The Loser loses again

[Chip]

Judge rejects Trump lawsuit against Hillary Clinton over 2016 Russia claims

Court ‘not the appropriate forum’ for former president’s complaint that Democrats unfairly linked his winning campaign to Russia

Reuters
Fri 9 Sep 2022

A US judge has dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton, saying the former Republican president’s allegations that Democrats tried to rig that election by linking his campaign to Russia was an attempt to “flaunt” political grievances that did not belong in court.

In throwing out Trump’s lawsuit on Thursday night, judge Donald Middlebrooks of the US district court for the southern district of Florida said the lawsuit was not seeking “redress for any legal harm” and that the court was “not the appropriate forum” for the former president’s complaints.

“He is seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him,” Middlebrooks said in his ruling.

Trump in March had sued Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, and several other Democrats alleging “racketeering,” a “conspiracy to commit injurious falsehood” and other claims in a 108-page lawsuit that echoed the long list of grievances he repeatedly aired during his four years in the White House after beating Clinton.

He had sought compensatory and punitive damages, saying he had incurred more than $24m in “defense costs, legal fees, and related expenses”.

In his ruling, Middlebrooks said Trump had waited too long to file his complaint by exceeding the legal statute of limitations for his claims and that he failed to make his case that he was harmed by any falsehoods, noting that many of the statements made by the defendants were “plainly protected by the First Amendment” of the US constitution governing free speech.

Representatives for Clinton and Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

Other defendants included Democratic representative Adam Schiff, who led one of the US House of Representatives’ two impeachments against Trump, and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who wrote a dossier circulated to the FBI and media outlets before the 2016 election.

US intelligence officials and others in the US government have accused Russia of meddling in that election. Moscow has denied that it interfered in the campaign.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...e_iOSApp_Other

[Lloyd]

He's a little cry-baby who took [strike]his ball[/strike] the documents and went home.

Typos courtesy of Samsung Auto-Incorrect™

[Chip]

For Trump’s Lawyers, Legal Exposure Comes With the Job

The many lawyers who have helped the former president avoid removal from office and indictment have drawn legal problems of their own.

By Michael S. Schmidt and Luke Broadwater
Sept. 10, 2022

A dark joke has begun circulating among lawyers following the many legal travails of former President Donald J. Trump: MAGA actually stands for “making attorneys get attorneys.”

Over six years and nine major investigations by Congress, the Justice Department and local prosecutors, as Mr. Trump has managed to avoid removal from the presidency and indictment, it has become clear that serving as one of his lawyers is a remarkably risky job — and one that can involve considerable legal exposure. Time after time, his attorneys have been asked to testify as witnesses to potential crimes — or evaluated as possible criminal conspirators themselves.

While the consequences his lawyers faced were extraordinary when Mr. Trump was in the White House, the dangers have only intensified since he left office and have become increasingly acute in recent weeks, as the former president has come under scrutiny in two different Justice Department investigations and has been forced yet again to find lawyers willing to represent him.

Last week, a Justice Department filing revealed that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had misled federal investigators about whether he had handed over to the Justice Department all the classified documents he took from the White House when he left office. That raised questions about whether the lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, could be prosecuted themselves and might ultimately be forced to become witnesses against their client. (Ms. Bobb recently retained a lawyer, according to a person familiar with the situation.)

The revelation capped a summer in which a team of lawyers that had been advising Mr. Trump as he tried to overturn the 2020 election faced a range of repercussions across the country from federal investigators, local prosecutors, state bars and government accountability groups.

One of Mr. Trump’s highest-profile lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was named as a target in a state criminal investigation in Georgia. The conservative lawyer John Eastman, who came up with what he conceded privately was an unlawful strategy to help Mr. Trump overturn the election, said he believed he was a target in that same investigation and declined to answer questions while being deposed before a grand jury. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman have also been named as subjects of interest in a flurry of federal grand jury subpoenas seeking evidence about attempts by Mr. Trump’s allies to create fake slates of electors to help keep him in office.

Two others who worked for Mr. Trump in the White House — the White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone and his deputy Patrick F. Philbin — were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Washington investigating the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including the roles that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman had played in helping Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cipollone, Mr. Philbin and at least nine other lawyers who worked for Mr. Trump have testified before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Earlier this year, Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin also were interviewed by the F.B.I. as part of its investigation into the classified documents investigation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/u...e=articleShare

[dneal]

Yeah, you guys aren't obsessed with Trump or anything...

lol

[TSherbs]

[FONT=Book Antiqua]For Trump’s Lawyers, Legal Exposure Comes With the Job

The many lawyers who have helped the former president avoid removal from office and indictment have drawn legal problems of their own.

[SIZE=3]By Michael S. Schmidt and Luke Broadwater
Sept. 10, 2022

A dark joke has begun circulating among lawyers following the many legal travails of former President Donald J. Trump: MAGA actually stands for “making attorneys get attorneys.”

30+ more subpoenas this week, several of them to more lawyers. godsake. Working for that guy, or in some cases, just having been within earshot of that guy (or of others who worked for him) requires you to hire counsel. The guy is his own form of legal plague.

[TSherbs]

Ouch: Trump Org guilty on all counts of tax fraud

[dneal]

So they prosecuted Trump? When does he get sentenced?

[Chip]

Are you just out of touch, or playing dumb?

Trump Organization guilty of tax fraud, New York jury finds

Twelve-person jury returns guilty verdict against former president’s company after being sent out on Monday to deliberate
The guilty verdict for the Trump Organization represents a major blow for the former president.

Lauren Gambino
Tue 6 Dec 2022

A jury in New York has convicted the Trump Organization of criminal tax fraud in a stinging rebuke of the former US president’s company.

Although Donald Trump was not personally on trial, prosecutors in the case brought by the Manhattan district attorney insisted he was fully aware of the long-running scheme in which they said executives were enriched by off-the-books perks to make up for lower salaries, reducing the company’s tax liabilities.

“This was a case about greed and cheating,” Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, said in a statement celebrating the guilty verdict. “In Manhattan, no corporation is above the law.”

The 12-person jury in New York’s state court was sent out to deliberate on Monday morning after a six-week trial in which Trump Organization lawyers pinned blame for the fraud solely on the greed of longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg.

Trump, who recently launched his 2024 campaign, assailed the investigation as part of a politically motivated “witch hunt”. In a statement on Tuesday, the Trump Organization denounced the verdict, which could carry a fine of up to $1.6m, a relatively negligible sum for such a large company though it could affect future business dealings. A lawyer for the Trump Organization vowed to appeal.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...dict-tax-fraud

[Chip]

The practical consequence of this all-counts conviction, along with other pending cases in New York against the Trump Organization would be having the day-to-day affairs of the company overseen by a monitor or monitors appointed by the courts. Also, Donald Trump and members of his family found responsible might at the very least have to step aside from their roles in running the firm.

The takeaway is the incredible chickenshittery of Mr. Trump in setting up Weisselberg, a devoted longtime employee, to take the fall. Good that the jury saw through it.

[dneal]

Are you just out of touch, or playing dumb?

So that’s a “no”, then.

[TSherbs]

Trump's response to the convictions?

"THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME CONTINUES, OVER & OVER AGAIN, & THE PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY AREN’T GOING TO TAKE IT MUCH LONGER. A GIANT POLITICAL SCAM!!!"

Looks like his cap key got stuck 🤣

[Chip]

Dumb and dumber.

The tax fraud case was filed against the TRUMP Organization, the FG's namesake criminal syndicate. It wasn't an individual indictment, although that might not be far off.

[dneal]

"Dumb and dumber" describes the TDS perfectly! Someone blows the "Trump" dogwhistle, and the mutts come running. How many times have they been duped so far? Maybe one day "we got him this time" will come true.

[TSherbs]

This sure feels like another loss for Trump:

Trump lawyers rebuked for wasting so much paper on their filing in NY case:

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-lawye...awsuit-1778547

[Chip]

The lawyers for the FG do a lot of venue shopping, hoping to get judges like Aileen Cannon, who seems to be both biased and ignorant of the law.

Even so, they seldom win a case in court.

[Chip]

Don’t Let Republican ‘Judge Shoppers’ Thwart the Will of Voters

By Stephen I. Vladeck

Feb. 5, 2023

For the 26th time in two years, the Texas attorney general Ken Paxton recently filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging a Biden administration policy. The suit, which seeks to wipe out a new Labor Department rule about the investment of pension trust assets, wasn’t filed in Austin, the state capital, or in Dallas, where the Labor Department’s regional offices are, or anywhere else with a logical connection to the dispute.

It was filed in Amarillo. Why Amarillo? By filing there, Mr. Paxton had a 100 percent chance of having the case assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2019 and a former deputy general counsel to the First Liberty Institute, which frequently litigates religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court.

“Forum shopping” has long been a problem in civil litigation. Clever lawyers use procedural rules to file in courts deemed most likely to be sympathetic to their claims. But what Mr. Paxton and other plaintiffs are doing is something far more nefarious — they’re engaging in a novel and specific form of “judge shopping,” seeking out the specific judge whom they wish to hear their case, presumably because of how they expect that judge to rule.

By taking advantage of a loophole in federal procedure, these plaintiffs are able to rely on a small handful of district judges appointed by Mr. Trump to thwart major features of President Biden’s agenda. The tactic upends the tradition of random assignment of judges and raises serious questions about the fairness and impartiality of the judicial system. And it can — and should — be easily fixed, whether by the courts themselves or, failing that, by Congress.

These cases (and others brought by private plaintiffs in Texas’s small divisions) have put a hard stop on several ambitious Biden administration initiatives, among them ones related to abortion and immigration. They include at least five administration policies on immigration as well as the student loan debt relief program, the Department of Health and Human Services’ post-Dobbs abortion guidance, and federal Covid vaccination mandates.

More requests for such relief are pending. In November, the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit in Amarillo that seeks to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, one of the drugs used during a medication abortion, which could make it unavailable nationwide.

Here’s how the loophole works: For decades, Congress has split up many of the 94 federal district courts into smaller “divisions” and has left it to each district court to decide how to divvy up cases among its divisions. Texas’s federal courts, in turn, have distributed their judges unevenly. Of the 27 divisions in Texas’s four district courts, nine have a single judge; 10 others have only two.

Although other states require judges to move around from time to time to avoid judge-shopping, Texas doesn’t. Thus, any new suit filed in Amarillo is sure to go to Judge Kacsmaryk, any new suit filed in Wichita Falls goes to Judge Reed O’Connor and any new suit filed in Victoria goes to Judge Drew Tipton.

The ability of litigants to handpick judges is strengthened by the increasing polarization of the judges sitting on district court benches. It’s increasingly possible to pick a judge who may be an ideological outlier among his peers. If anti-abortion groups can funnel all nationwide litigation challenging federal policies to Judge Kacsmaryk, and if anti-immigration groups can funnel all nationwide litigation challenging federal policies to Judge Tipton, that turns foundational principles about the structure of the legal system on their head.

Federal law used to require plaintiffs to show why a specific division was a proper place for their suit, but Congress eliminated that requirement in 1988. Today, a plaintiff merely has to show that the broader district is an appropriate venue — which is relatively easy to do when the federal government, with a jurisdiction of the entire country, is the defendant.

Litigants of all political and substantive stripes have taken advantage of this loophole — including big corporations like Purdue Pharma, which filed its bankruptcy in the White Plains Division of the Southern District of New York, which has a single eligible judge, rather than in Manhattan, where it would have faced a random draw among more than a half-dozen judges with more diverse reputations.

But Mr. Paxton has made the loophole into an art form. Of the 26 anti-Biden suits he has filed to date, he’s filed seven each in Amarillo and Victoria.

So far, blue state officials have barely ever gone judge-shopping. While they have picked friendly district courts, like those in San Francisco or Honolulu, they were still subject to random assignment of judges within those courts.

In his 2021 year-end report on the federal courts, Chief Justice John Roberts alluded to an instance in which judge shopping had caused trouble: The district judge assigned to hear all cases filed in Waco, Texas, had lured patent cases from across the country into his court by touting favorable procedural and logistical arrangements. In that case, when the criticism was not about a Republican state challenging a Democratic president’s policies, there was general agreement that this kind of procedural manipulation was inappropriate, leading the chief judge of the Western District of Texas to change the case assignment rules. Today, any new patent case filed in the Waco Division is randomly assigned among 12 judges in the broader district.

But if judge shopping is a problem in the patent context, it’s a problem outside of it as well. And the fixes are both easy and obvious. District courts can, as Texas’s Western District just did, change their rules of judge distribution on their own — without any national legislation. District courts can also agree to transfer cases out of their single-judge divisions to avoid the appearance of procedural manipulation, which the Biden administration has asked Judge Tipton to do for the most recent immigration challenge filed by Texas in Victoria.

Failing that, Congress can require district courts, when dividing their business, to ensure that no case has a greater than 50 percent chance of being assigned to a single judge. Congress can also require that suits seeking nationwide relief against a federal policy be heard by three district judges, not one, to avoid (or at least to mitigate) the judge shopping that has become so prevalent.

Whatever the solution, doing nothing will simply accelerate what is already a race to the bottom — in which handpicked, outlier district judges for whom nobody voted are increasingly able to dictate federal policies on a nationwide basis.

Right now, this practice may be beneficial for Republicans. But if nothing changes, you can be sure Democrats will try to take advantage when the next Republican sits in the White House. And regardless of who benefits in the short term, in the long term, the proliferation of this practice will be disastrous for the rule of law.

Stephen I. Vladeck (@steve_vladeck), a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, is a co-host of “The National Security Law Podcast” and the author of the forthcoming “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/o...e=articleShare

[TSherbs]

Cynical manipulation of a rigged system. Niiiiiice.

[TSherbs]

Another loss for the King:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/polit...ral/index.html

[TSherbs]

Kari Lake is trying to lose as many times as Trump: https://apnews.com/article/politics-...97f5ba0ea41bce

[Chip]

Lawsuit Against Trump Over Capitol Attack Should Proceed, Justice Dept. Says

The department told an appeals court that if President Donald J. Trump’s speech incited the Jan. 6 riot, he was not shielded by immunity.

Charlie Savage
March 2, 2023

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department told a federal appeals court on Thursday that it should reject former President Donald J. Trump’s claims that he is absolutely immune from being sued over his actions related to the attack on the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.

Members of Congress and Capitol Police officers have contended in a lawsuit that Mr. Trump incited the attack, including by delivering a fiery speech falsely claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen and urging his supporters to march on the Capitol. In a 23-page brief, lawyers for the Justice Department’s civil division urged the appeals court to allow their lawsuit to proceed.

The Justice Department says former President Donald J. Trump can be sued over the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. “Speaking to the public on matters of public concern is a traditional function of the presidency, and the outer perimeter of the president’s office includes a vast realm of such speech,” the brief said. “But that traditional function is one of public communication. It does not include incitement of imminent private violence of the sort the district court found that plaintiffs’ complaints have plausibly alleged here.”

If the appeals court were to side with the Justice Department and allow the Jan. 6 lawsuit to proceed, it could add to the mountain of legal costs Mr. Trump faces as he pursues his 2024 campaign for president.

The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution gives presidents immunity from being sued over their official actions. The lawsuits against Mr. Trump, which contend that his speech incited the Capitol attack, have raised the question of whether his speaking to his supporters about the 2020 election results fell within his official job responsibilities.

The Justice Department’s filing was notable in part because the department usually takes a broad view of executive power and defending the prerogatives of the presidency. But its brief asserted that if Mr. Trump did incite violence then the speech fell outside a president’s legally shielded official responsibilities.

However, the department’s brief did not endorse the idea that Mr. Trump instigated the attack.

“The United States here expresses no view on the district court’s conclusion that plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that President Trump’s Jan. 6 speech incited the subsequent attack on the Capitol,” the brief said. “But because actual incitement would be unprotected by absolute immunity even if it came in the context of a speech on matters of public concern, this court should reject the categorical argument President Trump pressed below and renews on appeal.”

The lawsuit is not the only pending case that tests the limits of when Mr. Trump was acting in his capacity as president. A separate court for the District of Columbia is currently weighing whether, as a matter of employment law, he was acting within his official capacity when he spoke disparagingly of a writer, E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her in the 1990s and is suing him for defamation.

In that case, however, the Justice Department joined Mr. Trump’s legal team in arguing that because Mr. Trump was the president at the time and made his allegedly defamatory comments about Ms. Carroll in response to reporters’ questions, he was acting within his official capacity. If so, the department could substitute itself as the defendant — as it is trying to do — and have the case dismissed as a matter of sovereign immunity.

A statement posted Thursday to Mr. Trump’s account on his social media network said, among other things, that courts in the District of Columbia “should rule in favor of President Trump in short order and dismiss these frivolous lawsuits.”

In the Jan. 6 lawsuit, lawyers for Mr. Trump have argued that any public speech by a president on matters of public concern are part of his presidential responsibilities and so the case against him should be dismissed. They also argued that his speech was protected by the First Amendment.

But Judge Amit P. Mehta of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled last year that the lawsuits against the former president could proceed. He cited Mr. Trump’s various communications before and on Jan. 6, like inviting supporters to come to Washington on the day Congress would certify Mr. Biden’s election victory and urging them to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” amounted to a “call to action.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers appealed that ruling to the D.C. Circuit, again arguing that presidents are always immune from any civil suits based on “speech on matters of public concern.” In December, the appeals court asked the Justice Department for its view on the matter.

The combined lawsuits against Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6 attack were brought by various Democratic members of Congress along with Capitol Police officers. The lawsuits also name other defendants, like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who are not part of the current appeal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/u...e=articleShare