Lmst

#AileenCannon #trump #judgeaileencannon #assassinationarrempt #RyanRouth #florida

This is insane;

“ The Florida federal judge who dismissed the criminal classified documents case against former President Donald Trump rejected a request that she step off the case of a man charged with trying to assassinate Trump at his golf course in September.”

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/business/money-report/trump-appointed-judge-aileen-cannon-refuses-to-recuse-from-attempted-assassination-case/4012871/?amp=1

AILEEN CANNON, AS A MEMBER OF TRUMP'S FLORIDA LEGAL TEAM
Mastodon Post

'Almost unprecedented': Judge drops Trump's classified docs case
MSNBC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WVfHSN3IiY

This is a good, brief account of the favor Judge Aileen Cannon just did for Donald Trump. Whether her ruling gets anywhere may be of little importance. The damage - big delay - has been done.

#aileencannon #classifieddocumentscase #democrats #judgeaileencannon #judgecannon #lisarubin #msnbc

:::

🚨 News Alert
Espionage Case Against Trump in Florida Dismissed

ORDER GRANTING DEFENDANTS' MOTION TO DISMISS SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT BASED ON APPOINTMENTS CLAUSE VIOLATION.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.672.0_1.pdf

#Law #EspionageCharges #Trump #FloridaCase #DocumentCases #ObstructionOfJustice #JudgeAileenCannon

#trump #judgeaileencannon #swamp #Corruption #maralago #classifieddocuments #gop
#jacksmith

WTF?!?! Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed classified documents case

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/15/politics/classified-documents-case-trump-dismissed-aileen-cannon?cid=ios_app

#JudgeAileenCannon #TrumpDocumentsCase
She did it! 🤦‍♂️

Florida judge dismisses criminal classified documents case against Trump | Donald Trump | The Guardian

"US district judge Aileen Cannon made ruling after hearing in which ex-president’s legal team urged her to drop charges."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/15/judge-dismisses-trump-classified-documents-case

Good Day!!

Studio Scene, by Kayoon Anderson

Today, the press and cable TV are mostly focused on tomorrow’s debate and how Biden can deal with Trump’s insanity and incoherence. I don’t find the discussions about this very interesting. I think Biden knows how to bait Trump, and no one really knows what crazy nonsense Trump will unleash. I hope Biden will mock Trump’s fear of sharks and electric boats; his claims that there’s not enough water in shower heads and dishwashers; and his claim that he got his vast knowledge about “nuclear” by osmosis from his uncle the MIT professor. Trump has absolutely no interest or knowledge about policy and Biden can demonstrate that too.

It is concerning that Trump is claiming Biden will be “jacked up” on drugs, because low information voters appear to be incredibly stupid and will likely believe it. Of course, Trump is the one who could be using drugs as a crutch.

Philip Bump at The Washington Post: No, Biden won’t be on performance-enhancing drugs for the debate.

Allies of Donald Trump have painted themselves into a cognitive corner. President Biden is unfit for office, they argue, because he is so old, and his mental abilities have deteriorated markedly. But then Biden will, say, deliver a State of the Union address in which he is energetic and pointed for more than an hour.

So they modify their claim: Biden is addled and wandering, except when he is given some sort of medication, perhaps a stimulant, that reverses that effect. And here we are, with Trump and those seeking his reelection to the White House demanding that Biden submit to some sort of drug test before this week’s first presidential debate, purportedly in effort to sniff out this theoretical drug.

Experts who spoke with The Washington Post, though, confirm that no such medicine exists.
At the outset, we should recognize that this claim is generally not offered seriously. It is, instead, an effort to escape the aforementioned contradiction, a way to hold both that Biden is incapable of serving as president and yet, unquestionably at times, not demonstrating any such impairment. What’s more, the demand that Biden undergo a drug test is itself not serious. It is, instead, meant to create a condition that allows Trump and his allies to continue to claim that any strong performance from Biden is a function of medication. The result is win-win for Trump, who can blame any loss on this wonder drug.

The wackos at Fox “News” are busy speculating about what drugs Biden could be using.

Host Maria Bartiromo — no stranger to conspiratorial argumentation — hosted Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) where she offered an observation made by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.).
“Jackson says Biden will have been at Camp David for a full week before the debate,” Bartiromo said, “and that they’re probably experimenting with getting doses right. Giving him medicine ahead of the debate.”
Burlison agreed that this was possible, though he offered that it might be more innocuous than medication. Perhaps, he said, Biden’s team is “jack[ing] him up on Mountain Dew.”
“Nothing like that exists,” Thomas Wisniewski, director of the NYU Langone Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, told The Washington Post by phone. “There are no medications or stimulants that can reverse a dementing process transiently.”

but quite often that can just exacerbate their confusion, as well,” he added. “They can be more stimulated, but they are not going to be behaving in a more cogent or normal fashion as a result of being stimulated by anything. Very often it’s the reverse.”

Adam Brickman, associate professor of neuropsychology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, concurred with that assessment.
“I’m not aware of any medications that would reverse or mask cognitive decline,” Brickman said. What’s more, he noted that “the association between energy and cognition is a very weak one. In other words, someone could have low energy but totally intact cognition and vice versa.”

Of course the goal of these drug claims is to prepare the idiots who support Trump for the likelihood that Biden will wipe the floor with Trump during tomorrow’s debate.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Trump’s claim that Biden is “jacked up” on drugs is more than projection — it’s cult conditioning.

Donald Trump has been thinking a lot about cocaine lately, even though drug-running is one of the few felony charges he’s not been indicted or convicted for. He has been routinely accusing President Joe Biden of using drugs, with the usual vivid details Trump injects into all his weird fantasies. “So a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the a—,” Trump told rallygoers in Philadelphia Saturday. “I say he’ll come out all jacked up,” he added, before going off on a diatribe accusing Biden of being the owner of a bag of cocaine found in a White House visitors’ closet last year.

La Lecture, 1877, by Henri Fanton-Latour

Since there’s no flight of Trump’s fancy too bizarre for right-wing media, this obsession of Trump’s is getting echoed by Republican politicians and MAGA talking heads. Fox News hosts, Republican politicians, MAGA media influencers, and every right-wing troll on Twitter have been playing their part as well-trained parrots, repeating the lie. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is even putting the lie in paid advertising.
Everyone knows that Trump’s favorite rhetorical tactic is psychological projection. You’d think Republicans would be a little more worried this would raise questions about what Trump has been ingesting. But no: The campaign tapped disgraced former White House doctor Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Tex. to be a major Trump surrogate pushing this lie. Jackson’s been hitting both TV and podcasts to toss around drug names like “Adderall” and “Provigil.” This only reinforces suspicions that this accusation is a confession, however. When Jackson was Trump’s White House doctor, he earned the nickname “Dr. Feelgood” for relentlessly pushing these drugs on people who do not need them. Jackson’s behavior was so egregious that the Navy stripped him of his rank.
What’s telling about this lie is, as with many MAGA falsehoods, it seems few, if any, of the people repeating it actually believe it. Trump and his allies have accused Biden not just of being a little tired at times, but of having dementia. As Mona Charen pointed out on the “Daily Blast” podcast, if Adderall could restore a demented person’s brain, they’d be mass distributing it to the millions of people who are suffering from this disease. As for the cocaine accusation, even the most naive person in the country knows cocaine makes people less coherent, not sharper. It causes people to ramble on about nonsense, which is closer to describing your average Trump speech, not anything Biden has been up to.
Trump is using his second favorite trick, besides projection: Tricking his followers into believing they’re in on his con.
Trump isn’t trying to convince anyone of this lie. He’s convincing them that, by repeating the obvious lie, they can share in what they believe is his mastery over reality itself. The lie is not a thing the MAGA person sincerely believes. It’s a weapon Trump has provided them. When he loses the debate, which they clearly expect he will, the lie gives them a way to participate in the post-debate spin. But it’s also the stupidity of the lie that makes it so fun. Saying something deliberately dumb is a reliable way to drive the liberals mad. Angering liberals is the emotional core of the MAGA base….
As I’ve written about before, this strategy is the oldest technique in the con artist’s book. The best way for a grifter to gain a mark’s trust is to make him feel like he’s in on the con. Cult leaders operate the same way, by creating this sense of intimacy with their victims. Once the mark feels he’s part of the conspiracy, it’s that much easier to victimize him. The mark feels like the predator and not the prey, and so he lets his guard down around the actual villain picking his pocket. Trump does this to his followers over and over again, and they always fall for it. Even the Capitol insurrection is a good example. Trump convinced the rioters that they were his partners in the attempted coup. In reality, they were his patsies, set up to take the fall while he hid away in the White House.

Read the whole piece at Salon. It’s good.

NPR has an interesting article on the Biden and Trump “debates” in 2020: COVID tests and crosstalk: What happened the last time Trump and Biden debated.

With Trump and Biden now near even in the latest polls, and many Americans unenthused — and still undecided — about voting for either of them, Thursday’s debate offers both candidates an opportunity. But it’s not without risks.
It’s likely to be a memorable night if 2020 is any indication. Here’s a look at what happened last time Trump and Biden took the stage together….

Albert Edelfelt, Portrait of the artist’s sister Bertha Edelfelt, 1881

The first round, in September 2020, was by many accounts a disaster. NPR’s Domenico Montanaro called it “maybe the worst presidential debate in American history.”
Trump arrived on the debate stage trailing in the polls and, apparently, jonesing for drama. He interrupted Biden constantly, peppering him with questions and personal slights despite moderator Chris Wallace’s pleas for order.
At one point, while Biden was talking about his late son Beau’s military service, Trump jumped in to attack his other son, Hunter, for his drug use (which Biden managed to seize as a sympathetic moment).
Biden tried in vain to ignore Trump talking over him throughout — but called the then-president a “clown” more than once. At one point he had clearly had enough.
“Will you shut up, man?” he said exasperatedly, as Trump continued accusing him of wanting to pack the Supreme Court. “This is so unpresidential.”
Trump even bulldozed over Wallace, prompting the then-Fox News anchor to declare, “Mr. President, I am the moderator of this debate and I would like you to let me ask my question and then you can answer.”

A bit more on the first “debate”:

Still, a few substantive moments stood out amidst the chaos and crosstalk.
One was when Wallace asked if Trump was willing to condemn white supremacists and tell them to “stand down.”
Trump blamed the “left-wing” instead, but said he was prepared to do so. At that point, both Wallace and Biden urged him to go ahead. Trump asked for a name, and Biden suggested the Proud Boys.
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said, in what sounded more like a call to action, and quickly became part of the far-right extremist group’s new social media logo.
Trump also repeatedly made baseless claims about the upcoming election being rigged, saying “This is going to be fraud like you’ve never heard.”
When Wallace asked if he would urge his supporters to stay calm during a potentially prolonged period of counting ballots, Trump demurred. He said instead that he was “urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully.”
“If it’s a fair election, I am 100% on board,” he said. “But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”

Read the rest at NPR.

The Supreme Court is still releasing decisions. Once again, they have held back the one on Trump’s claim of “presidential immunity.” They announced two decisions today.

The Guardian: US supreme court allows government to request removal of misinformation on social media.

The US supreme court has struck down a lower court ruling in the case of Murthy v Missouri, finding that the government’s communications with social media platforms about Covid-19 misinformation did not violate the first amendment. The court’s decision permits the government to call on tech companies to remove falsehoods and establishes boundaries around free speech online.
The court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs had no standing to bring the case against the Biden administration, with conservative justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissenting.
The ruling is a blow to a longstanding Republican-backed effort to equate content moderation with censorship. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which included the founder of a far-right conspiracy website, argued that the government and federal agencies were coercing tech companies into silencing conservatives through demands to take down misinformation about the pandemic.

Bloomberg Law: Supreme Court Further Weakens Public Corruption Prosecutions.

The US Supreme Court again pared back a public corruption law, this time saying that state and local officials who accept “gratuities” aren’t covered by a federal bribery statute.
The 6-3 ruling by Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday was the latest in a string of cases cutting the reach of federal corruption laws and prosecutorial discretion to bring charges against government officials.

Woman reading in garden. Ignacio Díaz Olano

In the latest case, Snyder v. United States, the justices said a law which makes it a crime for certain state or local officials to “corruptly” accept anything of value over $5,000 doesn’t reach gratuities paid in recognition of past actions.
The ruling undoes the conviction of former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder for receiving $13,000 from a trucking company after it was awarded city contracts.
A contrary ruling had the potential to criminalize “commonplace gratuities” like a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card, Chipotle dinner, or tickets to a Hoosiers game, the court said.
The ruling split the justices along ideological lines. Writing for the liberal justices in dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said “Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love.”
The justices’ concern over prosecutorial overreach could have implications for a number of criminal cases over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The justices in Fischer v. United States are considering whether federal prosecutors went too far in charging some defendants with an Enron-era statute prohibiting obstruction of an official proceeding.

Judge Aileen Cannon held another hearing yesterday in her efforts to waste as much time as possible and prevent the stolen documents case from going to trial. Here’s some of what happened:

Adam Klasfeld at Just Security: Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Search Challenge Flounders: Judge Signals Warrant Passed Muster.

Nearly two years after the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s effort to suppress the evidence that agents found inside his personal residence and social club appeared to fall flat on Tuesday.
Trump’s attorney, Emil Bove, argued that the search warrant was not detailed enough to survive Fourth Amendment scrutiny.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon pointedly disagreed: “It seems like it is, based on the caselaw that’s been submitted,” she said, minutes before court adjourned.
Though Cannon did not immediately issue a ruling, Trump’s challenge hinges on the “particularity” of the warrant, and her remarks throughout the proceedings left little doubt as to her leanings.
“It’s clearly delineated there to search for documents with classification markings,” she remarked toward the start of the hearing.

Click the link to read more about the hearing.

At Public Notice, Liz Dye wrote about Trump’s claims that he should be able to attack anyone involved in the legal cases against him: Trump asserts constitutional right to harass FBI agents.

In the stolen documents case in Florida, Trump called the special counsel’s motion to stop him from spreading vicious lies about the FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago a “naked effort to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech, under threat of incarceration, in a clear attempt to silence President Trump’s arguments to the American people about the outrageous nature of this investigation and prosecution.” [….]
In Florida, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to bar Trump from accusing the FBI agents who executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago of trying to assassinate him.
The backstory is that on May 21, Trump claimed to have been “shown Reports” that President Biden “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE” back in August 2022 when it raided the private club where he was storing stolen government documents.

Sleeping Woman with a Book, by Ferdinand Max Bredt

In fact, the “Report” was boilerplate language from the FBI’s operations order for the warrant, attached as an exhibit to his own motion to suppress the evidence kicked up on that raid. The FBI took great care to execute the warrant at a time when the club was shuttered for the season and there was no prospect that the former president and his family would be there. Nevertheless, Trump and his MAGA henchmen spent several news cycles claiming that President Biden had sent in agents “locked and loaded” ready to shoot him.
Those agents will necessarily be witnesses at the trial (should it ever happen), and yet Trump is falsely accusing them of attempted murder. Two of them were already publicly outed back in 2022 when someone gave the unredacted warrant to Breitbart and a former Trump aide, both of whom published it with the agents’ signatures visible.
After the agents were doxxed, they and their families were threatened and harassed, which influenced Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart’s decision to keep under seal parts of the affidavit in support of the warrant.
“Given the public notoriety and controversy about this search, it is likely that even witnesses who are not expressly named in the Affidavit would be quickly and broadly identified over social media and other communication channels, which could lead to them being harassed and intimidated,” he wrote.

Judge Cannon doesn’t seem to think this is a big deal.

Trump insists that his lies about the FBI are “core political speech” protected by the First Amendment. He also deliberately distorts the “heckler’s veto,” as he has done many times before, claiming that he cannot be silenced to prevent foreseeable, violent acts by his supporters. But as the DC Circuit wrote in its order upholding the gag order in the election interference case, “That doctrine prohibits restraining speech on the grounds that it ‘might offend a hostile mob’ hearing the message.” [….]
The DC Circuit judges noted that the trial judge need not find that the defendant’s statements had led to violent attacks in this case, they could infer the danger from attacks on everyone from Atlanta poll workers, to grand jurors in Fulton County, to the jury foreperson doxxed in the Roger Stone case. Applying the standard set out by the Supreme Court in Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada, the judges blessed the gag order based on a finding that Trump’s attacks on witnesses, jurors, and court staff posed a “substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing” the proceedings.
But that may not matter to Judge Aileen Cannon, who showed marked hostility to this (and every other) prosecutorial motion at a hearing Monday in Fort Pierce, where she waved away the ample record of Trump endangering witnesses and law enforcement, as well as an exhibit showing threats to FBI agents by a man who was killed in an attempted attack on an FBI building in Cincinnati just days after the warrant on Mar-a-Lago was executed.
“There still needs to be a factual connection between A and B,” the judge said, rebuffing Assistant US Attorney David Harbach’s efforts to make the government’s case.
“Mr. Harbach, I don’t appreciate your tone,” she fumed in response to the complaint that she wasn’t letting the government articulate its position, according to Just Security’s Adam Klasfeld, who was in the courtroom. “I expect decorum in this courtroom at all times. If you cannot do that, I’m sure one of your colleagues can take up this motion.” [….]
It seems highly unlikely that Cannon will do anything to curb Trump’s speech, until someone else gets hurt — and, if and when that happens, she will blame the government for failing to properly argue in favor of the gag order.

One more on the stolen documents case from Justin Rohrlich at The Daily Beast: New Pics Show Nuclear Secrets Stashed Beside the Diet Cokes at Mar-a-Lago.

On Monday night, following Trump’s latest disingenuous contention—that the FBI agents who seized and reviewed the contents of boxes upon boxes of sensitive materials stored at Mar-a-Lago “failed to maintain” the exact order of the documents within, which Trump now claims could somehow exonerate him—government lawyers filed a scathing response letting the air out of Trump’s contentions.

Nikolai Bekker Portrait of Countess Maria Hilarionovna Worontsov-Dachkova (1919).

Far from a neatly ordered system under which Trump, a notorious pack rat, maintained a precise inventory of important documents, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, along with prosecutors Jay Bratt and David Harbach, noted the “cluttered collection of keepsakes,” which “traveled from one readily accessible location to another” around the Palm Beach, Florida club.
“[T]his is not a case where reams of identically-sized documents were stacked neatly in file folders or redwelds, arrayed perfectly within a box,” the filing states. “To anyone other than Trump, the boxes had no apparent organization whatsoever.”
Trump kept highly guarded secrets in boxes with “personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency—newspapers, thank you notes, Christmas ornaments, magazines, clothing, and photographs of himself and others,” the government’s filing goes on.
“After they landed in stacks in the storage room, several boxes fell and splayed their contents on the floor; and boxes were moved to Trump’s residence on more than one occasion so he could review and pick through them,” the filing continues. “Against this backdrop of the haphazard manner in which Trump chose to maintain his boxes, he now claims that the precise order of the items within the boxes when they left the White House was critical to his defense, and, what’s more, that FBI agents executing the search warrant in August 2022 should have known that.”
Smith, Bratt, and Harbach included a slew of exhibits to back up their position, with numerous previously unseen pictures of Trump’s decidedly chaotic storage methods. One shows assorted wadded-up golf shirts side-by-side with a folder marked “CONFIDENTIAL.” Another shows extremely sensitive defense-related documents carelessly stacked up on the floor beside cases of Diet Coke, a Hermes tie box, and a “Save America” cap, several toppled boxes with papers, binders, and folders spilling out, and a box containing a Christmas pillow and a random length of bubble wrap, beneath which, as national security analyst and writer Marcy Wheeler pointed out, at least one document prosecutors say was related to America’s nuclear weapons program.
In one exhibit, Smith & Co. provide a new photo of a storage closet at Mar-a-Lago where the contents of at least five upturned bankers boxes can be seen spilling out onto the floor. Several suit jackets in plastic dry cleaning bags hang from a rack above them, a Gibson guitar case leans against the wall, and what appears to be a piece of rococo plaster molding teeters atop a cardboard box nearby. According to the indictment, one of the boxes seen here contained a 2019 document marked “SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY,” which denotes the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.

Read more and see photos at the Daily Beast link.

This post is getting really long, so I’m going going to end there. I’ll add a few more links in the comment thread. Have a great day, everyone!!

https://skydancingblog.com/2024/06/26/wednesday-reads-62/

#BidenTrumpDebate2024 #BidenTrumpDebates2020 #FBISearchOfMarALago #JudgeAileenCannon #MurthyVMissouri #NoBidenWonTBeOnDrugs #SnyderVUnitedStates #stolenDocumentsCase #SupremeCourt #TrumpAttacksOnFBIAgents #TrumpStorageMethods

The longer this continues, the more ... well, it's ridiculous. It's wacko!

Chaos And Mayhem In The US
https://medium.com/@silkester/chaos-and-mayhem-in-the-us-d2d5f64eed14

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#Trump #USJusticeSystem #ProsecutingTrump #LawAndOrder #CahosAndMayhem #11thCircuit #JudgeAileenCannon #Law #Justice #supremeCourt #SelfCoup

TRUMP CRIMINAL DOCUMENTS CASE IN PSYCHO COURT
Mastodon Post

Trump expressed concern that returning classified docs after
subpoena could result in criminal charges, according to sealed notes

-- ABC News headline

This would be pretty damning in any court except Aileen Cannon's. She will either blow it off or drag it out until after the 2028 election.

#aileencannon #classifieddocuments #classifieddocumentscase #convictedfelontrump #darthtraitor #dementeddon #dementiadon #democrats #deviousdon #donaldtrump #felonydon #judgeaileencannon #judgecannon #traitordon #traitortrump #trump #trumpconvictedfelon #trumpisaconvictedfelon #trumpisacriminal #trumpisacrook #trumpisdemented #trumptraitor

:::

Happy Caturday!!

Cat Thief, by Pil Hwa

Not surprisingly, there is quite a bit of Supreme Court news today. The right wing justices seem determined to help Trump prevent his criminal trials from going forward before the November election. We are waiting for SCOTUS to release a decision on Trump’s claim of “presidential immunity” for crimes he committed in office, and it looks like they are going to hold off announcing that decision until the bitter end.

And, of course, District Court Judge Aileen Cannon is working to help Trump avoid being tried for stealing and hoarding top secret government documents in a bathroom, a ballroom stage, an unsecure storage area, and of course, in his bedroom and even his desk.

Here’s the latest on the Supreme Court’s activities:

Josh Fiallo at The Daily Beast: What the Hell Is Going on With the Supreme Court’s Trump Ruling?

The Supreme Court released a slew of new rulings on Friday morning, but, once again, none of them included the decision weighing heaviest on Americans’ minds—whether Donald Trump should be granted king-like immunity for his criminal indictments.
Friday marks 114 days since the case was accepted by the high court—an inexcusable amount of time to rule on something so consequential to the country, a top legal expert tells The Daily Beast.
Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said Friday it’s clear that the Supreme Court, which has operated with a comfortable conservative majority since Trump’s presidency, is doing the ex-president’s bidding.
With each day that passes without a decision, the chances of a Trump trial before the 2024 election grow slimmer.
“They’re obviously delaying to benefit Donald Trump,” he said.
Tribe said, realistically, an appropriate time for the court to reach a decision on Trump would have been sometime in December, and Trump’s trial would’ve been completed by now.
Instead, it’s taken the Supreme Court more than twice the time to rule on Trump’s immunity—a matter an appeals court comprehensively rejected—than it took to rule on the much more complex United States vs. Richard Nixon case, which took 54 days.
What’s more, the arguments in Trump’s case were so outlandish that it should have been easy for the court to dispatch with them quickly, one former Supreme Court law clerk said this week.

Robert Reich agreed, saying that the court is in effect giving Trump immunity by their delay tactics. Another legal expert, Robert J. DeNault, told Fiallo:

While just a theory, he said it’s possible the court is contemplating two things—slating Trump’s case for “re-argument,” which would delay things even longer, or potentially ruling that special prosecutors like Jack Smith, whose team brought the election-subversion charges at the heart of Trump’s case, are unconstitutional

With their slow-walking of this case, the court has deliberately interfered in the 2024 election.

Wooster and Sauce, by Richard Adams

Lia Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and former court clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, published an op-ed at The New York Times on June 19: Something’s Rotten About the Justices Taking So Long on Trump’s Immunity Case.

For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-undecided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued. But the reasons to think something is rotten at the court are impossible to ignore.
On Feb. 28, the justices agreed to hear Mr. Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to subvert the 2020 election. The court scheduled oral arguments in the case for the end of April. That eight-week interval is much quicker than the ordinary Supreme Court briefing process, which usually extends for at least 10 weeks. But it’s considerably more drawn out than the schedule the court established earlier this year on a challenge from Colorado after that state took Mr. Trump off its presidential primary ballot. The court agreed to hear arguments on the case a mere month after accepting it and issued its decision less than a month after the argument. Mr. Trump prevailed, 9-0.
Nearly two months have passed since the justices heard lawyers for the former president and for the special counsel’s office argue the immunity case. The court is dominated by conservatives nominated by Republican presidents. Every passing day further delays a potential trial on charges related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election and his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol; indeed, at this point, even if the court rules that Mr. Trump has limited or no immunity, it is unlikely a verdict will be delivered before the election….
Mr. Trump’s lawyers put together a set of arguments that are so outlandish they shouldn’t take much time to dispatch. Among them is the upside-down claim that, because the Constitution specifies that an officer who is convicted in an impeachment proceeding may subsequently face a criminal trial, the Constitution actually requires an impeachment conviction before there is any criminal punishment.
That gets things backward: The Constitution confirms that impeachment is not a prerequisite to criminal prosecution. And yet Mr. Trump’s lawyers continued to take the untenable position, in response to questioning, that a president who orders the assassination of a political rival could not face criminal charges (absent impeachment by the House and conviction in the Senate).
It does not take weeks to explain why these arguments are wrong.

Read the whole thing at the NYT.

On another issue, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggests that previously decided marriage rights could soon be in jeopardy. The New Republic: Sotomayor Issues Dire Warning on Supreme Court Ruling on Noncitizens.

In a ruling delivered Friday, the Supreme Court decided 6–3 that U.S. citizens have no constitutional interest in their noncitizen spouses being able to enter the United States—despite the fact that a married person has an inherent interest in their spouse being able to live in the same country as they do. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned the ruling is an obvious sign the court will seek to overturn protections for marriage equality next.
Sotomayor issued a dire warning in her dissent, accusing the conservative supermajority of chipping away at constitutional protections for married couples and saying they’re making “the same fatal error” as they did in Dobbs v. Jackson, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned federal abortion protections.

By Stephanie Lambourne

“The majority, ignoring these precedents, makes the same fatal error it made in Dobbs: requiring too ‘careful [a] description of the asserted fundamental liberty interest,’” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s failure to respect the right to marriage in this country consigns U.S. citizens to rely on the fickle grace of other countries’ immigration laws to vindicate one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’ and live alongside their spouses.”
The case involved Sandra Muñoz, a U.S. citizen whose husband was denied a visa by the U.S. consulate in El Salvador. That denial came from a broad provision in U.S. immigration law that disqualifies a person from obtaining a visa if the consulate knows “or has reasonable ground to believe” that a person is trying to enter the U.S. “to engage solely, principally, or incidentally in” unlawful activity. Her husband was denied because of tattoos he has, which a court-appointed gang tattoo expert later determined were not gang-related.
Muñoz sued the State Department, arguing that her husband’s inexplicable denial of entry into the U.S. infringed on her constitutional liberty interest in her husband’s visa application and their inability to start a life together in the U.S. In upholding the denial, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices decided not just that the State Department doesn’t need to provide reason for denying a visa but that a citizen’s right to be married doesn’t supersede the state’s strict, and often questionable, immigration processes. The conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court’s ruling chips away at the core of Obergefell v. Hodges—the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015—which decided that citizens have a right to marriage.
In her dissent, Sotomayor cast urgent warnings on the impact of restricting who is allowed to be married in the U.S., noting that the conservative decision will extend to couples “like the Lovings and the Obergefells, [who] depend on American law for their marriages’ validity.”

We knew this was coming. Clarence Thomas told us so after the Dobbs decision.

Yesterday, Judge Aileen Cannon began holding hearings on the question of whether the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional.

Gary Fineout and Kyle Cheney at Politico: Judge Cannon wants to know whether Merrick Garland is supervising Jack Smith.

The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case grilled special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors Friday on how closely Attorney General Merrick Garland oversees their work.
Under persistent questioning from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the prosecutors declined to divulge details and seemed caught off-guard by the inquiries. At one point, Smith deputy James Pearce said he was “not authorized” to discuss the level of communication that occurred between the attorney general and the special counsel.

“I don’t want to make it seem like I’m hiding something,” Pearce then said.
The questioning came at the end of a five-hour hearing focused on a long-shot effort by Trump to have the charges against him thrown out. Smith has accused Trump of hoarding national secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after his presidency and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them.

Trump contends that Smith’s appointment by Garland as special counsel in November 2022 is unconstitutional and that Smith lacked the legal authority to bring the case against the former president.

Sophie Sperlich’s Solo Cat

Though other courts have uniformly swept aside similar challenges to the validity of special counsel appointments, Cannon — a 2020 Trump appointee to the bench — scheduled lengthy oral arguments on the matter, a sign that she was taking it seriously. During Friday’s proceedings, she gave little indication of how she intends to rule….
In questioning prosecutors about Garland’s supervision, Cannon seemed to be trying to determine how much independent authority Smith has in practice.
Smith’s team, led by Pearce, sharply rebutted arguments that Smith’s appointment was illegal and described Smith’s role as an uncontroversial exercise of Garland’s ability to organize the Justice Department as he sees fit. Pearce emphasized that Smith was “in compliance” with longstanding Justice Department rules and regulations regarding his appointment and his handling of the case.
The exchanges marked the beginning of a three-day stretch of intense hearings called by Cannon that will continue Monday and Tuesday. Monday’s hearing will focus on another aspect of Trump’s effort to invalidate Smith’s appointment — a claim that he is being improperly funded by an indefinite Justice Department budget line item.
The judge’s intense dive into an issue that has been brushed aside by most other courts has caused head-scratching in the legal community and drawn renewed criticism of her handling of the sensitive case. Adding to the unusual dynamic: Cannon permitted three outside experts — two in favor of Trump’s position and one in favor of Smith’s — to address the court for 30 minutes apiece, nearly unheard of in criminal matters.

The good news is that if Cannon does decide that Smith was illegally appointed, he will be able to appeal the decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals–which is why Cannon probably won’t decide that. She’ll just keep wasting time until it’s too late to try the case before the election.

The rest of this post is devoted to insane Trump news, so be forewarned.

Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley at Rolling Stone: Trump’s Not ‘Bluffing’: Inside the MAGA Efforts To Make a Second Term Even More Extreme.

“OF COURSE WE aren’t fucking bluffing.” That’s the message one close Trump adviser and former administration official — who requested anonymity to speak candidly — wants to get across to the press and public, when asked about Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign vows of “retribution,” unprecedented force, and militaristic action.
Indeed, this sentiment is shared widely among the upper echelon of Trumpland and the MAGAfied Republican Party, with various officials and conservatives with a direct line to the former president insisting that so-called “moderates” or alleged “establishment” types will be tamed or purged, if Trump retakes power next year.
Rolling Stone spoke with a dozen sources who are playing roles in Trump’s “government-in-waiting” or are in regular contact with the ex-president, including GOP lawmakers, Trump advisers, MAGA policy wonks, conservative attorneys, and former and current Trump aides. They universally stress that the former (and perhaps future) U.S. president and top allies are serious about following through on his extreme campaign pledges. These promises run the gamut from siccing active duty military units on not just American cities but also Mexican territory, all the way to prosecuting and potentially imprisoning Trump foes.
Several of these sources say that a wide range of litmus tests, loyalty screenings, and “guardrails” are already being implemented, or discussed with Trump, to root out so-called “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only) and MAGA-skeptical conservatives from embedding themselves within a possible second Trump administration. These processes would be largely aimed at drastically curtailing the number of squishy Republican officials who would be able to get in Trump’s ear to, in the words of one GOP lawmaker on Capitol Hill, try to “scare Trump off of what needs to be done or should be.” This lawmaker cited former senior administration officials such as Mark Esper and John Kelly who, at times, urged the then-president to moderate his policy desires.

The long engagement, by Susan Herbert

One idea regularly kicked around Trump’s government-in-waiting is a dramatic increase in the use of “lie detectors” across the federal apparatus, to root out or charge leakers and other subversives. These devices, called polygraphs, are frequently unreliable and inadmissible in courts of law….
Sources close to the former president and several of those counseling him on second-term policy add that one big reason they feel confident a revived Trump White House won’t be, in their minds, tamed in the ways it was during the first term is because Trump presumably won’t be running for reelection….
Further, many of Trump’s political and policy allies feel emboldened by the federal judiciary being (thanks to Trump) significantly more right-wing than it was when he first came into office. This would allow Team Trump, in the words of one conservative attorney close to the ex-president, to “get away with a lot more” than elected Republicans used to, in the face of an expected barrage of constitutional challenges to their executive actions or policies, if Trump wins in November.

There’s more at the link if you can get past the paywall. I got through by just wiping out my search history.

Politico: Trump keeps flip-flopping his policy positions after meeting with rich people.

Donald Trump privately hinted at a shift in immigration policy at a Business Roundtable meeting last week. He told the group “we need brilliant people” in this country, according to one of the attendees, who was granted anonymity to describe a private meeting. And when he talked about finding ways to keep American-educated talent at home, some top CEOs, like Apple’s Tim Cook, were seen nodding their heads.
The public move came a week later: On “The All-In Podcast” on Thursday, Trump said foreign nationals who graduate from U.S. colleges and universities should “automatically” be given a green card upon graduation.

It was the latest major policy shift from a candidate who has proven equal parts hardline and chameleon-like over time. Trump’s pivot on immigration followed his reversal on TikTok, embracing an app he once tried to ban, and his shift on cryptocurrency.
To the former president’s allies, the reversals are evidence of a nuanced politician taking thoughtful new positions on rapidly changing issues.

But there is also plainly a pattern of Trump aligning his political stances with the views of wealthy donors and business interests.

An automatic green card on graduation? Wouldn’t that attract even more immigrants to the U.S.? And hasn’t Trump said he was going deport all immigrants, whether they are here legally or not? I wonder how Stephen Miller feels about this latest Trump policy?

More on the green card promise from Chris Cameron at The New York Times: Trump Says He Would Give Green Cards to All Foreign College Students at Graduation.

Donald J. Trump said he would push for a program that would automatically give green cards to all foreign college students in America after they graduate, a reversal from restrictions he enacted as president on immigration by high-skilled workers and students to the United States.
But hours after Mr. Trump’s remarks aired, his campaign’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, walked back the former president’s comments, saying in a statement that there would be an “aggressive vetting process” that would “exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges” and that the policy would apply only to the “most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America.”

By Dee Nickerson

Appearing with the host David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor who backs the former president’s 2024 campaign, on a podcast that aired Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump had repeated his frequent criticism of high levels of immigration as an “invasion of our country.” But he was then pressed by Jason Calacanis, another investor who hosts the podcast, to “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America.”
“I do promise, but I happen to agree,” Mr. Trump said, adding “what I will do is — you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges.”
It would have been a sweeping change that would have opened a vast path to American citizenship for foreigners. The State Department estimated that the United States hosted roughly one million international students in the academic year that ended in 2022 — a majority of whom came from China and India. The United States granted lawful permanent residence to roughly one million people during the year that ended in September 2022, so such a policy change would significantly increase the number of green cards issued.
Mr. Trump suggested on the podcast that he had wanted to enact such a policy while in office but “then we had to solve the Covid problem.” The Trump administration invoked the pandemic to enact many of the immigration restrictions that officials had wanted to put in place earlier in Mr. Trump’s term.
Mr. Trump also lamented “stories where people graduated from a top college or from a college, and they desperately wanted to stay here, they had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can’t — they go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places. And they become multibillionaires.”

It’s crazy, but obviously it will never happen.

Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: On the House Floor, Republicans Gag Mentions of Trump’s Conviction.

The history-making felony conviction of former President Donald J. Trump has raised some historic questions for the House’s rules of decorum, which have existed for centuries but can be bent to the will of whichever party controls the majority-driven chamber.
The Republicans who now hold the majority have used those rules to impose what is essentially a gag order against talking about Mr. Trump’s hush-money payments to a porn actress or about the fact that he is a felon at all, notwithstanding that those assertions are no longer merely allegations but the basis of a jury’s guilty verdict. Doing so, they have declared, is a violation of House rules.

Scene from a Train, by Richard Adams

In short, perhaps the only place in the United States where people are barred from talking freely about Mr. Trump’s crimes is the floor of what is often referred to as “the people’s House,” where Republicans have gone so far as to erase one such mention from the official record.
In recent weeks, Republican leaders have cracked down on Democrats who refer to Mr. Trump’s court cases on the floor, citing the centuries-old rules of decorum, which date back to the days of Thomas Jefferson. Merely mentioning that Mr. Trump is a felon prompts an admonishment from whomever is presiding when the offending fact is uttered. (Mr. Trump is also indicted on felony charges in cases related to his handling of classified documents and attempting to overturn the 2020 election.)
“The chair would remind members to refrain from engaging in personalities toward presumptive nominees for the office of the president,” is now a common phrase heard in the chamber after the mention of the words “Trump” and “felon.”
On one occasion, Republicans barred Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, from speaking for the rest of the day and deleted his comments from the Congressional Record after he railed against Mr. Trump and his court cases.
“When they censor any mention of Donald Trump’s criminal convictions, they are essentially trying to ban a fact,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in an interview. “I am not aware of any precedent where factual statements have been banned in our lifetime.”

So what else is new?

At The New Republic, Greg Sargent writes that Trump will try to blame Biden for crimes committed by immigrants: Trump Just Revealed How He’ll Attack Biden at Debate—and It’s Vile.

You can’t say you weren’t warned: At the upcoming presidential debate on June 27, Donald Trump plans to highlight a handful of horrific murders—allegedly by undocumented migrants—and blame them on President Biden. We know this because Trump told us so right on his Truth Social feed.
“We have a new Biden Migrant Killing—it’s only going to get worse, and it’s all Crooked Joe Biden’s fault,” Trump seethed, referring to the horrible death of a 12-year-old Texas girl. “I look forward to seeing him at the Fake debate on Thursday. Let him explain why he has allowed MILLIONS of people to come into our Country illegally!”

Now that Trump has telegraphed this coming assault, the Biden campaign has time to prepare a response. What should it be?
First, let’s be clear on why this line of attack is pure nonsense. Trump and MAGA figures have aggressively highlighted such killings lately, in many forms: Trump sometimes brings up victims at campaign events. MAGA lawmakers put them on T-shirts. Fox News airs visuals of migrant mug shots. And as Aaron Rupar shows, Fox sometimes even puts individual crimes in chyrons.

The argument is always that Biden’s policies are to blame for these horrors. But at the most obvious level, this is absurd, because immigrants do not commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans do. That includes undocumented immigrants. There is no link between immigration and violent crime.
Of course, the real Trump-MAGA message is that all undocumented immigrants should be presumed violent and dangerous, regardless of what any pointy-headed statistics say. MAGA figures are highlighting specific killings to smear millions—that is, they’re arguing by anecdote.
But even at the anecdotal level, the claims implode under scrutiny. Take Rachel Morin, a young mother who was horrifically murdered in Maryland, allegedly by a migrant from El Salvador. Trump highlighted her at a recent rally, and MAGA figures regularly cite her to criticize Biden’s new legal protections for the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens.

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens on Thursday. I’m sure Trump’s behavior will be deranged and nonsensical. I don’t know if I can stand to watch it. At least we know that their mikes will be shut off while the other candidate is speaking.

That’s all the politics news I have for you today. I hope the cat art will make it somewhat bearable.

https://skydancingblog.com/2024/06/22/lazy-caturday-reads-167/

#immigration #JudgeAileenCannon #JusticSoniaSotomayor #ObergefellVHodges #sameSexMarriage #SpecialCounselJackSmith #SupremeCourt

Good Morning!!

Celebrating freedom on Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth, so I’ll begin with some writing about the holiday that celebrates freedom from slavery.

The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board: Editorial: Juneteenth isn’t a holiday just for Black people. Everyone should celebrate freedom.

Juneteenth is no more a holiday just for Black people than the Fourth of July is a holiday just for white people. It recognizes and celebrates a profound milestone in American history — the declaration of freedom for an entire race of American people who had been held in bondage for centuries.
Although the day itself, June 19, 1865, was far less life-changing than it should have been.
Juneteenth commemorates the arrival of Union Army Major Gen. Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas, with General Order No. 3 telling the people of the westernmost Confederate state that “all slaves are free.” Although the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect in 1863, it couldn’t be implemented until the Civil War ended and Confederate states surrendered.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his troops to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865 in Virginia, but other Confederate troops further south and west continued fighting, surrendering only in the months afterward. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery would be ratified in December 1865.
Enslaved people in Texas were the last ones in the Confederacy to find out they were freed. But the news didn’t filter across the state immediately. And some slave owners didn’t obey the order right away, waiting to see who would enforce it.
Texas may have been the last Confederate state to get word of emancipation, but in 1980 it became the first U.S. state to make it an official holiday.
Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. It’s also recognized as a state holiday in more than 25 states and the District of Columbia.

A bit more:

The 1865 announcement of freedom didn’t end systemic racism and its discriminatory effects in housing, employment and education. It didn’t stop the violence Black people faced day after day, and still do. Black people make up 13% of the U.S. population but account for 37% of the prison and jail population. Similarly, Black people are 37% of the homeless population nationwide….
But there are reasons to celebrate this holiday. Juneteenth is about honoring fortitude, perseverance and, yes, optimism. Those are traits Americans have always had. And they are traits Black Americans have demonstrated in abundance for centuries — otherwise, no Black people would have survived here. And Black communities have held celebrations big and small for Juneteenth since 1866.
Consider Opal Lee. The former teacher is often called “the grandmother of Juneteenth” for her decades of activism to get it designated a federal holiday. When she was a young girl, a mob of white supremacists attacked her Texas home and burned the furniture on Juneteeth in 1939.
In 2016, a month before she turned 90, Lee set off on a four-month walk from her hometown of Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., to publicize her cause. In 2021, Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support passed a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday, and President Biden signed it into law.
Last month, at 97, Lee stepped across the floor at a White House ceremony to be embraced by Biden as he placed the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, around her neck.

The Guardian: As Juneteenth grows in US, southern states cling to Confederate holidays.

Juneteenth has been recognized as a US federal holiday since 2021 and acts as a day to celebrate the end of slavery in the country – but millions of Americans will not have the day off today, 19 June, to mark the occasion.
At least 30 states – including most recently Rhode Island and Kentucky – and the District of Columbia recognize Juneteenth as an official public holiday, according to the Pew Research Center.

Portrait of Opal Lee by Sedrick Huckaby

Yet as the number of states to legally declare Juneteenth a holiday rises, other states continue to cling to holidays that honor the Confederacy.
Ten states – all in the American south – have at least one day commemorating the Confederacy, according to Axios, and six former Confederate states do not officially recognize Juneteenth: Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina and North Carolina.
Mississippi and Alabama each celebrate three Confederate holidays – paid holidays for state employees: Confederate Memorial Day; the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy; and Robert E Lee Day, to commemorate the leader of the Confederate army. In both states, Robert E Lee Day is also used to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr Day.
In Alabama, the Republican governor, Kay Ivey, has authorized this year’s Juneteenth as a state holiday for a fourth year, amid faltering legislative efforts to make it a permanent holiday.
A bill proposed earlier this year would have added Juneteenth as a permanent holiday in the state, but state employees would have been allowed to choose between taking that day or Jefferson Davis’s birthday off from work. The Alabama house of representatives approved the bill, but it did not get a vote in the state senate.

More at the link.

Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Judge Reshuffles Hearings in Trump Documents Case.

The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case abruptly changed the proceeding’s schedule on Wednesday, reshuffling the timing for hearings on an array of important legal issues.
The move by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was unlikely to have much impact on the overall trajectory of the case, but it reflected the substantial number of unresolved legal motions she is juggling. Last month, Judge Cannon scrapped the case’s trial date, saying she could not yet pick a new one because of what she described at the time as “the myriad and interconnected” questions she had still not managed to consider.
Judge Cannon kept in place a hearing she had set for June 21 to discuss a motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special counsel named to oversee the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, was illegally appointed to his job.
Similar motions have been rejected in cases involving other special counsels, including Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, and David C. Weiss, who has brought two criminal cases against Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.
The most important change Judge Cannon made to the schedule in a brief order was arguably the cancellation of a three-day hearing that had been set to take place starting June 24 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.
The hearing was originally meant to consider whether Mr. Trump’s lawyers should be permitted access to communications between prosecutors working for Mr. Smith and officials at the National Archives and several national security agencies.

Giddy up

The lawyers want those communications to bolster their claims that Mr. Smith worked hand in glove with the Biden administration and members of the so-called deep state to bring the documents case against Mr. Trump.
Prosecutors had objected to holding the proceeding at all, telling Judge Cannon in March that no similar hearings had ever been held in the Southern District of Florida, where she sits. In her order on Wednesday, she said she would place the hearing back on her calendar at some point in the future.
Instead of that hearing, Judge Cannon said there would now be a shorter one, on June 24 and 25, to consider different topics, including any lingering discussion about Mr. Smith’s appointment.
Judge Cannon also told the defense and the prosecution to be ready to debate Mr. Trump’s motion to exclude from the case any evidence — including more than 100 classified documents — that the F.B.I. discovered in August 2022 when agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
The two sides will argue as well over Mr. Trump’s attempt to suppress the private audio notes that prosecutors obtained from one of his lawyers through a process that pierced the normal protections of attorney-client privilege. The notes by the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, were central to the government’s allegations that Mr. Trump had obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the classified materials he took to Mar-a-Lago.
Finally, the parties are expected to discuss Mr. Smith’s request to Judge Cannon to alter Mr. Trump’s conditions of release by barring him from making public statements that could endanger F.B.I. agents working on the case.

Aileen Cannon is an expert at causing unnecessary delays without triggering an appeal to the 11th Circuit. If she rules that Jack Smith was illegally appointed, that would be cause for immediate appeal, so she will probably find some way to just waste more time.

Jose Pagliery at The Daily Beast: Trial Lawyer Lost 8 Lbs Skipping Trump’s McDonald’s Courthouse Lunches.

Donald Trump’s lead lawyer says the former president’s seven-week criminal trial in New York took a physical toll—but he still managed to lose weight by skipping Trump’s notoriously unhealthy meals.
Todd Blanche appeared on a podcast, For The Defense, hosted by the attorney David Oscar Markus.
“Was it McDonald’s for lunch every single day, or did you get something else?” Markus asked.
“Oh, no-no-no,” Blanche said. “Well, first of all, I didn’t have lunch one day. I ate in the morning and at night.”

Delivery of McDonalds order for Trump’s courthouse lunch

“Look, President Trump’s team takes care of everybody. Like, everybody gets food. You know, there’s a lot of food. It’s not always McDonald’s. There’s a lot of… variety. There’s pizza, and there’s other non-healthy alternatives to McDonald’s.”
Blanche smiled, turning away from the camera and raising his eyebrows.
“Look, I loved it, because, you know, you come in from lunch, and as you know when you’re on trial, you’re trying to figure out what the heck you’re gonna stuff in your belly with the hour that you have. And we would walk in, and there would just be this, just, plethora of just food everywhere,” he said, gesturing with his hands.
The public got a peek last Thursday, when Donald Trump Jr. posted a TikTok video from what legal teams sometimes call the “war room,” where defendants strategize during breaks. The clip showed Trump Sr. sitting before a half-finished 20-ounce Diet Coca-Cola, an opened bag of Lay’s potato chips, a box of Milk Duds, a Milky Way bar, a theater-sized box of Whoppers malted milk balls, and what appeared to be four Hostess SnoBalls….
Trump’s go-to McDonald’s meal—two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate shake—was first described by close ally Corey R. Lewandowski in a 2017 book, Let Trump Be Trump.

How is it possible that Trump hasn’t had a heart attack by now?

That’s all I have for you today. I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.

https://skydancingblog.com/2024/06/06/thursday-reads-267/

#AlitoLawClerkSusanSullivan #ClarenceThomas #DDay80thAnniversary #DickDurbin #HunterBidenTrial #JudgeAileenCannon #JusticeSamuelAlito #Normandy #rightToContraception #SenateVoteOnBirthControl #ToddBlanche #TrumpCourthouseLunches

Compromised, bought & paid for #JudgeAileenCannon 👇👇

Good Morning!!

Today Judge Juan Merchan will give instructions to the jury in the Trump hush money case and then they will begin deliberations. Some experts are predicting there will be a verdict today. I kind of doubt that, but what do know? A decision could certainly come this week.

At The New York Times, William K. Rashbaum and Jonah E. Bromwich write: Judge’s Instructions Will Be a Road Map for Jury Weighing Trump’s Fate.

Justice Merchan will describe the legal meaning of the word “intent” and the concept of the presumption of innocence. He will remind the jurors that they pledged to set any biases aside against the former president before they were sworn in, and that Mr. Trump’s decision not to testify cannot be held against him.
Then, according to a person with knowledge of the instructions that Justice Merchan plans to deliver, he will explain the 34 charges of falsifying business records that Mr. Trump faces. It will likely be the most important guidance that the judge offers during the trial. And it is no simple task.

Judge Merchan

In New York, falsifying records is a misdemeanor, unless the documents were faked to hide another crime. The other crime, prosecutors say, was Mr. Trump’s 2016 violation of state election law that prohibited conspiring to aid a political campaign using “unlawful means.”
Those means, prosecutors argue, could include any of a menu of other crimes. And so each individual false-records charge that Mr. Trump faces contains within it multiple possible crimes that jurors must strive to understand.
The moment that the jurors begin to deliberate will mark the first time that the complicated case will be assessed not by judges or a parade of commentators, but by everyday New Yorkers. The group may be aided by the two jurors who are also lawyers — though neither appears to have criminal experience, and one said during jury selection that he knew “virtually nothing about criminal law.”
Marc F. Scholl, who served nearly 40 years in the district attorney’s office, noted that jury instructions are often difficult to follow, particularly given that, in New York, jurors are barred from keeping a copy of the guidance as they deliberate. And he said that defendants are often charged with several different crimes, requiring even more elaborate instructions.
Still, Mr. Scholl said, one point of complexity stood out: “Usually you don’t have this layering of these other crimes,” he said.
Justice Merchan, according to the person with knowledge of his legal instructions, will proceed through each of the 34 charges count by count, explaining to jurors what each requires prosecutors to have proved.
The knotty legal instructions were the product of intense argument between the prosecution and the defense, culminating in a hearing last week in which each side sought to persuade the judge to make minor edits that could have had a major impact.

Read more details about those arguments at the NYT link.

People who have been covering the trial inside the courtroom, eg, Harry Litman, have expressed concerns about one juror who appears to be sympathetic to the defense. This is from Marc Caputo at The Bulwark: Trump Legal Team Pins Hopes on Hung Jury.
AS THE JURORS FILED into the Manhattan courtroom, day after day, almost none of them would look at Donald Trump. It’s one of those unsettling signs for defendants and their lawyers who worry about a guilty verdict.
Those worries have only grown in Trump’s orbit as allies have all but abandoned hope of acquittal. Even Trump, though he railed Monday on social media about the judge and the case, has privately sounded a note of resignation.

Trump sleeping in court

“Whatever happens happens,” Trump told one person recently. “I have no control.”
But there is one clear hope MAGAville clings to: a hung jury that results in a mistrial.
If that happens, Trump allies suspect that it will be chiefly due to the one juror who has made friendly eye contact with Trump from time to time as the jury enters the room and walks right past the defense table.
“There are eight people on that jury who definitely hate Trump. If there’s one person who doesn’t, it’s [this] juror,” said one court attendee who, like others for this story, relayed their observations on condition of anonymity to The Bulwark, which is also protecting the privacy and safety of the juror in question by not disclosing identifying details.
As the trial has progressed since April 15, these sources relate, this juror has appeared to nod along in seeming accordance with the defense at times. On other occasions, the juror has seemingly reacted favorably to and made eye contact with Trump’s congressional surrogates who began joining him in court in recent weeks.

I hope they’re mistaken. All we need it to have this end in a mistrial.

You might also be interested in this piece by Liz Dye at Public Notice. She provides an explanatory primer for people who haven’t followed the day-to-day action in the trial: What you need to know about Trump’s trial before the verdict.

From Charles R. Davis at Salon, a little schadenfreude: “Full panic mode”: Experts say Trump mad he’s “finally being treated like any other defendant.”

Donald Trump is not behaving like someone who expects to be found “not guilty.” In a series of posts over the Memorial Day weekend, the former president deviated from the norm of honoring soldiers who fought and died for the United States by instead posting on his website, Truth Social, about how unfair it is that standard courtroom procedures are not being bent in his favor.
Posting in all caps, Trump – facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush payment to an adult film star – on Monday raged against the order in which closing arguments will be made in his Manhattan trial. It is a “big advantage,” he said, and “very unfair” that the prosecution gets to go second. “Why can’t the defense go last?”
Whether he knows this and is just riling up gullible followers or if he simply never retained the information his defense counsel could surely provide, Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted that Trump is here complaining about a fact of life “in virtually every criminal court.” Per Cheney, “Prosecutors typically get a rebuttal during closings because [the] burden or proof lies with them, not [the] defense.”

Trump prosecutor Joshua Steinglass gives final arguments

Trump, then, is complaining about an order that exists because of the far higher standard that prosecutors must meet. The defense only needs to sow doubt about the government’s case, and it really only needs one juror to entertain the former president’s argument that the case is a “witch hunt”; the prosecution must show that its case is not just probable, but prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Trump is finally being treated like every other defendant,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney who has been following his hush money trial. “[R]eally,” she argued, “that’s what he objects to.”
In another weekend rant about the case, Trump again opined that it was wrong to bring a case against him while he’s running for president. If there was evidence of a crime, he wrote, referring to himself in the third person, “it should have been brought seven years ago, not in the middle of his Campaign for President.” [….]
Since Trump is no longer president, and can no longer pick those charged with enforcing the law, he is now just another man who must stand before and be judged by it. For a man who has long enjoyed impunity, it is intolerable. And while he may be able to evade financial penalties, at least for a time, in this case his actual liberty is at stake: it is not inconceivable that, when closing arguments conclude this week, jurors return a guilty verdict and Judge Juan Merchan decides that this particular defendant deserves some time behind bars.
George Conway, a conservative attorney turned harsh critic of the former president, believes Trump is reacting to his loss of control. “The defendant,” he posted on Threads, “is clearly in full panic mode.”

A couple of articles about the stalled Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case:

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo: Aileen Cannon Threatens To Sanction MAL Prosecutors.

In the up-is-down world of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, prosecutors attempted to stanch Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks on federal law enforcement – the kind of thing criminal defendants would not typically be allowed to engage in while on pre-trial release – and wound up themselves threatened with sanctions by the judge.
As Morning Memo recounted yesterday, the move by prosecutors to modify the terms of Trump’s pre-trial release came late Friday before the Memorial Day weekend and prompted a heated response from Trump.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon weighed in Monday, denying the prosecution motion, chastising them for playing loose with the local court rules, and threatening to impose sanctions on them in the future. On small bright spot, if you can call it that, is that she didn’t accede to Trump’s request to sanction the prosecution team immediately. Cannon’s denial was without prejudice, meaning prosecutors can refile their motion:

Cannon insisted that prosecutors had not sufficiently conferred with the defense team before filing and ordered that all future filings contain a statement of no more than 200 words by the opposing side of its position.
In a normal case, I’d applaud a judge keeping a tight leash on the prosecution team. But we’re in such uncharted territory here that you can’t attribute this to i-dotting or t-crossing by Cannon. Given any chance to chide the prosecution, she takes it. Given deplorable behavior by Trump that would normally never fly, she finds herself mute again and again.
The judge’s routine has become so predictable that even the analysis by legal observers bakes in a certain Cannon quotient: Anything that DOJ does that even arguably deviates from the rules leaves an opening that Cannon will take. So DOJ ends up graded on a weird Cannon curve while the Trump’s dangerous and unprecedented conduct gets set to the side.
One pattern emerging with Cannon is that when prosecutors implore her to assert herself and take more control over the case like so many judges do, she retreats to treating everything as an adversarial contest that she merely referees. But when it’s a matter of importance to Trump, she regularly asserts herself, going so far as to raise issues on her own. It’s another way in her handling of the case is imbalanced to Trump’s advantage.

At The New York Times, Alan Feuer has an piece about Judge Cannon: Emerging Portrait of Judge in Trump Documents Case: Prepared, Prickly and Slow.

…[A]t seven public hearings over more than 10 months, Judge Cannon has left an increasingly detailed record of her decision-making skills and judicial temperament.
The portrait that has emerged so far is that of an industrious but inexperienced and often insecure judge whose reluctance to rule decisively even on minor matters has permitted one of the country’s most important criminal cases to become bogged down in a logjam of unresolved issues.
She rarely issues rulings that explain her thinking in a way that might reveal her legal influences or any guiding philosophy. And that has made the hearings, which have taken place in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., all the more important in assessing her management of the case.

Aileen Cannon in court in stolen documents case

Regardless of her motives, Judge Cannon has effectively imperiled the future of a criminal prosecution that once seemed the most straightforward of the four Mr. Trump is facing.
She has largely accomplished this by granting a serious hearing to almost every issue — no matter how far-fetched — that Mr. Trump’s lawyers have raised, playing directly into the former president’s strategy of delaying the case from reaching trial.
It appears increasingly likely that the documents case will not go to a jury before Election Day, and that the only trial that Mr. Trump will face this year will be the one now ending in Manhattan, where jurors are expected to begin deliberating on Wednesday over whether he falsified business records in connection with hush money payments to a porn star.
Still, the next few weeks will bring Judge Cannon’s handling of the case in Florida into even sharper focus.
She may soon rule on a request by Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the two federal prosecutions of the former president, to bar Mr. Trump from making public statements that could endanger federal agents working on the documents case. That move, which the judge denied this week on procedural grounds, came in response to the former president’s baseless assertion that the F.B.I. was authorized to use deadly force against him during the search two years ago of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.
After a hearing in June, Judge Cannon will also have to make a significant decision on whether to give Mr. Trump’s lawyers access to communications between Mr. Smith’s team and top national security officials. The lawyers made that request hoping to bolster their contention that the so-called deep state colluded with the Biden administration to bring the charges.

Read the rest at the NYT.

Yesterday, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor had another update on the strange story of the Alitos and their protest flags: The Alitos, the Neighborhood Clash and the Upside-Down Flag.

The police in Fairfax County, Va., received an unusual phone call on Feb. 15, 2021. A young couple claimed they were being harassed by the wife of a Supreme Court justice.
“Somebody in a position of authority needs to talk to her and make her stop,” said the 36-year-old man making the complaint, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New York Times. The officer on the line responded that there was little the police could do: Yelling was not a crime.
The couple placed the call after a series of encounters with Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., that had gone from uneasy to ugly. That day, Emily Baden, whose boyfriend (now husband) contacted the police, had traded accusations with Mrs. Alito, who lived down the street. In a recent interview, Ms. Baden admitted to calling her a lewd epithet.
The clash between the wife of a conservative Supreme Court justice and the couple, who were in their 30s, liberal and proud of it, played out over months on a bucolic block in Alexandria. It was the kind of shouting match among private citizens, at the height of tensions over the 2020 election, that might have happened in any mixed political community in America. But three years later, that neighborhood spat — which both sides said began over an anti-Trump sign — has taken on far greater proportions.

Interview with Ms. Baden:

Amid the controversy, Ms. Baden said she was surprised to find herself playing a central role in Justice Alito’s account about a war of words, political signsand a flag. “I never saw the upside-down flag, never heard about it,” she said.

The Alitos

To better understand the clash, The Times interviewed Ms. Baden, her mother and her husband, as well as other neighbors, and reviewed the texts that Ms. Baden and her husband sent to friends after the episodes. Justice Alito, who did not respond to questions for this article,has in recent weeks given his own explanation of what happened.
There are some differences: For instance, the justice told Fox News that his wife hoisted the flag in response to Ms. Baden’s vulgar insult. A text message and the police call — corroborated by Fairfax County authorities — indicate, however, that the name-calling took place on Feb. 15, weeks after the inverted flag was taken down….
The justice later elaborated in an interview with Fox News, saying that in January 2021 a neighbor on the block displayed a vulgar anti-Trump sign, near where children wait for the school bus. Mrs. Alito complained to the neighbor. “Things escalated and the neighbor put up a sign personally addressing Mrs. Alito and blaming her for the Jan 6th attacks,” tweeted the Fox News reporter who interviewed the justice.
While the Alitos were on a neighborhood walk, “there were words between Mrs. Alito and a male at the home with the sign,” the network reported. The justice said the man used “vulgar language, ‘including the C-word,’” After that exchange, “Mrs. Alito was distraught and hung the flag upside-down,” the Fox reporter relayed.
But in the Baden family’s version, the justice’s wife initiated the conflict. “Aside from putting up a sign, we did not begin or instigate any of these confrontations,” Ms. Baden said later.

During the Covid crisis, Baden moved in with Baden’s mother Barbara, who lives in the Alito’s neighborhood. Her boyfriend, who grew up in the area also moved back home.

The couple participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, propped up Biden-Harris signs, and on the Saturday in November when the election was called, whooped and danced in the streets of the nation’s capital. When they got home, they displayed a political sign they had made from torn-up Amazon boxes, saying “BYE DON” on one side and “Fuck Trump” on the other….
Shortly after Christmas, as Emily Baden was with her dog in her front yard, an older woman approached and thanked her for taking down the sign, which had merely blown down. Ms. Baden realized that the woman was Martha-Ann Alito. The sign was offensive, Mrs. Alito said, according to both the justice’s account and a text message from Ms. Baden to her boyfriend.

Martha-Ann Alito and Emily Baden

Ms. Baden told her the sign would stay up, she recalled in the interview. The family was taken aback: Though the Badens and the Alitos lived just a short distance apart, Barbara Baden couldn’t recall ever communicating with the justice’s wife beyond a neighborly wave. In the interview, Emily Baden could not remember whether she put the signs up again.
Then came Jan. 6. Rocked by the violence and threat to democracy, the couple soon put up new signs in their yard, saying “Trump Is a Fascist” and “You Are Complicit.” Emily Baden said in interviews that the second sign was not directed at the Alitos, but at Republicans generally, especially those who weren’t condemning the Capitol attack.
Soon afterward, her mother took them down, out of safety concerns. “Look what these people can do,” she said in an interview, recalling her fears at the time about the mob that had stormed the Capitol. “I do not want to mark my house.”
It’s not clear whether Mrs. Alito saw those signs, but the day after the Capitol riot, as the couple parked in front of their home, she pulled up in her car, they said. She lingered there, glaring, for a long moment, recalled the couple, who texted their friends about the encounter.

In another incident, the young couple drove by the Alito’s house.

Mrs. Alito happened to be standing outside. According to interviews with Ms. Baden and her husband, as well as messages they sent to friends at the time, Mrs. Alito ran toward their car and yelled something they did not understand. The couple continued driving, they said, and as they passed the Alito home again to exit the cul-de-sac, Mrs. Alito appeared to spit toward the vehicle.
The couple, still shaken by the Capitol riot, said the encounter left them feeling uneasy and outmatched by the wife of someone so powerful.

Mrs. Alito seems a bit unhinged.

One more from Josh Dawsey at The Washington Post: Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour.

When Donald Trump met some of the country’s top donors at a luxurious New York hotel earlier this month, he told the group that a businessman had recently offered $1 million to his presidential effort and wanted to have lunch.

“I’m not having lunch,” Trump said he responded, according to donors who attended. “You’ve got to make it $25 million.”
Another businessman, he said, had traditionally given $2 million to $3 million to Republicans. Instead, he said he told the donor that he wanted a $25 million or $50 million contribution or he would not be “very happy.”

As he closed his pitch at the Pierre Hotel, Trump explained to the group why it was in their interest to cut large checks. If he was not put back in office, taxes would go up for them under President Biden, who vows to let Trump-era tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations expire at the end of 2025.
“The tax cuts all expire for wealthy and poor and middle-income and everything else, but they expire in another seven months and he’s not going to renew them, which means taxes are going to go up by four times,” Trump said, exaggerating the size of the cuts. “You’re going to have the biggest tax increase in history.”

Seconds after promising the tax cuts, Trump made his pitch explicit. “So whatever you guys can do, I appreciate it,” he said.

The remarks are just one example of a series of audacious requests by Trump for big-money contributions in recent months, according to 11 donors, advisers and others close to the former president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe his fundraising. The pleas for millions in donations come as the presumptive Republican nominee seeks to close a cash gap with Biden and to pay for costly legal bills in his four criminal indictments.

Trump is completely corrupt. So what else is new? Read the whole thing at the WaPo.

That’s it for me today. I hope I’ve given you something worth reading while we wait for the verdict.

https://skydancingblog.com/2024/05/29/wednesday-reads-59/

#EmilyBaden #hungJury #JudgeAileenCannon #JudgeJuanMerchan #JudgeSamuelAlito #MarALagoDocumentsCase #MarthaAnnAlito #TrumpCorruption #TrumpHushMoneyCase

#trump #treason #espionage #fraud
#noimmunity #insurrectionists #alito #clarencethomas #JudgeAileenCannon

De Niro calls the ONE-TERM LOSER A CLOWN!

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/robert-de-niro-calls-trump-clown-outside-trial-biden-campaign-message-2024-05-28/

#trump #treason #espionage #fraud
#noimmunity #insurrectionists #alito #clarencethomas #JudgeAileenCannon

Judge Cannon needs to be removed for unconventional bias!!

https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-declines-bar-trump-making-comments-about-law-enforcement-2024-05-28/

Dear #JudgeAileenCannon

Regarding "professional courtesy".

#GoFuckYourself

Happy Caturday!!

Paris Through the Window, Marc Chagall

There’s some big news in the stolen documents case today. Special prosecutor Jack Smith has asked Judge Aileen Cannon for a gag order to stop Trump from claiming that the FBI planned to assassinate him when they searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents that he stole from the government. This is significant, because if Cannon refuses, Smith could appeal to the 11th Circuit court and request that she be removed from the case.

Here are the basics, from Katelyn Polantz at CNN: Special counsel asks judge for gag order in Trump classified documents case.

Special counsel’s office prosecutors on Friday asked a federal judge in Florida to place a gag order on Donald Trump that would limit his ability to comment about law enforcement that searched his Mar-a-Lago resort.
The request – a first in the classified documents mishandling case – comes after the former president has repeatedly and misleadingly criticized the FBI for having a policy in place around the use of deadly force during the search and seizure of government records at his resort in August 2022.
While Trump has told his supporters he could have been in danger because of the policy, the policy is standard protocol for FBI searches and limits how agents may use force in search operations. The same standard FBI policy was used in the searches of President Joe Biden’s homes and offices in a separate classified documents investigation.

Polanz is minimizing what Trump has said. He actually accused the FBI of trying to kill him and claimed President Biden ordered them to do it.

Prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith wrote to Judge Aileen Cannon in a filing Friday night that the conditions that allow Trump not to be in jail awaiting trial should be updated.
The request will force Cannon into the center of an intensely charged and politicized battle, grappling with Trump’s ongoing presidential campaign and the First Amendment at the same time prosecutors are escalating their concerns to her about proceedings she oversees. The judge so far has moved slowly to resolve disputes in Trump’s criminal mishandling and obstruction of justice case before her, and no trial date is set.
“Trump‘s repeated mischaracterization as an attempt to kill him, his family, and Secret Service agents has endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and threatened the integrity of these proceedings,” prosecutors wrote.
His recent comments, they added, “invite the sort of threats and harassment that have occurred when other participants in legal proceedings against Trump have been targeted by his invective.”
The use of deadly force policy is included among several pages of paperwork governing FBI search protocol and policies when they went to Mar-a-Lago, which was made public in Trump’s case in federal court this week. The paperwork also lays out that agents would wear unmarked, business casual attire, and specifies that if Trump were to arrive at Mar-a-Lago during the search, leadership on site would speak to him and his Secret Service detail.

Alan Feuer writes at The New York Times: Prosecutors Seek to Bar Trump From Attacking F.B.I. Agents in Documents Case.

Federal prosecutors on Friday night asked the judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case to bar him from making any statements that might endanger law enforcement agents involved in the proceedings.
Prosecutors tendered the request after Mr. Trump made what they described as “grossly misleading” assertions about the F.B.I.’s August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. This week, the former president falsely suggested that the F.B.I. had been authorized to shoot him when agents discovered more than 100 classified documents while executing a court-approved search warrant there.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that President Biden “authorized the FBI to use deadly (lethal) force” during the search.
Mr. Trump’s post came in reaction to an F.B.I. operational plan for the Mar-a-Lago search that was unsealed on Tuesday as part of a legal motion filed by Mr. Trump’s lawyers. The plan contained a boilerplate reference to lethal force being authorized in cases of emergency, which prosecutors said that Mr. Trump badly distorted.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi Cat in a window

“As Trump is well aware, the F.B.I. took extraordinary care to execute the search warrant unobtrusively and without needless confrontation,” prosecutors wrote in a motion to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the classified documents case.
“They scheduled the search of Mar-a-Lago for a time when he and his family would be away,” the prosecutors added. “They planned to coordinate with Trump’s attorney, Secret Service agents and Mar-a-Lago staff before and during the execution of the warrant; and they planned for contingencies — which, in fact, never came to pass — about with whom to communicate if Trump were to arrive on the scene.” [….]
Prosecutors did not seek to impose a gag order on Mr. Trump in the classified documents case, but instead asked Judge Cannon to revise his conditions of release to forbid him to make any public comments “that pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation.”
Still, if Judge Cannon agrees to the request, it would mean that Mr. Trump could be placed in custody were he to violate the revised conditions.

You might also want to read Marcy Wheeler’s post: Jack Smith Invites Aileen Cannon to Protect the Country Rather than Just Donald Trump. I’m not going to excerpt from it, because it’s mostly long quotes from the filing.

This is from Andrew Weissmann on Twitter (I refuse to use that other stupid name):

Smart move by Smith as Judge Cannon won’t be likely to grant the gag order, will show her patent bias, and Smith can then appeal to the 11th Circuit.

Asha Rangappa asked him:

Can she just avoid ruling on it, like she has everything else?

Weissmann:

in theory yes, but I don’t think if she tries that ploy that Smith won’t mandamus her, and her lack of action one way or the other will look really bad on appeal.

I’ll be waiting anxiously to see what Loose Cannon does or doesn’t do.

Some analysis of Trump’s victimization strategy by Juliette Kayem at The Atlantic: Trump’s Assassination Fantasy Has a Darker Purpose.

When Donald Trump insinuated this week that his successor and the FBI were out to kill him, he showed how central violence has become to his conception of political leadership. The former president declared Tuesday on Truth Social, his social-media platform, that he “was shown reports Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL FORCE).” [….]
The genesis of the former president’s complaint is that, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 to obtain classified documents that were at the center of an investigation, agents were explicitly authorized to use force. This was not remotely unusual: FBI agents are routinely armed. The “reports” that Trump saw misinterpreted the parameters of the search, which—as the security analysts Asha Rangappa and Tom Joscelyn explained in Just Security—was guided by elaborate restrictions on when weapons could be used. The FBI subsequently said it followed a “standard policy statement limiting the use of force.” Attorney General Merrick Garland noted today that similar conditions were used in a search related to classified documents at Biden’s home in Delaware.

Victor Lukyanov, Summer Rain

The FBI had also carefully arranged to enter Trump’s property when he would be out of state—an odd way of carrying out an assassination. Still, the idea that Trump had been at physical risk rocketed across Truth Social. The X account of the House Judiciary Committee Republicans reposted—with the addition of siren emojis—a thread insinuating that FBI agents were acting like the “Gestapo” and had “risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests.” Trump’s campaign upped the hysteria with a fundraising email declaring that “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!” and that “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.” By evening, the longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon was asserting that “this was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated with him.” [….]
The claim that Biden and the FBI were looking to kill Trump is easy to dismiss as the typical hyperbolic ranting of the ex-president and his fans, and it competes in the news with other disturbing things he says and does. The assassination claim initially seemed to have come and gone in the news cycle. But the story was still out there, to be absorbed by Trump’s audience.
Since the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, Trump has become more and more apocalyptic in his language. This week, he sent another dangerous signal to his supporters: FBI agents are an armed enemy, ready to assassinate the former president. Unless, of course, Trump and his mob get to them first.

Trump’s Bronx Rally

On Thursday, Trump held a rally in the Bronx, and, as usual, created some controversy that the mainstream media pretty much ignored.

Edith Olmstead at The Daily Beast: Trumpworld Claims 25,000 People Attended His Rally. Aerial Shots Show Otherwise.

Trumpworld is once again splintering from reality. This time, the diversion relates to counting—specifically, how many people attended Donald Trump’s rally in the Bronx on Thursday.
Trump, who has long obsessed over the size of crowds at his events, shared an article from Right Side Broadcasting Network to his Truth Social account that quoted the Trump campaign as saying 25,000 people attended the “electrifying” event. The New York Times reported that Trump’s team had acquired a permit for an event for 3,500 people.
“The sheer numbers show the great enthusiasm that President Trump has gained among voters in even the bluest areas of the United States,” the Right-Side Broadcasting Network article crowed.
That number later appeared on Fox News, was shared across various MAGA social media accounts, and also popped up on the official X account of the Republican Party.
But aerial footage of the event, and The Daily Beast’s reporter on the ground, told a different story. ABC7’s coverage of the event showed a much smaller crowd located in an amphitheater at Crotona Park.
While law enforcement told the New York Post that the crowd was between 8,000 and 10,000 people, The Daily Beast had a reporter in attendance, who estimated about 1,000 people were there.

You can see photos at the Daily Beast link.

Oscar, by Annie Troe

At the rally, Trump invited some local criminals to share the stage with him. Talia Jane at The New Republic: Trump Proudly Accepts Endorsements From Rappers Charged With Murder.

Criminals of a feather flocked together on Thursday as Trump hosted two Brooklyn rappers out on bail for murder conspiracy during a campaign rally in the Bronx.
Rappers Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow were indicted in 2023, alongside some 30 other people, as part of a massive investigation into two rival Brooklyn gangs. Sheff G—real name Michael Williams—allegedly used his accomplishments to help fund widespread violence. According to the New York Daily News, Williams was released on a $150,000 cash or $1 million bond in April after being charged with conspiracy, multiple murder counts, criminal possession of a weapon, assault with a weapon, and 12 shootings. Williams’s lackey Sleepy Hallow—real name Tegan Chambers—was released with a $200,000 cash or $150,000 bond bail for conspiracy charges.
Trump proudly brought the rappers on stage with him to give remarks to the red behatted crowd on Thursday. Williams told the crowd, “They’re always going to whisper the accomplishments and shout your failures. Trump gonna shout the wins for all of us.”
Chambers kept it even more brief and simply shouted, “Make America Great Again.”

Update on the Alito Flag Controversy

Justin Jouvenal and Ann E. Marimow at The Washington Post: Wife of Justice Alito called upside-down flag ‘signal of distress.’

The wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a Washington Post reporter in January 2021 that an upside-down American flag recently flown on their flagpole was “an international signal of distress” and indicated that it had been raised in response to a neighborhood dispute.

Martha-Ann Alito made the comments when the reporter went to the couple’s Fairfax County, Va., home to follow up on a tip about the flag, which was no longer flying when he arrived.
The incident documented by reporter Robert Barnes, who covered the Supreme Court for The Post for 17 years and retired last year, offers fresh details about the raising of the flag and the first account of comments about it by the justice’s wife.

So why didn’t we hear about this in 2021??

The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.

Maria Karalyos, Black cat in the window

Oh really? Does the Post really think Martha-Ann would or could do this without him noticing?

The upside-down flag has long been a sign of distress for the military and protest by various political factions. In the fraught weeks before and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, it had also been adopted by supporters of the “Stop the Steal” movement, which embraced Donald Trump’s false claims that Joe Biden stole the election from him. Some of the rioters who participated in the attack had carried upside-down American flags with them.
The display of the politically charged symbol outside the Alitos’ home became a public controversy last week after the New York Times reported on it, raising new ethics questions for the Supreme Court as it prepares to issue pivotal rulings in two cases related to efforts by Trump and his supporters to block Biden’s 2020 election victory.

So if the NYT hadn’t reported on this, the WaPo would have stayed silent?

The Post subsequently reported on May 17 that residents said the flag was raised following a heated confrontation between Martha-Ann Alito and a neighbor over political yard signs, one of which carried a profane anti-Trump message and another that carried a message along the lines of “you are complicit.” One resident, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy in a sensitive situation, said the flag flew for between two and five days.
Samuel Alito told Fox News last week that the signs attacked his wife directly. Martha-Ann Alito has not publicly commented on the recent reports.

Now the Post tells us what really happened in 2021:

On Jan. 20, 2021 — the day of Biden’s inauguration, which the Alitos did not attend — Barnes went to their home to follow up on the tip about the flag. He encountered the couple coming out of the house. Martha-Ann Alito was visibly upset by his presence, demanding that he “get off my property.”
As he described the information he was seeking, she yelled, “It’s an international signal of distress!”

Alito intervened and directed his wife into a car parked in their driveway, where they had been headed on their way out of the neighborhood. The justice denied the flag was hung upside down as a political protest, saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that his wife had raised it.
Martha-Ann Alito then got out of the car and shouted in apparent reference to the neighbors: “Ask them what they did!” She said yard signs about the couple had been placed in the neighborhood. After getting back in the car, she exited again and then brought out from their residence a novelty flag, the type that would typically decorate a garden. She hoisted it up the flagpole. “There! Is that better?” she yelled.

Wow. She sounds kind of unhinged.

Justice Sotomayor Speaks Out

Abbie VanSickle at The New York Times: Justice Sotomayor Describes Frustration With Being a Liberal on the Supreme Court.

Some days, after Justice Sonia Sotomayor listens to the Supreme Court announce its decisions, she goes into her chambers, shuts the door and weeps.
“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,” Justice Sotomayor told a crowd on Friday at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she was being honored. “There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”
The comments about the challenges of being a liberal on a court dominated by conservatives came at the tail end of a public conversation with her friend and law school classmate, Martha Minow, a former dean of Harvard Law School and human rights scholar.

Kyohei Inukai, Cat resting on a window sill

The justice set a tone of optimism even as she voiced frustration with some of the court’s rulings, a possible signal that the end of the term, when the most high-profile decisions typically land, could bring more conservative victories. She urged a long-term view of pushing for the values she views as guiding principles — equality, diversity and justice.
“There are moments when I’m deeply, deeply sad,” she said, without citing any specific cases. “There are moments when, yes, even I feel desperation. We all do. But you have to own it, you have to accept it, you have to shed the tears and then you have to wipe them and get up.”
Decisions in dozens of cases are still pending, including on abortion, guns, the free speech rights of social media companies, the regulatory power of government agencies and whether former President Donald J. Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

Libertarians in Disarray

Today Trump will speak at the Libertarian Convention and it may not go well for him.

NBC News: Libertarian convention crowd appears hostile to Trump ahead of Saturday speech.

Trump is set to deliver a speech Saturday at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention, and if Friday night’s program is any indication, he could be facing a hostile crowd.
Former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who quickly endorsed Trump after dropping out, was booed during his convention remarks Friday night when he mentioned Trump.
“I’m speaking to you as a libertarian at my own core. I have gotten to know Donald Trump over the course of the last several years and the last several months,” Ramaswamy said as many in the crowd booed in response.
Ramaswamy continued, urging the audience of about 100 to ask themselves if they wanted to influence the next administration.
Separately, as Libertarian party members reviewed procedures and motions, a person at a microphone proposed that “we go tell Donald Trump to go f— himself.”
The audience cheered and roared with applause.
“That was my motion too!” another man yelled. “We are a Libertarian convention looking to nominate Libertarians. We do not need to give that time to non-Libertarians.”
Behind the two men, a third chanted, “F— Donald Trump.”

Politico: Libertarian convention devolves into fighting, obscenities on eve of Trump’s visit.

Donald Trump won’t be speaking to his usual self-selected crowd of adoring red-hatted MAGA fans when he addresses the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday.
As delegates gathered at the Washington Hilton on the eve of his speech, the party’s decision to host the former president, which had split the organization, erupted Friday into open revolt. Fuming delegates at the convention said they plan to protest Trump’s speech, and one group sought unsuccessfully to remove the former president along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from the agenda — a move that resulted in thrown punches and obscenities between supporters and opponents of the move.

“I would like to propose that we go tell Donald Trump to go fuck himself!” Kaelan Dreyer, a Libertarian from New Mexico, yelled into a microphone, winning cheers from the crowd. After shouting vulgarities at the convention’s chair and fending off punches, he was led out of the convention hall.

Ralph Hedley, Blinking in the sun

The raucous opening to the convention reflects the pockets of hostility that Trump faces as he appeals to the Libertarians to help him box out a growing, third-party threat from Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign.
“The vast majority of Libertarian Party members are not happy with this invitation,” said Bill Redpath, a 40-year veteran of the Libertarian Party and a former national party chair who’s helped organize their presidential ballot access for decades. “There are some people who call Trump the most Libertarian president of our lifetimes. That’s utterly ridiculous.”
Suburban Philadelphia options trader Jeff Yass, a libertarian and one of the GOP’s biggest donors, who was not in attendance at the convention, said it was “unclear” whether Trump could make inroads with libertarian voters. Yass, who bankrolled an effort to stop Trump from winning the Republican nomination and financed several of his primary opponents, has said he doesn’t plan to contribute to Trump, but will vote for him.
“He has some libertarian instincts for sure. Anti-war is big,” said Yass, who has also praised Trump for his support for education reform policies, which the two have spoken about. “But anti-immigrant, anti-free trade are not good.”

I guess he’s not bothered by Trump’s fascist tendencies.

“Polling Risk for Trump?”

The New York Times’ Nate Cohn on the current state of the presidential polls: A Polling Risk for Trump. His advantage may not be as stable as it looks.

The polls have shown Donald Trump with an edge for eight straight months, but there’s a sign his advantage might not be quite as stable as it looks: His lead is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.
Disengaged voters on the periphery of the electorate are driving the polling results — and the story line — about the election.
President Biden has actually led the last three New York Times/Siena national polls among those who voted in the 2020 election, even as he has trailed among registered voters overall. And looking back over the last few years, almost all of Trump’s gains came from these less engaged voters.
Importantly, these low-turnout voters are often from Democratic constituencies. Many back Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate. But in our polling, Biden wins just three-quarters of Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t vote in the last cycle, even as almost all high-turnout Democratic-leaners continue to support him.
This trend illustrates the disconnect between Trump’s lead in the polls and Democratic victories in lower-turnout special elections. And it helps explain Trump’s gains among young and nonwhite voters, who tend to be among the least engaged.
Trump’s dependence on these voters could make the race more volatile soon. As voters tune in over the next six months, there’s a chance that disengaged but traditionally Democratic voters could revert to their usual partisan leanings. Alternately, they might stay home, which could also help Biden.

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