myself, cuz finally, a conservative dating app, right?! i signed up, filled out all the very identifying info (for example, they require a phone number before you can even proceed to create a profile!), and waited patiently for an invite. Eventually i got in, crickets... Where are all the ladies?! All i see are other God-fearing men, Liberal-bashing away; seems kinda gay to me. i’ve never seen a dating site so sad and devoid of love. On top of that, the app crashes left and right. Don’t waste your time, this app is definitely the wrong stuff.
    an app for extremists to meet and further radicalize themselves in an echo chamber. One of the "get it know me" prompts is "January 6 was..." And " my favorite liberal lie is.." This is a site that is a breeding ground for misinformation and hate.
    What?!? Ok interface but violates my privacy. Way too many personal questions, I don’t want to give out my phone number so can’t sign up. Stupid to have to be invited unless you refer 3 other people, who will join? I have heard there are no women on the site and the ad shows hot conservative women but there aren’t any. Get rid of the January 6 question, have you seen all the men at January 6? Duh. Liberal web sites don’t ask for so much personal info, be better and respect my privacy. Why so many personal questions and invite only? Stupid
    Speaking of bad ideas, remember how Texas rushed a bunch of National Guard to police Abbott's COVID-funding wall? Well, funny story, Abbott forgot to withhold taxes. Now a bunch of NG members owe hundreds or possibly thousands in back taxes. It's kind of like the tax cut for the rich gutting people's refunds, basically, in that they weren't paying more or less but the shock value was dumped in their lap all at once.

  13. #81293
    Quote Originally Posted by Breccia View Post
    Well. It has not been a great 24 hours for Donald Trump.

    By now, everyone knows the FBI is interested in the rest of Trump's properties. As Cohen said, it just seems likely that he put stuff there, too.



    Multiple articles I read had experts suggesting that, the FBI already "knows" there's stolen property there, they just want a witness to get the search warrants as airtight as Mar-a-Lago's were.

    Of course, there's one person who keeps insisting Trump took WH property: Trump. As the NYTimes reports:



    Not surprised his lawyers never went to the feds and said "Our client would like to announce his guilt". I'm sure Trump announcing he had hostages was going to work exactly as planned.

    In a related story, did you know there was a Trump rally in DC Friday? No? Neither did anyone else. Twenty-seven people showed up and two of them were hired security guards.

    Invited speaker Deborah Weiss had an interesting take: the mysterious "they" sent all the invites to email junk folders. Yep, some mysterious dude who runs all of email stopped to redirect just her emails.

    Speaking of "nobody showed up" I could have sworn someone posted on this but I didn't see it. There's a MAGA dating app called "The Right Stuff" that launched on Oct 4 that advertised itself as a straight-only conservative dating site. Turns out, it's just men.



    Ah, yes, that's the stuff we had seen before.

    Well you didn't come to one of my posts without expecting me to dig further. Sure enough, at time of posting, the app has a 1.9 rating but it's out of 429 reviews now. Naturally, I picked a few:







    Speaking of bad ideas, remember how Texas rushed a bunch of National Guard to police Abbott's COVID-funding wall? Well, funny story, Abbott forgot to withhold taxes. Now a bunch of NG members owe hundreds or possibly thousands in back taxes. It's kind of like the tax cut for the rich gutting people's refunds, basically, in that they weren't paying more or less but the shock value was dumped in their lap all at once.
    Someone should tell them that there is already an app to find another man to date. Grindr. Sometimes women too. I mean, they could go really old school and do personal ads like farmers used to do in the late 1800s to find someone.

  14. #81294
    Only 27 people showed up to pro-Trump rally in Washington DC

    Merely 27 people attended a pro-Trump rally in Washington DC this week.

    “We put the word out, literally, about a week ago. We would have liked to have more people, but I would consider it a success,” John Paul Moran, founder of GOUSA, told the outlet.


    Quite the "sucksess" indeed.

  15. #81295
    Quote Originally Posted by Shadowferal View Post
    Only 27 people showed up to pro-Trump rally in Washington DC

    Merely 27 people attended a pro-Trump rally in Washington DC this week.

    “We put the word out, literally, about a week ago. We would have liked to have more people, but I would consider it a success,” John Paul Moran, founder of GOUSA, told the outlet.


    Quite the "sucksess" indeed.
    27 too many.

  16. #81296
    Void Lord Breccia's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by postman1782 View Post
    27 too many.
    25 too many. Two of them were paid to attend. People being paid by Trump supporters to get zero results is okay with me.

  17. #81297
    Quote Originally Posted by Breccia View Post
    25 too many. Two of them were paid to attend. People being paid by Trump supporters to get zero results is okay with me.
    LOL, did they admit this? It wouldn't surprise me.

  18. #81298
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    Quote Originally Posted by postman1782 View Post
    LOL, did they admit this? It wouldn't surprise me.
    The two in question were hired security.
    Quote Originally Posted by Crissi View Post
    Quit using other posters as levels of crazy. That is not ok


    If you look, you can see the straw man walking a red herring up a slippery slope coming to join this conversation.

  19. #81299
    Quote Originally Posted by Poopymonster View Post
    The two in question were hired security.
    You would think they wouldn't be counted then lol.

  20. #81300
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    Quote Originally Posted by postman1782 View Post
    You would think they wouldn't be counted then lol.
    They needed to boost those numbers as much as possible.

    Now, were Trump to actually be running for something I'm sure his supporters would worm their way out of the woodworks to show up for him in... larger... numbers, and even if the majority of republicans wouldn't show up to his rally they'd unfortunately still probably vote for him over evil Joe Biden who... fell off a bike once and is and making hamburgers more expensive, I guess.

    Trump's supporters want to hear how Trump is "sticking it to the libs" or "punishing the right people." That's the stuff they show up for, that's the stuff cheer on, and right now Trump doesn't have the power to do any of that and, much to the contrary, is getting a lot of that "sticking" and "punishing" done to him. But that doesn't mean that, God forbid that fat orange slob befouls American politics with his presence once more, that they won't show right back up again, or that he wont pretend this current utter lack of interest ever existed.
    “Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
    Quote Originally Posted by Wells View Post
    Kaleredar is right...
    Words to live by.

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