Trump News

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

Justice Department Argues That Trump Can Be Sued for January 6 Capitol Riot



As reported by the Washington Post, attorneys for the DOJ’s Civil Division wrote:

Speaking to the public on matters of public concern is a traditional function of the Presidency, and the outer perimeter of the President’s Office includes a vast realm of such speech. But that traditional function is one of public communication. It does not include incitement of imminent private violence.

Two Capitol Police officers and 11 House Democrats joined in a lawsuit to hold Trump liable for physiological and physical effects they allegedly suffered from the riot. (Ashli Babbitt was unavailable for comment.)

An appeals court remained undecided in December on whether Trump was acting within his official duties when he held the rally that preceded the riot. The court asked the DOJ to give an opinion on the case, while Trump has argued he has absolute immunity that protects him from being sued.

Here’s more, via WaPo:

The lawsuit was filed under a statute, written after the Civil War in response to the Ku Klux Klan, that allows for damages when force, threats or intimidation are used to prevent government officials from carrying out their duties.
[…]
The district court that first heard this suit already ruled that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s conduct.
[…]
The lawsuit is still at a preliminary stage, and the Justice Department emphasized that it was not saying the allegation that Trump incited the Jan. 6 riot is true — only that the “plausibly allege[d]” claims describe conduct outside the scope of a president’s official duties.

The lawsuit is still at a preliminary stage, and the Justice Department emphasized that it was not saying the allegation that Trump incited the Jan. 6 riot is true — only that the “plausibly allege[d]” claims describe conduct outside the scope of a president’s official duties.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
A spokesperson for Trump told NBC News: “The Manhattan District Attorney’s threat to indict President Trump is simply insane.”

“For the past five years, the DA’s office has been on a witch hunt, investigating every aspect of President Trump’s life, and they’ve come up empty at every turn and now this,” the spokesperson said.

“The fact that after their intensive investigation the DA is even considering a new political attack is a clear exoneration of President Trump in all areas. President Trump was the victim of extortion then, just as he is now. It’s an embarrassment to the Democrat prosecutors, and it’s an embarrassment to New York City.”




 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

Trump Conviction Would Probably Be Overturned on Appeal: Dershowitz

https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2021/04/20/dershowitz-1200x818.jpg

“I don’t think there will be a motion to dismiss that succeeds. This is New York justice. In New York, of course you can indict a ham sandwich. But in New York, you can also convict a ham sandwich because the jury pool will be very much against Trump and the judges will be very much against Trump,” Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said during an appearance on Fox News.

(clip)

‘Used His Own Money’​

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said in a statement that most campaign finance violations involve spending other people’s money illegally or accepting money that you should not.

“Trump did neither. He used his own money to resolve a private dispute, irrespective of any campaign. The impending indictment is based on an untested, tortured legal theory. This is an absurd abuse of the criminal process in our politics. It must be seen for the partisan pathetic ploy it is,” Gaetz, a Trump supporter, said.

“News of a possible indictment against President Trump is just ANOTHER example of the Left’s derangement,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) added.

“This is a TOTAL SHAM involving a weak case… from years ago… with questionable witnesses,” he said on Twitter.

Rudy Giuliani, another former Trump lawyer, said on Newsmax that the case would be a violation of due process and would eventually be dismissed if brought.

“Prosecutors have come out against this, and said, ‘Hey, don’t do this: This will get him elected president,'” Giuliani said. “This is such a miscarriage of justice, it’ll get him elected president.”
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
🔥 The New York Times ran a story Thursday headlined, “As a Possible Indictment Looms, Trump’s Team Plans to Attack.” Republicans attack! The sub-headline explained “If the former president faces criminal charges, his campaign plans to begin a broad offensive against Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney and a Democrat, accusing him of political bias.”

Bias? It’s kind of funny how the Times describes Trump’s defending himself as “an attack.”

The leaked rumor is Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg will soon indict President Trump, which would require Trump to be arrested, processed, mugshot, and detained until he makes bail (assuming the Court approves bail). Bragg, pictured below, will shortly become the first prosecutor in the history of the United States to file criminal charges against a former President.

District attorney Bragg is not always this zealous about prosecuting crimes. Earlier this year, the New York Post reported that “soft-on-crime Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has downgraded more than half his felony cases to misdemeanors — while also managing to lose half of the felony cases that do reach court.” Bragg’s campaign received funding from Soros-related entities, was endorsed by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, and ran on a platform of “criminal justice reform.”

So.

The charges against Trump relate to disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti’s claim that Trump paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in 2016, in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement. Ironically, lawyer Avenatti has been convicted of extorting Nike, by threatening the firm to disclose harmful information unless they paid him to shut up, and separately for wire fraud and identity theft, due to pinching $300,000 from one of his own clients.

The Times failed to mention either of Avenatti’s criminal convictions.

The charges are moldy baloney. To get to a felony conviction, DA Bragg must combine a misdemeanor “falsifying business records” charge with a second crime by re-characterizing the Daniels payment as an improper donation to Trump’s campaign, exceeding state donor limits. Even the New York Times thinks it’s a long shot, as it explained in a March 9th article about the case:

Combining the criminal charge with a violation of state election law would be a novel legal theory for any criminal case, let alone one against the former president, raising the possibility that a judge or appellate court could throw it out or reduce the felony charge to a misdemeanor.

Yesterday’s Times article spends most of its word budget describing how it expects the Trump campaign to use the Banana Republic-style prosecution to his advantage, which for some reason surprised the Times’ reporters as much as if they’d heard Anthony Fauci blurt something accurate for a change.

Trump supporters are rightly outraged by the trumped-up charges and will probably be even more energized to support the former President in his election campaign than discouraged at all. The story quoted aggressive New York lawyer Joe Tacopina, who said “If they bring this case, I believe this will catapult him into the White House, because this will show how they’re weaponizing the justice system.”

Tacopina is not the only one with that sentiment:

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Matt IS overestimating the intelligence of the power-hungry idiots who dreamed up this strategy. Never overestimate the intelligence of power-hungry idiots. Consider Sheila Jackson-Lee, for example. Just saying.




 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
But Turley said that based on those reports, the DA’s case against Trump “is legally pathetic” and “is struggling to twist state laws to effectively prosecute a federal case long ago rejected by the Justice Department against Trump.”

“In 2018 (yes, that is how long this theory has been around), I wrote how difficult such a federal case would be under existing election laws. Now, six years later, the same theory may be shoehorned into a state claim,” wrote Turley, who was a former expert witness for Trump’s first impeachment trial, for The Hill.

“While we still do not know the specific state charges in the anticipated indictment, the most-discussed would fall under Section 175 for falsifying business records, based on the claim that Trump used legal expenses to conceal the alleged hush-payments that were supposedly used to violate federal election laws,” Turley said. “While some legal experts have insisted such concealment is clearly a criminal matter that must be charged, they were conspicuously silent when Hillary Clinton faced a not-dissimilar campaign-finance allegation.

He noted that a Section 175 charge “would normally be a misdemeanor” and that the “only way to convert it into a Class E felony requires a showing that the ‘intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.’ That other crime would appear to be the federal election violations which the Justice Department previously declined to charge.”


Bragg’s office, meanwhile, could not prosecute the charge as a misdemeanor as it falls outside the two-year statute of limitations, Turley wrote. Instead, Bragg would have to pursue a felony charge.

“Prosecutors working under Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., also reportedly rejected the viability of using a New York law to effectively charge a federal offense,” Turley noted. Bragg also previously expressed doubts about the Daniels case and shut it down when he took office several years ago, he said, adding that two lead prosecutors resigned at the time.








 

herb749

Well-Known Member
So this DA is trying to tie his reelection to charging Trump while he lets violent criminal go. But the idiots in NYC will vote for him because he arrested Trump.
 

Hijinx

Well-Known Member
So this DA is trying to tie his reelection to charging Trump while he lets violent criminal go. But the idiots in NYC will vote for him because he arrested Trump.
The New York voters will vote for him because he let's violent criminals go, Trump is just a bomus.


What I see going on with Trump is what is a repeat of what happened to Sarah Palin in Alaska.
Sue them into leaving. Try them into leaving. Sooner or later the lawyers and crooked judges can break the fortunes of any person.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

Progressive Democrat Bragg’s Motivation in Nakedly Political Indictment of Trump



Yet no former president and substantial candidate should be the target of a criminal prosecution, especially by the opposition party, unless the matter is truly serious — unless it would be treated as felony conduct if it were committed by anyone.

Besides Bragg’s investigation, we have carefully covered the pending probes of the former president in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his illegal possession of classified documents. Those are extraordinarily serious matters. We can agree or disagree about the legal theories that prosecutors may pursue; and we should watch carefully whether, on the classified documents, Trump is afforded equal protection of the law given that President Biden and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, among others, have engaged in similar conduct with (so far) impunity. Nevertheless, if Trump were indicted for, say, obstructing Congress on January 6, 2021, or obstructing the grand-jury investigation of his hoarding of secret intelligence at Mar-a-Lago, no one could credibly claim that these were (pardon the pun) trumped-up cases, even if the decision to charge them is politically fraught.

Not so with the Stormy Daniels caper.

Bragg is engaged in bare-naked politics. The case is not merely unworthy as a prosecution of Trump (which is why federal prosecutors walked away from it years ago, as did Bragg before he was pressured by progressive Democrats into reviving it); it is also a case that everyone knows Bragg would never bring against anyone other than Trump. Crime is rampant in New York, in part because Bragg’s default position is leniency and often non-prosecution when it comes to hardened criminals. Here, the case of falsifying business records against Trump (which we’ve analyzed, for example, here, here, here, here, and here) is, at best, a nonviolent misdemeanor that is stale and that could be inflated into a felony only by theories that are legally and factually dubious. This is a classic, invidious selective prosecution. It is being launched strictly for political purposes.
 

Hijinx

Well-Known Member
Mr. Bragg is a black man with the mindset of the idiot that made this statement.

If you wants to be impotent you's got to act impotent.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
🔥 The New York Times ran a breathless story yesterday headlined, “N.Y. Authorities Prepare for Unprecedented Arrest of an Ex-President.”

The Times — and many other news sources — are now reporting that the NYPD is preparing for a potential Trump arrest by implementing wide-scale security procedures including mobilizing up to 700 riot cops, and it is rumored that New York officials have conferred with Trump’s Secret Service detail.

The Times explained that Trump would likely not be jailed, and his security detail would also have to be involved:

After an arraignment, Mr. Trump would likely be released on his own recognizance because an indictment likely would contain only nonviolent felony charges; under New York law, prosecutors cannot request bail in most such cases.
Mr. Trump will almost certainly be accompanied at every step of the process — from the moment he is taken into custody until his appearance before a judge — by armed agents of the United States Secret Service, who are required by law to protect him at all times.

I’m not as sanguine as the New York Times that Manhattan DA Bragg will not request Trump be jailed without bail. But the whole thing raises some interesting questions. Does the Secret Service have a duty to protect the President from unjust prosecution? Or, does the “rule of law” supersede their protective duties?

The Times noted that, should Trump resist the impending arrest, it would require Governor DeSantis to sign off on Trump’s extradition to New York, and the Governor will be splashed right into the political bouillabaisse:

f New York prosecutors sought Mr. Trump’s extradition, Mr. DeSantis would face an unenviable dilemma. He would be compelled to choose between authorizing an arrest warrant for Mr. Trump and inflaming his base, or attempting in some way to aide his Republican rival, and possibly face legal action as a result.


In other words, if DeSantis refuses to extradite Trump, the democrats will pillory the Governor as a lawless dictator, and DeSantis would eventually be ordered by a federal court to approve Trump’s extradition anyway. Lose-lose. If DeSantis does NOT resist extradition, then Trump supporters will accuse him of faithlessness, betrayal, and being a RINO deep-state tool.

Trump might avoid that distraction by voluntarily turning himself in, keeping the focus on the politically-motivated prosecution and the democrats’ double-standards. It’s hard to handicap what Trump’s best move would be.

Arresting Trump would be inconceivably reckless and stupid, which virtually guarantees they’ll go through with it. Democrats are currently sprinting as fast as they can to join the dictatorial ranks of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, who have both routinely used arrests as tools against their political opponents.

I’ll have a lot more to say about it if they ARE dumb enough to move forward with Trump’s arrest.





 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
“We will not be intimidated by attempts to undermine the justice process, nor will we let baseless accusations deter us from fairly applying the law,” the spokesperson said. “In every prosecution, we follow the law without fear or favor to uncover the truth. Our skilled, honest and dedicated lawyers remain hard at work.”

A trio of House Republican committee chairmen sent a letter to Bragg on Monday announcing an investigation and demanding communications, documents, and testimony in response to reports indicating that an indictment against Trump was imminent.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), and House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (R-WI) signed onto the letter that warned of “an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority: the indictment of a former President of the United States and current declared candidate for that office.”



 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

Nikki Haley Says New York Case Against Trump Is About ‘Revenge’




“Everything I have seen from this New York district attorney is that this would be something he’d be doing for political points, and I think what we know is when you get into political prosecutions like this, it’s more about revenge than it is about justice,” Haley told Fox News host Bret Baier on Monday.

“I think the country would be better off talking about things that the American public cares about than to sit there and have to deal with some revenge by some political people in New York,” she added.

Haley, who served as Trump’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, joins other Republicans campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination or are expected to join the race to warn against an unprecedented criminal indictment of a former president and criticize Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat. The prosecutor is investigating Trump in connection to hush money payments to former porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election cycle. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

Manhattan DA Behind Trump Indictment Responds to GOP With the Self-awareness of a Brick



According to Fox News, a spokesperson for Bragg spoke with Fox News Digital, saying that his office will not be intimidated by the GOP. Hilariously, the response from Bragg’s office is about as hypocritical as it gets:

“We will not be intimidated by attempts to undermine the justice process, nor will we let baseless accusations deter us from fairly applying the law,” a spokesperson for Bragg’s office told Fox News Digital.
“In every prosecution, we follow the law without fear or favor to uncover the truth. Our skilled, honest and dedicated lawyers remain hard at work,” the spokesperson added.

Bragg is currently attempting to turn what even other Democrats acknowledge is a misdemeanor into a felony. The likelihood of that happening is slim, and many Democrats fear that this weak attempt to arrest Trump will only strengthen his standing among Republican and Independent voters.

Their fears are likely to come true.

Bragg is trying to draw up a narrative of his charges being fair and unbiased, but there is nothing fair or unbiased about them. Bragg is notorious for being an anti-Trump die-hard, and using the legal system to elevate charges while he consistently reduces charges for hardened criminals is a look that says anything but “fairly applying the law.”
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

Soros-Funded NYC DA Behind Trump Probe in 2021: Convicting Trump Is ‘Number One Issue'



Bragg touted his experience investigating Trump in an interview with Hot 97’s “Ebro in the Morning” during his run for Manhattan DA. He said prosecuting Trump was “the number one issue.”

“A lot of people are wondering, whoever has this job are they going to convict Donald Trump,” host Ebro Darden asked. “That is the number one issue,” Bragg responded. “What I'll say is I'm the only–I was the first to announce against Cy Vance.

I too have a lot of issues which is why I decided to run. I'm the candidate in the race who has the experience with Donald Trump. I was the Chief Deputy in the Attorney General's Office. We sued the Trump administration over a hundred times. For the Muslim travel ban, for family separation at the border, for shenanigans with the census. So I know how to litigate with him.”



 
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