Convicted felon Donald Trump on Trial (Found guilty on 34 felony counts. 54 criminal count still in the air)

[Fergasun]

@tshile

The fact that he could be President again makes it even more important for this trial to adjudicate before the election.  "Man in charge of protecting nations secrets, convicted of not protecting them, going to be in charge again" Not sure why by your logic this minimizes the crime.  I think by most legal standards, it would maximize the crime.  Presidents and Congressfolks don't get a free pass and especially the President should set an example.  

 

Here's the thing.  He doesn't need to run for President. It's his choice. Sorry all your criminal trials are getting in the way.  Running for office shouldn't give you some special card to commit crimes.  How much more evidence to people need that the man is a criminal?  Can't wait for the Jan 6 one to drop...  but it needs to come in a short timeframe.  

 

Can anyone serious not laugh that he will be in the same position to protect and defend the Constitution.  

 

What message does it send to every other handler of classified information that it's not a big deal.  And Trump got multiple months of concessions that "regular people" don't.  

[Fergasun]

...

@PleaseBlitz

Because the DoJ was asking for December.  

 

I think the concern is that the trial could still get delayed.

[Ball Security]

22 minutes ago, tshile said:

I guess I should add the Fulton stuff may wind up also being a case to look forward to possibly real prison time. If they can prove he was actually trying to rig the election, that one may have legs to it. 
 

unfortunately I think they said the other day it’s expanding, so it seems to me that one is going to drag out even longer than the 1/6 stuff. But maybe not. 

The passive aggressive posting works well for you 

You consistently minimize these charges. “There was nothing more serious than mishandling documents”, you say.

 

For this case, as someone who has no prior convictions, he’s looking at an offense level of 37 yields which calls for 210 to 262 months. These are sentencing guidelines and this does not account for the obstruction of justice charges which could add 57-108 months. Though Cannon could, and likely would, run these concurrently.

 

In short, sentencing guidelines call for 17.5 years. These are not potential maximums. These are the guidelines. These charges are serious despite what you claim.

 

https://www.justsecurity.org/86901/how-much-prison-time-does-former-president-trump-face-applying-the-u-s-sentencing-guidelines/

[PleaseBlitz]

Just now, Fergasun said:

...

@PleaseBlitz

Because the DoJ was asking for December.  

 

I think the concern is that the trial could still get delayed.

 

Got it.  I think the December date was always considered extremely aggressive and was really just DOJ's tactic for counterbalancing Trump's delay tactics.  In other words, the DOJ knew Trump was going to shoot for 2025, so DOJ asked for 12/2023 hoping they'd meet in the middle.  As opposed to asking for mid-2024 and meeting in the middle of mid-2024 and 2025. 

 

I'll add that if the trial was in December, that might give the GOP more of a reason to ditch Trump and run someone that doesn't have all of Trump's myriad problems/personality defects/baggage/felony charges. 

[tshile]

Just now, Ball Security said:

You consistently minimize these charges. “There was nothing more serious than mishandling documents”, you say.

 

For this case, as someone who has no prior convictions, he’s looking at an offense level of 37 yields which calls for 210 to 262 months. These are sentencing guidelines and this does not account for the obstruction of justice charges which could add 57-108 months. Though Cannon could, and likely would, run these concurrently.

 

In short, sentencing guidelines call for 17.5 years. These are not potential maximums. These are the guidelines. These charges are serious despite what you claim.

 

https://www.justsecurity.org/86901/how-much-prison-time-does-former-president-trump-face-applying-the-u-s-sentencing-guidelines/

this is what becomes so frustrating - people like you are so wrapped up around this you don’t seem to correctly read things. 
 

im not minimizing the charges. They’re serious as hell. We all know that. Furthermore, anyone paying attention, understands that the charges require disclosing certain things about the evidence. We know they had to keep that in mind. We know there’s more serious stuff he had, that he’s not charged with, because they don’t want to deal with the content in open court. 
 

I have never once said these aren’t serious charges. I’ve gone on about how anyone else would be in a lot of trouble - and likely would be held in prison pending trial. 
 

furthermore you’ve completely ignored the fact that the federal sentencing guidelines are just that - guidelines. There is language in it that says judges have discretion to venture outside of them. This has been posted about and discussed numerous times in this thread. One of the explanations, posted in this thread, specifically stated multiple times that the unique and serious context of the person being charged makes determination a sentence based on the guidelines a waste of time. 
 

you need to do a better job of determining when someone is telling you what they think is right or should happen and what they think is likely to happen given the real world context of everything involved 

 

It seems obvious to me the charges are very serious. The situation is very serious because he could be president again and because we know he had way worse than what this trial will deal with. 
 

it also seems obvious to me that the extremely unique circumstances are going to allow for a lot of wiggle room for the judge, and my guess is given everything you’re very unlikely to see prison time for this particular case. 
 

fulton county and 1/6 are the baskets to put the eggs in. And i bet they’re going to take a while to get to a trial. And if he is president who the **** knows what happens. 

9 minutes ago, PleaseBlitz said:

 

Got it.  I think the December date was always considered extremely aggressive and was really just DOJ's tactic for counterbalancing Trump's delay tactics.  In other words, the DOJ knew Trump was going to shoot for 2025, so DOJ asked for 12/2023 hoping they'd meet in the middle.  As opposed to asking for mid-2024 and meeting in the middle of mid-2024 and 2025. 

 

I'll add that if the trial was in December, that might give the GOP more of a reason to ditch Trump and run someone that doesn't have all of Trump's myriad problems/personality defects/baggage/felony charges. 

My primary concern, if you go to the tweet and read the thread you’ll see the proposed schedule of everything in a following tweet, is it seems like there’s 1-2 weeks (sometimes 3) between each step. And I would think each step becomes a potential place for them to delay. 
 

when I looked at the scheduled, assuming they’d fight for delays along the way, it seemed unreasonable that the proposed trial date will not see further delays. 
 

I come up with all of that using my vast legal experience of nothing. 

[PleaseBlitz]

9 minutes ago, tshile said:

My primary concern, if you go to the tweet and read the thread you’ll see the proposed schedule of everything in a following tweet, is it seems like there’s 1-2 weeks (sometimes 3) between each step. And I would think each step becomes a potential place for them to delay. 
 

when I looked at the scheduled, assuming they’d fight for delays along the way, it seemed unreasonable that the proposed trial date will not see further delays. 
 

I come up with all of that using my vast legal experience of nothing. 

 

I can't see tweets at work, so I can't look at it.  I think what you are suggesting has merit, particularly because it'll be at the discretion of judge Cannon which is troubling.  In my experience with actual trials, which is not a ton but not zero either, judges are very hardcore about their schedules and parties asking for delays get their wrath.  But it all comes back to judge Cannon.  Will she continue to be very deferential to Trump, or will she realize she has a lifetime appointment specifically so she doesn't have to owe anyone anything. 

[Fergasun]

@tshile

I know nothing about Federal trials, but I would assume appeals wouldn't bump the trial date that much.  I also wonder if DoJ will ask for expedited everything due to "this alleged criminal could be President again." 

[LadySkinsFan]

55 minutes ago, PleaseBlitz said:

 

Not sure why @LadySkinsFan gave this a thumbs down.  This seems like great timing from my perspective.  #1, it's not after the election, as Team Trump wanted.  #2, its after Trump is likely to have sewn up the nomination (Super Tuesday is March 5, and 12 states including states with huge populations like TX and CA are holding primaries), so the GOP primary will be effectively over and the general will have effectively begun, and Trump will be in ****ing court for stealing national security secrets.  

 

I wanted it as soon as possible, so what if it interferes with any of the primary events he has planned. He's a private citizen, he doesn't have to run for any office. He has to show up for criminal trials. Let them play out and let voters decide if they want to vote for a convicted person instead of him winning the primaries ahead of the GOP convention. 

 

Personally I'm looking forward to the Georgia indictments if they include RICO elements. I hope that the Jan6 indictments include the insurrection charge too. Although not mentioned in the letter it doesn't mean that insurrection can't be included when the indictments come down. 

[The Evil Genius]

And when Fani Willis drops a racketeering charge on Trump..

[mistertim]

If he's found guilty and Cannon gives him what is, objectively, a ludicrously light sentence (some fines, zero prison time, for example), does the DoJ have recourse?

[AlvinWaltonIsMyBoy]

2 minutes ago, mistertim said:

If he's found guilty and Cannon gives him what is, objectively, a ludicrously light sentence (some fines, zero prison time, for example), does the DoJ have recourse?

From what I understand, as long as she explains it in a way that falls under the “special considerations” an appeal is unlikely to succeed. 

[tshile]

18 minutes ago, AlvinWaltonIsMyBoy said:

From what I understand, as long as she explains it in a way that falls under the “special considerations” an appeal is unlikely to succeed. 

That was what was outlined in the legal eagle video posted pages back. 
 

the way I understood the process:

the appeal can only be on the grounds the judge did not correctly take the time to outline the justification for going outside the bounds of the federal sentencing guidelines. So long as she does that, there’s very little chance the DOJ could win on appeal. They don’t consider the merits of the justification, just whether the justification was properly provided

 

i assume she would make sure she does that. 

@mistertim

[mistertim]

I guess the right wingers were correct, then. There are two sets of laws, only it's in Trump's favor, not against him.

[Bang]

Chances he pays said fine:

0%

 

Then what?

~Bang

[Jabbyrwock]

25 minutes ago, mistertim said:

I guess the right wingers were correct, then. There are two sets of laws, only it's in Trump's favor, not against him.

 

Probably more accurate to describe law as a statistical continuum that scales with wealth, political influence, skin melanin and gender.

 

Justice may be blind but sometimes mamma needs a new set of scales.

[The Evil Genius]

A NSFW poem for Friday.

 

Spoiler

 

 

[China]

Special Counsel Probes Team Trump’s Jan. 6 ‘War Room’

 

In the days and hours before the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, diehard Donald Trump allies gathered at Washington’s Willard Hotel, hunkered down as the last-ditch efforts to overturn the 2020 election went forward. What exactly they were doing in those meetings was a subject of intense interest for Congress’ Jan. 6 investigation, but the committee ran into the limits of its powers as it struggled to reconstruct the specifics of those eleventh-hour meetings.Now, special counsel Jack Smith’s office is taking its shot, hoping to figure out exactly what went down in the Willard “war room” — and just how involved Trump himself was in the Willard-based efforts to stop the transfer of power to then president-elect Joe Biden.

 

Special counsel investigators are grilling witnesses about the crucial Willard meetings, two people with knowledge of the investigation tell Rolling Stone. It could prove to be a fruitful line of questioning. One former senior Trump administration official, who stayed on through the Jan. 6 riot, simply refers to it as “the crime headquarters.” 

 

The Willard, a luxury hotel a block from the White House, became the site of what participants described as a “war room” for Trump-aligned lawyers and diehard MAGA operatives working to overturn the 2020 election. The summit took place in the days and hours before the certification of electoral college votes on Jan. 6, and participants included Trump advisers and allies such as Giuliani, John Eastman, Bernard Kerik, Boris Epshteyn, and Steve Bannon.

 

Investigators led by special counsel Jack Smith have questioned multiple witnesses — including then-top Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani — about the timeline and deliberations of the meetings, seeking to reconstruct the events, the sources say. The investigators also plan to bring in additional witnesses who have knowledge of the Willard meetings, the sources add.

The federal investigators are also focused on the level of Trump’s direct involvement in the meetings, the sources say. The then-president reportedly called Rudy Giuliani on Jan. 5 to complain about Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with a plan to block the counting of legitimate electoral college votes, according to interviews conducted by the Jan. 6 Committee. 

 

The special counsel’s office declined to comment on this story. But Smith’s interest in Trump associates’ activities at the Willard Hotel, where the then-president’s lieutenants reportedly oversaw the effort to disrupt the count of legitimate electoral college votes, suggests the special counsel is exploring Trump’s role in and knowledge of the efforts to disrupt the proceedings. 

 

Early this week, the former president was sent a target letter related to this investigation, strongly suggesting that an indictment — Trump’s third of the year — could be coming soon. The letter listed the federal statutes under which Trump is expected to be charged, including conspiracy, obstruction, and civil rights violations.

 

Smith’s office’s efforts to reconstruct what occurred at the Willard during the tumultuous Trump-Biden presidential transition could address questions left unanswered by Congress’ wide-ranging investigation into Trump and his associates.

 

The January 6 House committee interviewed a number of Trump allies in attendance about the Willard “war room,” including Giuliani and Kerik. But others, including Trumpist attorney Eastman, invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when asked even basic questions about whether they were in attendance at the Trump “war room” in early Jan. 2021.“We didn’t get to peek behind the curtain there because they stonewalled us,” a former Jan. 6 committee staffer tells Rolling Stone in reference to the Willard investigation.

The House committee also focused on the phone call Trump apparently made to deputies at the hotel the day before the insurrection. 

 

During Giuliani’s interview with the January 6 House committee, investigators asked about a phone call which they said took place between Trump, Giuliani, and Bannon at the hotel. Trump, one investigator said during Giuliani’s deposition, “called you and Mr. Steve Bannon and conveyed to you that the Vice President was very arrogant and that the President wasn’t happy with him,” according to transcripts released by Congress. 

 

Giuliani, citing attorney-client privilege issues, declined to describe the substance of his call with the former president. 

 

The Trump “war room” at the hotel was a subject of particular interest for the committee’s investigation for its role as a hub for the Trump campaign’s attempts to block the counting of electoral votes on January 6. Top Trump advisers used the so-called “command center” while pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the counting of legitimate electoral votes and encourage state legislatures to instead send slates of bogus pro-Trump electors in battleground states where the former president had lost to Joe Biden. 

 

In a sign that the fake electors plot could be a key part of the Smith investigation, the special counsel’s office has issued subpoenas to election officials in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin seeking information about the activities of the Trump campaign. 

 

Despite the “command center’s” importance in Trump’s attempted coup, during the presidential transition, the Willard hub attracted the private ire of other Trump advisers who were quietly embarrassed by Giuliani and others’ efforts. Other members of the administration and Trump campaign advisers, the former official says, regularly mocked their work and had nicknames for the “Star Wars cantina” of 2020 dead-enders.

 

One former senior Trump campaign official tells Rolling Stone that, in discussions at the time with other Trump aides, they called the Willard hotspot “idiot island.”

 

Click on the link for the full article
 

[China]

Trump shares ominous video to Truth Social as Jan. 6 indictment hangs in the balance

 

A new video shared by Donald Trump to Truth Social ramping up to the decision on whether or not he'll be indicted for the third time — this time in relation to his involvement in the events of Jan. 6 — has an ominous tone that could be taken as a threat towards the federal grand jury and/or special counsel Jack Smith.

 

In the clip, originating from the account MAGA.com, a stern image of Trump can be seen while a voiceover from a 2020 conversation about Iran can be heard saying, "If you f**k around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before." As The Daily Beast points out in their coverage of the new video, "the message seems to target special counsel Jack Smith, one of Trump's current biggest foes." In Mediaite's coverage, they remind that earlier in the week, Trump weighed in on the possibility of Smith seeking jail time for him, saying, "I think it's a very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters, much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016."

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

 

[China]

Before Jan. 6, Mark Meadows joked about Trump’s election claims

 

Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000 dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there.

 

In a text message that has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors, Meadows wrote to a White House lawyer that his son, Atlanta-area attorney Blake Meadows, had been probing possible fraud and had found only a handful of possible votes cast in dead voters’ names, far short of what Trump was alleging. The lawyer teasingly responded that perhaps Meadows’s son could locate the thousands of votes Trump would need to win the election. The text was described by multiple people familiar with the exchange.

 

The jocular text message, which has not been previously reported, is one of many exchanges from the time in which Trump aides and other Republican officials expressed deep skepticism or even openly mocked the election claims being made publicly by Trump, according to people familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the criminal investigation.

 

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading a Justice Department investigation of Trump’s activities in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, has focused on exploring whether Trump and his closest advisers understood that claims of fraud in the election were baseless, even as they pressed state officials and others to overturn Biden’s victory and convinced Trump’s millions of supporters that the election had been stolen, people familiar with the probe have said.

 

The text message is a small part of a broader portrait of Meadows that Smith appears to be assembling as he weighs the actions of not just Trump but a number of his closest advisers, including Meadows.

 

People close to Meadows have said that he was privately sympathetic to those Trump advisers who were skeptical of the fraud claims. Yet Meadows also played both sides, often appearing to indulge Trump’s desire to use those false allegations to try to remain in office, people who witnessed his behavior have said.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[LadySkinsFan]

Any thoughts that Meadows didn't sell out Trump? No, I don't think so either. Meadows thinks he's smarter than Trump and in no way would he take the fall for Trump. He's setting himself up for 2028. 

[skinsmarydu]

On 7/21/2023 at 1:13 PM, Jabbyrwock said:

 

Probably more accurate to describe law as a statistical continuum that scales with wealth, political influence, skin melanin and gender.

 

Justice may be blind but sometimes mamma needs a new set of scales.

Don't forget to give your wife some extra kisses.  She's lucky to have a partner with a brain. 

[Califan007 The Constipated]

In case it wasn't posted (and yes, I'm too lazy to click back past this page lol)...

 

 

[skinsmarydu]

1 hour ago, Califan007 The Constipated said:

In case it wasn't posted (and yes, I'm too lazy to click back past this page lol)...

 

 

Well, if we're posting our faves...

 

[Cooked Crack]