Day: May 30, 2024

I hope you’re sitting down for this, but last week Donald Trump told a lie. Ok, so what else is new? Only, what makes this particular lie stand head and shoulders above the hundreds of other lies Trump told last week is that it was in extreme violation of his gag order in the Florida stolen classified documents case, and it carried with it a menacing provocation to violence and stochastic terror. Trump claimed that, while the FBI was executing the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2021, the FBI was also there to execute Trump.

“BREAKING FROM TRUMP: BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME,” Trump wrote. “It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DoJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago.” Trump was referring to standard boilerplate language that exists on all FBI search warrants. It said what it always says, that deadly force will be used in response to any attempted lethal attack on its agents. It’s the exact same language that was used on the search warrant executed on President Joe Biden and Vice President Mike Pence.

But Trump didn’t stop there. In a later fundraising email, Trump claimed, “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.” What Trump didn’t mention was that he was out of state at the time the FBI entered Mar-a-Lago. This was because, in a completely unprecedented (and, in my opinion, wholly inappropriate) move, the FBI warned Donald Trump’s lawyers that they were coming to execute a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago and requested that they ensure Trump was NOT at the property when the search took place. That’s some assassination plan!

In response to this dangerous and hysteria-laden outburst by Trump, and after conferring with Trump’s attorneys by phone, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion in Florida judge Aileen Cannon’s court to sanction Trump for violation of his gag order. Instead of granting Smith’s request, Cannon sanctioned him instead, saying the Special Counsel’s efforts were “wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy.”

So what was Cannon’s problem? Turns out that Trump’s lawyers wanted to sit down with the Special Counsel in person before he filed his motion, and not right away, and certainly not by phone, but after the holiday weekend, or maybe even a week after that. Given the gravity of Trump’s idiocitc proclamation and the urgency with which it needed to be addressed, Smith correctly decided that Trump’s lawyers were sufficiently briefed and went ahead with the motion. Cannon decided that was rude. You read that right, Cannon decided that provocative and dangerous language used against the FBI was no justification for not extending Trump’s lawyers their infuriatingly absurd and stupidly unnecessary extension.

“Cannon’s wildly lawless rejection of Special Counsel Smith’s clearly correct request for a gag order against fake and dangerous claims that the FBI was ordered to assassinate him is good news,” said Harvard University Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe. “It’s the smoking gun that will finally lead to her removal from the stolen secrets case.”

But will it? I think not. I think — and this is just my opinion — that Jack Smith wants to wait. While it’s true that the appearance of bias ought to be, technically speaking, enough to get a judge removed from a case, proving it in appellate court can be tricky. I think Smith wants to wait until he has a boatload of impropriety before filing a motion of recusal against Cannon, and Cannon is just stupid enough to keep filling up that board with more and more absurd reasons to justify it.

After all, what’s the hurry? Trump’s next case is probably going to be the Georgia election interference case. The documents case can wait until, say, October at the earliest. Between now and then expect Cannon to screw up many more times. And then it’s going to be “Goodnight Aileen.” And like it says in the old song of similar name, “I’m sorry you ever were born.” And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.

The post Goodnight Aileen Cannon appeared first on Palmer Report.

So rarely held to account, Trump has finally had a small taste of justice. This is a good day for American democracy

The former president of the United States, and the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 election, is now a convicted felon 34 times over. In New York on Thursday, 12 jurors found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying business records in order to influence the 2016 election. It is the first criminal conviction for Trump, who has also been charged with felonies in three other criminal cases currently underway in Florida, Georgia, and Washington DC. He is the first former president to ever stand trial on criminal charges.

The jury found that Trump, who denies the charges, falsified business records in 2016 and 2017, when he made a series of payments to his lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, to reimburse Cohen for a payment of $130,000 that he had made to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film actor, in exchange for Daniels’ silence about a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Paying Daniels to shut up, the prosecution had argued, amounted to a conspiracy to influence the election. Labeling the payments to Cohen, as Trump and his flacks did, as payments of Cohen’s “legal retainer” was a fraud committed in furtherance of that conspiracy.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

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Former President Donald Trump talks to reporters at the conclusion of the second day of jury selection for his criminal trial at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 16, 2024, in New York City.

Photo: Justin Lane-Pool/Getty Images

Donald Trump is running for president to stay out of prison. But what happens if he has to run for president to try to stay out of prison — while he is already in prison?

What if he is running from Rikers? 

On Thursday, that possibility became very real, very fast, after Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts in a case in New York state court. The jury only deliberated for a day before issuing a sweeping verdict convicting him of charges related to paying hush money to a porn actress. 

Trump is now a convicted felon in a very complicated legal situation, brought on by his utter disregard for the rule of law.

Over the past year, he has been facing criminal charges in four separate cases, but his defense has had very little to do with proving his innocence in any of them. The facts in all of the cases go against him, and he and his lawyers know it. Instead, his legal strategy has been to delay the cases until he can win the presidential election, and then quickly abuse his presidential powers in order to kill the two federal cases against him. 

The state cases, however, pose a greater threat to him, as he wouldn’t have any ability to pardon himself, should he win.

In state court in Georgia, where Trump is accused of election interference, he is relying on a friendly, Republican-dominated state legal and political system, where efforts are already underway to discredit the local prosecutor. If that doesn’t work, Georgia’s Republican-dominated pardon board (its members are appointed by the Republican governor) will probably find some legal loophole to help Trump wriggle out of any punishment, especially if he is elected president. 

Then there is New York. 

Trump was unable to bully the state’s legal system into delaying his case there, and the judge showed little patience for the antics Trump has employed with impunity in other legal venues. All of that helped guarantee that the New York trial would take place before the election, even as his other cases were delayed and faded from political view.

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When the state charges were first brought against Trump in New York, pundits with little understanding of the legal system immediately branded the case to be weak, overdrawn, and too complicated. But the basic facts of the case are actually straightforward, revealing a criminal conspiracy that was designed to help Trump win the White House in 2016. 

It wasn’t too weak, too overdrawn, or too complicated for the jury. 

Think back to Friday, October 7, 2016. In the closing weeks of the presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton, a Washington Post story was posted online that night reporting on a 2005 “Access Hollywood” video in which Trump talked openly about how he frequently groped women, adding that, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” 

Almost immediately, shocked Republican leaders began to call on Trump to drop out of the presidential race. It was the biggest crisis of the Trump campaign. 

Trump’s campaign barely survived. But what would have happened to Trump if other scandals had come out immediately after the “Access Hollywood” tape became public? What if the “Access Hollywood” tape was quickly followed by the revelation that Trump had paid to have sex with a porn actress while he was married? 

Trump engaged in a plot to secretly pay off the porn actress and bury the story. As part of the cover-up, he fraudulently falsified records about the transactions involved in his scheme. 

Charges related to that cover-up were at the heart of the New York state case, including the falsifying of business records in order to hide the fact that he paid back his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for his payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

To bolster the argument that Trump engaged in a wide-ranging fraud to hide damaging news in the middle of the presidential campaign, the New York case also featured the role of the sensationalist tabloid National Enquirer in the practice of the “catch and kill” of stories potentially harmful to Trump. David Pecker, the former chief executive of the company that owned the Enquirer, testified during the trial in New York that he was involved in three payments to silence people with negative information about Trump: a Trump Tower doorman who said Trump had an illegitimate child, a former Playboy model who had an affair with Trump, and Daniels. 

Sentencing in the case will be July 11 — less than a week before the Republican National Convention. 

The post These Convictions Thwart Trump’s Plan to Pardon Himself appeared first on The Intercept.

If Michael Cohen hadn’t started speaking the ugly truth about Donald Trump’s crimes awhile back, Trump might never have ended up on criminal trial in New York. But Cohen saw the process all the way through, from testifying to Congress, to testifying to a grand jury, to testifying in Trump’s criminal trial.

After the jury convicted Trump on all thirty-four felony charges, Michael Cohen posted this response: “Today is an important day for accountability and the rule of law. While it has been a difficult journey for me and my family, the truth always matters. I want to thank my attorneys @eDanyaPerry for her invaluable guidance and support throughout this process.”

Cohen is also set to appear on MSNBC tonight during the 8pm hour (eastern time). We imagine he’ll have plenty more to say at that point. But for now it’s clear that Cohen has been fully vindicated.

The post Michael Cohen speaks up after Donald Trump’s felony conviction appeared first on Palmer Report.