US Politics: Hell Yes THEY Were Trying to Overthrow the Government

[ThinkerX]

Something I am starting to wonder about here...

Trump has an absolute belief that he is awesome, that he deserves it all, and that the rules simply do not apply to him. Yet would this...mentality... survive even a few days in a prison setting? Being confronted with something unpleasant he cannot change or avoid? I suspect this might lead to Trump have a literal mental breakdown, of the sort that might warrant institutionalization. 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

20 minutes ago, LongRider said:

I wanna see the warden give him extra KP duties throwing the ketchup against the walls. 

Too bad they don't have horses in jail. The main punishment at both summer camps I went to was shoveling their shit in the hot sun. All. Day. Long. It would be a funny sight to see him being forced to do it with his uncombed hair. I'll settle for any manual labor though.
 

12 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

His prison tats will be all golf clubs and Broadway musicals.

He's too much of a wimp to get a tat.

Quote

Am I the only one who thinks MTG has benefitted greatly from the timing of all this?

Her star may be fading already. I still can't believe she got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

47 minutes ago, Mindwalker said:

Plus I still wouldn't rule out even Biden pardoning him

This is extremely unlikely. Don't worry about it.

47 minutes ago, Gorn said:

Why do you say that? Juries are supposed to work exclusively based on evidence and testimonies they hear in court, not based on anything they may or may not remember from the news. They are specifically instructed to ignore anything that isn't part of the trial.

Go watch OJ: Made in America and repeat that again. It's pretty common for jurors to let their biases trump the evidence in court. Blind belief in their behavior is every bit as silly as believing judges are always ethical.  

[Varysblackfyre321]

21 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

It's a sad comedy. The conservatives most against sharia law are also the same people who would be the most likely to support it if they grew up in a Muslim country.

Well to be fair, so would anyone perhaps, we tend to learn our values from those who raise us principally. It should be acknowledged a lot of their(conservatives  who’re most anti-Islam) critiques are mainly a way to get the more  progressive or at least liberally minded(the people who fancy themselves as more enlightened than their ancestors) to go along with a bigoted movement or action or at least not oppose them.  It’s not because they’re scared of something just for being foreign.
 

If a person’s sole/main contribution towards defending lgbt rights is ranting about Muslim immigration they’re not ally on lgbt rights, anymore than the guy who can’t give a criticism of how Corporations without mentioning Jews and and/or non-whites and women ruining everything isn’t an ally to Labour rights

To be clear I do think a person could deconstruct Islam but it’s so Goddam hard when bad-faith actors spring up talking up how ‘they’ need to be soaked in pig grease and barred from immigrating to the west. A lot the skeptic/atheist community online who prioritized fearmongering about Muslims went full far right and even alt-right. 

Edited August 16, 2023 by Varysblackfyre321

[Zorral]

4 hours ago, JGP said:

Meadows case. 

Mark Meadows offered cash from Trump campaign to investigator auditing Georgia's mail-in ballots: indictment

https://www.rawstory.com/mark-meadows-georgia-cash/

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Mark Meadows is accused of offering financial assistance to state investigators doing signature matching if they moved faster as to finish by Jan. 6, the indictment reads.

Legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne observed the little-known detail on page 45 in the the Fulton County indictment relating to attempts to overturn that 2020 election that was released late Monday.

Signature-matching involved looking at absentee ballots – which need to have signatures on their envelopes – in an effort to see if any had been improperly filled out. ....

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Congressional effort grows to defund Jack Smith's Trump prosecutions

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/congressional-effort-grows-to-defund-jack-smith-s-trump-prosecutions/ar-AA1fmFOi?

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Some of former President Donald Trump's allies in Congress are jockeying to find a way to strip funding from special counsel Jack Smith's prosecutions.

In a series of new proposals, House Republicans are attempting to prohibit the use of federal money to pay for Smith's investigation and criminal cases against Trump.  

At least three different efforts are already underway, according to a CBS News review. Though they are unlikely to generate any large number of supporters and are being criticized as political posturing, the proposals could eventually derail fragile negotiations to avoid a government shutdown or emergency funding for natural disaster relief in Hawaii and Vermont. And they could be a wedge issue inside the Republican party on Capitol Hill. ....

 

 

[Gertrude]

4 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

I don’t think they’ll let him bronze in prison. He’ll be shockingly white. 

I know. I remember hearing Ghislane Maxwell was desperately trying to find some hair dye in prison because she had a tv interview or something. I would love to see Donny after a few months in prison. No bronzer, no hair dye, no hairspray, no lifts. Maybe a nice case of lice going around so he needs to shave his head. Perhaps a prison tattoo.

I know that if he does get jail time, he'll be pampered like the little shit he is, but let a girl dream.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

1 hour ago, ThinkerX said:

Something I am starting to wonder about here...

Trump has an absolute belief that he is awesome, that he deserves it all, and that the rules simply do not apply to him. Yet would this...mentality... survive even a few days in a prison setting? Being confronted with something unpleasant he cannot change or avoid? I suspect this might lead to Trump have a literal mental breakdown, of the sort that might warrant institutionalization. 

 

The trick is, on your first day of your incarceration, you find the biggest, meanest, toughest inmate (e.g. an Adibisi or Vern Schillinger) and you challenge that person to fisticuffs. You thrash that man so violently that his aryan brothers and/or drug mules can only at you with awe. 

Then it’s and easy 30 days in the hole and zip zap zoop you run the prison and you control the tits trade. 

Edited August 16, 2023 by Deadlines? What Deadlines?

[Zorral]

Ya it's fun to fantasize but we all know, if he get sentenced to some prison time, none of this will happen to him.  It won't be that sort of prison.    Shyte, even in prison, nothing in the least nasty happened to Jeff Davis, and he was released pretty quickly (though not pardoned).

Surely you all have read accounts of what it is like in these white collar rich people prisons.  They play tennis.  Literally.  One of the 'jobs' is tennis instructor.  Probably also golf instructor. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Her star may be fading already. I still can't believe she got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus. 

Yeah, but she had her own controversy this week with regard to a few of her staffers and some bullshit disaster relief moneys. That news was swamped by the Trump madness.

[Varysblackfyre321]

 

Edited August 16, 2023 by Varysblackfyre321

[Varysblackfyre321]

These people will need round the clock security.

[Zorral]

Rudy Giuliani’s RICO Roller Coaster
The former mayor practically invented the kind of prosecution he now faces.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/08/rudy-giuliani-trump-indictment-georgia-fani-willis.html

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Many have noted the irony here: Rudy Giuliani has now been indicted as a co-conspirator under the same law—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—that he invoked many times as a federal prosecutor busting Mafia gangs and inside traders on Wall Street in the mid-1980s.

But irony is too mild a tag to capture the predicament in which this man finds himself. Shameful and appalling are other words that come quickly to mind. Another term—more apt still after a moment’s reflection—is bewildering.

More than any other lawyer in America, Giuliani should have known that getting mixed up with Donald Trump—especially in Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election—would likely land him in his present state: an indicted felon who, at age 79, may spend the rest of his days in a federal courthouse, then prison.

As U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, Giuliani didn’t merely cite RICO statutes to take down many criminals; he practically invented the art of doing so. Congress passed the RICO Act in 1970, mainly as a way to go after Mafia kingpins, who had been able to evade indictments as long as they avoided direct involvement in their gangs’ crimes. RICO referred to “predicate crimes”—acts that prosecutors could stitch together as evidence of a corrupt organization and then lasso all of its members as part of a “criminal enterprise.” In other words, it was designed to go after “conspiracy.”

Giuliani and his team were the first prosecutors to figure out how to do this, in a systematic way, in a major felony case—and it was precisely the sort of case that the statute’s drafters had in mind. In the Mafia Commission trial, which lasted from February 1985 until November 1986, the Southern District indicted 11 Mafia figures, including leaders from all of the “five families,” who controlled myriad businesses and municipal services across New York City. Convicted of charges including extortion, labor racketeering, and murder for hire, the leaders were sentenced to between 70 and 100 years in prison. ....

 

 

[Zorral]

Trump Trial Threatens to Blow Up Georgia Republican Party

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/trump-trial-threatens-to-blow-up-georgia-republican-party.html

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... as Trump’s legal drama in Atlanta is reminding us, political polarization in Georgia isn’t just a matter of conflict between the two parties; it has also divided the Republican Party that controls state government. This intraparty division is mostly about Trump himself, or at least his efforts to boss and bully the Republicans who supervised the 2020 elections in Georgia and adamantly refuse to accept that it was “rigged.”

So while across the country most Republicans are lining up in solidarity with Trump and his contention that his legal problems are just another phase in his ongoing persecution by the Democrats who “stole” the presidency from him in 2020, the situation is very different in Georgia. Three of the top Republicans in state offices in 2020 — Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State (and chief election official) Brad Raffensperger, and then–Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan — have all testified before the Fulton County grand jury and will presumably be witnesses for the prosecution if and when this case finally goes to trial. ....

 

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Not sure if this has been posted. But in case it wasn't.

Small treat for our resident legalese speaker. Georgia Indictment in full.

 

[Gaston de Foix]

2 hours ago, Gorn said:

Why do you say that? Juries are supposed to work exclusively based on evidence and testimonies they hear in court, not based on anything they may or may not remember from the news. They are specifically instructed to ignore anything that isn't part of the trial.

It is the prosecution's job to present the case as if all the jurors are outer-space aliens who have never heard of Donald Trump until the moment they stepped into the courtroom.

Yes, that's absolutely the theory.  But when the sitting president tries to overthrow the constitution and remain in power, the jury is also the voice of the community and expresses communal outrage. 

Perhaps I worded it poorly, but I feel like what happened has kind of faded into noise and whataboutism due in part to the relentless coverage with Fox and Tucker Carlson.  And that makes a low-information, busy juror more vulnerable to spin and alternative facts. 

Like, we keep worrying about a convicted felon becoming president.  And it is worrying.  But imagine if he gets acquitted in the middle of the campaign or a few weeks before the election.  We may well have have 2016 redux then.  

[Zorral]

Why They targeted Georgia so heavily to commit election fraud:

Why Georgia Was Always a Special Case

"In every key swing state Republicans held one or both (often highly gerrymandered) state houses. But it was only Georgia that was under unified Republican control."

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-georgia-was-always-a-special-case

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There seems to be a consensus that the coup indictments out of Georgia are unexpectedly strong. I don’t know why it’s “unexpected” or exceeded expectations. The Fulton County DA’s office has been working on this for a very long time and they’ve always seemed in earnest about it, even when it was unclear whether federal investigators were focused on the people at the top of the conspiracy. But it’s a reminder that Georgia was always unique in the broader story of Trump’s failed coup. It’s not simply that there was a more aggressive local prosecutor on hand.

In every key swing state Republicans held one or both (often highly gerrymandered) state houses. But it was only Georgia that was under unified Republican control. Democrats held the governorships in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — a critical outcome of the 2018 midterm election. In many cases a Democrat was the secretary of state or held whichever office or appointee was charged with administering elections. Arizona was in close to unified Republican control. But Katie Hobbs, now the state’s governor, was secretary of state, the officer which administers the state’s elections.

This doesn’t mean there wasn’t lots of coup-advancing criminal conduct in those states. There was. Indeed, just yesterday Gov. Hobbs said the state’s attorney general should join Georgia in bringing criminal charges. But only in Georgia were the key players all Republicans, all at least nominal Trump supporters and all beholden to Trump to remain in office. Or so it seemed.

That’s why Georgia was always unique, even though corruptly assigning the state’s electoral votes to Donald Trump, on its own, wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the election. There were officeholders beholden to him he could threaten and intimidate. Sure, he could call Secretary of State Hobbs or Michigan’s Jocelyn Benson and demand they find votes for him. But why? They would have laughed in his face. He had no pull over them.

Georgia was always going to be a more extensive case, with more elaborate criminality because there were simply more crimes to commit, more officeholders and election officials he could try to bully, intimidate and frighten.

 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Yeah, but she had her own controversy this week with regard to a few of her staffers and some bullshit disaster relief moneys. That news was swamped by the Trump madness.

I don't see any stories about it, but what little I can see from Twitter since I'm not a member she sure is throwing a hissy fit that makes most 12 year olds look mature. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

14 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I don't see any stories about it, but what little I can see from Twitter since I'm not a member she sure is throwing a hissy fit that makes most 12 year olds look mature. 

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/08/marjorie-taylor-greene-staffer-two-others-agree-to-pay-50000-for-roles-in-east-palestine-charity-scam.html?outputType=amp

[Zorral]

OOOO oooo oooo

But she hasn't even been invited to the prom yet! Chickens and egs . . . .

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-may-not-run-for-reelection/ar-AA1flQiZ?

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Flamethrowing GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has suggested she might not defend her seat in Congress next fall after two commanding victories in Georgia's 14th District.

That doesn't necessarily mean she's getting out of politics, though.

Following comments by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp—who is reportedly weighing a run for the U.S. Senate in 2026—criticizing recent, disproven assertions by Donald Trump that he won the battleground state in 2020, Greene said she might be willing to challenge Kemp in a GOP primary.

Assuming, of course, Trump doesn't decide to name her as his running mate after winning the Republican presidential nomination. Greene is a close ally of the former president.

"I haven't made up my mind whether I will do that or not," she said about a possible Senate run, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story published Tuesday. "I have a lot of things to think about. Am I going to be a part of President Trump's Cabinet if he wins? Is it possible that I'll be VP?"

 

And I, I shall be queenie weenie!  (With apologies to Start the Revolution Without Me.)

[LongRider]

MTG and her delusions of grandeur.   VP for the T?   Hhahahahahahahah!!  Honey, the man hates women, and a female VP would detract from his awesomeness, which he would not want to happen.  Also, you being one who is loud, obnoxious, not afraid to discuss the difficult issues; I mean, who else in Congress would bring up Jewish Space Lazers?   Not his style.  Remember that shrinking violet with the adoring puppy dog eyes who wiped his butt every time T bent over.  That's what he wants in a VP, you don't qualify.