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Notes -
It's been a long time since we've discussed Trump, and there have been a number of developments in the court cases against him, and so I'm here to say that our long mottizan nightmare of peace and tranquility is finally over.
Florida
CNN: Federal judge indefinitely postpones Trump classified documents trial
Trump's trial in Florida over classified documents has been indefinitely postponed. (Jack Smith had requested it start the day after Trump's New York trial ended.) It turns out that new revelations made in documents Trump's lawyers requested have upended the case. CNN doesn't elaborate on what happened, for which I'll turn to this story:
Prosecutors admit key evidence in document case has been tampered with
It turns out that when the government alleged that Trump had classified documents he was not supposed to have, the government itself did not accurately know which documents Trump had, or which documents Trump was even supposed to have. Actually, worse than that, it turns out they fabricated some or all of the accusations. For instance, that famous picture of classified documents with cover sheets raided from Mar-a-Lago? It turns out those documents didn't have cover sheets, the FBI staged them before photographing, and they didn't even correctly label all of the documents they supposedly took:
The DOJ's Doctored Crime Scene Photo of Mar-a-Lago Raid
In order to prove Donald Trump had documents he wasn't supposed to have, the goverment took documents Trump had (that the NARA gave him in mislabeled boxes) and added cover sheets for photographs to them.
Whoops!
Judge Cannon has indefinitely postponed trial while Jack Smith's prosecutors work out answers to the questions posed by all these new revelations.
Georgia
CBS: Georgia appeals court will review decision that allowed Fani Willis to stay on Trump's Fulton County case
News-watchers will remember that, several months ago, it turned out that Fulton Prosecutor Fani Willis was hiring her secret lover to work on the Trump election fraud case. He was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while they dated and went on vacations together, for which she insisted (without evidence) that she always paid him back. This posed a serious concern of misconduct and the risk that Fani Willis would be forced off the case entirely. After weeks of wrangling, Judge McAfee ruled that Willis could stay on the case, as long as Nathan Wade did not. Trump's team appealed the ruling, and now, the Georgia Appeals Court will hear the decision:
Re-hearing the Fani Willis conflict of interest decision might lead to a repeat of the earlier hearing, where Fani repeatedly shouted over the courtroom and judge:
Fiery DA Fani Willis loses it on lawyer during misconduct hearing: ‘Don’t be cute with me!’
[...[
So the question of prosecuting Trump over the 2020 election in Georgia will have to wait until it's determined how much of a liar the prosecuting DA might or might not have been.
New York
This trial is the juiciest of all, as it is currently in session in New York, with the judge threatening to have Trump locked up:
CBS: Trump held in contempt again for violating gag order as judge threatens jail time
Trump has promised, in interview and social media post, that he's willing to go to jail for exercising his First Amendment rights to criticize Judge Merchan, having said in April that it would be his "great honor" to go to jail for violating Merchan's gag order.
The issue really stems from Trump's accusations of political bias in the New York courtroom. The gag order was imposed after Trump attacked Merchan's daughter for working for Democratic fundraisers:
Dem clients of daughter of NY judge in Trump hush-money trial raised $93M off the case
Another such example is that one of Bragg's prosecutors working the case is Matthew Colangelo, who left the #3 position at DOJ under Merrick Garland to work the Trump case:
Daily Mail: REVEALED: New PROOF the anti-Trump prosecutor in hush money trial is a 'true believer' in Leftist 'lawfare'... as Matthew Colangelo is exposed for taking thousands of dollars from Democratic party
Judge Merchan himself, it turned out, donated (a small amount) to the Biden campaign:
Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Trump case, donated to Biden campaign in 2020
The state is arguing, in effect, that Trump, by paying Stormy Daniels in 2017, falsified business records that should have rightfully been marked as a campaign contribution, and thus constituted a conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election. The count of falsifying business records is a misdemeanor under New York State Law, but can be elevated into a felony charge if the business records were falsified with the intent to commit another crime. Curiously, Alvin Bragg has alleged that Trump falsified business records to commit another crime, but has not charged him with committing any other crimes:
The New York Case Against Trump Relies on a 'Twisty' Legal Theory That Reeks of Desperation
Section 17-152 has never actually been prosecuted to this effect, so the case is entirely novel. New York is arguing, in effect, that Donald Trump engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election by falsifying business records in 2017.
This case is a hot one as it is currently in trial, and will likely be resolved with a few weeks. The question of whether the jury can be unbiased in such conditions is ongoing.
I will omit Trump's last criminal court case, the January 6th case run out of DC, as it is currently pending on a Supreme Court decision as to whether Presidents can even be tried for official acts in the first place, which would throw the whole case back down to the lower courts to disentangle which of Trump's actions on January 6th constituted private action. It goes almost without saying that, if Trump were elected in 2024, he could have the authority to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida.
Did you read this link?
The author doesn't justify they assertion at all. They take this snippet:
And assert that the photo is using those placeholder sheets.
But the quote doesn't say that. And the filing doesn't say that.
Can anyone else justify this assertion that the photo includes cover sheets provided by the FBI?
I would find it disturbing if true, but I see no reason to accept this reporter's assertion as fact.
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This is a tendentious presentation imo. Politico presents this as:
I think it's reasonable to put cover sheets on the classified documents, given they are classified. The documents would have already had classification markings, so I don't see how this is "willfully misleading" the public "into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security".
"Some or all", here, seems unjustified - I don't think anyone (other than perhaps Trump on Twitter) is claiming the accusations are all fake - that's a much stronger claim than "the documents aren't in the same order that they were when we scanned them". Your sources imply this is like "tampering" with evidence, and it may (not sure) be a procedural issue, but things like "adding cover sheets" and "reordering documents" don't undermine the claim that Trump committed a crime.
the government didn't have to stage a photo to release to the public or put the photo in the public charging document
in a world where the prosecution is attempting to redact and black out anything and everything they don't carefully curate for an agenda and engage in repeated fights for failure to turn over discovery requiring attorneys to file FOIA requests to gov agencies, it is honestly laughable to try to imply that the government was just being reasonable when they put cover sheets on classified documents reading CLASSIFIED PAY ATTENTION TO ME CLASSIFIED HUMAN INTEL CLASSIFIED so they could take a picture and have it published to influence the media and public
yes, they do because a defense to at least some of the more serious charges is that Trump didn't know the specific documents were there and didn't handle or interact with the documents and therefore was not engaged in willful conduct with respect to the those documents which would be supported by the documents still being in the exact order at time of seizure which they were when NARA created the boxes and told Trump to come get them and when they returned the boxes they demanded Trump turn over
I agree that this would be really, really bad.
But I dont see any reason to believe its true beyond wanting to believe its true.
Julie Kelly does not justify her assertion.
are you referring to use the cover sheets for the photo?
sure she does, she uses the changing statements of Jay Bratt, knowledge of what cover sheets they brought with them, the uniform nature of their appearance in the photo attached with a paperclip, the rolling trickle truth of prosecutors being forced to admit at the very least they made misleading statements about various pieces of critical evidence in the case, and the fact that no classified cover sheets were logged as "recovered" in the container
you can claim the DOJ team has not explicitly written "yes, we placed these cover sheets saying 'up to human intel' on the documents and took a picture of them," but you cannot claim she doesn't justify her assertion
No one else in the media se3ms to think she has justified herself. Foxnews and OAN haven't jumped on this. It's wishcasting.
okay, so you knew she had justified her speculation, having read the linked article, and you still wrote a comment claiming she didn't
and now you're dropping that having not addressed any part of that support and are claiming because you haven't seen "others in the media" or foxnews/oan talk about it, it's without support? what? why would I or anyone care what foxnews or oan think or do about anything
this is just dishonest
No more so than Otis Eugene Ray. Rank speculation is not justification. Your definition may differ.
If you believe that this story is more than wishcasting you should ask yourself why real conservative media outlets aren't repeating it.
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The use of the classified cover sheets in that photo does many things
It provides a lot more visual impact than just classified documents with markings.
It gives the impression that it would be obvious to anyone who casually looked in the box that it had classified documents. This is important because "knowingly" is an element of some of the charges.
It effectively substitutes the FBI's CLAIM that the documents were classified for the actual evidence of classification.
Since the classification markings on the pre-printed cover sheets didn't have to match those on the documents, it provided the impression that the documents had perhaps a higher classification level than they did. For instance, the NPR story claimed one of the cover sheets said "UP TO HCS-P/SI/TK", leading them to believe Trump had documents related to HUMINT. I thought at the time this was odd, you don't put "UP TO" on your caveats. But it makes perfect sense for a placeholder that might be used for a wide range of documents you might find. And given that, there might well have been no HUMINT at all; the placeholder is not evidence.
Since the narrative accompanying the photo in court filings did not reveal that the cover sheets were added by the FBI, it constitutes an attempt to prejudice and/or mislead the court (as well as the public)
This is true, and probably isn't ideal, but it is not a huge issue. Maybe prosecutors shouldn't do things for 'visual impact', but they do, and at any rate the conduct of Trump and his lawyers at various legal proceedings has been 100x worse.
Pretty sure the documents themselves have clear classification markings on them?
To the public, maybe? The claim is true, though, and it's not evidence to the courts, though. If those documents weren't actually classified when trump was President, Trump's lawyers would be all over that.
Do you actually think this made a difference in anyone's reaction to this case? And, again, the courts are considering the actual documents and their classification levels. Here is an article going over the actual documents and their classification levels and contents. I do not think the cover pages were materially misleading given that.
Even if this is the case -- and we in fact do not know that -- it would only be noticed by examining the document. Just casually looking in the open box would not make it obvious. There's a reason cover sheets are very noticable like that.
And to the court, at the time.
How do you know? At this point you have only the FBI's say-so.
Yes, there was in fact a lot of screaming about "OMG nuclear secrets" and "OMG HUMINT, Trump's getting our spies killed!"
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Does it, though? Because I, for one, am not sure about that at all. Because, first, does a president have the authority to fire an A.U.S.A like Smith on paper? Second, even if a president does have that power in theory, well, how DC is supposed to work on paper and how it actually works are two distinct things, so is this a power the president has in reality, or merely on some musty old piece of paper nobody who matters cares about? (I here link this marginally relevant Substack piece from our dear @KulakRevolt.)
Third, and perhaps most important, even if a president has such a firing power in general, one could easily argue that in this situation Trump would not, because allowing him to use said otherwise-legitimate authority "to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida" against him would so fatally-undermine basic justice and the rule of law that the very survival of Our Democracy demands the suspension of said authority until the cases are resolved, and that it be incumbent upon all to #Resist any attempt by Trump to remove Smith.
My personal expectation is that none of these things are going to matter — the system is going to find some way to push past all these roadblocks and keep these cases going.
Trump can definitely pardon himself, and his chances of firing jack smith are better than you think because at the end of the day he can always send law enforcement in to escort him out of the building if he gets ignored. Changing schedule F is probably one of trump’s first acts in office and the former Desantis staffer in charge of drafting that executive order will not leave that particular loophole in place.
What law enforcement? Why wouldn't they side with Smith?
Suppose Trump orders Smith fired, and the Justice Department says "no he's not" and ignores Trump. Trump tells the FBI to escort him out of the building… at which point the FBI says back, 'No, we're not doing that. You can't fire Smith; Smith is still employed no matter what you say, so we're not escorting him out. And if you try to send someone else to remove Smith, well, as far as we're concerned such a person will be trying to obstruct Smith in the course of his duties as a federal official, which is a serious federal crime, and we will arrest them on that very charge.' What then?
The Virginia national guard arresting FBI members for insubordination is a nightmare scenario for the deep state and it won’t happen because the DOJ will not #resist hard enough to bring it about.
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It's definitely an open question. But I don't think it amounts to much. Trump can pardon himself, he can fire everyone involved he can get his hands on, he can declassify any and all documents involved, he could order the entire classification system revoked. If Congress is on his side, they can open investigations into the investigators, they can defund the offices involved. And even if Congress isn't on his side, they couldn't impeach him before and won't impeach him over this.
Anything could happen, but I find it very unlikely that Trump's enemies will really push (escalate) a Constitutional crisis over classified documents the public isn't even allowed to know the details of, especially given all the other issues with this case.
Again, I dispute this. If he says John Q. Bureaucrat is fired, but the rest of DC says Mr. Bureaucrat isn't fired; they still work with Mr. Bureaucrat when he comes into the office; payroll still issues Mr. Bureaucrat his paycheck; and they have the guy Trump appointed to replace John hauled out of the building and arrested for trespassing, because he doesn't work there, since the job he claims to hold is actually still held by Mr. Bureaucrat; and anyone who tries to remove Mr. Bureaucrat on orders from Trump gets arrested themselves by the FBI for attempting to obstruct a federal employee in the exercise of his duties, because Mr. Bureaucrat is still a federal employee… then has John Q. Bureaucrat really been fired?
And if everyone ignores him, and keeps treating them as classified anyway?
And if everyone ignores him, and keeps acting as if the system is still in place?
With what people? Who are they going to order to carry out these investigations? What if those people ignore that order? Or side with those they're "investigating" against Trump and Congress?
Government "shutdowns," where nothing shuts down and the executive branch continued to spend and disburse funds without the constitutionally-mandated Congressional authorization, say otherwise. What happens when Congress "defunds" the offices, and Treasury just ignores them and keeps issuing the offices their funds as before?
Why not? I don't understand why everyone seems to think a "Constitutional crisis" would be any kind of big deal. What would change, really?
I hope that happens. Then those people can all be labeled as insurrectionists and Texas and Florida national guard can come in and literally kill the bureaucrats.
This would require a Republican governor with the guts to actually send troops against "fellow Americans" — civilians at that — rather than just threaten. It would also require National Guard troops willing to gun down "fellow American" civilians, even if they're feds.
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The Republicans would rather lose forever than tear apart the country that way.
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Jesus Christ dude. You know that bureaucrats are why we don't all live in mud huts and rape each other right? Have a little gratitude. You're posting this on an internet forum that only exists because generations of bureaucrats kept society together for a few thousand years.
Nope. You are mistaking bureaucrats for merchants.
Who enforces those contracts?
Read Order Without Law. In iterative games, contact law is largely pointless.
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Not the current crop of Bureaucrats, certainly.
Bureaucrats do not create society or wealth. They are a necessary evil to keep the peace and prosperity that productive people build, and the "necessary" part assumes that they are not corrupt.
Our Bureaucrats are deeply, irredeemably corrupt. They are not necessary, only evil.
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From my limited understanding, the president is the head of the executive, and any democratic legitimacy of the federal bureaucracy ultimately comes from the fact that the bureaucrats are enacting the will of a democratically (or however you call the electoral college system) elected president. While there are certainly mid-level bureaucrats who would do everything legal in their power to thwart his preferred policies (and some might even risk their job by going beyond that), I think the rest of DC pretending that Trump does not exist will not be an option. For one thing, do you really suppose the Supreme Court would play along with that? If they do not, should the rest of DC also pretend that the Supreme Court does not exist?
We already had four years of Trump. He was not my favorite president, but contrary to predictions from the left he turned out not to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. I don't think he would build death camps in his second presidency. It would not be the end of the world.
On the other hand, democracy in the US had (with one notable exception) been a great success in avoiding conflicts being resolved by force of arms. Even if Trump's supporters would idly stand by while the executive defected, the long term effects of establishing that the federal bureaucracy is independent of the president would likely be violent.
Trump's second term would not be about replacing the constitution with the Fuehrerprinzip. If he gets the EC votes, he may get out of legal troubles which may or may not have been politically motivated in the first place. This will not be the end of the world any more than Nixon getting pardoned about Watergate was the end of the world.
Again, this is how it's supposed to be, on paper. But that matters as much as when Bart Simpson was sent back to kindergarten:
The law isn't what's written on paper, the law is whatever is enforced. There's how the "employee handbook" says a workplace is supposed to work, and then there's how the workplace actually operates. (The very existence of "bothering by the book" and malicious compliance illustrates that there's a difference between the two, sometimes rather vast.) The written constitution is like an ignored, out-of-date employee handbook.
Maybe, maybe not. But it won't matter.
Absolutely yes. Because there's no actual enforcement mechanism for SCOTUS decisions, except the willingness of the executive to heed them. From the federal court system's own webpage:
And from Cliff Notes:
(DC still hasn't given Mr. Heller his permit.)
Not really. I mean, sure, maybe a few people might resort to violence, but only a few hundred at most, and they'll all be lone actors independently pursuing disorganized, poorly-targeted acts of domestic terror. Nothing that the FBI and ATF won't be able to handle (particularly given that at least half of our would-be rebels would be receiving "assistance" from someone in the pay of the FBI). Maybe you get a few more "Oklahoma City"s, but, as in that case, the perpetrators will accomplish nothing but creating martyrs for the other side, tainting their own side by association, and getting themselves executed (assuming the state takes them alive at all). And once a sufficiently-strong example is made of these people, most everyone else will be disincentivized to follow in their footsteps.
The nice thing about democracies is that there is a peaceful path forward if you are unhappy with an administration. Canvas for your issue, change the mind of the voters, change the stance of politicians or get elected yourself. Not an easy path forward, but with some notable benefits over the alternative.
This Calvin and Hobbes comic illustrates the position the bureaucracy would find itself in if they decided to do their thing without the blessings of President, SC and Congress.
And while this is getting deep into silly "could Darth Vader take Superman in a fight?" hypotheticals territory, there is the fact that the federal police agencies are not the strongest kid on the block. The US military seems kind of big on following a chain of command which ultimately ends with the president. They obviously will be reluctant to interfere within the US, but if the constitutional organs of the US are in agreement that a part of the DC bureaucracy is in rebellion, I strongly expect them to intercede on the side of the constitution. And a battle of federal law enforcement vs the US army would be even more lopsided that a battle of Feds versus Trump militias.
And just who's supposed to be revolting, and how? I keep bringing up the German Peasants' War for a reason. As the late Kontextmaschine over at Tumblr said, about JFK's quote that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable," that making violent revolution inevitable then crushing it by force can be a viable strategy. It will confirm, in the minds of Blue Tribers, the truth of every comment they've made about "neo-Confederates," or about domestic terrorism being the biggest threat to Our Democracy, and that there really is no living with the Deplorables, they'll truly have to be crushed utterly, and the surviving children forcibly reeducated residential-school-style.
The same military who
lied to"misled" Trump when he was president? The same military where these people are in command:…
Or see here:
…
…
…
…
More on that latter:
…
(Emphasis added.)
And on the Floyd riots:
…
The US Military is famously apolitical, and, like you note, they obviously will be reluctant to interfere within the US, particularly on behalf of Trump. The guys at the top, especially, spend a lot of time in DC, and interacting quite a bit with other DC "insiders." They're not going to want to send in troops to shoot fellow Americans — civilians, at that, even if Trump says they're in "insurrection." So all they need to do is declare that any conflict over authority, and what is or isn't in the president's power to do, is a civilian political matter, because the US Military does not get involved in civilian political matters, full stop.
So, let me ask you, if Trump declares the bureaucracy in insurrection, and the top brass say "no they're not," and tell Trump to go f*** himself — or even if they just say "civilian matter, we're staying out of it" — what then?
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They pre-emptively refused to quell the Floyd Riots, and that was before the COVID purges.
Exactly. Anyone expecting the Pentagon brass to intervene on behalf of Trump (or Red America, for that matter) is bound to be sorely disappointed.
And this is all contingent on Trump even winning. Odds are, we get a second Biden term, followed by a younger and lefty-er Dem after that (and after that, and after that…)
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What’s stopping trump from responding to that by declaring them all in a state of revolt and deputizing red state national guards to restore federal authority? Resistance libs already fever dream about that in their persecution porn; they won’t take a chance on Abbott and Desantis being de facto dictators for half the country, and if there’s already a constitutional crisis, well, alea iacta est.
That "red state national guards" aren't the sort to fire on fellow Americans?
Are they the sort to stand around at the entrance to federal workplaces checking ID badges, though?
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If we try and you're wrong, then we win. If we try and you're right, then this creates common knowledge of the problem, which is useful for coordinating further escalation, which creates opportunities for an eventual win.
What's the alternative? If we don't fight, we definately lose. What's the argument that fighting and losing leads to worse outcomes than not fighting and losing? What's the outcome you're actually attempting to avoid, and how do your prescriptions actually lead to avoiding it?
Should Hirohito have surrendered before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Do you think Japan should have continued to fight on further?) The war was already lost well before that point; all continuing to fight did was get even more Japanese killed.
This would require a Red Tribe capable of coordinating, rather than being downright allergic to it. (This is a point David Z. Hines has been making for years now.) These are my friends, my family, my neighbors I'm talking about. They're never going to do anything. They'll grumble, and mutter about "2nd amendment solutions," but they'll bow down and comply. Let somebody else take the risk of resisting Federal tyranny. And don't come around expecting them to join up with you — they don't take no orders from nobody, y'hear?
About a year ago, I did some reading about historical counterinsurgency methods, particularly Rome. And, contra to Princess Leia's comment to Tarkin, crackdowns usually didn't generate greater resistance, they generated submission. When they did lead to "further escalation," it was generally only a single cycle — Rome's second crackdown usually got the job done. The only exception, with multiple cycles of escalation, was the Jews — and look how that turned out:
…
We are not the imperial Japanese, and the Blues are not 1940s America. Should the Russian Whites have surrendered meekly to the Reds? My read is no, but again, our situation isn't Whites vs Reds either. We are actually in a much better situation, against a much less ruthless enemy. We have not yet begun to fight, metaphorically or literally. There is no rational basis for despair in the current situation.
The Reds I see around me are evidently capable of considerable coordination. You should at least consider the possibility that your personal experiences do not generalize.
Your opinion is that I am a liar, because I have repeatedly stated that I believe that "2nd Amendment solutions" are both a possible and practical solution to the current situation, without providing details of how that would work. I've stated that I prefer being called a liar to providing those details, annoying as it is, because I'm still hoping the current push for peaceful defiance will work. But I will note that every time you initiate this argument, you claim that "2nd Amendment solutions" means hicks with AR15s in twos and threes attempting to fight the US government. I think you badly underestimate both the chances both of the hicks actually trying this and the possible effectiveness of the strategy if they do, but I believe I've stated a number of times that my understanding of "2nd Amendment solutions" does not consist of Red Tribers, singly or in numbers, fighting the government with their personal collections of small-arms. If that was the scenario I was expecting, I would be significantly less confident in success, though still not as pessimistic as you. But that is not, in fact, the scenario I think is likely, and my assessment of that scenario is not the source of my confidence. If the Blues find a genie that magically un-exists all guns in America, it would not materially change my estimate of our chances for overthrowing Blue Tribe. The Second Amendment and the firearms it is intended to protect are much, much more valuable as a coordination mechanism than for pure tactical advantage. The tactical advantages come from other vectors, vectors which neither you nor most others appear to have grasped. I think this is a good thing, because we might still be able to unwind this mess before people like you stumble across them, a whole lot of people die, and the lights probably go out for the forseeable future.
And the part I can't figure out is, what your actual position is. Let's say you're right about everything. I'm lying, and we have no chance. You appear to argue that the correct option is unilateral surrender, let the Blues do whatever they want, in the hope that they'll abuse us less. Is that correct?
We haven't begun to fight because we're never going to. Because we're not capable of it. Every time, this wasn't the hill to die on. Every time, it wasn't yet time. Every time, we've backed down and said "next time" or "someday." Because we're never dying on any hills, because it will never be time, because "someday" will never come. We've always backed down, and we're always going to back down.
Because anything more than those random hicks requires levels of organization of which we are not capable. (It's how one can tell all the sizable "militia groups" are Fed honeypot operations — they're simply too coordinated to be authentic. It's got to be undercover FBI doing all the organizing.)
Organization requires hierarchy, requires following directions from others; and we're talking about people who declare that "they don't take orders from anyone but Jesus." They boast about how if someone told us to breathe, we'd suffocate ourselves to death just to spite them. Who swear that no matter how dire things get, should anyone dare talk to them about organizing or coordinating or fighting together — even if they've been a friend for decades — that automatically makes that person "the Enemy" and they will shoot them dead on the spot.
How are you going to get that guy to join up? How are you going to get him to follow directions, to coordinate his actions with yours, to not immediately go off and do his own "Lone wolf" thing?
As for your "other vectors," I suspect you're talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities. Those are a bit easier to do with a smaller group, but from what I've seen from investigating the issue, it's still more coordination than anyone I know is capable of.
Yes. At the very least, I want people to accept the war was lost long ago, and there's nothing we can do about it now (if not going further, to "accept we're utterly doomed and LDAR," or even "spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come by taking The Exit early," but I get that most are too religious to consider that).
Speak for yourself. Maybe that is the way you are. Maybe that is the way the people around you are. It is not the way I am, and it is not the way the people around me are. There's a decent argument that Rittenhouse single-handedly ended the Floyd riots, and he survived the Blues' attempts to crush him for it, and the attempts to crush him appear to me to have been costly for the Blues. They attempted to crush Kavanaugh, and failed. Gun owners refuse to comply with state and federal laws, and they get away with it. This is exactly the sort of coordination you and @The_Nybbler consistently claim doesn't exist, because you are both so black-pilled that you refuse to accept contrary evidence.
Abbott defying Biden on the border requires significant organization. Gun owners refusing to comply with registration requires coordination. But in fact, you are fundamentally wrong about the level of coordination required to destroy our present society. The amount of organization required is effectively zero. It can be done with individuals alone.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Red Tribers coordinate on all sorts of things, from defying law to purging the Republican party.
Infrastructure vulnerabilities are a significant part of why I think small bands of hicks with rifles have a better chance than you allow. To my knowledge, they never did find the guys who shot up that substation, and that is an example of an attack that can be effectively carried out by one person alone.
In any case, no, I am not talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities.
This is what I don't get. If we've already lost and the best thing we can do is to kill ourselves and spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come, why are the horrors to come horrors? You don't appear to believe in God, so once you're dead that's it, and none of this actually matters in the end. Even fighting, it really is not that hard to make sure you aren't taken alive, and then the horror is over. If you're right, we fight and they crush us, and this is worse... why? We're already doomed, no? What benefit is derived from quiet surrender? You already hate your life and want to die; how does surrendering to the blues improve any part of your situation? Why do you care about this question at all?
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And you never will.
Your enemy holds the bureaucracy. They hold the media. They hold the vast majority of the corporations. They hold an even more complete majority of educational institutions. They hold Federal law enforcement and state law enforcement in many states. And of course all big city law enforcement. Your tribe has paths for exit but no paths for entrance -- you may birth more young people but they end up rejecting you under the influence of the institutions. Immigrants may not join the other tribe but they vote for their party, and so do their children.
And most of your tribe respects all of those institutions despite their obvious capture. They can cynically ignore all the rules, all the laws, everything, to go after one of yours, and when the verdict comes in, your tribe will accept it. Ask Alex Jones or Rudy Giuliani. When Trump is duly convicted in New York Kangaroo Court, a large number of your people will say "Well, the jury had more information than I do, so he must be guilty" or similar rationalizations to trust the institutions. Because the very idea that the institutions are utterly corrupt and should be defied is anti-conservative.
That is the rational basis for despair.
Abbott and DeSantis are coordinating open defiance to the bureaucracy. Maybe they'll lose, but they haven't yet. The Bureaucracy tried to put Rittenhouse in a cell for the rest of his life, and he's a free man. The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.
The media are losing their influence, and in many cases their ability to even keep their doors open due to their entire business model going extinct.
And they are destroying those corporations, in a way that's pretty impossible to hide.
And yet, those agencies can and have been successfully defied, and they can and have fought and lost.
And those cities continue to decay.
They don't actually have a plan. They have a scam that works when we endlessly cooperate with it, and that falls apart if we simply and consistently defect. We are currently organizing that defection, and it is delivering tangible results. Your predictions have been consistent for some time, and increasingly they are being falsified by the actual outcomes. Your prediction was that Abbott would not be able to defy Biden on the border, but he did. Your prediction, I think, would be that Republicans would "compromise" and vote for the border bill, but we didn't. Resistance is not costless, but the costs can and are being borne.
Time will tell.
Too much of my tribe does, it's true, but less and less each day, and the more we push resistance, the more obvious the problems with the system become and the less my tribe respects it.
This is a prediction. Let's see how it goes.
To the extent that this is true, it seems to me that Conservatism is on the way out. Again, Abbott and DeSantis seem to be going for open defiance. The gun culture is definately going for open defiance. Trump's supporters are going for open defiance. Maybe you're right and it will all fizzle out, but that does not appear to me to be the trajectory we're on.
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Yeah, the power of the President is greatly constrained by the bureaucracy, but that doesn't actually mean that the bureaucracy is this all-powerful behemoth. What does it mean for "the rest of DC" to say something? Even in a 95% blue town there are Republican officials and justices and appointees and mandarins. If the bureaucrats want to unfire someone: Who's going to sign the paychecks? ; Who's going to sign off on maintaining the security clearances? ; Who's going to assign work? These are all people who would have to report to the President, or report to somebody who does. Why would the FBI step in and arrest people? This is a very unusual circumstance you're proposing, it would be unique in the history of the United States, and not "What would change, really?"
I'm moderately skeptical that DC will actually prove capable of being reformed and constrained any time soon, but it's not as though DC is this perpetual motion machine that escapes all laws of history and politics. Yeah, it would be a big deal if Trump got into office and tried firing people: that's why they don't want it to happen!
The same people who do so right now. (I mean, it's not like Biden is doing so.)
Again, on paper. What if they just don't? The President's orders aren't magic — they contain no inherent power to compel obedience in and of themselves.
Because they're as anti-Trump as the rest of the > 90% Leftist fed bureaucracy, and thus they'll agree with them that Trump can't fire John Q. Bureaucrat, and that John Q. Bureaucrat is still a federal employee. And attempting to obstruct a federal employee in the course of his duties — which is, in this view, what anyone attempting to remove John Q. Bureaucrat would be doing — is a federal crime. Why wouldn't the FBI arrest someone they believe to be committing a federal offense?
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Can't they rehire people as a contractor and effectively give them a pay rise? This is standard practice in many bureaucracies, as far as I understand it.
There are all kinds of Yes-Minister style games you can play.
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APA review, NEPA review, Hiding the relevant documents from the president and hoping he forgets, lawsuits, injunctions, protests; if Trump succeeds in firing a large portion of the entire civil service, you think tens of thousands of intelligent, well-connected people in the same city all pissed off at the same guy won’t be able to do anything about it?
While those are all real possibilities, they are very distinct from the scenario you described above: Bureaucrats unfiring somebody by disobeying direct orders.
That specific scenario may or may not be plausible. I don’t know how the federal government’s payroll software works, but that is the level that these things need to be analyzed on if you want a clear or definitive answer.
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Hot damn. If the FBI managed to screw up the investigation of what should be obvious misconduct, I’m going to be so disappointed. Let’s see what exactly they did…
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/03/mar-a-lago-trump-classified-documents-00156124
Looks like they added placeholders and cover sheets when they initially sorted the fifteen boxes. And then possibly failed to remove them? Assuming every cover sheet was left in the count, and there are really only half as many documents as stated in the warrant, that could mean Trump’s 15 boxes held fewer than 100! Witch hunt!
This is stupid. It’s also not the cause of the delay, which stems from the complaint that those searched boxes are now out of order. How much did they change? No idea. How did they notice the change? Because the contents were exhaustively documented after the seizure.
It’s not a great look for the prosecution. But it also has no bearing on the facts of the case. If Trump’s team could point to any version of the boxes as favorable, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I don’t mind a delay of the trial, but I’m not going to treat this as exculpatory.
it was discovered because Judge Cannon originally responding to supported accusations to require a special master to review the boxes for privileged information and that special master is the person who documented the state of the boxes which prove the government lied
not because the "contents" were exhaustively documented by the prosecution/fbi who were forced to admit they lied to the court about the documents and their handling post-seizure
also, does it give you any pause the linked politico article relies entirely on the statements of the Smith team which has already admitted to not being truthful with the court or defense counsel on multiple occasions? sure, they're liars, but their newest excuse which would takes tens of thousands of dollars and tons of effort to expose as lies are totally, definitely true now
whether the documents were ever disturbed from their original state after they were put into banker boxes by the national archives and picked up by Trump speaks directly to willful conduct element under the provisions of the espionage act Trump is charged with
a version of facts whereby the documents are still in chronological order when they were seized by the government does have an significant effect on at least this element
I agree that the reordering reflects badly on both the FBI and the prosecution. I agree that it should reduce their credibility, and that we should be skeptical of anything they say, checking it against actual evidence. Fortunately, we have actual evidence reviewed by a third party—the scans which revealed this inconsistency.
The change between those scans (taken in late ‘22) and today does not affect the substance of the case. A change before those scans could, but I haven’t seen anyone with actual skin in the game make that allegation.
Who have you seen propose this “chronological order” defense? Perhaps Trump’s counsel? Because I don’t think they’re disputing the authenticity of the special master scans.
government admission that evidence has been tampered with post seizure is a serious issue; you want to give the government the benefit of the doubt in all places we don't have "actual evidence" their conduct was below the standard we should expect, but that isn't a fair assessment given the history of these prosecutors not only in this case but others
we're talking about an extreme standard to prove criminal guilt; reasonable doubt inhabits these hidden areas of government conduct
at some point, 'oopsies, we made yet another misleading statement totally accidentally and also fought to avoid admitting it for months and also here are better, more innocent explanations for why evidence has been tampered with' should adjust your priors in meaningful ways as opposed to handwaving "reduced credibility" which doesn't actually affect the way you evaluate any of this
for these prosecutors, bridging the gap from this admission to concluding they're likely lying is justifiable
...You appear to be making the above argument about "oopsies" in this case. But of course, the agency in question has an absolutely horrifying history of previous "oopsies". @gattsuru covers a small selection of recent cases, and as he mentions, those aren't even top-ten contenders.
The FBI has been a deeply corrupt institution since the day of its founding. We actually know quite a few details about the sort of leader Hoover was, and the sort of organization he built. We know how that organization operated six decades ago, five, four, three. And then, somehow, the magical trustworthiness always appears for the current agency whose behavior we can only incompletely analyze, so they always get the benefit not only of the doubt, but of willful ignorance.
I should put together a list of OIG reports into FBI misconduct over the last couple decades. The reports will regularly find pretty serious misconduct and additionally list facts readers can easily connect as what is very likely some sort of extortion crime and then the report gets put in a cabinet somewhere mostly without any media attention, the agents involved will retire with full benefits, and then we turn the page and forget about it ready to be exasperated with the next FBI accusation against "the bad guys." For example, the OIG report looking into the FBI's handling of multiple victim accusations about USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. Does anyone else find it odd that while this investigation was being slow-walked to the point it wasn't moving at all until a local paper The Indystar broke the story wide-open and lead to public allegations by former gymnasts, the head of the office and likely his underling were working on obtaining post retirement cushy jobs with the US Olympic committee? Odd the head of the office lied to OIG investigators to attempt to cover up their misrepresentations of evidence and witness interviews as well as their attempt to coincidentally seek a job with USA Gymnastics/US Olympic committee. Huh, weird, oh well I guess he gets to retire with full benefits.
This agency is rotten to the core. I legitimately do not understand how it continues to enjoy such high reputation for credibility given the long list of known abuses where no one was meaningfully held accountable. I legitimately do not understand why judge's eyes gloss over or even they get angry when it's suggested these people shouldn't be assumed to be the most credible people to ever exist. It's almost comical how much defense counsel has to tip-toe around it until they find essentially a smoking gun. We turn the page and forget about it, "oh here look, the FBI is going after ____ for ____. He must be a bad guy." Do I think the FBI is above planting and manipulating evidence, lying about it, and ruining lives trying to cover it up? Not only do I think they are willing to do that, there are dozens of cases of it being proven they did just that.
Funny enough, I remember that reddit comment because it made me RES tag gattsuru as just "great." edit: I typed out the above before I looked further down the thread where gattsuru mentioned it.
What's particularly funny is how even defense lawyers get into it. Cfe when themotte's own notice that an FBI agent perjured herself at length during a criminal trial; he was genuinely curious how the FBI agent would weasel out of it (spoiler: easily!), and even entertained the possibility "whether the prosecutors will bother" to bring perjury charges (spoiler: no).
If the spreadsheet has the data, and it was just hidden, then she didn’t perjure herself by saying she handed over all the data.
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Of course DOJ messed the case up, because there was no "obvious misconduct" without them trying to arrange it!
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/05/02/unredactions_reveal_early_white_house_involvement_in_trump_documents_case_1028630.html
https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1784226958127014361
Haphazardly fill boxes with mislabel classified information, tell the Trump team to pick them up, then accuse Trump of haphazardly storing classified information. No neutral operators, no brave civil servants executing the spirit of the law, just Biden appointees organizing more lawfare against their opponents. Take salacious pictures of Trump's classified documents on cover sheets that were brought there for the purpose, to prejudice the public against Trump, because that's the same playbook that's worked all along. (It's not like Trump colluded with Russia either.) And it's not like anybody is going to prosecute Biden or Mike Pence over classified documents either.
Jack Smith had to admit that they lied, "this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented," about their central piece of evidence. How is the government going to prove that Trump should have known how to handle these documents when the government itself was wrong about what they were. They gave him mislabeled documents, essentially making it impossible for him to have ever handled them properly in the first place.
Remember how many times progressives on social media were wrong about Russia, and about Trump's legal woes in general? I think you're doing the same thing in reverse here. What the government's alleged to have done is very minor, but a lot of the words look like the words you'd use in a major situation, so it's blown up into a big deal.
Well, the same people who orchestrated Russiagate are now running the government. The parallel runs toward more scam prosecutions. Why do you think they lied about the cover sheets?
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The government insists that it wasn’t wrong about what they were. Or even which box they were in. Only that it was an error to say they were “in the original, intact form as seized,” because the order is not the same. Page 8.
Nor do you have a good reason to believe the documents were planted. Only that Trump was informed of some (other?) boxes left in Virginia. His administration has never denied that the boxes belonged to him, has it?
And what’s all this bullshit about mislabeling? A banker’s box in your house is inappropriate for any level of classification.
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I don’t doubt for one minute that Trump had classified documents, but it does suggest that the intended audience for the indictment was the American Electorate rather than a federal judge. Thinking back to the political situation at the time the charges were unsealed, Jack Smith and the Justice Department probably thought this was the kill-shot for Trump’s campaign.
I think that’s plausible, but not because of the revelations here.
Check out page 8. The government concedes that they were inconsistent because the order within boxes changed. Nothing else. They insist that the only other change to contents is the placeholder cards.
But nothing in the indictment, the sealing, the warrant depended on order! It was all about number of documents suspected to remain. Nothing I’ve seen in here casts doubt on that unless we assume that the boxes were made up wholesale. I’m not willing to bite that bullet.
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The "placeholders" are part of their strategy of trying the case in the media, e.g.. Not just the visual impact of the cover sheets, but media people (including NPR in that article) using the caveats on the placeholders (provided by the FBI) to show what a horrible thing Trump did.
I agree that using the photo as such is editorial narrative-peddling of the basest sort.
It’s like…you’ve seen those photos of heroin bricks and gold-plated guns from drug busts. They’re pure propaganda, right? The police want to look strong and successful, so they have incentives both to create such photos and to spread them around. Departments will tend towards policies that let them do it, like stacking all the product in one spot. But does that make the drug bust illegitimate?
I guess I’d expect a magically apolitical FBI to generate very similar photos. Maybe department policy includes a stack of cover sheets. (In my experience, the government loves those things, even in unclassified situations like training.) Or maybe they made the decision in the moment, either to make their sort easier, or to get that snappy photo.
If that’s true, then we’re back to priors. I believe the FBI is somewhat politically aware, and I assume some of its leadership holds a grudge against the FPOTUS. I don’t believe that was the driving factor. Then again, I wasn’t expecting them to pull the trigger at all.
If the gold-plated guns were actually props (not recovered in the bust), it at least risks poisoning the jury pool. And that photo wasn't actually just a publicity photo -- it was included in a court filing by the Justice Department, so it also IMO constitutes an attempt to prejudice the court.
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One way in which I see a second Trump term being significantly different from the first one is that he's not going to be shy around things like this.
This assumes there's actually things he can do "around things like this." I've made my case before as to why a second Trump term won't be significantly different from the first, because whatever his powers on musty old parchments nobody cares about, the President is a figurehead who only has as much authority as the Permanent Bureaucracy allows him.
This has been my position on Trump 2, and why I'd have preferred Desantis.
Trump could come in on day 1 and intentionally fire every single person in Fedgov that he has authority to fire, and those layoffs would be slow-walked so they'd take weeks to actually take effect, lawsuits would fly, deadlines would be pushed constantly further and further back, in some cases they'd just ignore the order entirely, and feet would be dragging this whole time to wait out his 4 year term. Inevitably, some of those workers would be "unfired" when it turns out there's nobody else immediately available to do their particular job.
If Trump can't bring in competent staffers to implement his plans, and he doesn't have a well of 'replacement' workers to step up and actually give the old ones the boot, 4 years is almost certainly not enough to significantly cut down the Federal Bureaucracy.
All that said, Javier Milei seems to have successfully made huge swaths of the Argentenian bureaucracy go AFUERA (correct me if I'm missing something) so there is a model for pulling it off.
Remember when Trump ordered the relocation of the Department of Agriculture Headquarters? It apparently worked almost as well as he intended! Shocker!
Trump is planning to raid the Abbott, Desantis, and Youngkin administrations for personnel. In particular the next governor of Virginia is overwhelmingly likely to be a democrat who fires them all anyways and both Texas and Florida have functioning conservative talent pipelines. It’s not like trump can’t get competent people.
Who will actually risk the possible consequences, often due to Trump himself turning on them?
I'm not so sure.
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Certainly not ones big enough to replace as much of the Permanent Bureaucracy as would need to be replaced. Assuming, of course, that Trump is even able to actually remove the people currently in place. And assuming he even gets elected.
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Eh, I’ve heard it before. He hires the best people, right?
What’s the deal with Virginia? Last I heard, the fights over schooling worked out okay for Republicans. Same for trans issues in general. What else is salient in the state, such that the polling leans so blue? @WhiningCoil
Recreational use and sale of marijuana was legalized before Youngkin took office, but he refused categorically to take any steps to establish any mechanism for legal sale.
I, for one, am kind of salty about that; I had visited Denver in previous years, enjoyed my share of legally purchased edibles and was really looking forward to being able to get them at a local mall.
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Virginia is dominated by Northern Virginia, which is a Washington DC suburb. For all intents and purposes, Virginia has been colonized by the federal government and votes with it's interest 99% of the time. Democrats have to be incredibly fucking retarded to squander their natural advantages, and they managed it back when Northam was elected. But for the most part, it doesn't matter.
Schools were probably the most salient issue that peeled off enough normies. And it was an uphill battle the entire time. The news lied, the schools lied, the politicians lied. And every time the truth eventually came out they just lied more. When they effectively lost the public relations battles, and the legal battles, they just dug their heels in and went "nuh uh". Nearly every school district is defying our Governors order with respect to trans students, knowing full well the school administrators will keep their jobs longer than our governor. It's tied up in courts, and even if the schools somehow lose, it's not their money they pay out. It's ours. But they are betting, probably correctly, that they can run out the clock until a Democrat takes over and drops the cases.
One county near me hit derangement levels I didn't think were possible, and voted in an even more pro-"pornography in schools" slate of board candidates. One took his oath of office on a literally stack of pornographic "childrens" books. Everyone clapped.
I've totally given up. Starting next year we are homeschooling our children. We were on the fence, taking our chances with private school. But after the most recent federal reinterpretation of Title IX, it's obvious no institution in any state is safe. Every single day we meet parents at parks doing the same thing. A not insignificant proportion of those parents are (or should I say were?) teachers themselves, and are choosing to protect their children from what they've seen the education system in our state become.
Do you think Virginia's non-consecutive-governor rule has an effect on their ability to make lasting change?
It certainly seems to. All we've gotten is a deep blue bureaucracy that holds the line, lies, sues, and is generally unproductive and passive aggressive when the executive is a Republican, and then double times it to push an agenda as soon as a Democrat gets back in. And frankly, it seems like the GOP has abandoned our state, there is almost no talent pipeline, and the old Clinton political machine has it's fingers in everything.
Fuck, I'm already getting mailers about local candidates. I live in a deep, deep red county, and all the mailers have been for Democrat candidates, and they all tout their experience in three letter agencies "fighting extremist" as credentials to keep "MAGA extremist" out of government. Of course all it takes to be a "MAGA extremist" to these people is think pornography shouldn't be in middle schools, or that schools shouldn't secretly transition children without their parents consent or knowledge.
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro
Title IX doesn't apply to private institutions that don't receive federal funding.
Very few private educational institutions don't receive federal funding. Private means private-run, not exclusively-privately-funded, because we built a gigantic money pipeline for "our" "education system" back when people were still foolish enough to believe that resources could be shared.
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Virginia is a blue state to begin with and it tends to swing away from the party in power, not towards it. They also have a weirdly timed election that would strongly benefit democrats if Trump wins in 2024 and IIRC Youngkin can't hold two consecutive terms.
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Nope. As soon as the trans stuff disappeared from the headlines, the voters promptly forgot and voted the same school board right back in.
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Think about it. How many competent, respectable people want the job of being Trump’s lackey to fix the X department? In the unlikely event that you aren’t fired and are even somewhat successful at purging the entrenched civil service, you have a good chance of literally going to jail once the next administration gets in.
One of Trump's big actual problems was a simple lack of anyone who was loyal to him or who he would show loyalty to, outside his own family.
I would consider this a personal failing of his.
On the other hand, if Trump put out a general call to his supporters to apply for Federal Government positions and he would expedite their hiring, he'd get probably tens of thousands of people responding.
I wouldn't expect 'competent, respectable' people to answer the call, but still.
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Nor should he be. When the Senate assassinates Caeser, it's bad news all around. When the Senate fails to assassinate Caeser...
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In case there's any question left about the press's lack of objectivity, the CNN article you cited -- article, not editorial, not column -- contains this bit:
It's yet one more of these irregular verbs.
I defend myself.
You air unfounded theories about the prosecution.
He is held in contempt of court for raising the specter of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones.
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