I Guess it's Time to Discuss January 6th

[dneal]

All for wandering around a building…

[Chuck Naill]

He was busy while wandering….😂
“ Doolin was found guilty on March 15, 2023, following a bench trial before U.S. District Court Judge Carl J. Nichols of civil disorder, a felony, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, and theft of government property.”

[dneal]

I don’t see any violent insurrection in that charge. I thought that’s what the Jan 6 committee claimed?

Taxpayers wandering around a building they pay for is a crime, when you have Trump Derangement Syndrome.

[Chuck Naill]

Here, since you can't read, "civil disorder, a felony, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, and theft of government property."

[TSherbs]

Damn! Prosecutors asking 33 years for Tario and Biggs!

<whistle>

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/0...jan-6-00111796

[dneal]

Here, since you can't read, "civil disorder, a felony, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, and theft of government property."

Yes, liberal prosecutors have shown themselves to be awfully creative with their trumped-up charges.

[724Seney]

Here, since you can't read, "civil disorder, a felony, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, and theft of government property."

Yes, liberal prosecutors have shown themselves to be awfully creative with their trumped-up charges.

This is all going to become like a bad Summer re-run. Again.
Once the power shifts in 2024 (which they are assuring it will), it will be fun to see these weasels cry, scream and express outrage about the "weaponized" judicial system.

[Chuck Naill]

Don't hold your collective breaths. I am very okay with never having supported or voted for Trump. Maybe it is called discernment that neither of you had.

If he is elected again, it will be because some military people think it is more honorable to not participate while others choose him over doing the right thing and voting for a Democrat or Repubican with character.

I've never complained about the judicial system except for the obvious Sessions and Barr bumbling about. Now Barr wants to redeem his legacy. Pence wants to appeal to Evangelicals. I just got a text from Asa.

[TSherbs]

Here is the entirety of a Jennifer Rubin article from WaPo, reviewing a legal paper submitted in the California Bar case against John Eastman. Ms. Rubin clearly explains the ramifications also for Mr. Trump and Mr. Chesebro:

washingtonpost.com
Opinion Eastman’s defense is shattered in state bar proceeding
By Jennifer Rubin|Aug. 28th, 2023

John Eastman, the lawyer allegedly at the center of the unprecedented and outrageous scheme to overthrow the 2020 election, faces criminal prosecution in Georgia and has been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal case. And Eastman must defend a bar complaint in California that threatens to revoke his law license.

At a critical hearing last week in the California bar proceedings, designated legal expert Matthew A. Seligman submitted a 91-page report, which I have obtained from the state bar, that strips away any “colorable,” or legally plausible, defense that Eastman was acting in good faith in rendering advice to the now four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump.
This report has serious ramifications for Eastman’s professional licensure and his defense in Georgia. Moreover, his co-defendant and co-counsel in the alleged legal scheme, Kenneth Chesebro, who has employed many of the same excuses as Eastman, might be in serious jeopardy in his Oct. 23 trial. (Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, also requested a speedy trial.)

In his report, Seligman addressed whether “the legal positions advanced by Dr. John Eastman in relation to the counting of electoral votes for the 2020 presidential election” were reasonable. Specifically, he assessed whether — as Eastman, Chesebro and others posited — Mike Pence, as vice president, had “unilateral authority to resolve disputes about electoral votes or to take other unilateral actions with respect to the electoral count” or could “delay the electoral count for a state legislature to take action with respect to a state’s electoral votes and whether a state legislature may lawfully appoint electors after the electoral count commences.”

Seligman reviewed the 12th Amendment, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and “centuries-long practice by Congress” to find that the Eastman positions were so devoid of support that “no reasonable attorney exercising appropriate diligence in the circumstances would adopt them.” In essence, Seligman strips away the pretense that Eastman (and, by extension, Chesebro) engaged in routine legal work.

Seligman’s report echoes the finding of U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter, who, in a matter concerning Eastman’s claim of attorney-client privilege to protect documents from the Jan. 6 House select committee, found that it “more likely than not” that Eastman and Trump had engaged in criminal activity.

If one follows Seligman’s legal and historical analysis, one must conclude Eastman and his legal cohorts (including co-defendant Chesebro) likely knew that their “advice” was beyond the pale. “The historical record conclusively demonstrates that the President of the Senate holds no unilateral power to take any substantive action with respect to the electoral count,” Seligman wrote. “In particular, the President of the Senate holds no unilateral power to reject electoral votes, to resolve disputes about the counting of electoral votes, or to delay the counting of electoral votes.” He concludes, “Dr. Eastman’s decision to advance those unfounded legal positions as part of an attempt to reverse the lawful result of a presidential election violates fundamental precepts of American democracy.”

In oral testimony, Seligman reiterated: “No vice president in American History has ever rejected a single slate of electors.” He likewise confirmed that no vice president had ever delayed the congressional proceeding for any reason.

Seligman’s damning report might well determine the outcome of Eastman’s bar proceedings. However, the implications of the report extend well beyond Eastman’s law license. For example:
If Eastman engaged in a bad-faith scheme to overthrow the election, then he (and presumably other co-defendant lawyers) lacked any colorable defense under federal law and therefore cannot remove their case to federal court.

If Eastman engaged in a bad-faith scheme to overthrow the election, none of his or other lawyers’ conversations are protected under the ambit of the First Amendment any more than a memo explaining how to break into a bank would be.

If Eastman engaged in a bad-faith scheme to block the certification of the election, then one could conclude he and others in the alleged “criminal enterprise” had the requisite criminal intent for state charges including a state racketeering charge.

The significance of stripping away the legal plausibility of the cockamamie scheme to undermine our democracy cannot be overstated. Consider how Seligman’s conclusion shatters not only Eastman’s but also Trump’s most likely defenses.

Trump’s claim of absolute immunity under Nixon v. Fitzgerald requires that his alleged conduct be within the “outer perimeter” of the president’s “official responsibility.” If the entire scheme was not even legally plausible, then certainly Trump’s maneuvering (plus the lack of any constitutional role for the president in certification) must fall outside the outer perimeter of his responsibilities.

Likewise, Trump’s defense under the Supremacy Clause (In re Neagle) also collapses if you follow Seligman’s reasoning. A massive report on Georgia liability by the Brookings Institution explained: The federal official is not immune from state criminal prosecution “simply because of his office and his purpose,” but instead must meet two conditions: 1) the federal official must have been engaged in conduct authorized by federal law or the Constitution; and 2) the official must have done no “more than what was necessary and proper” to effectuate his federal duty. In other words, a federal officer must actually act pursuant to federal authority, and their conduct must bear an objectively reasonable relationship to achieving a federal goal.

Trump’s engagement in a patently unreasonable scheme would deprive him of the protection of the Supremacy Clause.

And should Trump try to follow other defendants attempting to move the case to federal court, the Seligman analysis would destroy the basis for that request. Under the federal officer removal statute, he could not have acted under “color of office” nor have a colorable federal defense (e.g., absolute immunity, First Amendment, Supremacy Clause). He would have to defend his case in state court.

One additional point is critical: If Eastman’s scheme was patently absurd, a Trump defense based on “advice of counsel” (requiring reasonable advice) would be invalid, especially when a fleet of other attorneys made clear the scheme was illegitimate.

These defenses will soon be tested in Georgia in the Chesebro case. In less than two months, the criminal justice system could render the first decision on whether the defenses offered by these lawyers and their client, Trump, will hold water. (And if these are issues of law, the judge could dispense with them before Trump’s case gets to a jury.)

In short, if Seligman is right, Eastman’s legal goose — as well as Chesebro’s and Trump’s — might be cooked.

[Chip]

In the Georgia case, Mark Meadows is claiming that his phone call (with Trump) to Raffensperger, and also his clandestine visits to Georgia voting offices were part of his executive duties.

Yeah, right.

[TSherbs]

Yes, and, of course, White House personnel are not, by law, supposed to be working for a campaign effort.

The article just above addresses the same point.

Some gooses are getting warm.

[Chuck Naill]

Looks like Ruby Freeman is going to get her pound of flesh. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/us/ju...on/ar-AA1fZXnH

[Chip]

Giuliani's posh NYC apartment is for sale.

[TSherbs]

17 years for Biggs!

NPR News:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/31/11969...6-joseph-biggs

[TSherbs]

More "consequences":

from WaPo

Opinion Giuliani and Navarro know it now: The Trump reckoning has begun
By Ruth Marcus|Aug. 31st, 2023

The Trump reckoning, long in coming, has arrived — and not just in the array of criminal cases against the former president himself. A pair of powerful rulings in civil cases against two top Trump advisers offers another illustration of how the court system can stand up against the sheer lawlessness of such behavior.

For years, the Trump way — ignore lawful subpoenas, assert unfounded exemptions from compliance and generally run out the clock on legal claims — has been distressingly successful. Stonewalling has proved a particularly successful strategy in the face of congressional investigations.

But that approach has its limits, on welcome display this week in D.C. federal court, where two judges rendered powerful rulings against Trump advisers Rudy Giuliani and Peter Navarro that amounted to: Stop this nonsense. It’s not nice to fool with federal judges. They possess the power to rule against you, especially when you push the limits.

This week’s first case in point is U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell, presiding over a lawsuit brought by two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, who claim Giuliani defamed them when he accused them of tampering with the election results. Giuliani, through his own obstructionism, managed the feat of losing the case before it went to trial. Howell simply ruled against Giuliani, citing his repeated and flagrant failure to comply with his legal obligations to turn over relevant information to the other side.

An experienced lawyer and prosecutor, Giuliani nonetheless “has given only lip service to compliance with his discovery obligations and this Court’s orders by failing to take reasonable steps to preserve or produce” information, wrote Howell, an Obama appointee. “Instead, Giuliani has submitted declarations with concessions turned slippery on scrutiny and excuses designed to shroud the insufficiency of his discovery compliance.”

Howell’s bottom line: Giuliani gets to go to trial — but only on the question of how much money he owes. “Rather than simply play by the rules designed to promote a discovery process necessary to reach a fair decision on the merits of plaintiffs’ claims, Giuliani has bemoaned plaintiffs’ efforts to secure his compliance as ‘punishment by process,’” Howell wrote. “Donning a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences, but in a court of law this performance has served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straightforward defamation case, with the concomitant necessity of repeated court intervention.”

Facing criminal charges in Georgia and other civil lawsuits, Giuliani might have had strategic reasons for sitting on potential evidence, Howell noted, but that isn’t her concern. “Withholding required discovery in this case has consequences.”

Consequences. How sweet a word. We don’t want judges issuing these default judgments cavalierly, but to read Howell’s 57-page opinion is to understand that this is not a judge acting out of pique or even exasperation — she’s protecting the integrity of the legal process.

As was Judge Amit P. Mehta, Howell’s district court colleague presiding over the criminal case against Navarro for contempt of Congress. A Trump economic adviser who became a player in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results, Navarro was subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Like several other Trump officials, Navarro asserted executive privilege and declined to appear. “President Trump has invoked Executive Privilege in this matter,” Navarro told the committee. “Accordingly, my hands are tied.”

The House voted to hold him in contempt. The Justice Department agreed to prosecute him; he was indicted on two misdemeanor counts, failing to produce documents and failing to appear for testimony. The trial is set for next week.

Mehta, ruling from the bench on Wednesday, said Navarro couldn’t use the executive privilege claim in defending himself because he hadn’t produced enough evidence — any evidence, really — that Trump had asserted executive privilege or ordered Navarro not to comply with the subpoena.

This is clearly correct. There’s no written instruction from Trump, unlike in the case of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and communications chief Dan Scavino. Trump hasn’t backed up Navarro’s claim of conversations in which Trump supposedly told him not to comply.

Executive privilege can be claimed only by the actual executive, not a subordinate asserting it for himself. And many legal experts believe the privilege belongs to the incumbent president and can’t be invoked by a president once out of office.

All this is bad news for Navarro’s ability to defend himself against charges that each carry up to a year in prison. But it is admittedly cold comfort for the Jan. 6 committee, which has been disbanded and won’t be able to obtain Navarro’s testimony; there’s no prospect that the House under current GOP leadership would move to do so now.

But, to echo Howell, consequences matter. If Navarro is convicted of contempt, there will be consequences for him — and an ominous lesson for future Navarros. Reckonings take time, but in a system governed by the rule of law, they eventually arrive.

Admittedly, I am a bit of a Marcus fanboy....

[TSherbs]

This spouse can't be the first to feel this way:
https://www.newsweek.com/capitol-rio...moment-1823557

[Chuck Naill]

That's awful. Imagine spending 12 years in prison for Donald Trump and knowing that he, so far, has escaped justice. The only way to make sure Trump pays for his crimes is to vote for someone who can win. We don't need a Ross Perot.

[TSherbs]

Nordean gets 18 years

Pezzola, 10 yrs

Pezzola, on way out of courtroom: "Trump won!" Atta boy!

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-jud...ol-2023-09-01/

[TSherbs]

Interesting column from the Seattle Times on what we can learn from these Jan 6 trials:

www.seattletimes.comseattletimes.com
What we could all learn from the Proud Boys trials
By Danny Westneat|Sep. 2nd, 2023

There was a moment during judgment day for the Proud Boys, including for the Seattle-area leader Ethan Nordean, when a bright and basic line got drawn.

Nordean, the Proud Boy “war footing ground leader” from Auburn who was found guilty of seditious conspiracy for the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, had been arguing in court for leniency.

It wasn’t that violent that day, his lawyers said. Nordean only hurt some Capitol building security fences, not any people. Yes he was the guy with the bullhorn, and yes he wrongly led a band of 200 or so into the Capitol in a “stop the steal” uprising. But he was drunk, his lawyers said. And if you think about it, other Proud Boys argued, they were all victims — gulled, like tens of millions, by a con artist of a president.

“What they’re guilty of is believing a president who said the election had been stolen from them,” one of the Proud Boy lawyers said. “What reason did they have to know otherwise?”

Enough, said the judge.

“That day broke our tradition of peacefully transferring power,” summed up U.S. District Court Judge Tim Kelly. “It’s among the most precious things that we had as Americans. Notice I said ‘had.’ We don’t have it anymore. We can’t just snap our fingers and get it back.

“You’re going to have to be accountable for your role in that.”

With that, it felt like years’ worth of disorienting fog might be starting to clear a bit. At long last, a boundary was set. A limit reached.

Something does matter, it turns out. You can’t just shoot people on Fifth Avenue, metaphorically speaking, and then spin up an alternative reality distortion field about it. Actions matter.

Finally, some accountability.

I’ve been noticing this old concept creeping back into our unmoored public life, if ever so gingerly.

There’s the various indictments of former President Donald Trump for trying to subvert the democratic process. His henchmen and enablers also are finally being called to account, and in some cases even being held to it.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for example was just found by a court this past week to have defamed two Georgia election workers, after he had recklessly accused them of ballot fraud in 2020. It’s a relief to find that people can’t just concoct baseless smears to serve a quest for power. I’d become accustomed to assuming there are no guideposts in politics anymore — that they’re just going to get away with it.

The Proud Boys trials were a watershed in restoring some semblance of accountability.

On trial was this revisionism that Jan. 6 was just another protest, or as the GOP has called it, “legitimate political discourse.” But jury after jury, and now the judges too, have been clear-eyed about what it really was: a movement to use lies, fraud and force to stop the wheels of democracy.

Nordean and his pals were the muscle part of it. The ringleader got sentenced to 18 years in prison, shy of what federal prosecutors requested (27 years) but many times what Nordean thought he deserved (less than two years).

“Your upbringing was better in some respects — no criminal record, a job, people out there who depend on you, like a daughter,” the judge told Nordean. “It just makes this all the more tragic.”

It’s important to add: This judge was appointed by Donald Trump.

I’ve discussed in previous columns how verdicts and sentences like these ought to snap Republicans out of their cult-like Trump trance. The hearings this past week saw one Proud Boy after another sniffling, sometimes outright bawling, about how betrayed and leaderless they now feel. (Though some of that was phony, as one shouted “Trump won!” after getting his 10-year prison sentence — a show of just how deep this cult runs.)

For his part, Nordean was stoic but previously had lamented that Trump “left us on the battlefield, bloody and alone.”

Advertising

The entire GOP is going to be left bloody and alone if it doesn’t accept some responsibility for this era and move on from Trump.

But I also wonder about my own liberal tribe, and its sometimes tenuous relationship to this concept of accountability.

Can we push for, and then celebrate, righteous prosecutions and prison terms for right-wingers, when at the same time we refuse to hold people accountable for myriad crimes committed in our own cities?

Recently when I wrote how Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood is being destroyed by official neglect, some police officers and others in the criminal justice system said they feel there’s an implicit message to look the other way.

“The stuff you’re talking about in Little Saigon, the shoplifting, stolen property, theft, burglary, vandalism … the jail tends not to book for these, so there’s no incentive to investigate them in the first place,” one Seattle officer wrote.

I’m not saying that vandalizing a storefront is anywhere near as grave as storming the Capitol. Nor am I saying the justice system is unbiased or should be trusted uncritically; we’ve all watched it abuse people over the years, the most outrageous case being when police murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck.

But the answers can’t be to water down or completely abandon the principle of accountability. Or to disable the justice system. You can’t push for that and simultaneously cheer the long incarceration of some Proud Boys, in any case. That’s like the hypocrisy of the supposedly “law-and-order” Republicans, who are now calling for defunding the FBI.

One of the Proud Boys’ mottos, that they printed on T-shirts and chanted during the Capitol riot, was, ironically “[bleep] around, find out.” Of course they were the ones doing the bleeping around. And would be the last to realize they would be the ones finding out. To the tune of about 18 years.

It’s clarifying, this finding out. Some lever for getting back on track has been desperately needed in a nation going wide off the rails.

And if we’re honest, Seattle could stand to bring a bit of finding out back into our civic system as well.

[TSherbs]

Big implications for the primary!

NH AG reviewing challenge to Trump on ballot

Ethan DeWitt

New Hampshire Bulletin

The New Hampshire attorney general’s office is “carefully reviewing” the question of whether former President Donald Trump can run as a presidential candidate in the state, after one New Hampshire Republican argued that Trump’s role in encouraging the Jan. 6 protests that turned into an insurrection bars him from seeking office under the U.S. Constitution.

In a joint statement Tuesday afternoon following days of heated public discussion and a potential lawsuit, Attorney General John Formella and Secretary of State Dave Scanlan said the state’s Department of Justice was examining the issue.

“The secretary of state’s office has requested the attorney general’s office to advise the secretary of state regarding the meaning of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the provision’s potential applicability to the upcoming presidential election cycle,” the statement reads in part.

“The attorney general’s office is now carefully reviewing the legal issues involved.”

The confusion arose after a group of conservative lawyers penned an article earlier this month arguing that the 14th Amendment precludes Trump from running for re-election.

Section 3 of that amendment reads: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

The legal scholars have argued that Trump’s involvement in promoting theprotest event that turned into a riot in the U.S. Capitol – for which he is facing four federal criminal charges – qualifies as his having “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States, thus disqualifying him.

In an Aug. 22 radio interview, Corky Messner, a prominent New Hampshire Republican, cited that legal analysis and said he agreed that Trump was disqualified, the Boston Globe reported. Messner ran for U.S. Senate in 2020 against Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, and secured Trump’s endorsement at the time.

Messner has since told WMUR that he is weighing a legal challenge to prevent Trump from appearing on the ballot, and that he was considering financing the effort himself.

The proposal prompted a flurry of calls Monday from supporters of Trump to the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s Office, NBC News reported.

Scanlan has said he is looking into the proposal. But on Tuesday, he and Formella pushed back on the perception that they had decided to bar Trump from the ballot.

“Neither the Secretary of State’s Office nor the Attorney General’s Office has taken any position regarding the potential applicability of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to the upcoming presidential election cycle,” the statement reads.

This story was originally published by New Hampshire Bulletin.