Octopus Overlords

pr0ner wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 10:14 pm "Nothing's gonna happen"

Something happens.

"It's not enough because the system is BROKEN".

Zarathud wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 11:41 pm It also shows Trump lied about being audited, despite a mandatory audit.

A wide-ranging subpoena sent to Trump campaign officials last month shows new areas of investigative interest as part of the Justice Department’s extensive Jan. 6 criminal probe, according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post, and lawyers say a grand jury focused on the day’s events and related fundraising has increased its activities in recent months.

The subpoena was received in early December, according to a former Trump campaign official who provided the document to The Post on the condition of anonymity because a criminal investigation is ongoing. The document seeks more than two dozen categories of information, and includes some questions that were not part of a series of similar subpoenas reviewed by The Post that were sent to several dozen people in September.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is concerned that a former prosecutor who wrote a book about his time investigating Donald Trump may jeopardize the office’s continuing probe, potentially violating laws and ethics rules in the process, according to a letter to the publisher and author sent Wednesday.

The former investigator, Mark Pomerantz, was put on a special assignment to work the Trump case by Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and helped lead the effort until his abrupt resignation in February 2022, weeks into Bragg’s term. Pomerantz and another veteran lawyer, Carey Dunne, quit together in disagreement over how to proceed with the case.

Since then, Pomerantz has criticized Bragg, saying he wrongly stopped a move to quickly indict Trump, while Bragg sought more time to evaluate the evidence. Bragg now says a new book by Pomerantz to be published next month by Simon & Schuster could interfere with that effort.

onald Trump may have severely damaged his case in the defamation lawsuit brought against him by a woman who accused him of rape by expressing "repeated lies" during his deposition, according to an attorney.

Katie Phang, legal analyst and MSNBC host, was reacting to the unsealed transcripts of the testimony Trump gave as part of the suit brought forward by former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll.

Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

Former President Donald Trump’s legal team turned over more materials with classified markings and a laptop belonging to an aide to federal prosecutors in recent months, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.

The Trump attorneys also handed over an empty folder marked “Classified Evening Briefing,” sources said.

The previously undisclosed handovers – from December and January – suggest the protracted effort by the Justice Department to repossess records from Trump’s presidency may not be done.

...

A Trump aide had previously copied those same pages onto a thumb drive and laptop, not realizing they were classified. The laptop, which belonged to an aide, who works for Save America PAC, and the thumb drive were also given to investigators in January.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation, which is pursuing possible criminal charges related to Trump’s handling of national security records and obstruction of justice, had subpoenaed Trump last May for all classified records in his possession.

“Until February 10, 2023, about ten weeks before this case is set to be tried, Mr. Trump has refused to provide his DNA,” Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in a 21-page memorandum opinion. “Moreover, he has employed litigation tactics the effect and probable purpose of which have been to delay Ms. Carroll’s actions against him an object that is significant in view of the fact that Ms. Carroll now is 79 years old.”

In 2019, Carroll went public with allegations that Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s. Trump denied it to reporters by claiming: “She’s not my type,” sparking Carroll’s original lawsuit for defamation.

A special grand jury report on whether then-President Donald Trump and his allies tried to unlawfully interfere in the 2020 election results in Georgia says the grand jurors believe some witnesses may have lied under oath.

Alefroth wrote: ↑Thu Feb 16, 2023 6:12 pm https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald ... -rcna70397

A special grand jury report on whether then-President Donald Trump and his allies tried to unlawfully interfere in the 2020 election results in Georgia says the grand jurors believe some witnesses may have lied under oath.

Alefroth wrote: ↑Thu Feb 16, 2023 7:44 pm I wouldn't take that bet.

Grifman wrote: ↑Tue Feb 21, 2023 6:19 pm

Pyperkub wrote: ↑Tue Feb 21, 2023 7:15 pm
"REcommending" Indictments <> Indicting.

Grifman wrote: ↑Tue Feb 21, 2023 8:46 pm

Pyperkub wrote: ↑Tue Feb 21, 2023 7:15 pm
"REcommending" Indictments <> Indicting.

I’m pretty sure I already understood that

malchior wrote: ↑Wed Feb 22, 2023 6:32 am Those interviews and specifically the one on CNN yesterday with the GA foreperson are a huge Deathwatch moment. I'm not saying it wasn't news but it certainly wasn't wise to put this person on the air acting like that when the stakes are this high. I wonder if I'll be around to read a book about how unserious this nation became. Probably not because people somehow can't see what a shitshow we have become. Boiled frogs and all.

Here is a sample if you didn't get a taste of it.

Kurth wrote: ↑Wed Feb 22, 2023 2:32 pmBut it is what it is, right? I don't see how you can blame CNN and other news agencies for shining a light on the fact that someone who is playing an integral role in potentially steering the course of our democracy is a fucking idiot. When you say, "it was[] news but it certainly wasn't wise to put this person on the air," I think it exposes the fundamental issue I have with some (by no means all) of the "Deathwatch" commentary.

From where I sit, it's not the job of the news media to drive things to a certain outcome, and that's how I read your commentary here when you criticize this as being unwise news.

I certainly agree that if the goal of the news media is to form public opinion so it's more supportive of indictment and criminal charges against Trump, then this coverage certainly wasn't wise. But I don't think that's their job. In my mind, it's either news, or it's not, and whether it furthers or hinders a particular outcome shouldn't be part of the equation.

Zarathud wrote: ↑Wed Feb 22, 2023 8:54 pm Jury of your peers. Our Peers are Fucking Idiots desperate for attention.

But two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.

...

Starting in May, FBI agents in the Washington field office had sought to slow the probe, urging caution given its extraordinary sensitivity, the people said.

Some of those field agents wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June, after Trump’s legal team asserted a diligent search had been conducted and all classified records had been turned over, according to some people with knowledge of the discussions.

The idea of closing the probe was not something that was discussed or considered by FBI leadership and would not have been approved, a senior law enforcement official said.

...

On one side, federal prosecutors in the department’s national security division advocated aggressive ways to secure some of the country’s most closely guarded secrets, which they feared Trump was intentionally hiding at Mar-a-Lago; on the other, FBI agents in the Washington field office urged more caution with such a high-profile matter, recommending they take a cooperative rather than confrontational approach.

...

The FBI agents’ caution also was rooted in the fact that mistakes in prior probes of Hillary Clinton and Trump had proved damaging to the FBI, and the cases subjected the bureau to sustained public attacks from partisans, the people said.

Prosecutors countered that the FBI failing to treat Trump as it had other government employees who were not truthful about classified records could threaten the nation’s security. As evidence surfaced suggesting that Trump or his team was holding back sensitive records, the prosecutors pushed for quick action to recover them, according to the people familiar with the discussions.

...

It’s unclear how the investigation may have been reshaped if the two sides had settled their disputes differently. Had the criminal investigation been closed in June, as some FBI field agents discussed, legal experts said it’s unlikely agents would have yet recovered the items found in the FBI’s raid of Trump’s residence.

The way conservatives tell it, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a hive of anti-Trump villainy, filled with agents looking for any excuse to hound the former president with investigative witch hunts. But the thing to understand about Donald Trump’s legal troubles is that they exist not because federal agents are out to get him, but despite the fact that the FBI is full of Trump supporters who would really like to leave him alone.

This morning, The Washington Post reported that FBI investigators clashed with federal prosecutors over the decision to search the former president’s residence, where highly classified documents were found despite Trump’s insistence that he had none.

“Some of those field agents wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June,” the Post reported, adding that FBI agents were “simply afraid” and “worried taking aggressive steps investigating Trump could blemish or even end their careers.” The FBI did not exhibit this worry in 2016, when it publicly announced that it was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified documents, an announcement that, even with all the other mistakes her campaign made, likely cost Clinton the election. That decision was made in part because then-Director James Comey feared that pro-Trump FBI agents would leak the details if he did not announce them publicly. The federal investigation into the Trump campaign, by contrast, was properly kept confidential until after the election. As one agent told the reporter Spencer Ackerman in 2016, “The FBI is Trumpland.”

President Joe Biden is also under investigation for his mishandling of classified documents, but for now the two situations are distinguished by Biden’s attorneys discovering and voluntarily handing those documents over, as opposed to lying about having them and then insisting that they were his to keep. Neither man, however, should be above prosecution if the circumstances call for it.

A simple but obvious fact has been lost over the past few years, amid Trump’s direct attacks on the FBI, and liberal defenses of the FBI against those attacks: FBI agents are cops. Law-enforcement officers, including the FBI, have long been disproportionately conservative, but in the past few decades, like the rest of the nation, they have also become far more polarized by party, a reality reflected in the rhetoric and positioning of advocacy groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police. There are liberal and moderate cops, but they are not close to comprising a majority. Simply put, the FBI is full of people who would prefer not to investigate Donald Trump. He remains under federal investigation only because of his own inability to stop criming.