Category Archives: legal news

Donald Trump, legal news, national news

Trump Derangement Syndrome?

Critics of this blog have accused its author — that’s me — of suffering from something called Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I’m not entirely sure I know what it means, other than I gather that critics believe I spend too much time and emotional capital commenting on the actions of the immediate past POTUS.

Please forgive this bit of candor, but a lot of it has to do with Donald J. Trump himself. He keeps thrusting himself into the news. Talking heads keep telling us that Trump is motivated primarily by his insatiable thirst for attention.

That thirst is driving this silly — no, stupid — idea that he will run for president again in 2024. I am not convinced he is going to run but, by golly, he’s going to keep his name in front of our faces for as long as he can. That presence in our national consciousness is going to last until, oh let’s see, when gets indicted, tried and sentenced to time in the slammer.

I don’t know if any of that will happen. I do know, though, that for as long Trump is walking and talking among us — making news along the way — I’ll keep commenting on the things he says and does.

Bear in mind — and perhaps some of you have noticed — that I don’t flail at every single pronouncement that flies out of the former Numbskull in Chief’s trap. I am picking my shots.

Will they still call it Trump Derangement Syndrome? Yeah. Probably.

I’ll stay with it for as long as it matters.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news, legal news, political news, State news

Use the ‘bully pulpit’ to end gun violence

Greg Abbott has a forum called the “bully pulpit” to advance causes he deems essential. The Texas governor has used it with minimal effect to call attention to illegal immigration.

The Republican, though, needs to fire it up to talk about another key issue on the minds of parents, students and educators: gun violence in our schools.

You know what I’m talking about. The Uvalde school massacre in May remains on the top of Texans’ minds as Abbott campaigns for re-election against Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke.

We’re seeing campaign ads now calling attention to what Abbott has failed to do in the wake of Uvalde. He has opposed efforts to increase the minimum age for those who purchase weapons from 18 to 21 years of age. He has failed to call a special legislative session to deal forthrightly with gun violence.

O’Rourke is seeking to make Abbott’s non-response to Uvalde a campaign issue. I don’t yet know whether it is resonating with voters who are sickened by what happened at Robb Elementary School, when a lunatic packing an AR-15 rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammo walked into the school and slaughtered 19 fourth graders and two educators who sought to protect the children.

One of our nation’s greatest Republicans, Theodore Roosevelt, used to proclaim that the bully pulpit existed precisely for officeholders to further worthy causes. Protecting our children against random acts of evil certainly qualifies … yes?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, national news

How did Mrs. Thomas keep this secret?

Ginni Thomas says she never has discussed her political activity with her husband, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

That’s right. Mrs. Thomas would have us believe that Justice Thomas, presumably an alert, learned individual, would be oblivious to her involvement in activities involving the overturning of the 2020 presidential election; Ginni Thomas has made no secret of the notion that she believes the election was stolen from Donald Trump.

So, Justice Thomas, who has taken part in rulings involving the election — who has failed to recuse himself from those decisions — knows nothing about his bride’s involvement. We are asked to believe that?

I believe Ginni Thomas has described Justice Thomas as her “best friend.” I believe “best friends” tell each other, well, everything.

Who in the world is Ginni Thomas kidding? Not me. Not most Americans. My hunch is that her husband knows all about what his wife has been doing when she’s away from the house.

Ginni Thomas told all of this to the House select committee examining the 1/6 insurrection. Chairman Bennie Thompson, as he has done throughout the testimony, swore in Ginni Thomas to “tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth” under threat of criminal prosecution.

Hmmm. What’s next? There could be a perjury accusation on its way.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, local news, political news, State news

AG race: most troublesome

Of all the contests on the Texas ballot in this midterm election cycle, one of them presents the greatest opportunity for joy … and also for profound disappointment.

It’s not the governor’s race. It’s the next one down on the ballot, the contest for Texas attorney general.

I keep hearing chatter that it might be the closest statewide race on the ballot, the one contest that gives Democrats their greatest chance of breaking the death grip Republicans have had on the state elective offices for nearly three decades.

The GOP incumbent, Ken Paxton, is seriously damaged goods. Yet here he is, seeking a third term after winning re-election in 2018 while under felony indictment for securities fraud. In 2022, he’s still under indictment. 

Oh, but there’s more. Seven of his top legal assistants quit the AG’s office complaining about what they allege is criminal conduct. They blew the whistle on what they contend is corruption. The FBI has launched an investigation into Paxton’s conduct.

The man has embarrassed the state. His Democratic foe is Rochelle Garza, a civil-rights lawyer from the Valley. She reports that the race is narrowing. Indeed, polling from around the state suggests a tightening contest.

What gives me hope is that Garza is as clean as they come. She can hold her own background up to Paxton’s shady behavior, which became evident when the Collin County grand jury indicted him in 2015 on an allegation that he failed to disclose his relationship with an investment firm to potential customers.

But there’s even more to pore through. Just this past week, Paxton ran like a frightened puppy when a federal process server showed up at his McKinney home to serve him papers to testify in a court proceeding. Paxton said he didn’t know who was standing outside his house; but then we learned that he knew several days earlier that he would be served the summons.

The guy is a worm. A weasel. A coward.

For the life of me I do not understand how this guy continues to have any standing among Texas voters.

A grand jury in his home county indicts him on a felony charge; his top legal team bails; the FBI launches a probe into alleged misconduct; he hides from a process server.

And on top of all that, the AG has been front and center in promoting The Big Lie, that Donald Trump was the victim of an electoral heist in the 2020 presidential election.

Can’t we do better than having someone so damaged as our state’s top law enforcement official? Well, we can! The question: Will voters show the good sense to reject this clown?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, national news

Let her believe that crap, however …

Ginni Thomas is entitled to believe whatever conspiratorial crap fills her seemingly vacuous noggin, such as the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald J. Trump.

We have no evidence of any such theft. Still, that’s reportedly what she told the House select committee examining the 1/6 insurrection.

Fine, lady. You believe whatever you wish.

However, she occupies an unusual place in the world of public figures. She’s not elected or appointed to any high-profile office. She is, though, married to someone who fits that bill: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Here is where Ginni Thomas’s denials of wrongdoing get a little sticky, not to mention stinky. She insisted to the committee that she and her husband don’t ever discuss politics at home. And yet, she would have anyone with half a noodle in their skull believe that she would ignore what she has told others that the 2020 election was the “greatest political heist” in U.S. history.

Is she going to have us believe she never has said anything to her best friend, the man to whom she’s been married for 35 years about what she believes is the greatest act of theft in the history of our nation?

I am not going to accept that Justice and Mrs. Thomas never have talked between themselves about her political life outside the walls of their home.

The issue came to the fore when Justice Thomas cast the lone dissenting vote as the court ruled that he had to turn over his presidential papers to the National Archives. Every other justice ruled that Trump had to cut them loose; not so, Clarence Thomas ruled.

I will stand by my earlier demands that Clarence Thomas resign from the court. He has no business ruling on matters related to the insurrection when he is married to someone who believes The Big Lie about alleged electoral thievery.

And I do not believe for a nanosecond that Ginni Thomas has never said a word about to the justice.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, State news

When did civil liberties protection become evil?

Democrat Rochelle Garza wants to become Texas’s next attorney general. She is running against a seriously flawed incumbent, Ken Paxton, who already has been re-elected once while running with a felony indictment hanging over his head.

Garza, though, has a curious bit of baggage as she seeks to defeat her Republican opponent. She is a lawyer steeped in the tradition of the American Civil Liberties Union. She fights to protect our civil liberties, you know, those lined out in the Constitution.

She’s also not scarred by the kind of wounds inflicted on Paxton. A Collin County grand jury indicted Paxton in 2015 on an allegation of securities fraud. He hasn’t stood trial yet.

However, in this curious and infuriating political climate, Garza must defend her work as a civil liberties lawyer. It’s a throwback to an earlier campaign, the 1988 presidential election between Vice President George H.W. Bush and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

President Bush vilified Dukakis because of the governor’s belief in the ACLU mission, which is to protect our civil liberties.

I keep wondering: How did ACLU membership and a defense of that legal organization’s mission become a punchline, an epithet, a four-letter word?

It has become all of that.

For my money, I would rather be represented by a legal eagle who isn’t stained by allegations of misconduct. Toss aside political affiliation and ask: Do you want to be represented by an individual who faces possible prison time if his case ever gets adjudicated, or do you want your AG to be someone whose record is clean and clear of any suspicion?

I’ll stick with Rochelle Garza.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, legal news, national news, national security, political news

Will Trumpism outlive its founder?

It has been said by more than one commentator that the movement Donald J. Trump spawned will live long past the time he no longer is a political factor.

Pardon the skepticism, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.

I’ll start with this notion: I have doubt that Donald Trump is (a) going to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and (b) that the GOP has gone totally braindead to nominate him if he does enter the fray.

The Republican Party has shown itself in the past, oh, six years to be a party full of gullible numbskulls who are willing to swallow the swill delivered by Trump. They ignore the threat he continues to pose to our democratic process; they give him a pass on the idiocy that flies out of his mouth; they proclaim a desire to “defund the FBI” after the feds find top-secret documents squirreled away in his Florida home.

So, what is going to happen to Trump’s movement — his cult — once he’s no longer a political player. The way I see it, and I’ll admit it is from the cheap seats, whatever “movement” that Trump has stoked will disappear. Why keep telling The Big Lie about a “stolen election” if the Main Man is no longer calling the shots?

I am going to hold tightly onto my own hope that the law’s lengthy arm is going to corral The Donald sometime soon. The Justice Department is examining whether Trump broke the law in taking those classified documents from the White House; the House select 1/6 committee is considering whether to ask for indictment related to the insurrection that Trump clearly incited; the Fulton County (Ga.) district attorney is looking into whether Trump broke state election laws by demanding that officials “find” enough votes to overturn that state’s 2020 presidential election result.

Oh, and the New York attorney general already has filed a $250 million lawsuit against the Trump Organization for allegedly falsifying its worth to obtain favorable loans.

We have, as they said in a movie, “a target-rich environment.”

The cult leader, it appears to me, is going down in flames. May the fire consume what is left of the movement that bears his name.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news, legal news, local news, political news, State news

Paxton: profile in cowardice

This incident should make me laugh out loud. It should be just another example of a politician proving he’s a chickensh** coward.

But dang! This is serious stuff and it reveals the utter lack of integrity of the man holding the office of Texas attorney general.

AG Ken Paxton, a Republican, was supposed to receive a subpoena related to a lawsuit filed by those who want the state to pay for out-of-state abortions. It came from the federal government, which right there tells me it’s a serious matter.

What did our state’s chief law enforcement officer do? He hid in a room inside his McKinney home, then fled an hour or so later with his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, at the wheel of their motor vehicle.

Ken Paxton tried to avoid being served with subpoena, court record says | The Texas Tribune

What an absolute crock of horse manure!

Paxton sent out a Twitter message that said he was concerned for his family’s safety, which he said is why he didn’t respond to the process server. And that makes me go … huh?

The Texas Tribune reports: “It’s clear that the media wants to drum up another controversy involving my work as Attorney General, so they’re attacking me for having the audacity to avoid a stranger lingering outside my home and showing concern about the safety and well-being of my family,” he wrote in a tweet.

The sequence of events appears weird on its face. The process server shows up. He waits around. Paxton is inside the house. Then his wife drives him away.

How many more examples of Paxton’s unfitness for public office does this clown have to exhibit? He has been under felony indictment alleging securities fraud almost since the day he took office in 2015. The Securities and Exchange Commission launched an independent investigation. Several key legal aides quit the AG’s office after alleging misconduct by the attorney general himself. The FBI is examining a whistleblower complaint against the AG.

Now this.

I know this sounds silly, but if Paxton has done nothing wrong, why didn’t he just go to the front door of his home, receive the subpoena and then contest it the way he normally would … through due process?

The guy should have resigned his office long ago.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump, Joe Biden, legal news, national news, political news

No need to ‘restore’ voter integrity

I have to say this as loudly and clearly as I possibly can say anything: The American electoral process is clean, fair and its integrity does not need to be “restored.”

Once again — ad nauseum — we hear adherents of the former Big Liar in Chief suggest that there is something fundamentally broken within the electoral system.

There isn’t. The system ain’t broke. The excuse mounted that declares “widespread vote fraud” is the result of one man losing the 2020 presidential election by 7 million ballots. He has succeeded in planting sufficient doubt in the gullible skulls of his cult followers about the integrity of the most recent presidential balloting.

Court after court, expert after expert all have determined that the loser’s assertion of widespread voter fraud is, in itself, fraudulent. The only theft of the election results has been the work of the loser’s attempt to toss out legitimate election returns.

Having taken a swing or two at the critics of the electoral system, I want to assert that the system isn’t perfect. Then again, it’s never been absolutely free of the occasional effort by someone, somewhere to cast an illegal ballot. Hey, it goes with the territory.

There have been reported isolated incidents of phony votes cast since, oh let’s see, the beginning of the Republic!

But to hear Republican politicians these days, you’d think the entire system is corrupt. That it’s crooked. That the integrity of the system is so compromised that it puts our national government in dire peril.

Only one problem has existed with this hysteria: No one has proven a word of it!

The midterm election is coming on quickly. There will be some election deniers on the ballot in several states. They will continue to promote The Big Lie as they try to persuade voters to send them to public office. The midterm election will be as clean and relatively corruption-free as the 2020 election turned out to be.

I just have heard all I can stand to hear from those who proclaim to seek a “restoration” of our electoral integrity. There is not a damn thing to restore.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news, legal news, local news, national news

Don’t let this death recede

Mahsa Amini’s identity, I believe, well might become a household name soon in a place where one wouldn’t expect.

That would be the Islamic Republic of Iran. Amini was a 26-year-old Iranian woman who was taken into custody and who later died. Why? Because she showed a few too many strands of her hair outside the hijab she was wearing.

Women must follow certain conservative tenets of Islamic faith, such as ensuring their hair is tucked away. The penalty is the fate that befell Mahsa Amini.

Amini’s death has prompted protests the likes of which have rarely been seen or heard since the Ayatollah Khomeini’s forces seized control of Iran in 1979.

Iranians have marched onto city streets seeking justice for Mahsi Amini, who by any measure of human decency should be alive today. Indeed, she should be walking free in her country. But, oh no. She’s now dead because that hideously named “morality police” squad took her into custody and quite likely killed her.

As Time Magazine reported on its website, Mahsa Amini has become a martyr to a cause unknown in the power circles of the governing Islamic Republic: human rights.

On social media, her name became an Iranian version of #MeToo — a prompt for ordinary people to post experiences of loss and oppression at the hands of the Islamic Republic, gathered under #MahsaAmini.

The Protests in Iran Have Shaken the Islamic Republic to Its Core (msn.com)

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been on the U.S. sh** list of nations that flout basic human rights for its citizens.

Too often people become victimized in nations such as Iran. The world wrings its hands and calls go out for justice. Then the emotion subsides, and the world’s attention turns to other crises.

Let us not allow Mahsa Amini’s name to recede into the background. She needs to remain at the top of our consciousness and must become a cudgel for the civilized world to use against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com