Tag Archives: Donald Trump

crime news

Reaction puzzles me

The initial Republican Party reaction to the FBI agents’ search for records within Donald J. Trump’s glitzy south Florida mansion has me a little bit puzzled.

I don’t hear much defense of the ex-POTUS’s conduct coming from the GOP faithful. Who out there is willing to say that it’s all right for a president to squirrel away classified documents taken from the White House? Who is willing to say it’s OK for a president — as it has been reported — to flush documents down the toilet or burn ’em in a fireplace?

No, we’re hearing instead are accusations about “weaponization” of the Justice Department and the FBI. Some GOP lawmakers are suggesting that Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to either resign or be impeached. For what? For following up on his pledge to ensure that “no one is above the law”? When the AG says “no one,” he means, well, no one, not even a former president of the United States.

The hysterical reaction from the hysterical right wing, though, is laughable … except that it ain’t funny.

What does make me chuckle — but only a little bit — is that the right-wingers just aren’t going to say that Donald Trump didn’t do anything wrong.

The man is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

As for the Justice Department’s search for wrongdoing, it would be foolish to believe that DOJ — at this juncture of the probe — is going to go easy on what appears to be a mountain of evidence that implicates the man who once took an oath to protect the Constitution, but who in reality launched an all-out attack on it.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

DOJ makes history!

Donald J. Trump is correct. The search of his home in Florida is the “first time in history” that the FBI has conducted such an operation against a former U.S. president.

There. Now that we have that out of the way, I want to make sure we all understand something else.

Trump is the first president to resist the peaceful transfer of power to a new administration; he is the first president to have incited an attack on the Capitol; he is the first president to have demanded that states “find” votes to reverse the outcome of an election; he is the first president to have been accused of taking top-secret documents out of the White House illegally.

So, is the FBI search legal? Yes. It is. The Justice Department obtained approval from a federal judge to proceed with the search. The FBI needed to demonstrate “probable cause” to believe a crime has been committed, and it did in the eyes of the judge who issued the search warrant.

Trump’s assertion that he now is the first president in U.S. history to have been subjected to this kind of legal action is correct.

However, he deserves it!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Uncategorized

FBI zeroes in on Trump

What in the name of juris prudence are we to make of the news that exploded this evening?

The FBI has walked into the home of the immediate past U.S. president to search for who knows what. The announcement comes on the eve of the 48th anniversary of the date Richard Nixon resigned the presidency as the Watergate scandal unraveled everything in sight.

Let’s understand what the so-called “raid” at Mar-a-Lago entails.

A federal judge had to sign off on a Justice Department request to allow the agents to look for evidence of specific allegations of criminal wrongdoing.

Thus, this is not just some rogue agency running amok. It is the result of a federal judge determining that the FBI had enough to justify a thorough search of a former president’s home.

There appears to be building evidence that Donald Trump broke more than one federal law when he squirreled federal documents away as he was preparing to vacate the White House after the 2020 election.

We don’t know what the FBI was seeking. It will become known in due course.

However, from my perch, it looks for all the world that the feds have the goods on the individual who gave the finger to the oath he took to protect the government.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, political news

Trump gets support from CPAC … imagine that!

This is likely the biggest non-surprise of the current political season, but it’s still worth a comment or two.

It comes in the form of the endorsement of Donald J. Trump’s continuing presence on the political scene by the Conservative Action Political Conference, which met this past weekend in Dallas.

I cannot help but shake my noggin.

The CPAC faithful want Trump to run for president in 2024. They have decided, I reckon, to ignore the two impeachments during his term in office, the stunning pile of evidence that mounts from the House select committee’s probe into the 1/6 insurrection and perhaps the possible indictments for criminal activity that might come from the Justice Department.

Oh, and never mind that Trump has yet to lay any sort of agenda for the future. He continues to wallow in The Big Lie that he keeps alive by suggesting the 2020 election was stolen from him.

That’s leadership? That’s moving toward the future?

At CPAC, conservative Texans show Donald Trump loyalty | The Texas Tribune

The “conservative movement” has been hijacked, along with the Republican Party, by the cult of personality led by Donald J. Trump.

The Texas Tribune summed up nicely the theme of Trump’s keynote speech: Trump stuck to a familiar script and repeated the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even as those claims have repeatedly been debunked by even his own former aides. He painted cities run by Democratic leadership as hellscapes awash in crime and lamented what he described as an open southern border with Mexico.

The Texas crowd ate it up. “I’m over the moon, I’ve been trying to see him for years,” said Therese Boehnlein, who drove from Waco to Dallas to see Trump.

Well … OK. The ex-POTUS dropped a hint or two that he’ll run again in 2024. That will be his third attempt at the White House. Just remember something: He got fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a lot fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020.

Truly astounding.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news, political news

Wait for RINO epithets

Wait for it. They will come in due course, if they haven’t already been pouring in at Liz Cheney’s congressional re-election campaign office.

Rep. Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, is featured in a political ad in which he calls Donald J. Trump the “greatest threat to democracy” in the nation’s history.

You know what’s coming next, right? There will be exclamations from the Trump cultists that Dick Cheney’s views don’t matter, and that he’s a Republican In Name Only. Yep, Daddy Dick Cheney is a RINO in the eyes of those who continue to coalesce around Donald Trump.

Dick Cheney proclaims his pride in his daughter Liz’s efforts to expose Trump as the crooked fraud that he is.

The elder Cheney is trying to get his daughter re-elected to the House seat from Wyoming, the very seat Dick Cheney occupied before he left Congress to become White House chief of staff for President Ford. He then served as defense secretary for President George H.W. Bush before being tapped to run as VP with “W.”

The thing is, Dick Cheney also is right when he calls Trump a “coward” because he lies to his supporters about the so-called theft of the 2020 presidential election. The former VP says, instead, that Trump is the electoral thief, seeking to reverse the results of an election he lost handily.

I haven’t cheered much for Dick Cheney ever since he coerced President George W. Bush into going to war with Iraq on the false claim that the Iraqis played a role in events of 9/11; they played no role!

However, the ad he has participated in on behalf of his daughter give me pause to offer some much-appreciated praise for the man once called “the shadow president” during the two terms of the Bush administration.

Will the ad turn the tables and breathe enough life into Cheney’s campaign to resurrect it? It’s not likely. Then again, we ought to consider tossing the conventional political playbook into the crapper.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump

Cheney appears doomed

Liz Cheney is facing the mother of all conundrums as she seeks re-election to another term in the U.S. House of Representatives from Wyoming.

You see, Cheney serves on that select House committee searching for the truth behind the 1/6 insurrection. She has been highly critical of Donald J. Trump and his role in revving up the crowd to assault the nation’s Capitol Building on the day Congress was certifying the Electoral College results from the 2020 presidential election.

Cheney has managed, therefore, to anger many of her constituents for simply speaking truth to power.

I fear we are going to witness in a few days a political bloodletting that will occur for all the wrong reasons.

Cheney appears headed for defeat in the GOP primary in Wyoming. Trump has endorsed a fellow cultist to defeat Cheney. Never mind that Cheney voted with the Trump administration more than 90% of the time during Trump’s term in office. Or never mind that she remains as fervently conservative in her views as ever.

Her “sin” is that she believes Trump was wrong to rile up the crowd, sending them into battle to take down our government on 1/6.

“She’s done us dirty,” said Sharon Tuggle, who identified to CNN as a Trump supporter. “Look at how she’s done Trump.” Tuggle added that Cheney lost her vote because of the congresswoman’s work on the Jan. 6 committee.

“She’s supposed to be supporting him,” said Tuggle. “She’s a Republican for crying out loud.”

“I find her work on the Jan. 6 committee just repulsive,” said another female voter.

OK. Let me spell this out one more time. Cheney’s oath didn’t mention Trump. She took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, not Trump. That is what she is doing. She isn’t loyal to Trump. It’s the Constitution that deserves the undivided attention of all 535 members of Congress.

Be strong, Rep. Cheney. You have plenty of allies — such as yours truly — out here beyond your state’s borders.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

How does this clown do it?

For the ever-lovin’ life of me I cannot understand a key element of the contemporary political landscape.

It is this: How in the world does Donald J. Trump remain a “player,” someone the media are obsessed with in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election campaign season?

There appears to be a growing probability that Justice Department sleuths are going to find enough to indict the former president on charges that could include conspiracy to commit sedition.

Indeed, it well might be that the 76-year-old huckster who masqueraded as our commander in chief is going to spend the rest of his sorry, crooked, corruption-filled life as a criminal defendant.

Let us remember something about the damning testimony we have heard in recent weeks implicating Trump as a conspirator in the 1/6 insurrection: Every witness, almost all of whom are Republicans, delivered their evidence under oath; they took an oath that states that if they were not truthful, they faced criminal prosecution on charges of perjury.

Trump is now reportedly considering a third run for the presidency. He failed to get more actual votes than either Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020. He sneaked into the White House by a fluke victory in the Electoral College.

Then he got impeached twice. Once on a charge of soliciting a political favor from a foreign government and once on inciting the all-out attack on our government. No need to remind me that he avoided conviction on either count.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said he will pursue “anyone” who is criminally complicit in the effort to interfere with the “peaceful transition of power from one administration to the next.” Donald John Trump sought to interfere in that process. What in the name of democracy is going to prevent a felony indictment against this clown?

And yet … he remains a player in the 2024 presidential campaign. I hear serious political observers say with a straight face that this twice-impeached narcissist is the GOP favorite to be nominated in two years.

I am baffled to the point of madness.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Cheney standing tall

It’s getting harder by the day for me to dislike U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, the conservative Wyoming lawmaker who is distinguishing herself by being one of the few Republicans in Congress who is willing to speak the unvarnished truth about Donald J. Trump.

She calls him — in no particular order — an existential threat to our democracy, a danger to the nation, a pathological liar, someone who has “no business being anywhere near the White House.”

There’s some other stuff, too, but you get my drift.

I once despised Liz Cheney. I didn’t like it when she declared her candidacy for Wyoming’s only House seat; I said at the time that she was a carpetbagger who spent hardly any time in the state her dad, Dick Cheney, represented during his House tour.

She’s also a bit too right wing for my taste.

Then along comes The Donald, who torches the Constitution and all but disavows the sacred oath he took to defend it. Cheney said, “That’s enough.”

She has said time and again that the sacred oath must stand over any fealty to a politician. Cheney also said that her work on the House select committee examining the 1/6 insurrection fills her with pride in the duty she is performing in seeking the truth behind the attack that Trump incited.

Win or lose in her August GOP primary in Wyoming, Cheney said she will remain committed to the task before her. “The sun will come up the next morning,” she said, and she will keep pursuing her effort for the truth behind the attack.

Normally, a politician who vows to do his or her job isn’t worthy of extraordinary praise. The context of this time, though, makes it different. That context compels me to offer the highest praise I can to a politician who is showing exemplary courage.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Uncategorized

Bannon bellows utter bullsh**

Steven Bannon strode before some microphones outside the courthouse where today he was convicted of two counts of contempt of Congress and then bellowed one of the more ridiculous pronouncements I ever have heard.

“I stand with Donald Trump,” Bannon yelled, “and with the Constitution.”

Roll that one around, OK?

Has there been a president of the U.S.A. who understands less of the Constitution than Donald J. Trump?

The testimony we have heard from the 1/6 House select committee tells me that Donald Trump shattered the oath he took to be loyal to the Constitution and to democracy.

Well, suffice to say only that Donald Trump and Steven Bannon deserve each other.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot, national news

Hearings have changed my mind

No one has asked me my opinion on whether the 1/6 insurrection hearings conducted by the House select committee has changed my mind about what happened on that horrible day.

I am going to offer an opinion anyway.

Hell yes, I have changed my mind on the insurrection. After listening to several days’ worth of testimony, I am even more convinced than before that Donald J. Trump needs to be charged with any variety of federal crimes.

I thought he was guilty long ago. I still believe in Trump’s guilt. What has changed, though, has been the passion with which I believe this stuff about the former POTUS.

Does that count as a “changed mind?” If not, then it should. Therefore, I will conclude that my mind has changed about who is responsible for the insurrection.

I believed in Trump’s guilt when the hearings started. I believe in them even more as they grind on toward a conclusion.

What never will change in my mind is a demand for accountability and a prison sentence if the ex-president ever gets convicted.

http://johnkanellis_92@hotmail.com