Category Archives: legal news

crime news, legal news

Ex-POTUS faces legal steamroller

My ego is in check, meaning that I am willing to acknowledge I am wrong far more frequently than I am right.

There. I’ve laid down my predicate for being able to boast just a little on something I said a while ago … which is that Donald Trump’s legal difficulties well might overwhelm his continuing campaign to become president once again.

Trump is facing the real prospect of being declared ineligible to run for president based on a clause in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says that no one who engages in an insurrection or gives “aid and comfort” to those who do is ineligible to seek public office.

Legal scholars on all sides are coming to the same conclusion: The amendment is clear, that Trump did seek to overthrow the government and he damn sure gave aid and comfort to the job that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The amendment makes no stipulation that says an insurrectionist must be convicted of a crime, only that the he or she participated in the act.

Boy howdy! Trump damn sure did participate.

The 14th Amendment was enacted just after the Civil War. Its aim was to prevent states from seceding and declaring war against the government.

To be clear, this matter is far from settled. There have been lawsuits filed and myriad court battles loom. This matter could up in the laps of the U.S. Supreme Court. I won’t pretend to predict how the SCOTUS would rule on this case. Its members include three Trump nominated justices, along with three other conservatives.

One final note. The calls for disqualification are coming from conservative lawyers and assorted legal scholars along with progressives. Maybe the right-wingers out here among the masses can beat some sense into the skulls of the six conservatives on the nation’s highest court.

Donald Trump, to be abundantly clear, is now engaged in the fight of his life.  I don’t know what y’all might think, but from my North Texas perch, he is looking more and more like a goner.

crime news, legal news, local news

Paxton trial about to begin … bring it!

A source I have developed at a major Texas university told me this week — off the record — about what he thinks might happen when Ken Paxton stands trial in the Texas Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors he allegedly committed while serving as Texas attorney general.

My source said it’s a tough call, “but right now I’d say he gets acquitted.” He said the Senate’s partisan makeup, with 18 Republicans and 12 Democrats, likely could save Paxton from being kicked out of office if he is convicted of any of the crimes alleged against him.

“But that could change” once the trial begins,” my friend said.

The Texas House impeached Paxton in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote; many House Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in impeaching Paxton based on the unanimous recommendation of the House committee tasked with examining the myriad complaints against Paxton.

The panel ruled that Paxton took a bribe from a key campaign ally and abused the power of his office to conceal an extramarital affair.

The Senate trial begins Tuesday. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate and the trial, imposed a sweeping gag order on senators, a decision I happen to endorse. The bar is set high for conviction, as the Senate needs a two-thirds vote to toss Paxton out of office.

The impeachment managers have brought in some heavy hitters to serve as legal counsel for the prosecution. Paxton’s legal team has asked that all but one of the 30-plus counts in the impeachment articles be dismissed.

I am one Texan who wants the AG tossed out, if only to rid the state of the constant embarrassment this clown brings to the law enforcement office he oversees.

Are there enough Republicans in the Senate who will join their Democratic colleagues in making the same decision, that they are fed up with the conduct of an attorney general who brings shame to the high office he occupies?

Let us hope so.

crime news, legal news

GOP governor puts brakes on anti-DA bandwagon

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a dedicated Republican to be sure, has intervened in fine fashion against an effort by fellow Georgia Republicans to clip the wings of a district attorney who has engineered an indictment against Donald J. Trump.

Fulton County DA Fani Willis has become public enemy No. 1 in the eyes of Georgia Republicans who want her booted out of office. They are acting on a law that gives the state legislature the power to strike back against a prosecutor who is doing her job.

Not so fast, said Gov. Kemp, who today put the kibosh in any notion that the state constitution allows such punitive action against an elected district attorney.

Georgia’s General Assembly GOP caucus said it believes Willis has politicized the judicial process by indicting Trump on charges that he sought to defraud the federal government in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

What utter horsesh**!

Kemp said he will not allow the legislature to act on this specious notion. He said Willis has followed the law and the state constitution. Therefore, her decision to ask the grand jury to indict Trump will stand.

And the trial will proceed.

crime news, Donald Trump, legal news

Trump won’t testify … ever!

All this chatter I keep hearing from TV news talking heads about the possibility of Donald Trump testifying in any of the criminal trials awaiting him makes me want to laugh out loud.

Let’s settle the issue once and for all: Donald Trump will not testify in any of these trials. Why not? Because he cannot tell the truth. Thus, he becomes a candidate for perjury.

Trump cannot tell the truth about his involvement with the Jan. 6 assault on our government. He cannot speak truthfully about how he squirreled away those classified documents from the White House. He cannot speak truthfully about the co-defendants who also have been indicted.

Imagine him putting his hand on a holy book and swearing to tell the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

It won’t happen. No judge worth a damn is going to summon Trump to court and demand that he tell the truth.

Donald Trump cannot comply with a judge’s order.

crime news, legal news

A trial for the ages?

Let’s not pussyfoot around the obvious, which is that any of the four trials awaiting Donald J. Trump can be categorized as the “most significant legal proceeding in U.S. history.”

Every one of them will make history. They will become trials for the ages. They likely will be included in the first line of the obituary written for the individual who will stand trial.

Donald J. Trump is the first former president of the United States to be indicted for allegedly committing felony crimes against the government he swore an oath to defend and protect.

He is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty. My sense, though, is that state and federal prosecutors have done their jobs well enough to secure convictions perhaps on all the charges leveled against Trump. How many of them are there? Ninety-one!

Did any of us ever imagine seeing a former POTUS stand trial for seeking to overturn an election and obstructing the peaceful transfer of power after he lost that election? I damn sure never imagined it.

The trials that have been set constitute the most meaningful court proceedings this country ever has witnessed. We cannot possibly overstate what they will mean to the future of our democratic republic.

crime news, legal news

Date set, let justice rule

Mark down the date of March 4, 2024, which is what I intend to do.

That is the date set by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan for the start of a trial to determine whether Donald J. Trump is guilty of trying to overturn the results of a free, fair and legal presidential election.

Judge Chutkan has declared her intention to proceed with a “speedy trial” for the former president of the United States. Interestingly, for a man who says he did “nothing wrong,” Trump has been trying to delay this proceeding until sometime in 2026.

That prompts me to wonder: If Donald Trump is as innocent of the serious felonies for which he has been indicted as he insists he is, why delay the trial?

OK, we’re a long way from the start of the trial. There will be lots of “discovery” to be made. Lots of motions to consider. Chutkan, though, appears set to proceed with a trial that will begin one day prior to the Super Tuesday Republican Party presidential primary election in which several states will decide whom to nominate for POTUS.

Even more remarkable has been the statements from Fulton County (Ga.) District Attorney Fani Willis, who says she is ready to go to trial as early as October … in 2023, just a couple of months from today.

A Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump for violating state law in seeking to overturn those election results. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, one of the 19 defendants indicted by the panel, is seeking to move the state trial to federal court, claiming he was acting as an agent of the federal government when he was doing the then-president’s bidding. Good luck with that, chief.

To be honest, all this maneuvering in all four courts has me a bit befuddled. I just hope all the judges who are hearing these cases — in New York, Atlanta, in Florida and in DC — can keep everything straight.

However this all plays out, it is looking for all the world to me that Donald John Trump is a world of some serious hurt.

crime news, legal news

Trump mug … for the ages

The critiques of Donald Trump’s mug shot taken at the Fulton County, Ga., sheriff’s office make me laugh.

Some folks suggest he rehearsed the pose he would strike. Others say it reflects a frightened criminal defendant. Still more believe Trump’s puss will energize his base and that his support will grow among the American voting public.

I happen to believe that Donald Trump’s support level has topped out. His base remains loyal, but only because it comprises the moronic MAGA dumbasses who have bought into the cult of personality he has cultivated.

I don’t know about how he came up with the pose we all have seen. Nor do I really care. I do know that the mug shot played on virtually every newspaper’s front page (what’s left of them) around the world today. That’s likely to Trump’s desire, given his penchant for publicity. Trump seems to ascribe to the notion that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.”

Whatever …

The mug shot will stand for the ages as the defining moment in Donald Trump’s political career. It likely will remind him every single day of his miserable life about the horrendous day he endured, having to fly to Georgia, then wait in a dank jail building, get the picture taken, have his fingerprints recorded and then he returned to his New Jersey resort.

He made history when he had the picture taken, being the first U.S. president or former POTUS to have been arrested and arraigned on a criminal indictment.

Nice goin’ … Donald.

crime news, legal news, national news, political news

GOP awash in contradiction

An astonishing array of competing opinions has gripped the Republican Party by the throat as its presidential stable of candidates prepares to debate on an Iowa stage.

The “star of the show” is a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted candidate for POTUS, Donald Trump … who isn’t even going to be there for the opening round of Q&A.

He’s the talk of the event in absentia. Imagine had he decided to take part. He’d be the talk of the event in that context as well.

I am going to presume this is what Trump has wanted. He is a media hog, even as he proclaims the media to be “the enemy of the people.” The truth is he loves the media and the media love him despite rumors to the contrary about media bias against Trump.

His presence on the political stage has thrown the entire process into chaos, which was one of the hallmarks of the time he held the office of president. His alleged “style” of governing hardly ever contained a moment of research of actual scholarship. He thrived on his “hunch” and his “belief” in what someone had told him.

What continues to astound me, truth be told, is that all of this is OK with the gullible MAGA morons who continue to back this clown’s latest presidential candidacy.

We are left, then, with circumstances in which Trump becomes the story. He’s not at the debate? He’s the story. Would he show up? He is still the story.

This is the environment that makes Donald Trump most comfortable. It saddens me to say it, but it also demonstrates most graphically one more reason why he is patently unfit to hold the office he is seeking.

crime news, legal news, national news

Televise the trials!

Donald John Trump is not your every-day criminal defendant, given that for four years he occupied the presidency of the United States.

Therefore, it is imperative that the federal judiciary do something far out of the ordinary. It needs to televise the federal trials that will determine whether Donald Trump is guilty of the crimes for which he is being charged.

Trump has four trials pending. Two of them are in state courts. New York and Georgia grand juries have indicted him for committing crimes against the nation he once took an oath to protect.

I want to focus on the two federal indictments. One of them came from a grand jury in Florida; that’s the classified documents case in which Trump pilfered documents from the White House and stashed ’em in his glitzy estate. The other came from a D.C. grand jury; that is the matter involving the 1/6 assault on our government.

You see, this is critical inasmuch as Trump was once elected to the presidency. He took an oath to protect the government against all enemies. Then he shunned that oath when the 2020 election didn’t turn out the way he wanted; he lost that contest to Joe Biden.

Americans who were governed by this fraud have a right to witness how these trials play out. Will they produce sideshows, melodrama and game-playing? Yes, they might … but that isn’t necessarily pre-ordained.

I recall meeting with Tom Phillips, who in the 1990s was chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. The OJ Simpson trial was underway and Phillips said that the judge in that trial, California Superior Court Judge Lance Ito, had plenty of authority to rein in the lawyers. He could have set time limits on the presentations. He could have demanded decorum and dignity in the courtroom.

Phillips said trial judges have immense power to run these trials in orderly and concise fashions.

It’s that knowledge that gives me hope that if the federal judiciary turns on the TV cameras in the courtroom that they will expose the public to a ringside view of how one of our three branches of government does the job prescribed in the US Constitution.

legal news

What the 14th omits …

As I read — and re-read — Section 3 of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, I am struck by the absence of a single, simple qualifier that our founders left out of that clause.

It refers to the commission of an “insurrection or rebellion” by someone who might want to return to public office after having pledged to protect the government against such actions.

It states that “No person” shall be a senator, U.S. representative, president or vice president if they violate that oath. Period.

It says nothing about whether that person must be convicted in a court of law to disqualify him from office.

I bring this up because of constitutional scholar chatter that’s making the rounds about whether Donald Trump is qualified to seek the presidency in 2024. Some argue that of course he should be tried in court and have that decision delivered by a jury. Others argue that the Constitution is silent on that issue, therefore, he is disqualified just by an allegation of such an act.

I don’t consider myself to be a constitutional absolutist. I have tended to interpret the founders’ intent a bit more liberally. It is tempting, though, to apply “original intent” to my reading of the 14th Amendment, meaning that if the founders didn’t declare a qualification that it doesn’t exist.

Here is the section in its entirety. You be the judge:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

I do hope we can let the courts decide this matter quickly. My preference is for Trump to be convicted and then barred from public office for the rest of his miserable life.