Interesting...


https://twitter.com/julie_kell.../1784228073392513169

quote:

So, in other words, the federal government potentially shipped boxes of classified information from government storage to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, then charged him for possessing it, then rescinded his clearance after charging him?

That's not a fair interpretation of those documents.

Has there been testimony or evidence that GSA knew or had indexed the contents? Or was it just a pallet of boxes that needed to be moved?

That's the thing, these documents were just uncovered via FOIA of from unredacted motions in FLA. All of this was previously redacted, one should wonder why.

quote:

federal government potentially

Anything to this? Are they trying to steal TX, among other places?

Somehow, I’ve got in my head, that when all this started, the National Archives knew Trump had some documents. They went to Mar-a-Lago went through them, and removed some. They told Trump to put another lock on the door, and went home. Not long after that, Mar-a-Lago was raided.

I don’t remember this information being around very long.

quote:

Originally posted by Muddflap:
Somehow, I’ve got in my head, that when all this started, the National Archives knew Trump had some documents. They went to Mar-a-Lago went through them, and removed some. They told Trump to put another lock on the door, and went home. Not long after that, Mar-a-Lago was raided.

I don’t remember this information being around very long.

It has been around since the beginning of this whole mess.

https://www.foxnews.com/politi...ls-prosecution-trump

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas raised a question Thursday that goes to the heart of Special Counsel Jack Smith's charges against former President Donald Trump.

The high court was considering Trump's argument that he is immune from prosecution for actions he took while president, but another issue is whether Smith and the Office of Special Counsel have the authority to bring charges at all.

"Did you, in this litigation, challenge the appointment of special counsel?" Thomas asked Trump attorney John Sauer on Thursday during a nearly three-hour session at the Supreme Court.

Sauer replied that Trump's attorneys had not raised that concern "directly" in the current Supreme Court case — in which justices are considering Trump's arguments that presidential immunity precludes the prosecution of charges that the former president illegally sought to overturn the 2020 election.

Sauer told Thomas that, "we totally agree with the analysis provided by Attorney General Meese [III] and Attorney General Mukasey."

"It points to a very important issue here because one of [the special counsel's] arguments is, of course, that we should have this presumption of regularity. That runs into the reality that we have here an extraordinary prosecutorial power being exercised by someone who was never nominated by the president or confirmed by the Senate at any time. So we agree with that position. We hadn't raised it yet in this case when this case went up on appeal," Sauer said.

In a 42-page amicus brief presented to the high court in March, Meese and Mukasey questioned whether "Jack Smith has lawful authority to undertake the 'criminal prosecution'" of Trump. Mukasey and Meese — both former U.S. attorneys general — said Smith and the Office of Special Counsel itself have no authority to prosecute, in part because he was never confirmed by the Senate to any position.

Federal prosecutions, "can be taken only by persons properly appointed as federal officers to properly created federal offices," Meese and Mukasey argued. "But neither Smith nor the position of special counsel under which he purportedly acts meets those criteria. He wields tremendous power, effectively answerable to no one, by design. And that is a serious problem for the rule of law — whatever one may think of former President Trump or the conduct on January 6, 2021, that Smith challenges in the underlying case."

The crux of the problem, according to Meese, is that Smith was never confirmed by the Senate as a U.S. attorney, and no other statute allows the U.S. attorney general to name merely anyone as special counsel. Smith was acting U.S. attorney for a federal district in Tennessee in 2017, but he was never nominated to the position. He resigned from the private sector after then-President Trump nominated a different prosecutor as U.S. attorney for the middle district of Tennessee.

Meese and Mukasey argued that because the special counsel exercises broad authority to convene grand juries and make prosecutorial decisions, independent of the White House or the attorney general, he is far more powerful than any government officer who has not been confirmed by the Senate.

Sauer and Trump's other attorneys objected to the legitimacy of Smith's appointment in the charges against Trump in the classified documents case, also brought by Smith, before a Florida federal court.

In a March court filing in Florida, Trump's attorneys claimed that the special counsel's office argues in federal court that Smith is wholly independent of the White House and Garland — contradicting Trump's arguments that the federal charges against him are politically motivated. But at the same time, the special counsel's attorneys insist that Smith is subordinate to the attorney general, and therefore not subject to Senate confirmation under the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

"There is significant tension between the Office’s assurances to that court that Smith is independent, and not prosecuting the Republican nominee for President at the direction of the Biden Administration, and the Office’s assurance here that Smith is not independent and is instead so thoroughly supervised and accountable to President Biden and Attorney General Garland that this Court should not be concerned about such tremendous power being exercised to alter the trajectory of the ongoing presidential election," Trump's attorneys wrote in the filing.

The special counsel's office, responding to Trump's claims in the Florida case, argued that the attorney general "has the statutory authority to appoint a Special Prosecutor" and that the Supreme Court even upheld that authority "in closely analogous circumstances nearly 50 years ago" — in a 1974 case that challenged the prosecutor investigating the late President Richard Nixon.

Meese and Mukasey wrote in their brief that the Nixon case was irrelevant because it "concerned the relationship between the President and DOJ as an institution, not between the President and any specific actor purportedly appointed by DOJ."

The pair also said special counsel investigations are necessary and often lawful, but stated that "the Attorney General cannot appoint someone never confirmed by the Senate, as a substitute United States Attorney under the title ‘Special Counsel.’ Smith’s appointment was thus unlawful, as are all actions flowing from it, including his prosecution of former President Trump."

Smith was a private citizen when Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed him as special counsel to investigate Trump in 2022.

Other recent special counsels — including John Durham's Trump-Russia probe; David Weiss of the Hunter Biden investigation; and Robert Hur, who investigated Biden's mishandling of classified documents — were all confirmed by the Senate to various positions before being named as special counsels.

The Florida court has yet to rule on Trump's motion to dismiss the classified documents case due to claims that Smith was improperly appointed.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on Trump's immunity arguments before its term ends in June.

^^^^^^
A day-brightener, sdy.

quote:

Originally posted by Bytes:
A question for the Forum legal beagles: When justices in a Supreme Court case grill one side vs the other is that an indicator of the ruling?

In most cases that's tricky, there are so many things that can affect this, the pubic notoriety and attention is unbelievable, especially since they started releasing the audio. I've never appeared before the SCOTUS, but have noticed recently that predictions of outcomes haven't been too far off the mark. But in normal cases in lower courts it's a bad idea to call up the client afterward and say we have it locked. The main reason is that you can have everything in your favor, and the court should agree, but then hands down a surprise.

As the creator of the Boston publican “Mr Dooley” had him say:

26 minutes long, but a good discussion w Peter Schweizer



Campaigns are changing because of a tactic called “lawfare.” The Biden administration is using federal government resources, and taxpayer money to conduct the sort of mudslinging that has traditionally been done by political campaigns.

That’s the focus of the most recent episode of The Drill Down, where hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers go into the weeds to show how the Biden administration is coordinating all four of the legal prosecutions against Biden’s opponent in the November presidential election, former President Donald Trump.


Fani Willis, the Fulton County prosecutor prosecuting Trump in Georgia on election interference charges, even showed up at the White House Correspondents Dinner last week.


In April 2022, the Biden White House leaked a story to the New York Times showing Biden “confided to his inner circle” his frustration with Attorney General Merrick Garland for not throwing the book at Trump. Four months later, Trump’s Mar a Lago residence was raided by the FBI at Garland’s direction.

Schweizer says another interesting coincidence occurred in December of 2022 when the #3 person at the Department of Justice in Washington, Matthew Colangelo, announced he was leaving DOJ to take a job with the Manhattan DA’s office.

As Schweizer notes, while the Manhattan DA’s office does matter, this is a “massive step down” for the third-highest DOJ official to take. “Why make that move other than that Joe Biden wanted direct input on NY prosecution?” Schweizer asks.

Two other members of the NY prosecutor’s team, Susan Hoffinger and Joshua Steinglass, were involved in the Trump Organization’s previous court case for conspiracy, criminal tax fraud, and falsifying business records, as also reported by the Times.

Colangelo would later deliver the prosecution’s opening statement in Trump’s trial in Manhattan.

This all has “the fingerprints of the White House all over it,” Schweizer adds.

Spread it around

https://twitter.com/MTGrepp/st.../1785409491267354939

I’ve seen that several times over the past few weeks, and yes it will never make the news.

He says he didn’t have an affair.

She says she didn’t have an affair.

But what was the $130k payment for?

President Trump did an interview with TIME magazine that just became available. The main focus of the interview is what he would do in his second term. The article is starting to become the subject of a lot of commentary in the main stream media. The link to the article is below. None of it surprises me, but I am surprised that he would be that candid in the interview. For example, he says he would be willing to fire any US Attorney who refuses to prosecute anyone he thinks should be prosecuted.

Here is the link: https://time.com/6972021/donal...-election-interview/

^^^Donald Trump is ALWAYS candid.

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
I’ve seen that several times over the past few weeks, and yes it will never make the news.

He says he didn’t have an affair.

She says she didn’t have an affair.

But what was the $130k payment for?

To make the false, but politically damaging, story go away.

Joey D
4/30/24

In the 7 AM Hour: Larry O’Connor and Julie Gunlock discussed:

7:05 AM - INTERVIEW - JOE DIGENOVA - legal analyst and former U.S. Attorney to the District of Columbia – discussed Trump’s legal trials and Biden’s classified documents.

Last week was a whirlwind, between Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal trial in Manhattan and the high-stakes Supreme Court presidential immunity arguments in D.C. that could determine when and if the former president goes on trial in the nation’s capital.

What’s ahead: The focus this week will mostly be on New York, where the trial resumes Tuesday with more witness testimony. On Thursday, the judge will hold a second hearing about Trump’s alleged violations of a gag order. In the Florida classified document case, we’re still waiting for U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon to makes some big decisions.

quote:

He says he didn’t have an affair.

She says she didn’t have an affair.

But what was the $130k payment for?

People and companies regularly figure that coughing up some money is cheaper than dealing with the nonsense in an actual court or the court of public opinion all day long.

How many out of court settlements are similar? No admission of liability, and a non-disclosure agreement in exchange for a check. Will probably happen 1,000 times today.

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
I’ve seen that several times over the past few weeks, and yes it will never make the news.

He says he didn’t have an affair.

She says she didn’t have an affair.

But what was the $130k payment for?

I routinely settle cases on behalf of my clients for nuisance value. It's their call and often, they would rather pay something to get rid of BS cases and save lit costs and the time and uncertainty of litigation.

What's nuisance value? Highly correlates with potential risk and since my job is to mitigate risk and bring certainty, the amount varies on a case by case basis.

I give clients their legal options but often things are resolved for business reasons, having little to do with the merits.