Tag Archives: MAGA

crime news, national news

Will a competent jury be found?

One of the mysteries of this nation’s criminal justice system has to be the selection of competent jury panels to try cases that are on the top of everyone’s mind.

Hence, it is with a significant degree of confidence that I will assert that the federal government will be able to try its case against Donald J. Trump in front of a competent panel of jurors, whether it’s in Florida or New Jersey or in Timbuktu.

The burden for convicting Trump of any of the various crimes he has been charged with committing is high. The Justice Department team led by special counsel Jack Smith has to prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The verdict must be unanimous. If a single juror holds out, we have a mistrial on our hands.

The only possible glitch that could occur — as I see it through my untrained, non-lawyer’s eyes — is a juror who is so wedded to Donald Trump that he or she cannot be persuaded to follow the evidence.

Then again … during the jury selection process, it seems unfathomable to me that such a juror would be seated to hear the trial in the first place.

The legal teams have to agree on a panel comprising individuals who truly are neutral, who have no bias, who can hear the evidence as if they are hearing it for the first time … and then deliver a verdict.

That all said, I must declare that I never in a million years could clear the jury selection process. My own bias is so abundantly clear that any lawyer worth a damn would disqualify me the moment I opened my trap.

That leaves the door open to anyone else who might not have read a single thing about Trump’s alleged crime of squirreling classified documents from the White House and blabbing to visitors about having these sensitive papers.

The beauty of our system of criminal justice is that such a jury panel can — and likely will — be found. Yeah, it’s a mystery … which makes it all the more remarkable.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump, military news, national news

The circle tightens around Trump

As the world learns more about the allegations involving the classified documents that ended up in Donald Trump’s Florida mansion, the keener the perspective becomes on what kind of individual served for a term as commander in chief.

Let’s look briefly at his disdain for the men and women who work in our intelligence community and who risk their lives to protect our lives.

We have learned that Trump exposed these documents to guests at his Florida estate who had no security clearance. He boasted about having them illegally, even calling attention to their sensitive nature.

He could have put people’s lives in jeopardy. He could have risked their lives … and to what end? To make himself look good in front of his friends? To satisfy his juvenile ego?

Trump clearly has no appreciation or understanding of the risks that these individuals take. Nor does he honor the sacrifices many of them have made in service to their country.

I flash back now for just a moment to the day of his inauguration. He went to CIA headquarters and stood in front of a wall containing stars symbolizing the agents who died in the line of duty. Did the new president honor them? Did he salute their service? Did he bow his head in silent prayer?

No! He instead boasted about the size of the crowd attending his inaugural speech, which we would learn later was seriously inflated.

This man lacks any empathy gene that would seem to be required of someone serving as our head of state. Many of us knew this all along. Some of us even warned the public that Trump’s entire professional life had been geared toward self-aggrandizement.

The indictments and the evidence we are seeing that led up to them are providing proof of what we have known all along. This individual is unfit for public office!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Smith must be drooling

Jack Smith, the young man hired by Attorney General Merrick Garland to examine the alleged crimes of a former POTUS, appears to be a serious lawyer who is every bit as meticulous as the fellow who appointed him to this key task.

However …

The career prosecutor must be salivating at the revelations he has uncovered related to Donald Trump’s pilfering of classified documents, which he stashed at Mar-a-Lago as he was departing the White House in January 2021.

Now we have audio recordings of Trump showing off highly sensitive documents to a White House “staffer,” telling this person that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Mark Milley, had given him plans to attack Iran.

What the hell?

This is the idiot that the MAGA Morons want to return to the White House in 2024? Good ever-loving God in heaven. What in the world will it take to knock sense into the noggins of the cultists who continue to say the world would be a better place with Trump in charge?

My astonishment level seems to be as boundless as Trump’s ignorance of the crimes he has been indicted for committing.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Judicial icon speaks out; pay attention, GOP

Leave it to one of the nation’s great legal minds to offer the bold, brash and unvarnished truth to those who have tossed aside their loyalty to the Constitution in favor of loyalty to a cheap politician.

Michael Luttig is a retired federal judge, a keen conservative legal thinker. He has zeroed in directly on the cult following that Donald J. Trump has developed and is cultivating in his quest for the presidency in 2024.

Listen up, you MAGA morons. He’s telling you the truth.

“If the indictment of Mr. Trump on Espionage Act charges – not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the president on Jan. 6 – fails to shake the Republican Party from its moribund political senses, then it is beyond saving itself. Nor ought it be saved,” Luttig said in a scathing New York Times op-ed published Sunday.

Wow! He’s got plenty more to say.

“No assemblage of politicians except the Republicans would ever conceive of running for the American presidency by running against the Constitution and the rule of law. But that’s exactly what they’re planning,” Luttig wrote.

To be brutally honest, this fealty to Trump — the twice-impeached, twice-indicted for POTUS — boggles my noggin beyond all recognition.

Trump has pledged to select a special counsel whose task will be to root out “the most corrupt president” in history. Trump isn’t talking about himself, although he damn sure should be. Oh, no. He vows to find a prosecutor to go after President Biden. That is the hallmark of a tinhorn dictator.

Judge Luttig isn’t some squishy liberal, some progressive bomb thrower. He is a highly regarded conservative legal expert who is siding with the rule of law and the notion that public officials — starting with the president of the United States — take sacred oaths to protect the Constitution.

He wonders what has become of the party of which he has been a member. “The stewards of the Republican Party have become so inured to their putative leader, they have managed to convince themselves that an indicted and perhaps even convicted Donald Trump is their party’s best hope for the future,” Luttig wrote in his op-ed.

Is anyone out there in MAGA Land going to pay attention?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

Prosecutor seeks postponement … good!

If you thought that special counsel Jack Smith was going to railroad a trial through to its conclusion by accepting a judge’s way-too-early court date, well, guess again.

Smith has asked the judge in the case involving Donald Trump and those classified documents to push the trial back to Dec. 14.

You know what it tells me? It tells me that Smith is so confident in the evidence he has gathered that he is willing to wait an extra few months to put his case before the people.

He also is exhibiting an extraordinary level of fairness to Trump and his legal team. There can be no doubt that Smith is playing his strategy out by the book. That he is leaving no room for appeal on any sort of “technicality” that Trump’s team might construe in the event Smith is able to get a conviction on any of the counts on which Donald Trump stands indicted.

As a cheap-seat witness to all of this, I am willing to wait until December to see what the federal government has in its first-ever indictment of a former POTUS.

Let’s allow the judicial process to do its work.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

Anti-democrats: here and there

I have struggled — until just now — with trying to connect a few dots outlining the political alliances in this country and those that are playing out in the Kremlin and in Kyiv.

Here is what I have determined:

The forces that oppose democracy in Ukraine are being bolstered by those who oppose democracy in this country.  That’s it.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in early 2022 came with the tacit blessing of the MAGA morons and the ultra-right-wingers who questioned initially why the United States was just so damn committed to Ukraine.

You heard them, didn’t you? I surely did. They appeared on right-wing media outlets to suggest that American-led efforts to shore up Ukraine were being fed by a phony assertion that Ukraine wasn’t really a democratic state.

Who do you suppose led that amen chorus? Well, that would be the presumed front runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and the individual Joe Biden succeeded after the 2020 presidential election.

The MAGA cult is parroting many of the talking points coming from the Kremlin. And where is the outrage from the moronic right-wingers over the war crimes being committed against Ukraine by Russian military personnel? They have been silent!

This is all combined to suggest that small-d “democrats” — led by President Biden — are rallying to protect democracy as it is being pursued in Europe. They also are seeking to protect our governmental principles against the forces operating against it here at home.

Those who oppose democracy are fighting on the battlefield to defeat it in Ukraine; their American compatriots have stormed our nation’s Capitol Building to return a 2020 defeated candidate for president to the office he lost in a free and fair election.

The symmetry is quite stunning … don’t you think?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

There’s no ‘there’ to Biden probe

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Republicans in Congress have begun their expected yammering over the plea deal struck by Hunter Biden with the Department of Justice.

Biden, the son of the president, pleaded guilty to tax charges and to illegally purchasing a firearm. He won’t go to jail, assuming that a federal judge approves the agreement.

The GOP caucus in Congress is now alleging that Biden got away with something. I am forced to ask: What precisely did he escape?

Republicans vow to continue their witch hunt against Biden until they find something they can hang around his neck.

Let’s understand something about this whole matter. Republicans have been “investigating” Biden for many years, dating back to before his dad became vice president. Have they found anything on which to file charges? Any criminality discovered?

The answer: No! Nothin’, man.

They will come up with actionable accusations the same way they promised to do so with Hillary Clinton and the alleged crimes she committed while serving as secretary of state.

As Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, Calif.: There is no “there” there.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Keep your distance, Mr. POTUS

Joe Biden has issued a directive ordering White House staffers to maintain a vow of silence regarding the indictments surrounding his immediate predecessor as president of the United States.

The president did so as a show of respect for the isolation he honors between political matters and those involved with administering the rule of law.

Many Democrats want President Biden to speak out, to take the fight to the Republicans, to — in effect — ignore the isolation.

Wrong! That is a fool’s option.

It is clear that Biden’s predecessor never would honor such a principle. Indeed, he says if he’s elected (God forbid!) in 2024 that he’s going to appoint a special counsel to go after Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and possibly any other Democrat he considers a worthy target.

I will interject that the current special counsel, Jack Smith, was selected by Attorney General Merrick Garland, that the White House had no role in finding this individual. AG Garland felt the need to separate himself from the twin probes into the 1/6 assault on our government and the classified documents caper that has produced a 37-count indictment against the former POTUS.

I believe President Biden’s fealty to the rule of law must stand. He won’t offer personal comment on his predecessor’s plight. Nor should he.

Nor should the White House staff weigh in with cheap shots and innuendo. Let’s just allow the process to do its work … according to the United States Constitution, which all elected public officials take an oath to “defend and protect.”

As for the leading 2024 GOP pretender for the White House, let him yammer on. The more he says the deeper he seems to sink into an abyss from which he might not escape.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Sham ‘hearing’ worthy of scorn

You may take this straight to the bank because it is the unvarnished  truth, which is that I could have lived my entire life without hearing about a sham “hearing” conducted by MAGA cult members of Congress that actually saluted the criminals who stormed the Capitol Building on 1/6.

There they were: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar, among others, pretending to conduct a congressional hearing on the events of that terrible day.

All the while, the MAGA cultists insisted that the traitors who stormed the Capitol that day were being treated as political prisoners. The government, they said, wrongfully prosecuted them for crimes against our democracy because the 2020 election indeed was “stolen” from the guy who lost it legitimately.

What’s just as horrifying, of course, is that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who owes his speakership to these MAGA morons — let it happen in the first place.

None of these yahoos hold chairmanships in any actual House committee. The hearing they conducted today was made up to look like an official event, when in fact it was nothing of the sort. It was a staged propaganda performance designed to denigrate the prosecutions that have put many of the “witnesses” who spoke today behind bars.

And why are the convicted felons? Because they stormed the Capitol, assaulted police officers assigned to protect members of Congress from the frothing mob, they smashed windows, defecated on the floor of the Capitol Building and threatened to execute Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over a congressional hearing to certify the Electoral College results of the 2020 presidential election.

Oh, did I mention that that the Republican incumbent lost that election to Joe Biden?

The traitors who answered the call to assault the government from the guy who took an oath to “defend and protect” the Constitution do not deserve anything other than the nation’s scorn for the crimes they committed.

That goes as well for the president who incited them.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

military news

But … we’re doing that, Mr. VPOTUS!

While listening the other day to former Vice President Mike Pence declare his 2024 presidential candidacy, I was struck by a theme he kept harping on.

We need to do all we can to support democratic nations, such as Ukraine, he said. The United States must take the lead in helping Ukraine fend off the illegal and immoral invasion by Russian forces, he added. We need to stand for democracy in Europe, Pence said.

But … wait!

We’re already doing that, aren’t we? President Biden has not just said all of that but has persuaded Congress to spend a lot of money to arm the Ukrainians, to train them in using the equipment we’re providing them. He has imposed punishing economic sanctions on Russia, persuading our NATO and EU allies to go along.

The Ukrainians are — as near as many experts can tell — winning the fight in the field against a demoralized, under-qualified Russian invading force.

How is that? Because the United States has stepped up as the world’s pre-eminent champion for democracy!

What does Mike Pence think we should do differently than what we have done already?

For my money? Not a damn thing!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com