The Donald Trump Score Card

MAGA = Make America Gay Again


Trump's We Have to Keep Our Country Gay Gaffe Spurs Social Media

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“Remember I was going to say,” he continued, “I was going to use an expression: We have to keep our country gay.” Rather than correcting himself, he made a stuttering noise, followed by, “But I mean, it’s not, for some reason it’s not great anymore.”

 

Trump attorneys seen leaving DC court.

Trump is again trying to play obstruction after many subpoenas were issued by the DOJ.


Trump Lawyers Push to Limit Aides’ Testimony in Jan. 6 Inquiry

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"Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump are engaged in a behind-the-scenes legal struggle to limit the scope of a federal grand jury investigation into the role he played in seeking to overturn the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the matter.

The closed-door battle, unfolding in Federal District Court in Washington, has centered on how far Mr. Trump can go in asserting attorney-client and executive privilege as a means of keeping witnesses close to him from answering potentially damaging questions in their appearances before the grand jury, the people said.

The issue is important because it will determine how much evidence prosecutors can get from an inner circle of some of Mr. Trump’s most trusted former lawyers and advisers. The outcome will help to shape the contours of the information that the Justice Department will be able to gather, as it looks into Mr. Trump’s involvement in the chaotic events after the election that culminated in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

That process continues even as the Justice Department also pursues a separate criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of government documents that he took with him when he left office, including hundreds marked as classified."

 

Riggleman: White House switchboard called a Capitol rioter on January 6

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"Former senior technical adviser for the January 6 Committee, Denver Riggleman, said the White House switchboard connected a phone call to a Capitol rioter on January 6, 2021.

"You get a real 'a-ha' moment when you see that the White House switchboard had connected to a rioter's phone while it's happening," Riggleman told 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker. "That's a big, pretty big 'a-ha' moment."

Riggleman, an ex-military intelligence officer and former Republican congressman from Virginia, oversaw a data-driven operation for the January 6 committee, pursuing phone records and other digital clues tied to the attack on the Capitol. He stopped working for the committee in April."

 

Why Didn’t the FBI Review Social Media Posts Announcing Plans for the Capitol Riot?

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"According to reporters’ accounts of what happened on Jan. 6 and congressional testimony by high-ranking FBI officials, the FBI largely did not anticipate that the certification of the Electoral College vote that day might spark violence in Washington, D.C. The only document the FBI produced warning about Jan. 6 was a single bulletin issued by the bureau’s Norfolk, Virginia, field office. This absence of warning is particularly striking given that a significant amount of the planning for the Jan. 6 riot took place in public on social media platforms like Facebook, Gab and Parler. Anyone with a Twitter account and an hour of time to kill could have warned about the potential for violence on Jan. 6—and many did.

So how did the bureau miss all this? In testimony before Congress, FBI Director Christopher Wray and then-Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Jill Sanborn have explained that the problem stems from the FBI’s internal guidelines, which prevent FBI employees from examining social media except when certain conditions are met. “We’re not allowed to ... just sit and monitor social media and look at one person’s posts … just in case,” Wray told the House Judiciary Committee recently."

 

Why Didn’t the FBI Review Social Media Posts Announcing Plans for the Capitol Riot?

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"But there’s a problem with this explanation of the FBI’s failure: It’s deeply misleading.

"A close look at the internal Justice Department and FBI documents that constrain the bureau’s domestic operations suggests that nothing in the FBI’s guidelines prevented the organization from reviewing public social media posts by would-be insurrectionists. Whether or not agents and analysts did so is a different question—and as far as the public record shows, they didn’t. But unless a significant change has been made to those guidelines since they were last made public, in 2016, FBI policy wasn’t what was holding the bureau back from looking.

The fact that Jan. 6 might be chaotic wasn’t exactly a secret. NBC reports that one person posting on the pro-Trump site TheDonald.win wrote in December, “If we occupy the Capitol building, there will be no vote.” Others posted suggesting blocking off the tunnels that connect the Capitol building to surrounding House and Senate offices and shared a map marking entrances and exits to the building. The New York Times describes how some Trump supporters posted pictures on Facebook of the weapons they planned to bring to Washington, D.C., for that day. And as Rohini Kurup and Benjamin Wittes noted on Lawfare, “prominent supporters of Trump … used metaphors of war to describe what would happen on Jan. 6.”"

 

Mental breakdown?

 

Why Didn’t the FBI Review Social Media Posts Announcing Plans for the Capitol Riot?

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"In other words, Wray is correct that the bureau needs an authorized purpose to review social media, and that First Amendment considerations are involved. But his testimony leaves out the fact that the DIOG specifically authorizes FBI employees to review social media posts potentially protected by the First Amendment under certain circumstances—circumstances that could well have been met in the case of the soon-to-be Capitol rioters. After all, wouldn’t Facebook posts announcing plans to invade a government building raise criminal or national security concerns under the FBI’s definition of “authorized purpose”?

What’s more, both Wray’s and Sanborn’s comments ascribe a level of difficulty to meeting the standard for an authorized purpose, assessment, or predicated investigation that just isn’t there. The guidelines aren’t nothing—they were developed to prevent the FBI from beginning investigations based on air. And the First Amendment protections are there for a very good reason. But the bar for opening a preliminary investigation—“‘information or allegation’ indicating” that “[a]n activity constituting a federal crime or a threat to the national security has or may have occurred, is or may be occurring, or will or may occur…”—is not high; the bar for an assessment is even lower."

 

Why Didn’t the FBI Review Social Media Posts Announcing Plans for the Capitol Riot?

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"To what extent did the bureau’s lack of action stem from a cultural unwillingness within the organization to recognize the potential danger of extremism among a politically right-wing group that is largely white? How much did it stem from a desire within the FBI, on both individual and institutional levels, to avoid angering the president by investigating his supporters—especially when the president had made very clear how far he was willing to go to punish those in the FBI who had led the Russia investigation in its earliest stages? Was the FBI simply unprepared for, or unwilling to countenance, a potential riot egged on by the chief executive himself?"

 

Trump — who once endorsed DeSantis as his 'great friend' — slams the 'ungrateful' Florida governor, saying 'I made him,' report says

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"Privately, Trump now lambasts the man he once referred to as his "great friend," calling the Florida governor "ungrateful" for his earlier endorsement, The Washington Post reported.

"I made him," The Washington Post reported Trump told his aides while monitoring DeSantis' public appearances and polling numbers."

 

Trump Is Battling a New York Law Used to Take on Corporate Giants

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"Like thousands of earlier actions by the attorney general’s office — including those against the oil giant Exxon Mobil, the global bank UBS, the tobacco company Juul, and Mr. Shkreli and his former pharmaceutical company — Ms. James’s lawsuit against the Trumps hinges on a muscular law that provides her office with an upper hand when investigating and punishing corporate wrongdoing.

The law, enacted nearly 70 years ago when Jacob K. Javits was New York’s attorney general, has become a mainstay of the office. It has been central to a wide range of recent civil actions that have reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements.

Ms. James’s lawsuit is not Mr. Trump’s first run-in with this particular statute; her predecessors employed it in legal actions against his for-profit education venture, Trump University, and his family charity, the Trump Foundation, both of which paid millions of dollars to resolve the cases. (The foundation was also dissolved)."

 

Trump-endorsed candidates, Lake and Masters, and the GOP in general are quiet about reinstatement of AZ law banning abortion in nearly all cases.


GOP quiet as Arizona Democrats condemn abortion ruling

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"Arizona Democrats vowed Saturday to fight for women's rights after a court reinstated a law first enacted during the Civil War that bans abortion in nearly all circumstances, looking to capitalize on an issue they hope will have a major impact on the midterm elections.

Republican candidates were silent a day after the ruling, which said the state can prosecute doctors and others who assist with an abortion unless it's necessary to save the mother's life. Kari Lake, the GOP candidate for governor, and Blake Masters, the Senate candidate, did not comment.

Katie Hobbs and Kris Mayes, the Democratic nominees for governor and attorney general, implored women not to sit on the sidelines this year, saying the ruling sets them back more than a century to an era when only men had the right to vote.

“We cannot let (Lake) hold public office and have the power to enact extreme anti-choice policies that she’s spent her entire campaign touting,” Hobbs said during a news conference outside the attorney general's office. “As Arizona’s governor I will do everything in my power and use every tool at my disposal to restore abortion rights in Arizona.”

The ruling presents a new hurdle for Republicans who were already struggling to navigate abortion politics. It fires up Democrats and distracts attention from the GOP's attacks on President Joe Biden and his record on border security and inflation less than three weeks before the start of early and mail-in voting, which are overwhelmingly popular in Arizona."

 

Elton John, a Favorite of Trump, Performs at the Biden White House

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"The two men enjoyed friendlier relations before the Trump presidency: Mr. John sang at the wedding of Mr. Trump and Melania Knauss in 2005. And when Mr. John wed his longtime partner, David Furnish, in a civil ceremony, Mr. Trump offered public congratulations: “If two people dig each other, they dig each other. Good luck, Elton. Good luck, David. Have a great life,” Mr. Trump wrote in a blog post, which has since been taken off-line.

But as Mr. Trump grew more involved in politics, the singer he was so personally fond of began to publicly declare his support for Democrats. Mr. John, who played at a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival for the presidency, said that he had “fear for the world” if Mr. Trump were to win.

Mr. John told the news site Mic in the summer of 2016. “He’s already doing it.” The warning was prescient: After Mr. Trump’s election victory, his administration aggressively moved to strip away the rights of people in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community."

 

Trump and his lawyers keep ghosts of Nixon and Watergate alive and haunting

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"But they did not go to the judge who issued the search warrant or to one of the other federal judges in the same courthouse, the closest federal court to Mar-a-Lago. Instead, they went 70 miles to the outer edge of the same judicial district, where they might have hoped to find a more receptive judge. There their case was assigned to Federal Judge Aileen Cannon, still in just her second year on the federal bench. Cannon was one of the last of Trump's appointees to be confirmed by the Senate.

She gave the Trump team most of what they wanted, including an order that the Department of Justice stop looking at the documents they had seized or using them in any way. She also ordered appointment of a special master, directing Justice and Trump's team to each suggest two candidates. Trump's team rejected both of Justice's candidates, but Justice was willing to accept one of the two names offered from the other side. That's the one Cannon chose."

 

Trump and his lawyers keep ghosts of Nixon and Watergate alive and haunting

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"But then things began to go awry. On Tuesday of this past week, the special master Cannon chose, Raymond Dearie, came to court in Brooklyn N.Y. and told the Trump team they needed to show evidence for Trump's claim that the documents had been declassified. Trump's lawyers said they wanted to hold any such evidence back for now, to leave the question open and then possibly use the declassification issue as a defense later on.

Dearie would not let them have it both ways. The documents were either classified or they were not. Put up or shut up, some might say. "You can't have your cake and eat it, too," Judge Dearie said.

Later in the week, things got even more problematic for Trump when a three-judge panel on the Federal Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta overruled Judge Cannon and said the Justice Department could continue using the classified documents in its investigation after all."

 

Trump and his lawyers keep ghosts of Nixon and Watergate alive and haunting

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The 11th Circuit could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, so we await the result there. But we have seen some of Trump's three appointees on that court vote against him as well during his fruitless objections to the 2020 election outcome.

The momentum of the case is decidedly not encouraging from the standpoint of the former president. And his own lawyers strongly implied to Judge Dearie that they foresaw Trump dealing with an indictment in the document case.

 

Trump and his lawyers keep ghosts of Nixon and Watergate alive and haunting

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"The Nixon team had also thought they might find a relatively friendly courtroom when Federal Judge John J. Sirica took over handling the Watergate cases and trials. A former congressional staffer for Republicans, Sirica had been active in the GOP and rewarded with a federal judgeship in 1957 by Republican Dwight Eisenhower, while Nixon was vice president.

By 1972, Sirica was the senior judge on the District of Columbia circuit and could assign cases as he pleased. He assigned Watergate to himself. But from there on, nothing went quite as Nixon's team might have hoped. Sirica sentenced the president's chief of staff and his top domestic adviser to prison terms, along with Nixon's first attorney general and his former White House counsel and others.

Sirica was responsible for the pivotal ruling that Nixon could not claim executive privilege to withhold the critical tape recordings Jaworksi wanted to use as evidence at criminal trials. Sirica eventually ruled that the tapes also had to go to the House Judiciary Committee as it weighed Nixon's impeachment.

When Nixon took that on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Jaworksi presented the argument for Sirica's ruling and won a unanimous judgment (including the votes of three justices whom Nixon had appointed).

The tapes were released to Congress; and 16 days later, Nixon was gone."

 

Barnett had a walking stick with a stun gun built into it. He doesn't want the words 'stun gun' being used during his trial scheduled for December 12.

He doesn't want the words 'riot' or 'attack' to be used at his trial.

Barnett rejected a plea deal.


Bigo Barnett wants to cancel use of certain words in his trial for participating in Jan. 6 assault on Capitol

 

Declassifying by thinking about it and Hillary's emails at Mar-a-Lago.


Opinion | Trump's latest bad week was difficult to ignore — even for Fox News

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"You know you’re having a bad week when the Fox News interview positioned as your triumphant rebuttal makes you look somehow more guilty, and less tethered to reality. Such was the case last Wednesday night, however, when former President Donald Trump sat down across from staunch Fox News ally Sean Hannity — and proceeded to say some truly unhinged things. With Hannity showing off a poker face that would make a Las Vegas high roller weep, Trump proceeded to argue that he could maybe declassify documents with his mind, and speculated that the FBI could have been searching for a cache of Hillary Clinton’s emails at his Mar-a-Lago club. Or at least, that "a lot of people" were suggesting that scenario."

 

Right wing media is trying to paint it that way. Of course they'll take any incident twist it and lie about it. And their followers soak it up like gravy on bread

Patrol Captain Speaks on Polarizing Investigation