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Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Take that MTG! LOL


Marjorie Taylor Greene's Own Words Used Against Her in Biden Campaign Ad

By Aila Slisco On 7/18/23 - NEWSWEEK

Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is used as an unlikely spokesperson to tout President Joe Biden's social policies in the president's latest 2024 reelection campaign ad.

The Biden campaign on Tuesday turned the tables on Greene, clipping her words and using them as selling points for the president's 2024 campaign in an ad uploaded to his Twitter account alongside the comment, "I endorse this message." The tweet quickly went viral, receiving more than 5 million views less than two hours after being shared. (CONTINUES)

Friday, June 9, 2023

Trump Indicted, Charged in Classified Documents Inquiry

The seven counts against the former president include conspiracy to obstruct, willful retention of documents and false statements, according to people familiar with the indictment. He said he would surrender to the authorities on Tuesday.

The Justice Department on Thursday took the legally and politically momentous step of lodging federal criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, accusing him of mishandling classified documents he kept upon leaving office and then obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them.

Mr. Trump confirmed on his social media platform that he had been indicted. The charges against him include willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and a conspiracy to obstruct justice, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department made no comment and did not immediately make the indictment public.

The indictment, handed up by a grand jury in Federal District Court in Miami, is the first time a former president has faced federal charges. It puts the nation in an extraordinary position, given Mr. Trump’s status not only as a one-time commander-in-chief but also as the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to face President Biden, whose administration will now be seeking to convict his potential rival of multiple felonies.

Mr. Trump is expected to surrender to the authorities on Tuesday, according to a person close to him and his own post on his social media platform, Truth Social.

“The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been indicted,” Mr. Trump wrote, in one of several posts around 7 p.m. after he was notified of the charges.

The former president added that he was scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Miami at 3 p.m. on Tuesday.

In a video he released later on Truth Social, Mr. Trump declared: “I’m an innocent man. I’m an innocent person.”

The indictment, filed by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, came about two months after local prosecutors in New York filed more than 30 felony charges against Mr. Trump in a case connected to a hush money payment made to a porn star in advance of the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump remains under investigation by Mr. Smith’s office for his wide-ranging efforts to retain power after his election loss in 2020, and how those efforts led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. He is also being scrutinized for potential election interference by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga.

Public filings in the documents case have painted a picture of Mr. Trump repeatedly stonewalling efforts by both the National Archives and Records Administration and the Justice Department to retrieve the trove of hundreds of sensitive government records that the former president took with him from the White House and kept mostly at his private club and residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.

While the nature of a few of the documents found in Mr. Trump’s possession is known — he had held onto letters from the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, for example — it remains unclear what other classified materials were found at Mar-a-Lago and what national security damage his possession of them caused, if any.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly characterized the investigation as a politically motivated witch hunt, and in recent weeks his lawyers have sought to raise what they say are issues of prosecutorial misconduct.

Full article at NYT


Monday, July 11, 2022

Courageous Cassidy Hutchinson

The Courage of Jan. 6 Witness Cassidy Hutchinson

 By Peggy Noonan, June 30, 2022 

 


Only a woman would have done what Cassidy Hutchinson did because only a woman, in a place of such power and prestige, would have registered everything and taken such close notes instead of spending that time swanning around being important.

Here she was, all by herself, 26 years old, in front of the whole country.

I found her testimony to the Jan. 6 committee entirely credible. If she lied I see no motive. Any who know otherwise, who can rebut what she said, should come forward and, like her, testify under oath.

She was steadily promoted in Donald Trump’s White House, rising from intern to primary assistant to chief of staff Mark Meadows. She was by all accounts professional and discreet, a conservative, a Trumpian committed to the higher political mission. The powerful men around her appear to have been undefended in her presence and spoke freely—she’s only a kid, a girl, what can she do? She helps the steward clean ketchup off the wall after the president has a tantrum and throws his plates and silverware. In the scheme of things she’s nobody.

And yet such people can upend empires.

By being there this week, she showed a lot more guts than the men of that White House. Mr. Meadows, counsel Pat Cipollone and others—her testimony made them sound like a bunch of jabbering hysterics. You tell the president not to do that! No, you tell him! They worried about legal exposure. Ms. Hutchinson paraphrased Mr. Cipollone: “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable!”

You get the impression she, on the other hand, was worrying about what was right.

Now alone, with the administration over but its men still hiding, she came forward, and what she said changed everything. Her testimony made criminal charges against the former president more likely. In National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote that her testimony was devastating in that it portrayed Donald Trump as “singularly culpable” for the events of 1/6. As to the disputed limousine fight between the president and his Secret Service agents, Mr. McCarthy says, sensibly: Let them speak under oath. Ms. Hutchinson didn’t say that the skirmish occurred but that she had been told it had—by an agent who was there, minutes after it allegedly happened. There’s nothing wrong in this venue with hearsay. “The point of an investigation is to search for reliable, admissible evidence,” Mr. McCarthy writes. “For that, hearsay is not only allowed but encouraged.”

David French in the Dispatch also saw Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony as strengthening the case for prosecution. Mr. Trump approved of the riot, intended to walk to the Capitol with the mob, thought Vice President Mike Pence deserved harm. Most serious, in Mr. French’s view, is what Ms. Hutchinson testified she heard Mr. Trump say of the crowd: “You know, I don’t effing care that they have weapons. They’re not there to hurt me. Take the effing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”

Magnetometers—mags—are used to detect weapons. Some members of the crowd carried them.

Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony must be corroborated by others who might have heard Mr. Trump say this. But if it stands, an indictment “would be a relatively simple story,” Mr. French writes.

“First, Trump summoned the mob to Washington.” Second, he “knew the mob was armed and dangerous.” Third, he exhorted them to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol. Ms. Hutchinson said he attempted to lead it himself. Fourth, he further inflamed the mob after the attack began by tweeting: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what was necessary.”

With this fact pattern, his earlier admonition to the crowd to move forward “peacefully and patriotically” looks, to Mr. French’s eyes, “more like pro forma ass-covering than a genuine plea. It was a drop of pacifism in an ocean of incitement.”

The purpose of gathering all possible information on this ugly historical event is to see that those who did it are exposed and punished so it never happens again. If Mr. Trump had succeeded, he would have produced a new era, in which democracy and its processes would no longer work in America, in which the outcome of every national election would be a question. We can’t allow that because we can’t survive that way, we’d be finished.

What is important now is getting more people testifying publicly under oath. More people are going to want to talk. The committee should be given the resources to pick up its pace and lengthen its schedule.

After Ms. Hutchinson, the testimony of Messrs. Meadows and Cipollone is more crucial than ever. Mr. Meadows was in the thick of everything on 1/6 and before, as the conspiracy unfolded. Ms. Hutchinson said he asked for a presidential pardon. Did he? For what? (Mr. Meadows has denied it.)

Mr. Cipollone, also at the heart of events, is an interesting case. Almost every book and article about the end of the Trump administration portrays him as a bit of a hero, so it’s generally assumed he was more than a bit of a source. Why so shy now?

He knows whether Ms. Hutchinson told the truth. He knows more than that.

Mr. Cipollone is said to have concerns regarding questions of executive privilege. Rep. Liz Cheney implied in hearings that it was simpler than that: “Our committee is certain that Donald Trump does not want Mr. Cipollone to testify here.”

It is possible he’s keen to keep his business and political ties to Trumpworld and has concluded he can maintain them by never saying in public what one might say in private, on background. Let the girl be brave; he will be careful.

But he owes the public that paid his salary the truth, and until he does his Washington nickname, “Patsy Baloney,” will stick.

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