Tag Archives: insurrection

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.

national news

No moral equivalence

The “whataboutism gang” is alive and functioning fully in this age of deflection and distraction.

I wrote to a critic of my blog who challenged my assertion that the Republican Party has become the “party of rage.” He said Democrats and progressives remained silent when rioters burned office buildings and marched in city streets to protect government policies.

I wrote this: I have condemned the rioting that occurred. Let me be clear on this point: There can be no possible moral equivalence between what the street rioters did and what the traitorous mob did on Jan. 6. The Jan. 6 mob launched a full-on frontal assault on our nation’s government at the behest of the POTUS. Do not equate the events. Therein lies the reason for my description of the GOP as the “party of rage.”

My critic no doubt will respond. That’s his right and I welcome the exchange. I just have lost patience, though, with those who use the “whataboutism” dodge as a justification for what their guy says or does. They seek to point fingers away from their own heroes and toward those on the other side. It’s a distraction, pure and simple.

The whataboutism strategy generally comes from those who are desperate to make a case — any case! — in favor of their guy. That’s what I can surmise in this instance. Absent any credible defense against the charges leveled against their hero, the Donald Trump MAGA moron crowd is left to hurl epithets at those who demonstrate their own anger.

Except that in the instance to which I have referred, they aren’t even close to the same thing.

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

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

Mug shot makes history

The photo on the left has made history of a nature the subject of the picture likely never imagined it would make.

It is a mug shot taken of Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States, who today was arrested and then released from the custody of the Fulton County, Ga., sheriff’s office.

He is charged with crimes against the federal government.

I encourage you to look long and carefully at this picture. It made history the moment it was snapped. Trump is the first president of the U.S.A. ever charged with a felony.

It now likely becomes the foremost image of the 45th POTUS.

So … very … sad.

crime news, national news

Mug shot, fingerprints …

As I write these words, Donald J. Trump is being booked at the Fulton County, Ga., jail on charges that he sought to overturn a duly constituted federal election in 2020.

He will deliver his fingerprints, will get his picture taken, will post bail and then will go to wherever he intends to go.

It sounds all so very routine. Except that it isn’t. The defendant in this matter is a former president of the United States of America who allegedly sought to steal an election from the guy who defeated him, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Trump will be treated just like every other criminal defendant who’s been processed in this fashion. Which brings me to the beauty of our criminal justice process.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has declared many times that “no one is above the law.” He also has implied that no one should be treated more harshly than others. Donald Trump is getting precisely the treatment he deserves from Georgia officials who are running the show with this latest set of indictments against the ex-president.

I happen to be OK with the way this is being played out.

Let’s remember, too, that Donald Trump always has sought to portray himself of being charge of all he sees, does and touches.

Not … this … time!

What is remarkable — to my way of looking at it — is that the individual in charge of the proceedings happens to be a Black woman. Given the ex-POTUS’s open disdain for Black people and for women, it is remarkable that District Attorney Fani Willis would be the one to dictate the terms of what the former president is having to endure.

The irony is remarkable. Don’t you think?

So it will go as Donald Trump surrenders to the authorities on a charge of racketeering. His face is likely to be plastered on every newspaper on Earth the next morning, not because what he went through is so extraordinary, but because of who he is and what he has been charged with doing to the very government he once took an oath to “defend and protect.”

Let the due process continue.

crime news

Is Trump disqualified?

Can it possibly be true that Donald J. Trump’s conduct on 1/6 — his provoking the assault on our government and his giving “aid and comfort” to those who mounted the attack — has disqualified him from seeking the presidency?

That is the view of two highly esteemed legal experts. One of them is a conservative, the other is a liberal. They are, respectively, former U.S. District Judge Michael Luttig and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

The have written an op-ed in which they declare that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution means that Trump is hereby disqualified from seeking the presidency. Period … full stop!

Luttig said that when the amendment was ratified in 1868 — shortly after the Civil War — it made no qualifier to declaring someone ineligible if they knowingly engaged in an insurrection or rebellion. The amendment’s intent was to prevent another war within the United States.

Indeed, at least two congressional leaders — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell — are on record declaring that Trump was responsible for the attack on the government that sought to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election results. Oh, did I mention that Trump lost that election to Joe Biden?

They have been joined, interestingly, by a host of conservative legal scholars who contend that Trump, indeed, should be barred from the presidential ballot because of what he said that day on the Ellipse. He challenged the crowd to take control of the electoral process and stop the certification of what he contends to this day as a “stolen” election.

Two conservative law professors, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, wrote in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, according to CBS News:

In writing about Trump’s speech from the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, to his supporters who then overran the Capitol, Baude and Paulsen said Trump delivered a “general and specific message” that the election was stolen, calling on the crowd to take immediate action to block the transfer of power before falling silent for hours as the insurrection progressed.

“Trump’s deliberate inaction renders his January 6 speech much more incriminating in hindsight, because it makes it even less plausible (if it was ever plausible) that the crowd’s reaction was all a big mistake or misunderstanding,” they write.

Oh … my … goodness!

When those upon whom you depend for legal support turn on you in this fashion, it seems to me that it’s time to call it quits.

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.