Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Fugus]

https://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...rocess-second/



The PAC is 100% correct, especially after Trump ordered the ATF to ban bump-stocks despite Obama having the ATF look into it and they determined they didn't have the authority to do so.

It's a rare instance in which I agree with him, actually.

The sad thing is that he only went that route because he knew it made him look bad with the shootings being his supporters.

[Edge-]

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/20/polit...ion/index.html

Mike Lindell is learning that when you make a contract you have to actually honor that contract.

He actually owes the $5M he promised to the first person to debunk his 2020 election "data", and the guy who did it ended up suing to get his money. He won.

I do wonder how much money Lindell has left laying about at this point. Can't be too much.

[Breccia]

the guy who did it ended up suing to get his money. He won.

Quick, dude, get your money before Dominion gets it! There is a clearly finite time limit!

[Fugus]

Not directly Trump related and not enough to warrant it's own thread but still worth posting and this seems the most appropriate since it was largely due to stuff Trump encouraged.

It's about a racist right winger who killed someone and Abbot in Texas was saying he was going to pardon them.

[Breccia]

Another day, another Trump failure in court.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is presiding over the trial in Manhattan stemming from writer E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit, responded a day after Trump’s lawyer sent him a letter indicating that Trump might take the witness stand in the trial but saying would be too difficult for him to attend the entire trial for logistical reasons tied to his former office.

In his letter Wednesday, the lawyer, Joe Tacopina, asked Kaplan to instruct jurors: “While no litigant is required to appear at a civil trial, the absence of the defendant in this matter, by design, avoids the logistical burdens that his presence, as the former president, would cause the courthouse and New York City. Accordingly, his presence is excused unless and until he is called by either party to testify.”

"Wait, the defense handed the judge a script, with instructions to the jury, and asked him to read it?"

Yes.

And in case you were wondering if Trump's phrasing, making it sound like he was doing everyone a favor and falling on the sword when in fact his fat ass is terrified of the stand, was noted by the judge...it was.

Strike one:

Kaplan responded that the court does not accept Trump’s counsel’s “claims concerning alleged burdens on the courthouse or the City” if Trump were to testify. He noted that Trump is under no legal obligation to be present or to testify and that Carroll’s counsel has signaled that she was not planning to call Trump as a witness.

Strike two:

Kaplan also cited Trump’s coming travel to a campaign event in New Hampshire on the third day of the scheduled trial while pointing out that he is entitled by law to have Secret Service protection and that additional security measures can be provided, as well.

Strike three:

Kaplan also noted that Trump was notified of the April 25 start date on or about Feb. 7, giving him “quite ample time within which to make whatever logistical arrangements should be made for his attendance.” He said it’s “quite a bit more time” than Trump was given ahead of his recent historic indictment by a Manhattan grand jury in a case involving hush money payments made during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Not only did the judge bitchslap this arrogant-ass request, he brought up that Trump is facing other criminal charges. I'm going to get @cubby on this in the usual one/two punch of "expertise asked for" and "it's funny as fuck", but, I think Kaplan giving that specific reason was a warning shot.

Kaplan concluded that Trump’s request for special jury instructions is “premature.”

“Mr. Trump is free to attend, to testify, or both. He is free also to do none of those things,” Kaplan wrote. “Should he elect not to appear or testify, his counsel may renew the request.”

“In the meantime, there shall be no reference by counsel for Mr. Trump in the presence of the jury panel or the trial jury to Mr. Trump’s alleged desire to testify or to the burdens that any absence on his part allegedly might spare, or might have spared, the Court or the City of New York,” Kaplan added.

By the way, while this is a civil trial, this is a civil rape trial. I'm pretty sure that, when accused of raping someone, when the court asks you to take the stand, you don't get to say "I'm too busy, I'll save you the trouble by not showing up".

If Trump is really playing the "Trump wants to testify" card, there's a good way to handle that: call his bluff. Ask his lawyers, politely, in court, in front of the jury, for Trump to take the stand. Watch how quickly Trump's lawyers immediately refuse. It doesn't even need to go full subpoena, although yes, I was tempted to make a joke about Trump's small subpoenas after the judge used the term "premature". Just say "if he wants to testify, I have some questions I'd like to ask under oath".

He'll refuse.

Do that, while the jury can see it. Dismiss that fake-ass "Trump wants to testify but oh no it would be such a burden y gaiz! It would be a burden. Don't ask the accused rapist to defend himself, it would be a burden."

[PosPosPos]

https://twitter.com/lawindsor/status...75730687352833

If you can't win because you are so deeply unpopular with voters, just make sure nobody can vote.

[Dontrike]

https://twitter.com/lawindsor/status...75730687352833

If you can't win because you are so deeply unpopular with voters, just make sure nobody can vote.

Republicans would love to make voting illegal.

[Edge-]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2324375.html

Figured this fits for the broader Republican party given that Trump is still the current likely nominee and head of the party.

Kellyanne apparently is realizing that culture war bullshit plays real well with the base and only the base, and isn't great for national electoral ambitions. Now she's critical of DeSantis here, but I find it funny she's critical on this topic just a few short months after Sarah Sanders gave her response to the SOTU which was almost exclusively culture-war based.

Shame Republicans don't have much on the actual policy-front to talk about outside of culture war shit. Well, reproductive health care and rights and all but that's a very losing issue for them as we've repeatedly seen.

[Taifuu]

Once again, they're not even trying to hide their disdain for democracy. Why work on running on a platform that entices voters when you can just remove them from the voting process entirely?

[Breccia]

You know...when I started this thread's concept years ago, it was called "Trump: Two Weeks In Summary" then four, then 99 days, etc etc. The megathread was a later creation.

I remember, sometimes, back in the day, when I could wait a week to collect three or four damning articles about how Trump was an incompetent idiot. When lying to the small crowd it was raining on, that it wasn't a small crowd and it wasn't raining, then attacking his own government agency for posting actual pictures proving he was a fat liar.

And he hadn't killed anyone yet.

Good times...good times...

Now, I have to restrict Google searches for the last 24 hours just for the number of negative articles to be in the three to four range. We know so much about how Trump isn't just incompetent, not just a liar, not just a con man, but objectively corrupt, a thief, and an attempted dictator and attempted murderer.

Case in point:

1)
In mid-January 2021, two men hired by Trump’s legal team discussed over text message what to do with data obtained from a breached voting machine in a rural county in Georgia, including whether to use it as part of an attempt to decertify the state’s pending Senate runoff results.

“Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close hold,” Jim Penrose, a former NSA official working with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to access voting machines in Georgia, wrote in a January 19 text to Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, a firm that purports to run audits of voting systems.

“We only have until Saturday to decide if we are going to use this report to try to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we hold it for a bigger moment,” Penrose wrote, referring to a potential lawsuit.

The plot to breach voting systems in Coffee County, coordinated by members of Trump’s legal team including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, is part of a broader criminal investigation into 2020 election interference led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Willis’ office is weighing a potential racketeering case against multiple defendants and is actively deciding who to bring charges against, sources tell CNN. Willis has subpoenaed a number of individuals involved in the Coffee County breach, including the two men who carried it out who were in touch with Penrose and Logan.

We've discussed this before. Per the NYTimes Aug 2022:

In another development on Monday, newly released court records provided fresh details about the lengths Mr. Trump’s allies went to as they tried to overturn the results in Georgia and other states. One batch of documents showed that a forensics team working with lawyers aligned with Mr. Trump successfully gained access to critical election infrastructure in Coffee County, Ga., obtaining information about voting machines and software.

The revelation, detailed through emails and texts obtained by The New York Times, is the first confirmation that the rural county’s electoral system had been breached by an unauthorized outside group. The news of the breach was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

The infiltration of Coffee County’s electoral system is one of several examples in states across the country, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Colorado, where a loosely connected network of technical experts and lawyers have sought to obtain sensitive information about voting equipment in a sprawling attempt to show that the 2020 election was corrupted by fraud.

Yep. The plan was to breach the voting machines to show they could be hacked...and then, apparently, use the breach that they caused themselves to say the election was hacked. And then crown Trump god emperor.

2) Biden, with some of the lowest polling numbers he's ever had, still beats Trump in a direct matchup.

3) Pro-life groups, such as the Susan B Anthony group, wait, wasn't she about voting? The fuck?

Anyhow, they are now threatening to boycott Trump, not because he's a horrible human being and a criminal, but because he's not pro-life enough.

And we've been talking a lot about how strong anti-abortion messages are less and less favored in the country. So Trump will have to campaign and run on a topic that makes him even more deplorable.

4) Trump is continuing to scream "I am your justice!" into the microphone, a time-tested strategy of his to pretend that he's doing this for his voters, not for himself. That, somehow, they're the ones wronged by Trump failing to win the 2020 election.

In addition to proposing a bunch of stuff that would be illegal, or at least authoritarian. Because Trump doesn't want rules, we've seen that, it was called 2016 to 2020.

[Edge-]

https://www.axios.com/2023/04/21/pol...-desantis-2024

Most Republican primary voters say fighting "woke" ideology in schools and businesses is more important to them than protecting Medicare and Social Security from cuts, a new Wall Street Journal poll out today showed.

...

But 55% of Republicans say that fighting "woke ideology in our schools and businesses" is more important than protecting entitlement programs from cuts, per the Journal poll.

27% of Republican voters say protecting Social Security and Medicare benefits from cuts is more important to them.

However, 49% of all voters said they would support a candidate who pledged to keep entitlements as they are rather than push for cuts.

I'm increasingly warming up to letting Republicans move to the southern states and just letting them leave, we'll rip out the federal infrastructure and take all the folks that don't want to live there no more. They can even build their own wall to keep themselves locked in there.

[The Stormbringer]

https://www.axios.com/2023/04/21/pol...-desantis-2024

I'm increasingly warming up to letting Republicans move to the southern states and just letting them leave, we'll rip out the federal infrastructure and take all the folks that don't want to live there no more. They can even build their own wall to keep themselves locked in there.

I dunno, I'd feel bad for kids born there. We'd need some way to rescue them too.

[cubby]

Not only did the judge bitchslap this arrogant-ass request, he brought up that Trump is facing other criminal charges. I'm going to get @cubby on this in the usual one/two punch of "expertise asked for" and "it's funny as fuck", but, I think Kaplan giving that specific reason was a warning shot.

The judge is indeed bitchslapping Trump's legal team and giving them all notice that his future presence at the upcoming criminal trials will be required, and no amount of "logistical issues" will be allowed to excuse the presence.

[Fugus]

https://www.axios.com/2023/04/21/pol...-desantis-2024



I'm increasingly warming up to letting Republicans move to the southern states and just letting them leave, we'll rip out the federal infrastructure and take all the folks that don't want to live there no more. They can even build their own wall to keep themselves locked in there.

We would also have to ban them from returning otherwise they would pull an Ayn Rand and cross the border the moment they hit hard times to mooch off the better system and then go back when they can to avoid paying into the system providing it. The “Virtues of Greed” and all.

[Breccia]

The judge is indeed bitchslapping Trump's legal team and giving them all notice that his future presence at the upcoming criminal trials will be required, and no amount of "logistical issues" will be allowed to excuse the presence.

I'm starting to wonder if working for a large paperwork-fuelled admin-driven state government has helped understand the legal profession.

Or, if it's just easy to say "Trump's lawyers are horrible" because all they've done is

Fixed that for you.

LOSING

[Edge-]

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1649507816711897091

Welp, some audio from Abby Grossberg, the Fox producer who got fired during the whole Dominion thing.

Apparently Sydney Powell, THE KRAKEN, kept accidentally sending her stuff because she's bad at her job and can't keep the "Abby's" straight in her contacts. Grossberg, smartly, apparently didn't open many of them knowing they might turn up to be evidence that ropes her into this mess. But did field many frantic calls from Powell asking her to delete the information.

Navarro thinks she's totally to blame for everything going off the rails and they were close to proving their case before she derailed everything, or something. He still stands by these statemetns.

Anyways, it's all fucking hilarious. Weird how incompetent people like this constantly end up in Trump's orbit.

[Belize]

I dunno, I'd feel bad for kids born there. We'd need some way to rescue them too.

The south has a lot of oil, the U.S. could invade after they secede and liberate it.

[postman1782]

Once again, they're not even trying to hide their disdain for democracy. Why work on running on a platform that entices voters when you can just remove them from the voting process entirely?

Don't let anyone on the right hear you say democracy, they will start saying some bullshit that we aren't a democracy, we are a constitutional republic. With them not know that a constitutional republic is a form of democracy. Because they are morons.

- - - Updated - - -



Cleta Mitchell, apparently one of Trump's attorneys from him trying to overturn the 2020 election, is on tape, trying to steal the 2024 election by enacting blatantly illegal election laws. She should be in fucking prison.

[Edge-]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/u...-election.html

Former President Donald J. Trump took part in a discussion about plans to access voting system software in Michigan and Georgia as part of the effort to challenge his 2020 election loss, according to testimony from former Trump advisers. The testimony, delivered to the House Jan. 6 committee, was highlighted on Friday in a letter to federal officials from a liberal-leaning legal advocacy group.

Allies of Mr. Trump ultimately succeeded in copying the elections software in those two states, and the breach of voting data in Georgia is being examined by prosecutors as part of a broader criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump and his allies interfered in the presidential election there. The former president’s participation in the discussion of the Georgia plan could increase his risk of possible legal exposure there.

A number of Trump aides and allies have recounted a lengthy and acrimonious meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, which one member of the House Jan. 6 committee would later call “the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.” During the meeting, then-President Trump presided as his advisers argued about whether they should seek to have federal agents seize voting machines to analyze them for fraud.

Testimony to the Jan. 6 committee from one aide who attended the meeting, Derek Lyons, a former White House staff secretary and counselor, was highlighted on Friday in a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation from Free Speech for People, a liberal nonprofit legal advocacy group. Mr. Lyons recounted that during the meeting, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, opposed seizing voting machines and spoke of how the Trump campaign was instead “going to be able to secure access to voting machines in Georgia through means other than seizure,” and that the access would be “voluntary.”

Other attendees offered similar testimony to the committee, which released its final report on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in late December. Among those involved in the Oval Office discussion were two prominent pro-Trump conspiracy theorists: Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who spread numerous falsehoods after the 2020 election and who also discussed Mr. Giuliani’s comments in her testimony.

That uh...seems bad for Trump avoiding potential criminal charges for his involvement in that part of the scheme. I figured he was smart enough to stay indirectly involved throughout, but I guess when he was in Bigly Panic mode he rolled up his sleaves to get his own hands dirty. And potentially implicate himself down the road. Oops.

[Cthulhu 2020]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/u...-election.html



That uh...seems bad for Trump avoiding potential criminal charges for his involvement in that part of the scheme. I figured he was smart enough to stay indirectly involved throughout, but I guess when he was in Bigly Panic mode he rolled up his sleaves to get his own hands dirty. And potentially implicate himself down the road. Oops.

To those who need it broken down, Fani Willis has evidence and testimony that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell conspired to steal voting machine data in Georgia to create a pretext for Donald trump to seize voting machines, and they all discussed it in a 12/18/20 Oval Office meeting.

Just waiting for the GA indictment to drop.