That Sound You Hear?

... that's the sound of a growing flock of chickens on their way home to roost.

Ex-Trump lawyer Eastman faces potential disbarment as ethics trial winds down

Nov 3 (Reuters) - A California state judge is soon set to rule whether former President Donald Trump's personal lawyer John Eastman should lose his law license, capping a disciplinary trial held over five months.

Judge Yvette Roland on Thursday issued a preliminary finding of culpability against Eastman, who is accused of violating attorney ethics rules when he tried to help Trump undo Joe Biden's win in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Eastman denies wrongdoing.

The trial, which first began in June, was due to wrap up on Friday. Roland's preliminary ruling allows state bar prosecutors to present "aggravating" evidence to support disbarment, a bar spokesperson said. Eastman's unproven voter fraud claims led to harassment of election officials and undermined public trust in election results, bar prosecutors have alleged.

"Our office received lots of threatening and harassing messages in the aftermath of the 2020 election," Sambo (Bo) Dul, a former lawyer for the Arizona Secretary of State's Office, testified on Friday. Dul is now general counsel to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs.

The culpability finding "marks a major milestone in the state bar’s pursuit of accountability," States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan policy group that filed a disciplinary complaint against Eastman in 2021, said in a statement.

The case is still not over. Both sides will file written closing arguments by Nov. 22. Roland, who sits on California's State Bar Court, will then have 90 days to issue her ruling, which is appealable.

The California Supreme Court has the final say on all disciplinary matters.

Eastman was separately indicted in August on criminal charges in Fulton County, Georgia, for trying to overthrow the 2020 election there. Eastman, who was charged in the criminal case alongside Trump and additional former lawyers to the ex- president, pleaded not guilty in September.

A former law professor at Chapman University in California, Eastman drafted legal memos suggesting then-Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to accept electoral votes from several swing states when Congress convened to certify the 2020 vote count. Pence rebuffed his arguments, saying he did not have legal authority.

Eastman faces 11 counts of attorney ethics violations, including misleading courts and making false public statements about voter fraud in the 2020 election. His strategy was "completely unsupported by historical precedent or law, and contrary to our values as a nation," state bar prosecutor Duncan Carling said at the start of the disciplinary trial in June.

Eastman has consistently defended his legal theories throughout the trial and argued they were advanced in good faith. He has contended that the allegations of voter fraud put the 2020 election in "uncharted territory."

During the trial he questioned statements made by election officials that there was no voter fraud in the states Biden won. He made unproven election fraud claims at a rally outside the White House on Jan. 6, 2021.

After that rally, Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and delayed the congressional certification of the election.

Ari Explains

One of the things that has become a complete bugaboo is the fairly simple fact that when normal people don't know enough about some issue - eg: all this Trump shit - we go in search of good info, knowing "good" info is not all that easy to find, while an awful lot of truly shitty people are willing to put out all kinds of total bullshit that gets internalized by gullible (but honestly trusting) people who've been sucked in because cynically manipulative assholes feel no compunction about amping up the rage in order to cash in on it - either politically or monetarily, or both.

OK - thus endeth the rant.

Let's go to Ari Melber for a pretty good explainer.

And Another One Down

Trump co-defendant Jenna Ellis pleads guilty in Georgia election case

ATLANTA — Jenna Ellis, a former lawyer for Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, pleaded guilty Tuesday to illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia, making her the third attorney associated with the former president to accept a plea deal in the sweeping criminal racketeering case.

Ellis, who had been facing two charges including violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering act, pleaded guilty in court Tuesday morning to a single felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. The deal allows her to avoid jail time in exchange for providing evidence that could potentially implicate other defendants and agreeing to testify in any future trials. Ellis worked closely with personal Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, another defendant in the case who faces 13 charges.

The plea marks the first time a senior Trump aide has been held criminally accountable for and has admitted to making false statements that the 2020 presidential election was tainted by widespread fraud. In a hearing Tuesday morning, Ellis tearfully admitted that she was wrong and misled and that she no longer believes those false claims.

“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis said.

Appearing before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee on Tuesday, Ellis and her attorneys Franklin and Laura Hogue listened as a prosecutor read out details of an amended indictment. According to the details of the agreement, Ellis agreed to complete three to five years probation and 100 hours of community service, and to pay $5,000 in restitution to the Georgia secretary of state. She agreed to write a letter of apology to the state of Georgia.

She is the fourth Trump co-defendant to plead guilty in the case. Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall, accused of playing a wide-ranging role in the conspiracy to reverse Trump’s loss in Georgia, pleaded guilty Sept. 29 in a cooperation deal with prosecutors. Former pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro each pleaded guilty last week on the eve of their scheduled joint trial in the case.

As part of their plea deals, Hall, Powell and Chesebro each recorded a lengthy video answering prosecutors’ questions about their roles and the roles of others in the alleged election interference conspiracy.

Ellis is the second co-defendant with known direct links to Trump to plead guilty in the case. A onetime Fox News regular who was hired in late 2019 as a legal adviser to the Trump campaign, Ellis was part of the post-2020 election legal team, appearing alongside Giuliani and pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell at press conferences where she echoed false claims of election fraud.

She worked closely with Giuliani, traveling to battleground states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania where prosecutors say she spoke to lawmakers urging them to reject the popular vote results in their states. The Georgia indictment also pointed to memos she wrote for Trump outlining how Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the election results.

Ellis was later admonished by a Colorado judge for the false statements she made about the 2020 election. As part of that proceeding, Ellis admitted that several statements she said back then were false — stating that she acted “with “a reckless state of mind” and telling the court she had acted with “selfish” motives and that her actions had "undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election.”

It is not known what Ellis told prosecutors or what documents she might share in the case. Rumors had swirled for weeks that Ellis might be among those seeking a plea deal — in part because of her public complaints that Trump was unwilling to pay her mounting legal bills.

Ellis, who hosts a podcast for the American Family Network, also publicly declared in September that she was unlikely to support Trump’s bid for the 2024 nomination. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said on her podcast in September. “I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

Sidney Powell Bails

• 72 months probation
• ~$9,000 in fines and restitution
• Letters of apology to the people of Georgia
• Testify against co-defendants

Former Trump attorney Sidney Powell is pleading guilty to state charges in Georgia in connection with her actions taken in advance of January 6, 2021. The plea requires her to plead guilty to 6 counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with election administration.

Powell was sentenced to 6 years of probation, must pay a $6,000 fine, a $2,700 restitution to the state of Georgia, and must testify truthfully against other co-conspirators, including Donald Trump. She also must write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia.

Powell may not have contact with other co-conspirators in the case.

Powell's plea deal is likely to lead to more guilty pleas up the chain.

This story is just breaking. We will provide an update as soon as we learn more. 

And this puts us fully inside the oval office

for the Dec 18 meeting.

Cracking It Open

(This is a repeat/update of a post from 09-30)

This Hall character is kinda the poster boy for Mike Flynn's project to have goons going around seizing voting machines.

There are so many aspects to this enormous attempt to kill American democracy, it's a wonderment any law enforcement outfit has been able to do anything.

The unraveling has begun, and it's picking up a little steam, but there is a very long stretch of very treacherous road still ahead of us.

Big Doin's Down Georgia Way

There has to be some probability that this Scott Hall character is kind of a keystone - that if he's rolled over on Powell, then a significant section of the coup plot (that hasn't gotten a lot of play) will come to light, which could easily lead to a cascade of damning revelations about how wide and deep this fucked up mess really is.

• Georgia
• Michigan
• Wisconsin
• Pennsylvania
• Arizona
• Nevada
• New Mexico

If we get lots of shit hitting lots of fans, then I have to hope that more than just the politicians and operatives get spattered. Somebody had to bankroll the thing, and there has to be any number of wealthy wannabe-plutocrats who should not be left unspattered.

Justice Limited

NOTES:

• 'Bout fuckin' time we started hearing about Mike Flynn and Boris Epshteyn
• There are 20 others who had a hand in this fucked up mess, but they'll walk because "insufficient evidence"
• Lindsey Graham is a smarmy little prick

I guess we just take what we can get.

Georgia Panel Recommended Charging Lindsey Graham in Trump Case

A special grand jury made the recommendation last year after hearing from dozens of witnesses on whether Donald J. Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election.

A special grand jury that investigated election interference allegations in Georgia recommended indicting a number of Trump allies who were not charged, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, and Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser.

In its final report, which a judge unsealed on Friday, the panel also recommended charges against Boris Epshteyn, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s main lawyers, as well as a number of other Trump-aligned lawyers, including Cleta Mitchell and Lin Wood.

Mr. Trump and 18 allies were charged in a racketeering indictment that was handed up last month by a regular grand jury in Fulton County, Ga.

The special grand jury, which Fulton County prosecutors convened to help with the investigation, met at an Atlanta courthouse from June to December of last year. It spent much of that time hearing testimony from 75 witnesses on the question of whether Mr. Trump or any of his allies had sought to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

Under Georgia law, the panel could not issue indictments itself. In the Trump case, that task fell to a regular grand jury that was seated over the summer. The regular grand jury heard evidence from prosecutors for one day in early August before voting to indict all 19 defendants whom prosecutors had sought to charge.

The special grand jury’s mandate was to write a report with recommendations on whether indictments were warranted in the investigation, which was led by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Ms. Willis asked to convene a special grand jury because such panels have subpoena powers, and she was concerned that some witnesses would not cooperate without being subpoenaed.

Portions of the report were publicly released in February, but those excerpts did not indicate who had been recommended for indictment, or on what charges. The release of the full nine-page report this week was ordered by Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court.

Mr. Epshteyn declined on Friday to comment about the report. Others whom the advisory panel recommended for indictment did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

After the special grand jury recommended indictments of about 40 people, the district attorney had to weigh which prosecutions would be the most likely to succeed in court. A potential case against Mr. Graham, for example, would have been hampered by the fact that there were conflicting accounts of telephone calls he made to a top Georgia official. Mr. Graham has repeatedly said that he did nothing wrong.

Fulton County prosecutors indicated in court filings last year that they were interested in those calls by Mr. Graham, a onetime critic of Mr. Trump who became a staunch supporter. They were made shortly after the November 2020 election to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.

Mr. Raffensperger has said that in those calls, Mr. Graham suggested the rejection of all mail-in votes from Georgia counties with high rates of questionable signatures, a step that would have excluded many more Democratic votes than Republican ones. But the phone calls are not known to have been recorded, and recollections differ about exactly what was said — factors that probably figured in the decision not to charge Mr. Graham.

In a filing seeking Mr. Graham’s testimony, prosecutors said that he “questioned Secretary Raffensperger and his staff about re-examining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump,” and “made reference to allegations of widespread voter fraud” during those calls.

Mr. Graham has characterized as “ridiculous” the idea that he had suggested to Mr. Raffensperger that he throw out legally cast votes, and the senator’s lawyers have argued that he was carrying out a legitimate investigative function as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a bid to avoid testifying before the special grand jury last year, Mr. Graham waged a legal battle that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ultimately, he was forced to testify.

Afterward, he said that he had spent two hours giving testimony behind closed doors, where he said he “answered all questions.”

Mr. Graham has been critical of prosecutors in the Georgia case and the three other criminal cases against Mr. Trump, characterizing them as liberals who were “weaponizing the law” to unfairly target the former president.

After the Georgia indictment, Mr. Graham told reporters in South Carolina that he was not cooperating with the Fulton County prosecutors, dismissing the idea as “crazy stuff.”

“I went, had my time, and I haven’t heard from them since,” he said.

Dear Mr Jordan

Read a fuckin' book.

Your friend,

Fani

The Boys

Maybe not Proud Boys, so much as Poster Boys - for FAFO.

Can you say, "Hoist on their own petard"?

I knew you could.

Former Proud Boys leaders Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl sentenced for Jan. 6 sedition
Biggs' sentence is the second longest in connection with the Capitol attack.

Two former Proud Boys leaders who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy for their actions during the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol were sentenced on Thursday, with the judge handing down one of the longest sentences yet for someone charged in the Jan. 6 attacks.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly sentenced Joseph Biggs, the former leader of the group's Florida chapter, to 17 years in prison. He sentenced Zachary Rehl, the former leader of the Proud Boys' Philadelphia chapter, to 15 years in prison.

Biggs, a U.S. army veteran, was a close ally of the former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio. Biggs was convicted of seditious conspiracy in May alongside two other Proud Boys leaders following a more than four-month-long trial.

In handing down his sentence, Judge Kelly accepted the government's recommendation to apply an enhancement that effectively labeled Biggs' crimes as acts of terrorism in seeking to influence the actions of government through threats and use of force.

Prosecutors had sought 33 years in prison for Biggs, their longest recommended prison sentence yet for any participant convicted of joining the Jan. 6 assault -- their same recommendation for Tarrio. They had previously sought 25 years in prison for Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted for leading his far-right militia members in a separate seditious conspiracy and sentenced earlier this year to 18 years in prison.

Biggs' sentence is the second longest for any defendant charged in connection with the Capitol attack; Rehl’s sentence is the third longest. Tarrio is set to be sentenced next Tuesday.

By The Numbers

The often startling numbers behind Trump’s indictment in Georgia

The indictment of former president Donald Trump, his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others in Georgia is the biggest of all the indictments against Trump, at least by volume.

Below are some remarkable and instructive numbers behind the indictment brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D).

19
The number of people charged, including Trump. Each is accused of racketeering and at least one related crime.

41
The number of individual counts in the indictment, many of which involve multiple people.

13
The number of counts faced by both Trump and Giuliani, tied for the most among the defendants.

5 of 6
The number of unnamed individuals identified as unindicted co-conspirators in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump who have been charged in Georgia: Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jeffrey Clark. (The identity of the sixth unindicted co-conspirator in Smith’s case has not been confirmed but doesn’t appear to match those indicted in Georgia.)

30
The number of unindicted and unnamed alleged co-conspirators in the Georgia indictment. As occurred after Smith presented his indictment, efforts to identify the co-conspirators and glean who might have cooperated in the investigation began almost immediately Monday night.

3
The number of Trump lawyers present at the infamous Nov. 19, 2020, Republican National Committee news conference who are now indicted: Giuliani, Powell and Jenna Ellis. The news conference featured bizarre stolen-election conspiracy theories involving Venezuela, Cuba and China. RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel later remarked (presciently) that she was concerned about legal liability arising from the event.

2
The number of Trump lawyers now charged with crimes that they focused extensively on proving that others had committed. Giuliani was a pioneer of pursuing federal racketeering cases when he was a prosecutor and is now charged under a Georgia racketeering statute. Powell falsely claimed to have proof of widespread election fraud in 2020 and is now charged with conspiracy to commit election fraud in an alleged voting machine breach in Coffee County, Ga.

161
The number of overt acts listed as being part of the racketeering conspiracy. Overt acts aren’t necessarily crimes in and of themselves — many sound innocuous, while others are charged as crimes — but instead demonstrate the furtherance of an alleged crime. (To make a racketeering case, prosecutors must prove at least two “predicate” crimes and establish a pattern of activity geared to the advancement of the alleged criminal enterprise.)

127
The number of times “false statement” is mentioned in the indictment. Georgia law has a broad prohibition on making “a false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation … in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government.”

13
The number of false statements Trump is accused of making to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) in their Jan. 2, 2021, phone call alone.

1
The number of Trump White House officials charged. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows becomes the first, for his participation in the Raffensperger call.

12
The number of Trump tweets the indictment lists as overt acts by the former president. Trump’s unwieldy social media persona has long been viewed as a potential legal liability, and his tweets have been used against him in legal proceedings. The tweets cited include those making false claims of voter fraud, urging people to watch a hearing featuring Giuliani’s false claims, applying pressure on Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), and urging then-Vice President Pence ahead of the Jan. 6 certification in Congress to help overturn the election.

2
The number of state Republican Party chairs who have been indicted. Former Georgia GOP chairman David Shafer joins former Michigan GOP co-chairwoman Meshawn Maddock, an alternate elector who was indicted in that state last month. Alternate Trump electors in Arizona, including former state GOP chairwoman Kelli Ward, also are facing legal scrutiny.

3 of 16
The number of alternate electors charged: Shafer, Shawn Still and Cathy Latham. In Michigan, all 16 alternate electors were charged with crimes including forgery, but in Georgia, some took immunity deals to cooperate with prosecutors.

91
The total number of felony counts Trump now faces in his four indictments.

Indictment #4

Trump has now been charged with 91 felony violations.

DONALD JOHN TRUMP

13 Counts

1, 5, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 27-29, 38, 39

RUDOLPH WILLIAM LOUIS GIULIANI

13 Counts

1-3, 6-7, 9 , 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 23-24

JOHN CHARLES EASTMAN

9 Counts 1-2, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 27

MARK RANDALL MEADOWS

2 Counts

1, 28

KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO

7 Counts

1, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19

JEFFREY BOSSERT CLARK

2 Counts

1, 22

JENNA LYNN ELLIS

2 Counts

1, 2

RAY STALLINGS SMITH III

12 Counts

1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 23, 25

ROBERT DAVID CHEELEY

10 Counts

1, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 23, 26, 41

MICHAEL A.ROMAN

7 Counts

1, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19

DAVID JAMES SHAFER

8 Counts

1, 8 , 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 40

SHAWN MICAH TRESHER STILL

7 Counts

1, 8, 10, 12, 14,16, 18

STEPHEN CLIFFGARD LEE

5 Counts

1, 20, 21, 30, 31

HARRISON WILLIAM PRESCOTT FLOYD

3 Counts 1, 30, 31

TREVIAN C.KUTTI
3 Counts

1, 30, 31

SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL

7 Counts 1, 32-37

CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM

11 Counts 1, 8 , 10, 12, 14, 32-37

SCOTT GRAHAM HALL

7 Counts 1, 32-37

MISTY HAMPTON (AKA EMILY MISTY HAYES)

7 Counts 1, 32-37

What to know about Trump's 4 indictments and the criminal charges

As former President Donald Trump pushes forward with his 2024 campaign, incidents from before, during and after his term in office are under intense legal scrutiny. He has now been indicted in four separate criminal cases.

Here's where the investigations, led by two state prosecutors and a federal special counsel, stand:

Indicted: Manhattan "hush money" probe

A New York grand jury investigating the circumstances surrounding a "hush money" payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 voted to indict Donald Trump on March 30, making him the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges.

He was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, and pleaded not guilty to all charges on April 4. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg defended the decision to charge Trump in a press conference.

"Under New York state law, it is a felony to falsify business records with intent to defraud and intent to conceal another crime," Bragg told reporters. "That is exactly what this case is about: 34 false statements made to cover up other crimes."

The case stems from a payment made just days before Trump was elected president in 2016. His former attorney, Michael Cohen, arranged a wire transfer of $130,000 to Daniels in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair. Prosecutors were investigating potential falsification of business records related to reimbursements made to Cohen. Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, and vehemently denied wrongdoing in this case.

In the weeks before the grand jury decision, a steady stream of former Trump employees and White House staffers were seen entering Bragg's offices, including Trump's former White House counselor and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, former director of strategic communications Hope Hicks, and his former lawyer and "fixer" Michael Cohen.

Cohen, who went to prison on federal charges related to the $130,000 payment to Daniels, has met repeatedly with prosecutors this year — more than a half-dozen times since mid-January.

He appeared before the grand jury twice.

In his memoir "Disloyal," Cohen described an intense effort in October 2016 — just before the presidential election — to prevent the actress from speaking publicly about an alleged affair with Trump. Ultimately, Cohen wired the money through a newly created limited liability company, and both Cohen and Daniels have claimed she and Trump signed a non-disclosure agreement using the aliases David Dennison and Peggy Peterson.

Trump, a Republican who is running once again for president, has repeatedly denied allegations of wrongdoing, and lashed out at Bragg, a Democrat, calling the case a "political persecution."

In ruling against an effort by Trump to have the case moved from state to federal jurisdiction Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein addressed Trump's accusation that the indictment was politically motivated.

"Trump argues that a 'politically motivated' district attorney who 'disfavored [Trump's] acts and policies as president' caused the grand jury to indict. Trump fails to show, however, that the grand jury lacked a rational basis for the indictment," Hellerstein wrote.

Hellerstein also faulted another argument made on Trump's behalf, that he is immune from prosecution because the payments were made while he was president.

"Reimbursing Cohen for advancing hush money to Stephanie Clifford cannot be considered the performance of a constitutional duty," Hellerstein wrote. "Falsifying business records to hide such reimbursement, and to transform the reimbursement into a business expense for Trump and income to Cohen, likewise does not relate to a presidential duty."

The case is scheduled to go on trial in March 2024.

Indicted: Special counsel's Mar-a-Lago documents case

Trump became the first former president charged with federal crimes when he was indicted June 8 on 37 felony counts related to alleged "willful retention" of national security information after leaving the White House. He pleaded not guilty.

An aide to Trump, Waltine Nauta, was also charged in the case and has entered a not guilty plea.

Three additional charges against Trump, and two more charges against Nauta, were filed in a superseding indictment on July 27, when prosecutors also introduced charges against Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira. Trump has pleaded not guilty to those counts as well.

The case was brought by special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed in November to oversee two Justice Department's criminal investigations into Trump.

The indictment accuses Trump of storing boxes containing classified documents "in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room." Trump lives at Mar-a-Lago, a private Palm Beach, Florida, country club owned by his company.

The indictment also alleges conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruptly concealing a document or record, a "scheme to conceal," and making false statements and representations.

Trump has defended his handling of classified information, and accused Smith of pursuing the case out of political bias, calling Smith a "radical."

The judge in the case, Aileen Cannon, has scheduled the trial for May 2024, which would place it toward the end of the Republican presidential primary season.

Indicted: Special counsel's Jan. 6 investigation

Smith's office has also been investigating alleged efforts to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power after Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, including the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The grand jury hearing evidence in this case indicted Trump on Aug. 1.

Trump faces four charges in this indictment: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.

The indictment lists six unnamed co-conspirators. Prosecutors allege they were "enlisted" to assist Trump in "his criminal efforts to overturn" the election "and retain power."

"The attack on our nation's Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy," Smith said in a brief remarks after the release of the 45-page indictment outlining the charges. "As described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies. Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government: the nation's process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election."

Trump has vehemently denied allegations of wrongdoing related to his efforts to overturn the election results, and accused the special counsel of political bias.

"Why didn't they bring this ridiculous case 2.5 years ago? They wanted it right in the middle of my campaign, that's why!" Trump said in a post on his social media site, Truth Social.

Indicted: Election interference case in Fulton County, Georgia

The Fulton County district attorney's investigation into Trump's conduct following the 2020 election began in February 2021 — spurred by an infamous recorded Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump pressed him "to find 11,780 votes."

The probe grew in size and scope over the next two years, ultimately leading to the creation of a special purpose grand jury — tasked with investigating not only Trump but also alleged efforts of numerous allies to thwart the outcome Georgia's election, which President Joe Biden won. The special purpose grand jury had subpoena power, but could not issue indictments. The panel of 23 Georgians interviewed 75 witnesses in 2022, and completed a report in January, which was provided to Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis.

Among those interviewed by the special purpose grand jury were many Trump allies, including his former attorney, Rudy Giuliani; South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham; and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. It also interviewed Georgia officials who are among Trump's political critics, such as Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

In February, a judge ordered a small portion of the report to be made public. The grand jurors wrote that they found "no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election," and that a ""majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it."

A grand jury was impaneled over the summer, and on Aug. 14, it returned an indictment against Trump and 18 allies on charges of election fraud, racketeering and other counts related to alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Those charged include Giuliani and Meadows as well as John Eastman, a conservative lawyer; Jeffrey Clark, a Trump Justice Department official; and Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, lawyers who pushed baseless claims of voter fraud.

Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, allows the group to be charged for criminal acts that are alleged to have taken place both in Georgia or outside the state in furtherance of the conspiracy to overturn the outcome of the presidential election in Georgia.

The 98-page indictment lists 41 total counts, including 13 against Trump, and notes there are 30 unindicted co-conspirators.

The indictment describes several schemes allegedly used by Trump and his co-defendants to attempt to reverse his electoral loss, including making false statements to state legislatures and top state officials; creating fake Electoral College documents and recruiting supporters to cast false votes at the Georgia Capitol; harassing Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman; and "corruptly" soliciting senior Justice Department officials and then-Vice President Mike Pence.

It also accuses members of the "enterprise" of stealing data, including ballot images, voting equipment software and personal voter information, from Coffee County, Georgia, and making false statements to government investigators.

Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. In a statement following the indictment, attorneys for Trump criticized the investigation, saying "this one-sided grand jury presentation relied on witnesses who harbor their own personal and political interests."

"We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been," said the attorneys, Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg.

In a statement to CBS News, Giuliani said the indictment "is an affront to American Democracy and does permanent, irrevocable harm to our justice system."

More Comin'

Way too many of us still don't quite understand how close we came to losing it all.

And way too many of use are still way too complacent about the ongoing efforts to fuck us over.

Previously Secret Memo Laid Out Strategy for Trump to Overturn Biden’s Win

The House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation did not uncover the memo, whose existence first came to light in last week’s indictment.

A lawyer allied with President Donald J. Trump first laid out a plot to use false slates of electors to subvert the 2020 election in a previously unknown internal campaign memo that prosecutors are portraying as a crucial link in how the Trump team’s efforts evolved into a criminal conspiracy.

The existence of the Dec. 6, 2020, memo came to light in last week’s indictment of Mr. Trump, though its details remained unclear. But a copy obtained by The New York Times shows for the first time that the lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, acknowledged from the start that he was proposing “a bold, controversial strategy” that the Supreme Court “likely” would reject in the end.

But even if the plan did not ultimately pass legal muster at the highest level, Mr. Chesebro argued that it would achieve two goals. It would focus attention on claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column.”

The memo had been a missing piece in the public record of how Mr. Trump’s allies developed their strategy to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. In mid-December, the false Trump electors could go through the motions of voting as if they had the authority to do so. Then, on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally count those slates of votes, rather than the official and certified ones for Mr. Biden.

While that basic plan itself was already known, the document, described by prosecutors as the “fraudulent elector memo,” provides new details about how it originated and was discussed behind the scenes. Among those details is Mr. Chesebro’s proposed “messaging” strategy to explain why pro-Trump electors were meeting in states where Mr. Biden was declared the winner. The campaign would present that step as “a routine measure that is necessary to ensure” that the correct electoral slate could be counted by Congress if courts or legislatures later concluded that Mr. Trump had actually won the states.

It was not the first time Mr. Chesebro had raised the notion of creating alternate electors. In November, he had suggested doing so in Wisconsin, although for a different reason: to safeguard Mr. Trump’s rights in case he later won a court battle and was declared that state’s certified winner by Jan. 6, as had happened with Hawaii in 1960.

But the indictment portrayed the Dec. 6 memo as a “sharp departure” from that proposal, becoming what prosecutors say was a criminal plot to engineer “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect.”

“I recognize that what I suggest is a bold, controversial strategy, and that there are many reasons why it might not end up being executed on Jan. 6,” Mr. Chesebro wrote. “But as long as it is one possible option, to preserve it as a possibility it is important that the Trump-Pence electors cast their electoral votes on Dec. 14.”

Three days later, Mr. Chesebro drew up specific instructions to create fraudulent electors in multiple states — in another memo whose existence, along with the one in November, was first reported by The Times last year. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot also cited them in its December report, but it apparently did not learn of the Dec. 6 memo.

“I believe that what can be achieved on Jan. 6 is not simply to keep Biden below 270 electoral votes,” Mr. Chesebro wrote in the newly disclosed memo. “It seems feasible that the vote count can be conducted so that at no point will Trump be behind in the electoral vote count unless and until Biden can obtain a favorable decision from the Supreme Court upholding the Electoral Count Act as constitutional, or otherwise recognizing the power of Congress (and not the president of the Senate) to count the votes.”

Mr. Chesebro and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. A Trump spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment.

The false electors scheme was perhaps the most sprawling of Mr. Trump’s various efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It involved lawyers working on his campaign’s behalf across seven states, dozens of electors willing to claim that Mr. Trump — not Mr. Biden — had won their states, and open resistance from some of those potential electors that the plan could be illegal or even “appear treasonous.” In the end, it became the cornerstone of the indictment against Mr. Trump.

If you've been shit-talking AG Garland because you think he's been slow on the uptake, just know that he had an awful lot of pest control and varmint removal to do before he could even put the machinery in gear.

How long would it take you to root out the authoritarian assholes who've spent their whole careers militating for a Unitary Executive, and doing everything possible to torpedo any effort to unfuck a major department that's been increasingly fucked up by a Daddy State-leaning cadre happily scheming and hacking away at the government from the inside?

While another lawyer — John Eastman, described as Co-Conspirator 2 in the indictment — became a key figure who championed the plan and worked more directly with Mr. Trump on it, Mr. Chesebro was an architect of it. He was first enlisted by the Trump campaign in Wisconsin to help with a legal challenge to the results there.

Prosecutors are still hearing evidence related to the investigation, even after charges were leveled against Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. The House committee last year released emails its investigators obtained showing that Mr. Chesebro had sent copies of the two previously reported memos, one from Nov. 18 and another from Dec. 9, to allies in the states working on the fake electors plan.

But he did not attach his Dec. 6 memo to those messages, which laid out a more audacious idea: having Mr. Pence take “the position that it is his constitutional power and duty, alone, as president of the Senate, to both open and count the votes.” That is, he could resolve the dispute over which slate was valid by counting the alternate electors for Mr. Trump even if Mr. Biden remained the certified winner of their states.

Mr. Chesebro, who is described as Co-Conspirator 5 in the indictment but has not been charged by the special counsel, addressed the second memo to James R. Troupis, a lawyer who was assisting the Trump campaign’s efforts to challenge Mr. Biden’s victory in Wisconsin.

By the next day, the indictment said, Mr. Chesebro’s memo had reached Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.

According to the indictment, Mr. Giuliani, who is referred to as Co-Conspirator 1, spoke with someone identified only as Co-Conspirator 6 about finding lawyers to help with the effort in seven states. An email reviewed by The Times suggests that particular conspirator could be Boris Epshteyn, a campaign strategic adviser for the Trump campaign who was paid for political consulting. That day, Mr. Epshteyn sent Mr. Giuliani an email recommending lawyers in those seven states.

As he had done in the earlier memo, Mr. Chesebro cited writings by a Harvard Law School professor, Laurence H. Tribe, to bolster his argument that the deadlines and procedures in the Electoral Count Act are unconstitutional and that state electoral votes need not be finalized until Congress’s certification on Jan. 6. Mr. Chesebro had worked as Mr. Tribe’s research assistant as a law student and later helped him in his representation of Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 election.

Calling his former mentor “a key Biden supporter and fervent Trump critic,” Mr. Chesebro cited what he described as Mr. Tribe’s legal views, along with writings by several other liberals as potential fodder for a messaging strategy. It would be “the height of hypocrisy for Democrats to resist Jan. 6 as the real deadline, or to suggest that Trump and Pence would be doing anything particularly controversial,” he wrote.

But in an essay published on Tuesday on the legal website Just Security, Mr. Tribe said Mr. Chesebro’s Nov. 18 memo “relied on a gross misrepresentation of my scholarship.”

For one, Mr. Chesebro quoted a clause from a law review article by Mr. Tribe about Bush v. Gore as support for the idea that the only real legal deadline is Jan. 6. That was taken out of context, Mr. Tribe wrote, saying he was only narrowly “discussing the specifics of Florida state law.” Mr. Chesebro, by contrast, made it sound as if he was putting forward “a general proposition about the power of states to do what they wish regardless of the Electoral Count Act and independent of the deadlines set by Congress,” he added.

For another, Mr. Chesebro cited a constitutional treatise in which Mr. Tribe wrote that a past Congress cannot bind the actions of a later Congress, which Mr. Chesebro used to buttress his proposal that parts of the Electoral Count Act are unconstitutional. But Mr. Tribe wrote that what he meant was Congress can pass new legislation changing such a law.

The indictment also accuses Mr. Trump and his unindicted co-conspirators of acting with deception in recruiting some of the fraudulent electors. That included telling some of them that their votes for Mr. Trump would be used only if a court ruling handed victory in their state to Mr. Trump.

The Dec. 6 memo dovetails with that approach. Mr. Chesebro wrote that Mr. Pence could count purported Trump electors from a state as long as there was a lawsuit pending challenging Mr. Biden’s declared victory there. But he also proposed telling the public that the Trump electors were meeting on Dec. 14 merely as a precaution in case “the courts (or state legislatures) were to later conclude that Trump actually won the state.”

Mr. Chesebro also suggested he knew that even that part of the strategy would draw blowback.

“There is no requirement that they meet in public. It might be preferable for them to meet in private, to thwart the ability of protesters to disrupt the event,” he wrote, adding: “Even if held in private, perhaps print and even TV journalists would be invited to attend to cover the event.”

A New Wrinkle

Special Counsel Obtained Search Warrant for Trump’s Twitter Account

The warrant, obtained in January, adds a new dimension to the scope of the federal inquiry into the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Prosecutors working for Jack Smith, the special counsel who has twice brought indictments against former President Donald J. Trump, obtained a search warrant early this year for Mr. Trump’s long dormant Twitter account as part of their inquiry into his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, according to court papers unsealed on Wednesday.

The warrant, which was signed by a federal judge in Washington in January after Elon Musk took over Twitter, which is now called X, adds a new dimension to the scope of the special counsel’s efforts to investigate the former president.

The court papers, which emerged from an appeal by Twitter challenging the judge’s decision to issue the warrant, did not reveal what prosecutors were looking for in Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, which the tech company shut down just days after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But the papers indicate that prosecutors got permission from the judge not to tell Mr. Trump for months that they had obtained the warrant for his account. The prosecutors feared that if Mr. Trump learned about the warrant, it “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates,” the papers said.

The existence of the warrant was earlier reported by Politico.

Finally

This time - finally - he's in serious legal trouble.

If It Feels Big

... if it feels momentous - that's because it is.

How It Reads

The indictment is a True Crime Story in four parts (hat tip = Driftglass)

1) A gang shows up at the bank examiner's office (in the middle of an audit) and they say, "The money in that bank belongs to us - tell them to hand it over."

The bank examiner tells them to fuck off.

2) The gang members dress up like bank employees and try to convince the bank manager to take their IOU, and hand over about 20% of the money so they can "count" it.

The bank manager tells them to fuck off.

3) Gang members get several meetings with the head teller and try to pressure him into delaying the audit long enough to let the gang figure out another way to steal the money.

The head teller tells them to fuck off.

4) Gang members get a crowd together at City Park, whip 'em into a rich creamy lather, and send them to ransack the bank.

Podcast

The indictment reads like a well-written novella, or a play in 4 acts. A crime story perfectly framed, telling the story of how a gang of criminal idiots tried to knock over a casino.

• First they try some straight-up cheating
• Then they dress up in phony uniforms and try to pass themselves off as having authorization to go in thru the back and steal the money
• Then they try to convince the door man that has the authority to walk into the vault, take the money, and hand it over to the gang members
• Then, once all their other plots didn't work, they decided to shoot their way in and blow the place up

A Score Card

With Mike Pence finally coming out and showing us a bit of actual courage - joining Chris Christie as pretty much the only well know Republicans to go openly against Trump, we start to think maybe there's hope for the GOP to reclaim its honor.

Yeah no - prob'ly not. But a guy can dream, can't he? I mean it is a sign of hope, right?

WaPo has kind of a breakdown on the State Of The Indictment



5 things Trump’s Jan. 6 indictment week tells us about the 2024 election

The first former president of the United States to be indicted has now been charged a third time. This historic event capped a week that tells us a few things about the 2024 presidential race, in which the former president remains the overwhelming GOP favorite.

Here’s what we’ve learned from the past five days.

1. No candidate can escape the specter of Jan. 6

Republican Party leaders have spent much of the past two years hoping to just move on from Jan. 6 — and urging Trump (in vain) to stop talking about the 2020 election.

This week made clear that nobody can escape it.

Trump faces a criminal trial over his role in efforts to overturn the election that culminated in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And former vice president Mike Pence, who was invoked more than 100 times in the indictment, has been forced to lean into making the Jan. 6-centric case he had long declined to emphasize.

(Imagine you were told a month ago that Pence would be selling merchandise based on Trump’s indictment — new gear features the slogan “too honest,” which is what Trump allegedly called Pence as Pence declined his entreaties to help overturn the election.)

The party as a whole and all its 2024 contenders will feel a newfound onus to weigh in, too.

The GOP has done its best to avoid a detailed accounting of Trump’s actions and his false claims of mass voter fraud. It acquitted him at his post-Jan. 6 impeachment trial based on a technicality. (Key senators said you can’t impeach someone who has left office.) Then it pulled out of a deal for a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission.

But this indictment has landed when Trump is again the focal point of American politics. There is no waving it off because he’s out of office. And 2024 opponents who have carefully massaged and triangulated their messages about Trump’s legal peril will risk being left out of the major topic of conversation if they don’t engage.

Oh, and Trump has signaled he is going to make all of this very uncomfortable for the GOP by using it to re-litigate the 2020 election and his false claims that it was “stolen” from him.

2. Trump may be losing control of the clock

Trump’s legal team has made clear it would prefer his federal criminal cases don’t go to trial before the 2024 election. While that remains possible with the classified-documents case in Florida — set for trial in May but subject to delay, in part thanks to the new superseding indictment and the care required in handling sensitive material — the Jan. 6 case in Washington, D.C., may be a speedier affair.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment appears built for speed. For a start, he charged Trump solo. If he charges Trump’s alleged co-conspirators, it will apparently be separately. And he kept the indictment narrowly focused on four charges, one count each. Then Smith announced at a news conference that “my office will seek a speedy trial.”

He might get his wish. A magistrate judge said Thursday that a trial date will be set at the first hearing, on Aug. 28, which isn’t always how it’s done. Trump lawyer John Lauro has said it’s “absurd” to try to conduct the trial in accordance with the Speedy Trial Act, which would mean starting the trial within 100 days.

Also remember that, unlike the classified-documents case, this one doesn’t feature a Trump-appointed judge who has in the past ruled in his favor in controversial ways. And it does feature a fact pattern that has been chewed over extensively for more than two years.

3. Ron DeSantis is running out of ideas

July was not a good month for the Florida governor. The presidential race was actually mostly static for his first month as a candidate, but since then he has gone from trailing Trump by nearly 30 points in the Republican primary to trailing by nearly 40 points. He’s now competing just to be in second place in states like Iowa and South Carolina, after polling close to Trump as recently as February, before he was officially running.

Hence the campaign shake-up.

What’s got to be particularly frustrating for DeSantis is that he’s even losing badly to Trump among voters who might logically be in his corner, like those who emphasize fighting “woke” corporations, a DeSantis signature issue. And his supposed retooling of his message hasn’t exactly borne fruit.

So what’s left for him to do to arrest the backsliding? Well, this week DeSantis sent Vice President Harris a letter seeking a meeting to discuss his state’s controversial slavery curriculum (she declined). And he just agreed to a one-on-one debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), which Newsom proposed nearly a year ago.

The combined picture is a campaign more focused on stunts than anything else, because the “anything else” has roundly failed.

4. Trump’s woes have not helped Biden

Despite all the legal drama surrounding Trump, polls this week suggested that the GOP might be as competitive as ever in the 2024 general election.

A New York Times/Siena College poll showed Trump and Biden tied at 43 percent in a prospective matchup, despite most recent quality polls giving Biden a small edge.

A CNN poll, meanwhile, showed that encouraging signs about the economy and inflation really have yet to give President Biden much of a boost.

Finally, the CNN poll included a somewhat remarkable finding. It asked whether people had more confidence in Biden or congressional Republicans to deal with major issues. While Americans in December picked the GOP by two points, they picked it by nine points in this poll.

All of which might help explain why Barack Obama felt the need to give Biden a reality check about Trump’s potential to defeat him in 2024.

• About the only thing the polling data shows is how ubiquitous and dangerous wingnut propaganda is. Press Poodles always miss the point on this one, and that blind spot always shows them to be unaware of (or deliberately ignoring) the single most important angle they should be reporting on.
• As the village is being wiped out by an avalanche, WaPo tells us all about property damage and the human toll, while carefully omitting any reference to one party's denial of gravity, friction, and slope failure - making it impossible for normal people to prevent the catastrophe.

5. Republicans won’t desert (or vouch for) Trump

There has been little in the way of a merit-based defense of Trump after this latest indictment, as was the case after the previous two. And relatively few Republicans have actually gone to bat for him in any significant way — at least compared with the way they did when the federal government searched Mar-a-Lago a year ago.

But in this case, the tepid pushback is arguably more pronounced.

The idea is that Trump is being politically targeted.

The idea is that there is a two-tiered system of justice.

The idea is that Trump was entitled to free speech and may even have believed his falsehoods.

Virtually none of the Republican defense argues that Trump was actually right and that his actions were warranted. This lack might be considered rather patronizing, because it implies that he wasn’t, and they weren’t. Why not just argue that what he said and did was substantiated?

Because they can’t. It’s in some ways an extension of what happened after the 2020 election. Republicans by and large didn’t echo Trump’s obviously false claims of mass voter fraud, because they seemingly knew they were ridiculous. They instead made process arguments about voting rules that changed during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, supplementing Trump’s objections with these to at least seem like they were on the same page.

Some seemed to think that was the smart play and it would all just blow over. Then Jan. 6 happened.

Nearly three years later, Republicans get to keep dealing with it, right into the middle of the 2024 election.

BTW - Pence (and a shit load of notable others) ignored congressional subpoenas. But they've all complied with the subpoenas from Jack Smith's office. Maybe we should be doing something about the little problem of people cherry picking which laws they will and won't obey. Seems like we need just a bit of a change.