All Things Trump: the story continues...

[Sean Hayden]

--small government! Like, all in the hands of one person small? Who are these people...

--//--

What is the Trumper long-term vision --are they just shit stirrers looking to generate conflict they can exploit? They don't have in mind expanding a democrat president's power...so I guess Trump's just the last president, and it's the rapture sometime after that...

I think the agenda is not so much Trump as the last president, it's more sweeping. The rhetoric points to permanent minority rule of Christian Patriots, banishing to irrelevance (and in some cases prison) the godless baby-killing degenerates and groomers who've led America astray. Once that is accomplished, the majority of the country will wake from the delusions foisted on them by the Socialists and Enemies of the People, coming around at last to the right way of thinking.

Fairy tales aside, the real agenda appears to be regulatory capture writ large, instituted as standard policy of the federal government.

I guess they want it all. It already feels like every conflict between community and money ends with the community doing a little worse.

[JimC]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-30/ ... /102666100

A US federal judge has thrown out Donald Trump's $US475 million ($714 million) defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which the former president claimed the network's description of his election fraud as the "big lie" associated him with Adolf Hitler.

In a ruling late on Friday night, US Judge Raag Singhal, who was nominated by Mr Trump in 2019, said CNN's words were opinion, not fact, and therefore could not be the subject of a defamation claim.

[Tero]

Trump in Erie: "The Bidens got millions of dollars from Ukraine, now Ukraine gets billions of billions of dollars from the American taxpayer...Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional payment of our depleted stockpiles."

(COMMENT THERE: Every time there's much usage of American bombs & missiles, there are reports saying we're just about to run out of them.)

[Tero]

Trump now speaking to wife. She not clear on this democracy thing vs dictator.

"It's always unpleasant when you have to go in and tell your wife that, 'By the way, tomorrow sometime I'm going to be indicted,'" Trump told radio host John Fredericks on a July 28 episode of "The John Fredericks Show."

"And she says, 'For what?' And I say, 'I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea,'" Trump continued.

Trump has been arraigned in two separate investigations. In April, he was arrested and charged in connection with hush money payments made to the porn actress, Stormy Daniels. And in June, he was arraigned for a second time in Florida, and accused of mishandling top-secret information. Prosecutors say he violated the Espionage Act 31 times, and lied to the FBI.

[Tero]

4 more counts

[JimC]

The Deep State strikes back!

[Tero]

From Bella

[Tero]

The case is weighty, but its impact on the GOP primary could be light

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4 ... -election/

[Tero]

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reacts-j ... es-1816792
In the statement, Trump's representatives questioned the timing of the indictment and referred to it as a "disgraceful and unprecedented political targeting."

"The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes," the statement reads. "President Trump has always followed the law and the Constitution, with advice from many highly accomplished attorneys. These un-American witch hunts will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House so he can save our Country from the abuse, incompetence, and corruption that is running through the veins of our Country at levels never seen before."

[Tero]

You can't really claim incompetence and false charges. They are quite efficient with the false charges, week after week.

Hunter Biden still not charged. Hillary not in jail.

[Tero]

Seems a liitle odd in comparison. The Jan 6th case should have more years in comparison.

The documents case could be bargained to no prison.

[Tero]

Exploited violence.

McCarthy told Fox News Digital that Smith alleges that Trump "exploited the violence at the Capitol riot."

"That’s an unseemly thing for a prosecutor to do when he is not charging Trump with the Capitol riot," McCarthy explained. "Inconveniently for him, he has no evidence that Trump orchestrated them, or intended for them to do it."

McCarthy added that Smith put this into the indictment so he can argue that he "needs Capitol riot evidence in the trial."

"And then he’ll try to rush the trial in the run-up to the election," McCarthy said. "Then the American electorate will have Capitol riot imagery in the front of their minds as they go to vote in 2024."

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/legal- ... indictment

[Tero]

There was a bit more there:
Smith is using a statute enacted right after the Civil War, which was actually directed at violent intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan against Black voters in the South — which doesn’t have any connection to what we’re talking about here," McCarthy explained. "They applied that law to ballot box stuffing, so what Smith is trying to tease out of that case is what then-Justice Thurgood Marshall said in the 1960s: You don’t have to have violence. You just have to have activity that functionally cancels out people’s votes."

[Tero]

Shocking as it was, Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6 did not violate any laws in obvious ways.

He never directly told those at the Jan. 6 rally to attack Congress. During his speech that day, he even said he knew the protesters would behave “peacefully and patriotically.” It was part of a longstanding Trump pattern, in which — as my colleague Maggie Haberman puts it — “he is often both all over the place and yet somewhat careful not to cross certain lines.”

As for Trump’s broader effort to overturn the election result, no federal law specifically bars politicians from attempting to do so.

Without such a law, Smith has relied on a novel approach. He has charged Trump with committing criminal fraud and violating conspiracy laws that were not written to prevent the overturning of an election result.

A key part of these laws is that they revolve around a person’s intent. Intent is core to the notion of fraud: Only if somebody is knowingly trying to deceive others can he be committing a fraud. If he is spouting falsehoods that he genuinely believes, he isn’t participating in an illegal conspiracy.

That’s why this case seems likely to revolve around Trump’s state of mind. The first page of the indictment, referring to his claims of election fraud, states, “These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.” By contrast, Trump’s defense lawyers are likely to argue that he truly believed he had won. By airing his honest views, the lawyers will explain, he was exercising his right to free speech, The Times’s Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman write.

Legal experts are divided over the strength of the evidence on intent that Smith has presented. Some experts consider it strong, noting that the indictment cites repeated examples of White House aides and state officials telling Trump that he lost. Other legal analysts are more dubious because there is no testimony or recording in which Trump himself acknowledges the reality of his election loss. (Of course, Smith may have additional evidence that he did not include in the indictment.)

For now, you can think of the new charges as being both more important and less solid than Trump’s previous federal indictment, which involved his refusal to return classified documents. In the latest case, he was subverting the very foundation of democracy — the peaceful transfer of power after an election. Yet it remains unclear whether he broke any specific law when he tried to do so.

By David Leonhardt NYT

[Tero]

Trump: I'm bored.
Trump lawyer: But Hunter Biden!