Aaron Parnas

Kid's got balls. I wonder if she'd be willing to lend some to the dog-ass Republicans in Congress.

Coupla Good Wins

Lawyer Oyer brings it.

Mercedes Chandler

Aaron On Justice

Robert Arnold

People's suffering is not acceptable collateral for someone else's comfort.

What we're doing now

is what we'd be doing

in 1930s Germany

or 1960s America

Overheard

The guy who torched the warehouse filled with paper products

is getting more jail time

than most pedophiles and rapists.

Overheard

When Pam Bondi is finally in prison, I'll gladly fork over a few extra tax dollars to pay somebody to walk by her cell at least once every day and yell out the DOW Jones average.

Concentration Camps

Bill-n-Hill

(partly cribbed from The Other 98% on FB)

Bill and Hillary Clinton have waded into the Epstein fight saying, “Put us on live TV”, and James Comer’s first instinct was to kill the cameras. They are not asking for special treatment, they are using their formidable political skills to demand transparency in a case where Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires the release of fully-unredacted files, while the Trump administration is still dragging its feet and slow-walking compliance.

By planting their flag on “public or nothing,” the Clintons flip the script and force Republicans to explain why secrecy suddenly matters more than the disclosure they've spent 10 years demanding.​

The Clintons' stance is not just a valid claim to the moral high ground - it's a trap. The more they insist on testifying in public, the more obvious it becomes that the real panic is on the right, where Trump’s orbit brushes up against names and records that have never fully seen daylight.

By embracing an open hearing, they are effectively daring Comer and his allies to keep shielding a system that's covered in fingerprints of Trump and the entire Epstein Class.​

And to be sure, if Bill Clinton is guilty of any shitty thing, then he has to burn along with the rest of them.

But this is how you turn years of right wing Clinton obsession inside out. If Republicans refuse public testimony, they look like they're protecting Trump, the tattered remnants of his DOJ, and all the members of The Epstein Class, rather than pursuing the truth and seeking justice for the surviving victims.

If they cave and allow it, they risk an on-camera beatdown that ties the unreleased files, the stalled transparency law, and Trump’s own connections into one long, unedited narrative that damns their very existence.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum

Let justice be done though the heavens fall

Mr Smith Goes To The Hill

Read: Jack Smith deposition transcript

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Wednesday released the transcript of the panel’s deposition with former special counsel Jack Smith concerning his team’s investigations and prosecutions of President Trump.

Earlier this month, Smith’s attorneys sent a letter to Jordan requesting that his closed-door deposition be made public. In the testimony, Smith defended his decision to bring charges against Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

From Document Cloud

Katie Johnson

Yes, it's all allegation at this point, but jeezus, there are simply too many "allegations" for none of it to be true - and how the fuck could a guy with a daughter do this kinda shit?

All I want is 10 minutes with him in a locked room.

Katie Johnson's full testimony of 2/11/16

On Comey And James

I just wish the judges could tell it like it is.

ie: "I'm dismissing these cases because they're filled with bullshit charges brought by a dumbass president who's nothing but a vindictive little prick. Oh, BTW - I'm referring the government's lawyers to their respective Bar Associations, and strongly recommending sanctions and disbarment. The court stands adjourned."

Judge tosses cases against Comey and James, rules prosecutor appointment unlawful

The decision disqualifying Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney sets back Trump’s efforts to use the Justice Department to target perceived rivals.

A federal judge dismissed charges against former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James on Monday, delivering a blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to engineer prosecutions of two of his prominent foes.

U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled that Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor overseeing both cases, had been unlawfully appointed to her position and, therefore, indictments she secured against Comey and James must be thrown out.

Currie, however, denied a request to bar the Justice Department from seeking to indict them again under a lawfully appointed prosecutor.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately return calls for comment. However, department officials are all but certain to appeal.

Currie, an appointee of President Bill Clinton normally based in South Carolina, was specially assigned to rule on the validity of Halligan’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Her decision delivered rebukes to the Justice Department on two fronts.

By declaring Halligan’s appointment invalid, Currie joined several other judges in rejecting legal arguments the Trump administration has used to install loyalists in top prosecutorial positions across the country.

The judge’s decision to go further and dismiss the cases against Comey and James complicates Trump’s efforts to deploy the Justice Department in furtherance of his desire for retribution.

Trump has called for Comey’s prosecution for years, following his decision to fire the then-FBI director in 2017. He has accused James — a Democrat who ran for office, in part, with vows to hold Trump accountable — of wrongdoing after she secured a multimillion-dollar civil fraud judgment against Trump and his real estate empire last year.

Since his return to the White House in January, Trump has repeatedly called on the Justice Department to move swiftly to charge James and Comey with crimes, paying little mind to whether evidence existed to support charges.

When Erik S. Siebert, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney overseeing both investigations, concluded that the evidence did not suffice, Trump forced him out of his job and installed Halligan, an ex-White House aide and one of the president’s former personal lawyers, in his place.

Within days, Halligan, who had no previous prosecutorial experience, took both cases before grand juries and secured indictments.

In addition to the effort to challenge the validity of Halligan’s appointment, Comey and James both have urged judges to end their prosecutions on grounds that they are improperly driven by Trump’s vindictive animosity toward them. Separately, Comey has sought dismissal of his case over what his lawyers have described as irregularities in the grand jury process that resulted in his indictment

In defending Halligan, the Justice Department advanced an expansive view of its authority to temporarily fill U.S. attorney vacancies with the president’s candidate of choice despite efforts by Congress to rein in the circumstances in which appointees can fill those roles while bypassing Senate approval.

Typically, the Senate must confirm a president’s U.S. attorney picks. But the law empowers the attorney general to temporarily fill vacancies by making an interim appointment for a period of 120 days.

If the Senate has still not confirmed the president’s nominee by the end of that time, the law permits the federal judges in a given judicial district to name a temporary replacement.

Justice Department lawyers maintain that the attorney general has the authority to make successive interim picks as she did with Halligan’s appointment after Siebert was forced out.

Attorneys for Comey and James disputed that interpretation of the law. They argued that if an administration were allowed to name new interim U.S. attorneys every 120 days, there would be no reason for a president to ever put nominees before the Senate for confirmation.

Today's Robert

We can build a world where innocence is not a commodity.

Just A Wish

If I had 3 wishes, the 1st would be to live long enough to see all these fascists assholes, in government and business, be held fully accountable - arrests, trials, convictions, and prison sentences long enough to cost them their lives.

My 2nd wish would be exactly the same - just for insurance.

And I wouldn't need the 3rd. The first two would give me everything I could ever want.

Well Well Well

Whenever there's another weird thing that POTUS TACO does, we have to stop for a second to consider the possibility that it's meant to distract us from something else.

I can't say for sure that Katie Phang came up with it, but if Trump can't just blow this off, then maybe this is it.

Remember, we've sent USAGs to prison before. Finding enough leverage to get Bondi outa there might not be such a hard row to hoe.

I get the feeling that somebody like Pam Bondi fits with the Trump administration because she can't really hack it in a profession based on actual competition and contention, and so she's been forced to fail up her entire career.

Also, I've been wondering if the courts could help themselves enforce their rulings by coming down hard on Trump's lawyers when they bring the kind of ridiculous garbage they're always bringing before the judges.

Torpedo a few of these clowns, and maybe enough of the others will hesitate to lick Trump's boots the way they've been doing.

Katie Phang

She makes a point worth serious consideration: Judges are having a hard time getting Trump's goons to comply, and there's a lot of hand-wringing about the obvious probability of a crisis that ensues if the courts ordered the US Marshals into the fray. So maybe the thing to do is get after the lawyers.

I'm thinking Katie Phang could make a pretty good Attorney General.

There Will Be Justice

But it probably won't happen until after some really bad shit goes down.

Another Win

...for the good guys. This time, it's Janet Mills, Maine's Governor.

I need a scorecard - some way to keep track of Trump's lengthening string of losses.

We're Here

This is where we are now.

Which is to say: We ain't dead yet, but the fat lady's warmin' up.

Justice

Served and not abused.