Trump Leaving Office Poll (Part 2)

[beatbandito]

Democrats about Biden dropping out: "Trump will sue, they'll never be allowed on the ballot!"

Trump after Biden drops out:

[Mongrel]

They are legit mad that all their Hunter Biden money has been wasted now. Biden always could have had some kind of medical problem which forced him to drop and they still had no plan for Harris? lmao

The horrific attacks will come later (they've already started), but for now the pissbaby tantrum is delightful.

[Mongrel]

Not linking because for now the relevant clips are on Twitter, but some MAGA streamer just blew $100k on a wankpanzer wrapped in that photo of Trump getting shot, gifted it to Trump, and Trump's response was to start bitching about google image editing or something (confused Trump noises) and like, man, could it get any more quintessentially MAGA than that?

[Thad]

Smith's filed an appeal in the Florida stolen documents case and a superseding indictment in the DC election subversion case. The superseding indictment drops the components that are considered immune under the recent SCOTUS ruling.

I don't have a lot of faith that the SCOTUS that issued that ruling will uphold any conviction, but Smith's fighting the good fight here and that's worth doing no matter how it ends. (And who the hell knows, maybe we'll have a different majority by the time this is all done playing out. I won't get my hopes up, but in the scheme of things we've seen much less likely shit than a couple of septuagenarians dying in the time it takes a protracted legal case to get resolved.)

[Mongrel]

So Giuliani's bankruptcy filing was bounced out of court as a bad-faith filing. This apparently means that:

1. ALL of your personal property is subject to seizure
2. ALL of you real property is subject to turn over
3. ALL of your accounts receivable are subject to turn over

Couldn't happen to a niiiiiicer guy.

[Thad]

Merchan has rescheduled sentencing for after the election. It's fucking infuriating but, OTOH, I've been saying for months that the courts aren't going to save us and this is just the latest example.

I suppose on the plus side, it gives him less to work with on appeal. If that matters. With this SCOTUS, who knows anymore?

[Thad]

I'm still working my way through Smith's motion for immunity determinations but like the rest of his filings it's a thorough, easy-to-read historical record.

Aside from the redactions, which AFAICT are every name that isn't Trump, Pence, or a citation? Like, Kemp's name is redacted when it refers to Kemp as an individual but then unredacted in Trump v Kemp, in the same sentence, where it's quite clear they're referring to the same person, and Kushner's name is redacted even though he's referred to as "the defendant's son-in-law". I'm sure there are rules for what you're supposed to redact, and I'm sure they're following them, but as a layman I find it deeply silly and occasionally confusing.

The point of the whole exercise is to argue that Trump's not immune under the recent Supreme Court immunity ruling, that everything they're charging him with is either something he did in his personal capacity as a candidate or, if done in an official capacity, surpasses the ill-defined threshold of presumptive immunity.

They're fighting the good fight. I hope it's enough.

[Mongrel]

I think the main things which strike me out of the Jack Smith filing are: 1) However much bald-faced crime you thought there was, there's more, and 2) However close you thought a real coup d'etat was in the United States of America in 2020, it was closer.

I really hate to credit Pence, and even he's mainly just trying to tell Trump to wait until, well, 2024. But he did lay out his red line from the beginning, and refused to go along with Trump when Trump crossed that line. Virtually nobody else in there had any actual moral line of any kind, however low: It's all talk about structural problems, legal problems; how to get from where they were to where they wanted to be.

[Thad]

Sean Wilentz at the Atlantic: How Jack Smith Outsmarted the Supreme Court

I think the headline is kinda dumb but I think the article does a pretty good job summarizing the principal legal argument in Smith's motion.

[Thad]

1800 pages of Smith's appendices were released today.

Well, not all 1800 pages were published; there are probably hundreds of pages of redactions in there. But there's previously-unreleased information there, including transcripts of January 6 Commission interviews.

[Thad]

A judge has ordered a significant portion of Giuliani's property into receivership.

[Mongrel]

Platinum toupee rack
Dog-eared collection of vintage Hustler magazines
Closet full of bottles of embalming fluid
Assorted self-awarded trophies and medals
Nine shredding machines in various states of disrepair
Twenty-two fifty-gallon drums, fifteen of which are still full of Grecian Formula

[Mongrel]

Senators Ron Wyden and Jamie Raskin have requested the DOJ to name a special counsel to investigate whether Kushner is acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Saudi Arabia: https://finance.senate.gov/imo/media/do ... r_fara.pdf

[Mongrel]

A RUDY GIULIANI GHOST STORY.

On Halloween morning, a moving and storage company hired by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss arrived at Giuliani's NYC apt to plan the removal of his personal possessions. But when they arrived, they found the apt virtually empty!

Freeman and Moss learned from the realtor that Giuliani had removed most of his things, including the most valuable ones, from the apt four weeks ago—without informing Freeman and Moss. But where did Giuliani move them *to*? No one knew. Some were in Ronkonkoma, but no one knew the specifics.

"Days after representing to the Receivers and the Court that he was prepared to comply with the Turnover and Receivership Order, Defendant acknowledged that he does not actually know where the co-op share certificates or the proprietary lease actually are."

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap ... 7.81.0.pdf

[Mongrel]

EDIT:

NEW: Judge Liman REJECTS Rudy Giuliani's request to reschedule his hearing to do a Mike Lindell broadcast: "No good cause has been provided"

fucking l o l

[Thad]

Harry Litman: Constitution in Crisis #6: Playing a Bad Hand Well

I think it's a mostly-good look at why Jack Smith is doing the things he's doing, and a convincing argument that it's the best play he can make under the circumstances.

I think any talk of either federal case being revived someday is wishful thinking, but I appreciate Smith (successfully) moving for dismissal without prejudice because that's the right move and you make the right move even if it's not likely it'll ever come to anything.

I dunno. The next four years are going to be bleak but the more Trump flexes his muscles the weaker he looks. The same inertia that's been his advantage the past three-and-a-half years is going to be working against him now that he's back in power. I don't think he's going to get more popular once he takes office, and I don't know that most Republicans in the government are competent to do the kind of damage they want to do. Republicans couldn't accomplish shit (except, surprise! tax cuts for the rich) the last time they held both houses, and Johnson's majority is going to be smaller than Ryan's was.

And as inconvenient as it is that we have fifty different state electoral systems in this country instead of a single federal one, that's a double-edged sword: yes, it's allowed Republican state governments to stack the deck in their favor, but it also prevents a Republican federal government to do the same kind of meddling on a national scale.

There's a chance that our ailing institutions hold together enough that this is merely a dark time in American history and not the end of what democracy we have. It fucking sucks but I guess I'll take it.