Pretty good article from a paper that is more anti Trump than pro.


Millions losing faith in our system over Trump-Biden divide: ‘Can’t vote our way out of this injustice’

https://nypost.com/2023/06/13/...-trump-biden-divide/

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow suggests Trump can make a plea deal to promise not to run for POTUS in exchange for freedom.

More to the point- blackmail.

https://www.breitbart.com/clip...-to-avoid-jail-time/

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
If he's not involved with this case, his opinion doesn't mean jack shit.

I read last week that Weissmann and another fellow traveler were the ones behind the scene that did the work that has Jack Smith as the front man. Weissmann has a long history of cruelty and questionable ethics. If interested, look at his dealings with Paul Manafort. No links provided.

^^^And ENRON!

quote:

Andrew Weissmann was the lead attorney/prosecutor for the Mueller "Russia Collusion Investigation".

Yes, and Lisa Monaco was part of that effort too. These same people have been using "lawfare" to come at Trump since 2016.

Lisa Monaco would certainly know the content of the letter written by Barack Obama to Donald Trump; she, Susan Rice and Kathryn Ruemmler might have even assisted in the writing of it. Remember, it was Susan Rice who wrote the January 20th “by the book” memo memorializing the FBI targeting of Trump, and Kathryn Ruemmler represented Susan Rice as her lawyer when investigators made inquiry.

Lisa Monaco was previously President Obama’s senior advisor for national security. Monaco is now the Deputy Attorney General to AG Merrick Garland.

Deputy AG Lisa Monaco is the head of the DOJ operation that was targeting the Trump Mar-a-Lago documents and framing the legal issues for the DOJ to use in court. Monaco would know that any production of documents that did not include the Obama letter would mean a “national security document” remained in Mar-a-Lago.

Special Counsel Jack Smith also reports to Lisa Monaco.

https://theconservativetreehou...-claims/#more-247679

‘Back Up Plan For Jack Smith’ – Corrupt Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann Floats More Serious Federal Charges Against Trump in New Jersey

Self explanatory...

quote:

Originally posted by Ripley:
‘Back Up Plan For Jack Smith’ – Corrupt Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann Floats More Serious Federal Charges Against Trump in New Jersey

Self explanatory...

Already posted and discussed halfway through the previous page...

Question:

Was Mike Pence ALWAYS a snake and just hid it really well from 2016-2020 or did he turn into this snake later?

https://twitter.com/mercedessc...284104037179392?s=20

Trump's indictment is not the slam dunk case liberal media believes it is

The media’s pronouncements that Donald Trump is almost certainly guilty of crimes are based on an ignorance of the law and a blinding political bias. As is often the case with capacious fiats mouthed by the featherhead class, the opposite is true.

The former president has several viable defenses. Some will be offered in pre-trial motions challenging the 37 charges in a Florida grand jury indictment related to his handling of alleged classified documents. These motions are appealable if denied. Such interlocutory petitions and arguments are laborious and time-consuming. They render special counsel Jack Smith’s stated ambition of a "speedy trial" fanciful, at best.

Trump’s principal defense rests with the Presidential Records Act (PRA). It is not "farcical" as former Attorney General William Barr claims. It was a law passed by Congress in 1978 that granted an exclusive right of former presidents to maintain custody and control of presidential papers accrued during their terms in office. Arguably, it includes classified documents.

It is a fundamental precept of law that specific statutes prevail over general statutes. The PRA is a specially crafted law that applies to a narrow group of people. That is, presidents. By contrast, the Espionage Act enacted in 1917 is a general statute that applies broadly to all citizens. Hence, the defense will argue that PRA takes precedence over the Espionage Act, which accounts for most of the charges against Trump.

It is another elementary tenet of law that if statutes are in conflict, the more recently implemented statute predominates over the earlier one. Here, the Records Act was passed 61 years after the Espionage Act. This makes it more recent, relevant, and operative. Trump’s lawyers will argue that the PRA is the governing and controlling law, not the Espionage Act.

So, what does that law mean?

For more than a decade, it was the considered opinion of the Department of Justice that the PRA conferred a unique right on former presidents to keep whatever presidential records they want, and the government has no authority to seize them. The National Archives agreed. A president has the sole discretion to segregate and dispose of records.

Indeed, so convinced was the DOJ of this interpretation that its lawyers defended it in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. in 2012. They argued that ex-president Bill Clinton was allowed to maintain custody of whatever he wanted during his two terms, including audio tapes with suspected classified information that he stored in his home. The judge, without reservation, agreed.

District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that control over presidential records rests squarely in the hands of a former president. She wrote, in relevant part, "The National Archives does not have the authority to designate materials as ‘presidential records.’ It lacks any right, duty, or means to seize control of them."

The judge also adopted the very argument made in court by the Justice Department: "(Seizing the records) is an ‘extraordinary request’ that is ‘unfounded, contrary to the Presidential Records Act’s express terms, and contrary to the traditional principles of administrative law’."

Forty-five years ago, congress passed the Records Act to memorialize what previous presidents had always been permitted to do as a matter of tradition and practice. This is important since it is incumbent on courts to interpret statutes consistent with legislative intent. As The Wall Street Journal noted in a recent editorial, "If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless." Quite right.

Importantly, the PRA is a civil statute with no criminal penalty attached. Judge Jackson’s opinion reinforced the legal constraints on both the National Archives and the Justice Department. Their ability to retrieve documents is limited to a civil action, not criminal seizure. Hence, the proper remedy was for Garland to bring a civil lawsuit to enforce his subpoena and allow an impartial judge to resolve the matter.

Trump’s defense team will argue that Garland manipulated the law by commandeering the Espionage Act to criminalize conduct that is not criminal at all under the prevailing statute, the Presidential Records Act. Garland defied his department’s own legal interpretation of the law and the previous court decision to target Trump in advance of a national election. His flagrant abuse bears the unmistakable stench of partisan politics, which has infected the attorney general’s tenure from the outset.

The FBI did not raid Bill Clinton’s home to reclaim classified material. Nor did the agency raid the same home when his wife, Hillary, stored more than a hundred classified documents on her personal server as Secretary of State. Notably, she did not have the protection of the Presidential Records Act. But it seems that abusive raids and inflated indictments only happen to Republicans. The new litmus test for prosecution is party affiliation not fidelity to the law.

Trump’s defense team will aver that unequal application of the law and selective prosecution are a violation of their client’s due process rights. These rights are based on principles of fundamental fairness guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. This will likely be the subject of another pre-trial motion to dismiss the case. After all, "Equal Justice Under Law" should be more than mere words chiseled on the pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court.

A similar motion based on constitutional violations may argue that Garland snookered a Florida magistrate into signing an overly broad general search warrant that is strictly prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. If the evidence seized was accomplished by unlawful means, it constitutes an unreasonable search and seizure. The evidence would be inadmissible under the well-established exclusionary rule.

You can be assured that Trump’s defense team will seek to exclude or suppress the testimony of his lawyer, Evan Corcoran, who was forced to testify before the Washington grand jury prior to the indictment. District Court Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the attorney-client privilege could be pierced under the so-called "crime-fraud exception."

Trump’s current attorneys will contend that the ruling was deeply flawed and erroneous. Regardless, it is not binding on the trial court in Florida. Moreover, the special counsel and Judge Howell refused to allow the defense to even examine the sealed evidence on which the matter was being argued. That deprived them of presenting a fair counter-argument, which was the prosecution’s intent all along. The adverse decision was preordained.

At issue are instances in which Trump supposedly asked his counsel about ways to avoid producing evidence that Garland was seeking. But it has never been a crime for a client to ask his attorney questions —even questions about how to evade government intrusions and demands. As George Washington University law professor and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley has pointed out, "Clients do it all the time…indeed, it’s encouraged."

We don’t prosecute people for their thoughts or discussions. Was it unreasonable or somehow criminal for Trump to ask his lawyer if he could adopt the same obstructive tactics that Hillary Clinton and her lawyer employed to escape charges? Not at all. It’s the kind of query that attorneys field quite frequently and then disabuse.

Trump’s team will protest that criminalizing confidential conversations protected by law is an egregious overreach by special counsel Jack Smith. Howell’s conclusions and her ruling itself are an alarming breach of a cherished principle that communications between a lawyer and client are sacrosanct.

It appears from the indictment that prosecutors used (or misused) Corcoran’s testimony to help build their case. If that judicial ruling was in error, then any charges that derived from Trump’s own attorney should be stricken from the case as unlawfully brought.

Several of the charges against Trump accuse him of obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve the documents in dispute. In the criminal codes, obstruction requires proof that a person act "corruptly" or "act with an improper purpose." Those rather vague terms were later defined by the Supreme Court as behaving with a "wrongful, immoral, depraved, or evil" intent.

This is an extremely high standard for prosecutors to sustain. Trump’s legal team will assert that if their client sincerely believed he was entitled to the documents under the meaning of the Presidential Records Act, as well as the court’s interpretation of it in the earlier Clinton case, then he did not harbor the requisite "corrupt" intent. It is not "immoral, depraved, or evil" to want to keep what you think is yours if you are genuinely convinced of it.

Even before the raid, Trump insisted that he was acting lawfully. Can there exist a credible motive to obstruct an investigation into a lawful act? People are not motivated to impede non-crimes. If Trump prevails in his argument that his actions were lawful under the PRA, then it seems incongruous to charge him with obstruction without an underlying crime.

A serious dilemma facing the special counsel is how to hold a public trial guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment when much of the evidence is contingent on classified material. Jurors have a right to examine the documents to determine whether they qualify as national defense information under the meaning of the Espionage Act. That is their duty as the triers of fact. To understand the facts and apply them to the law, jurors must literally see the evidence.

However, 12 average citizens selected from the community do not possess the requisite security clearance to view the records that are critical to the prosecution’s burden of proof. The same applies to lawyers.

Prosecutors cannot simply tell everyone, "Trust us when we say that the seized documents qualify as prohibited material under the statute." They cannot put an FBI agent or security analyst on the witness stand who vows that the 31 documents violate the Espionage Act. That is a question of fact that resides solely in the provenance of the jury. This approach would also deprive the defense of a fair and robust cross-examination.

Failure to permit the jury to read the documents themselves might well constitute reversible error. This leaves the government with the option of declassifying the records. So, imagine a trial where the former president of the United States is accused of having classified documents that have since been declassified. It sounds absurd because it is.

There is a law called the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) that outlines various procedures for handling sensitive documents in court without jeopardizing national security. But CIPA is a process, not an unblemished resolution. It is replete with risks that can lead to a case being overturned on appeal.

Unaware of Trump’s various defenses, the chronically biased media has gobbled up every word of the indictment and treated it as gospel. Already, they have convicted him in the court of public opinion. No need for a pesky trial. These are the same faux journalists who pasteurized the phony Trump-Russia collusion "dossier" as scripture. None of them are smart enough to heed the warning of Albert Einstein that "The only mistake in life is the lesson not learned."

Veteran lawyers know better. Through experience, they realize that indictments are one-sided narratives with embroidered storytelling. In prominent cases, they are often designed for public consumption and meant to agitate or inflame. There isn’t a prosecutor alive who doesn’t think his case is better than it really is. That delusion is frequently reflected in an overwrought indictment.

Prosecutors also have a nasty habit of ignoring exculpatory material that is beneficial to the accused. They twist the law and contort the evidence in the most damning light possible. And sometimes they fail at proof. Especially when their seemingly invincible evidence is challenged by skillful lawyers armed with credible witnesses that, in the end, undermine the charges.

Of course, that is what a trial is for. But first, Special Counsel Jack Smith must survive a flurry of dismissal motions to which the mindless media remains oblivious.

quote:

Trump’s principal defense rests with the Presidential Records Act (PRA). It is not "farcical" as former Attorney General William Barr claims.

Bill Barr is such a disappointment.

It's not going to be easy to clean house at DOJ/FBI but if given the 2nd chance Trump should fire every last attorney in that office and start over. He should be vetting a list of conservatives even now. If it wasn't for Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr things would have been far different for Trump. There was never any justification for the Mueller probe, which only happened because Jeff Sessions was weak.

At least now he knows about Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Co.

Why Donald Trump Cannot Get a Top-Tier Lawyer

by Alan M. Dershowitz

Former President Donald Trump has now been arraigned and pleaded not guilty. He was represented by two lawyers, neither of whom he apparently wants to lead his defense at trial. He has been interviewing Florida lawyers, and several top ones have declined. I know, because I have spoken to them. There are disturbing suggestions that among the reasons lawyers are declining the case is because they fear legal and career reprisals.

There is a nefarious group that calls itself The 65 Project that has as its goal to intimidate lawyers into not representing Trump or anyone associated with him. They have threatened to file bar charges against any such lawyers. When these threats first emerged, I wrote an op-ed offering to defend pro bono any lawyers that The 65 Project goes after. So The 65 Project immediately went after me, and contrived a charge based on a case in which I was a constitutional consultant, but designed to send a message to potential Trump lawyers: if you defend Trump or anyone associated with him, we will target you and find something to charge you with. The lawyers to whom I spoke are fully aware of this threat -- and they are taking it seriously.

There may be other reasons as well for why lawyers are reluctant to defend Trump. He is not the easiest client, and he has turned against some of his previous lawyers, as some of his previous lawyers have turned against him. This will be a difficult case to defend and an unpopular one with many in the legal profession and in general population.

Good lawyers, however, generally welcome challenges, especially in high-profile cases. This case is different: the threats to the lawyers are greater than at any time since McCarthyism. Nor is the comparison to McCarthyism a stretch. I recall during the 1950s how civil liberties lawyers, many of whom despised communism, were cancelled, and attacked if they dared to represent people accused of being communists. Even civil liberties organizations stayed away from such cases, for fear that it would affect their fundraising and general standing in the community. It may even be worse today, as I can attest from my own personal experiences, having defended Trump against an unconstitutional impeachment in 2020. I was cancelled by my local library, community center and synagogue. Old friends refused to speak to me and threatened others who did. My wife, who disagreed with my decision to defend Trump, was also ostracized. There were physical threats to my safety.

Our system of justice is based on the John Adams standard: he too was attacked for defending the British soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre, but his representation of these accused killers now serves as a symbol of the 6th Amendment right to counsel. That symbol has now been endangered by The 65 Project and others who are participating in its McCarthyite chilling of lawyers who have been asked to represent Trump and those associated with him.

Trump's lawyers have now alleged that one of the prosecutors has suggested to Stanley Woodard, the lawyer for Waltine Nauta, Trump's co-defendant, that his application for judgeship may be negatively affected if he persists in defending Nauta vigorously rather than encouraging him to cooperate against Trump. If that is true – I have not seen the evidence to support it – then it represents a direct attack on the 6th Amendment.

Whatever one may think of Trump or the charges against him, all Americans must stand united against efforts to intimidate lawyers and chill them from defending unpopular clients pursuant to the 6th Amendment. Bar associations must look into the threats and actions of The 65 Project and of prosecutors who try, by subtle or other means, to influence the representation of clients by threats to their careers or other means.

Hard cases may make bad law, but partisan cases endanger constitutional rights. We must do everything to assure that all defendants, including Donald Trump, get the zealous representation to which the Constitution entitled all Americans.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.../donald-trump-lawyer

How about you, Professor Dershowitz? You represented the President before, in his 1st Impeachment trial.

I don't care if President Trump violated laws per the allegations for one specific reason. It is that his attackers actively shielded their side when they committed the same or worse actions. I cannot care more about DJT doing something than the left cared about Hillary, Biden, Obama, Bill Clinton, etc doing the same or worse.

This is obviously only a politically motivated attack, after years of previous politically motivated attacks.

A secondary reason would be that the long term negative effects on our country of prosecuting political opponents would be dire. Technical fouls or minor transgressions should probably be forgiven legally though made known publicly. President Ford was very wise to pardon Richard Nixon.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
How about you, Professor Dershowitz? You represented the President before, in his 1st Impeachment trial.

Maybe he will at some point.
Seems to me currently he is good press for DJT until then.

Tucker Carlson slammed Fox News for apologizing and ousting the producer responsible for running a headline that seemingly called President Joe Biden a “wannabe dictator” the day former President Donald Trump was arraigned in federal court.

“inside Fox, the women who run the network panicked.” Carlson noted the producer who put the chyron on the screen, a tenured employee who “was considered one of the most capable people in the building,” resigned less than 24 hours after the controversy.

https://www.breitbart.com/the-...-headline-joe-biden/

^^^
Ep. 4 Wannabe Dictator



https://twitter.com/TuckerCarl.../1669472439472988161

Damn, that banner was real?

[Gunnery Sgt. Hartman]Well- no shit![/Gunnery Sgt. Hartman]


Nailed it:

quote:

Carlson then used the remainder of the fourth episode of his Twitter show to compare Biden’s acts to that of a “wannabe dictator.”

“Of course, Joe Biden is not a wannabe dictator. Just because he’s trying to put the other candidate in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he himself committed, doesn’t mean he has a totalitarian impulse. Come on. That’s absurd,” Carlson joked. “It takes a lot more than jailing your political rivals to earn the title ‘wannabe dictator.’”

Carlson then said wannabe dictators “enrich themselves and their families, their tribe, even as the countries they govern grow steadily poorer and more desperate.”

“They take kickbacks from businesses and from other dictators. They use the official functions of their government to funnel cash to themselves. They don’t bother to hide the fruits of this,” Carlson added. “They live in garish mansions, with big lawns far from the teeming cities, even as their own citizens languish in growing poverty in some cases, literally living in tents on the street.”

“People can’t gather in large numbers to protest the rule of the dictator if they try that they’ll be arrested by his state security services, even years after the fact,” Carlson said before playing a clip of law enforcement arresting Ashli Babbit’s mother while protesting in Washington, DC.

"And by the way, it’s not just public protests that would be banned in a dictatorship, you wouldn’t be allowed to complain from your own home,” Carlson said. “Unauthorized opinions expressed on the internet would be censored. Go too far, press too deep, tell too much truth, and they’ll just erase your opinions. They have no choice really.”

“Those who support the regime can keep their weapons and use them freely, including on public transportation. That’s a core civil right for them,” Carlson continued. “But for those who dissent from the program, self-defense is an unaffordable privilege. Turn in your guns, Mr. Mrs. peaceful opposition, you’re a danger to society, and we know who you are.”

“Dictators build cults of personality around themselves, and they use those cults to deny the glaringly obvious,” he said.

“If Joe Biden ever developed some profound physical or medical problem that was obvious to everybody. Journalists would say something. This is not North Korea. We don’t have state media here,” Carlson joked. “If Joe Biden was say, incapable of completing a full sentence or mistook his sister for his wife, or suddenly started falling down in public for no reason, the New York Times would report on that and then get to the bottom of what was actually happening.”

Carlson also criticized Biden for claiming “ownership” of American children in a recent video uploaded to Twitter to honor LGBTQ Americans.

“These are our kids. These are our neighbors, not somebody else’s kids. They’re all our kids,” Biden said in the video. “And our children are the kite strings that hold our national ambitions aloft.”

“See, Joe Biden isn’t saying your children belong to him like a dictator would. He says something very different from that. He’s saying America’s children are ‘our children,’ not his alone. Ours,” Carlson said. “You share your children with Joe Biden evenly right down the middle with alternating weekends. You’ve got joint custody with Joe Biden, and you can thank heaven that you do.”

“A nation is like a family. Every family has a head, a father. That’s Joe Biden, our nation’s father, and this, ladies and gentlemen, is now his fatherland. Just don’t call it a dictatorship, or we’ll have to issue a statement disavowing you,” he concluded.

Totalitarian motherfuckers!

I love this! Yeah, Tapper panicked, in part because these were Cubans cheering President Trump. Hispanics are a big sector of the voting public.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
Yesterday, CNN anchors, including Jake Tapper, were shocked, appalled and depressed by President Trump’s reception, after he stopped for a bite at a packed Cuban restaurant after his arraignment. Among other things, the giant mob of fans sang the President an early “Happy Birthday.”

As you’ll see in the clip, the CNN anchors were vexed by what was appearing on their own network, what must to them have seemed more like a love fest and much less like what they were expecting: a chagrined politician just disgraced by his criminal arraignment.

So Tapper panicked, and told the control room to pull the plug.

ANCHOR: Whatever this spectacle is, that is unfolding before us, let us remember what this case is really about…

TAPPER: Folks in the control room: I don’t need to see any more of that. He’s trying to turn this, he’s trying to turn it into a spectacle, into a campaign ad. That’s enough of that. We’ve seen it already. Let’s go over the 37 charges…

Poor Jake. He was clearly in excruciating pain watching how Trump’s persecution is making the former President more popular than ever. Enjoy!


The Columbia Bugle
@ColumbiaBugle

Fake News Jake Tapper Having A Meltdown Watching Footage Of President Trump At Miami Cafe

“The folks in the control room, I don’t need to see anymore of that.”


https://twitter.com/ColumbiaBu.../1668719449006850049

I think this CNN story is extremely telling of how much they hate him.

They hate him so much that they are trying to use his early acceptance and inclusion of transgender people against him. This is an obvious attempt to try and turn some of his supporters against him while at the same time completely destroying their narrative that he hates the LGBTQ community.

Of course like the leftists they are they intentionally miss the point. Mutilating children and allowing biological male athletes to compete against women isn’t even close to the same as allowing adult transgender women to compete in a beauty pageant.

https://apple.news/AixPeYIh-QkGYZzYJOMyKHw

quote:

Trump repeatedly celebrated the inclusion of transgender women in his beauty pageant
Updated 9:02 PM EDT June 16, 2023
Years before he said he was running for president to "defeat the cult of gender ideology," Donald Trump welcomed and praised the inclusion of transgender women in the Miss Universe pageant.
In since unreported radio and television interviews from spring and summer 2012, Trump celebrated the interest in a 23-year-old transgender woman named Jenna Talackova participating in a Canadian pageant. He then later effusively praised the winner of the Miss USA pageant, Olivia Culpo, for saying that transgender women should be allowed to compete.
Trump, then the owner of the Miss Universe pageant, would go on to cite the possible participation of transgender women in Olympic sports to justify his decision to end a ban on transgender pageant participants.

But a decade later, as he geared up to run for a second White House term, Trump promised to "ban men from participating in women's sports," when speaking about transgender athletes -- a reflection of how restricting trans rights has become a powerful talking point among conservatives and a potential a litmus test for Republican candidates.
Since launching his 2024 campaign Trump has also referred to gender-affirming surgery for minors as "child sexual mutilation," said he'd seek to make such surgeries illegal if he returned to the White House, said he'd sign executive orders instructing federal agencies not to promote transitioning at any age, and ask Congress to pass a bill requiring the government to only recognize only genders assigned at birth.

That's a departure from how he approached the inclusion of transgender people in society more than a decade ago.

For example, at the Miss USA pageant in June 2012, Culpo said she welcomed the participation of transgender women in the competition -- a comment that Trump supported.

"I do think that that would be fair, but I can understand that people would be a little apprehensive to take that road because there is a tradition of natural-born women," Culpo said when asked if transgender participants should be allowed. "But today where there are so many surgeries and so many people out there who have a need to change for a happier life, I do accept that because I believe it's a free country."

That seemed to go over well with Trump.

"She gave a great answer, a very tough question -- on transgender -- just the question everybody wants to hear, and she gave a great answer and she really did a great job," Trump said praising Culpo on Fox and Friends in June 2012.

"It was a very cool answer," added Trump. "Great, [she] gave a great answer."
"Her answer was a very intelligent answer and that's one of the reasons I assume the judges picked her," Trump said in another June interview on Fox and Friends.
In 2012, Talackova was allowed to compete after threatening legal action over the Miss Universe organization ban on transgender contestants, which had come under scrutiny.
Trump claimed to CNN at the time he personally made the decision to end the ban before even knowing about the legal threats from Talackova's attorney, Gloria Allred.
A statement released by the Trump Organization at the time said the change was to modernize the pageant.

"Pageant rules have been modernized to ensure this type of issue does not occur again," read the statement, issued on Trump's behalf by his then-attorney Michael Cohen.
Cohen told CNN on Thursday the decision was made to follow Olympic guidelines on transgender athletes. At the time, the Olympics allowed the participation of transgender athletes who had sex reassignment surgery and two years of hormone therapy.
In an April 2012 appearance on "The Laura Ingraham Show," Trump celebrated the buzz associated with Talackova's entry into the pageant.
"Well it became a big, big deal up in Canada," Trump said. "And you have the Miss Canada, which is essentially the Miss Universe. It's the pre-Miss Universe, it's the screening for Miss Universe -- and a woman, transgender was in."

"But there's many, many, many contestants and they agreed to let her, based on the laws of Canada and the laws in the United States, they agreed to let her participate," he added. "So I will say there's, there's great interest and if you look at it from a show business standpoint, that's wonderful. But there is certainly great interest."
In an interview on Fox News also in April of 2012, Trump defended his decision to let Talackova compete.

"It has become a hot subject. It is being talked about all over the world right now," Trump said. "This is a young woman, who, according to the laws of Canada and according to the laws of the United States, is allowed to enter the pageant system."
In the same interview, Trump cited the Olympics as part of his rationale.
"We didn't have a rule. This is sort of new territory. We are going by at some point, the Olympic rules because the Olympics are having a very big question about this -- should this be allowed," Trump said. "I said we have 58 contestants in Canada, I said let her run and maybe she will win and if she wins, she will go to Miss Universe. And I think I made the right decision, I feel fine with the decision."


Trump's decision was praised by the LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD at the time.
"For more than two weeks, the Miss Universe Organization and Mr. Trump made it clear to GLAAD that they were open to making a policy change to include women who are transgender. We appreciate that he and his team responded swiftly and appropriately," they said in a statement.
© 2023 Cable News Network, Inc. A WarnerMedia Company. All Rights Reserved.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
Why Donald Trump Cannot Get a Top-Tier Lawyer

by Alan M. Dershowitz

Former President Donald Trump has now been arraigned and pleaded not guilty. He was represented by two lawyers, neither of whom he apparently wants to lead his defense at trial. He has been interviewing Florida lawyers, and several top ones have declined. I know, because I have spoken to them. There are disturbing suggestions that among the reasons lawyers are declining the case is because they fear legal and career reprisals.

There is a nefarious group that calls itself The 65 Project that has as its goal to intimidate lawyers into not representing Trump or anyone associated with him. They have threatened to file bar charges against any such lawyers.
<snip>

That’s utterly disgusting. And, I hope, illegal.