The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Smoove_B »

The hits keep coming:
A federal grand jury investigating the activities leading up the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the push by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the result of the 2020 election has expanded its probe to include seeking information about Trump's leadership PAC, Save America, sources with direct knowledge tell ABC News.

The interest in the fundraising arm came to light as part of grand jury subpoenas seeking documents, records and testimony from potential witnesses, the sources said.

...

According to Save America's statement of organization filed to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the committee was established just days after the 2020 election. At the time, the filing said the new committee is affiliated with the Trump campaign and the Trump Make America Great Committee, a small-dollar focused, joint-fundraising committee between the president's campaign and the Republican National Committee, which has been sending out donor solicitation emails for Save America.

Similar to regular political action committees, leadership PACs can only accept up to $5,000 per donor, far less than the upwards of $800,000 donations that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party's high-dollar joint fundraising committee, Trump Victory, had previously raised.

Since its inception, Save America PAC has brought in more than $135 million, including transfers from affiliated committees, according to disclosure records. As of the end of July, the PAC reported having just under $100 million in cash on hand.
Has any man in American history been more prosecuted than TFG?

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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by LawBeefaroni »

The audacity of audacity.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by malchior »

More revelations about the Trump DOJ cesspool. We find this out because someone...ah yes...waited for his book deal. The revelations are disgusting. He was a public servant when he got improper requests but choose to monetize this information for private gain. Worse he declined to prosecute and watched another office prosecute it. There is a reason this system is so rotten. This guy shouldn't be applauded for staying quiet while harm was done.

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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Pyperkub »

malchior wrote: Thu Sep 08, 2022 1:10 pm More revelations about the Trump DOJ cesspool. We find this out because someone...ah yes...waited for his book deal. The revelations are disgusting. He was a public servant when he got improper requests but choose to monetize this information for private gain. Worse he declined to prosecute and watched another office prosecute it. There is a reason this system is so rotten. This guy shouldn't be applauded for staying quiet while harm was done.

Let's not forget that it isn't just Trump in the GOP who has sought to prosecute people for political purposes. Remember Alberto Gonzalez in the W. Bush administration firing AG's for not prosecuting false cases to install more malleable folks?
Multiple investigations — by Congress, the DOJ, and the press — demonstrated to most Americans the firings of the US attorneys represented an attempt to influence criminal investigations to the benefit of one political party over another. Gonzales, McNulty, and several others in the Justice Department eventually lost their jobs under a barrage of late-night comedy roasts and Sunday morning talk show incredulity.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by malchior »

DOJ appealed some portion of the ridiculous Cannon order. We don't know the scope and we don't know if it will hit a panel of Trump judges at 11th circuit or not.

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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Jaymann »

Daehawk wrote: Sat Sep 10, 2022 12:22 pm
That is right on point. "Where are the lawyers?" could even be a campaign slogan.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Daehawk »

Lawyers like to get paid too.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Isgrimnur »

CNN
The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump's lawyers proposed two selections each to a federal judge for who should serve as "special master" in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
...
Thomas Griffith, a retired federal judge and George W. Bush appointee, served on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals from 2005 to 2020. In one of his final major rulings before retiring, he wrote the majority opinion rejecting House Democrats' attempt to subpoena Trump's former White House Counsel Don McGahn. (The decision was later overturned.)

In the years since his retirement, Griffith co-authored a report alongside other prominent conservative lawyers and officials debunking Trump's lies about massive fraud in the 2020 election. And he publicly endorsed President Joe Biden's nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court.

Barbara Jones, another retired federal judge and a Clinton appointee, is a former federal prosecutor and a retired judge from the Southern District of New York from 1995 to 2012. She brings a lot of special master experience to the table, having recently served in that position for three high-profile criminal investigations with political implications.

She was tapped to serve as a special master to examine materials seized during an FBI raid of Rudy Giuliani's home and office in April 2021. She was also a special master in the Michael Cohen case, to make sure investigators didn't sweep up any documents that were attorney-client privileged.
...
Paul Huck Jr., Trump nominee

Huck, who has his own law firm, had been a partner at the Jones Day law firm, which represented the Trump campaign in 2016, and a contributor to the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society.

Huck also previously served as the deputy attorney general for Florida and as general counsel to former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist -- who was a Republican at the time but served as a Democratic member of the US House and is the Democratic nominee for governor in Florida. Chris Kise, Trump's current lawyer, also worked for Crist and overlapped with Huck.
...
Raymond Dearie, Trump nominee

Dearie, a Reagan nominee, has served as a federal judge in New York since 1986. He retired in 2011 and is now a senior judge on the circuit.

Dearie also served a seven-year term on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court. He was one of the judges who approved an FBI and DOJ request to surveil Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, as part of the federal inquiry into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Kraken »

Daehawk wrote: Sat Sep 10, 2022 1:36 pm Lawyers like to get paid too.
Exactly. Anyone who works for trump must assume that they're donating their time. Especially if they lose, since trump hates losers.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Roman »

Twitter is ablaze with questions as to why trump flew into Dulles today….
Indictment? Grand jury testimony? Illness(Walter Reed)?
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Jaymann »

Roman wrote: Sun Sep 11, 2022 11:08 pm Twitter is ablaze with questions as to why trump flew into Dulles today….
Indictment? Grand jury testimony? Illness(Walter Reed)?
He had to retrieve some boxes from an airport locker.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Smoove_B »

This feels like a big deal

NEW: The Mar-a-Lago search warrant has been further unsealed — and it reveals the DOJ subpoenaed surveillance MAL footage from Jan 10, 2022 to present. In other words, DOJ has visuals on every foreign asset that visited the Nuclear Spy at his Espionage hotel in 2022. MAGA can’t be thrilled about this. Jared Kushner can’t be thrilled about it either. 8 months of footage to sort through.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Alefroth »

Did they actually get the footage?
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Holman »

Roman wrote: Sun Sep 11, 2022 11:08 pm Twitter is ablaze with questions as to why trump flew into Dulles today….
Indictment? Grand jury testimony? Illness(Walter Reed)?
The Trump-arrival episode is a good cautionary tale about overreacting. Twitter was full of people claiming to see that he exited his plane with a jacket draped over his shoulders, which *of course* must have meant that he was in handcuffs. (He wasn't.)

When later pictures appeared of Trump on his VA golf course with a sizable entourage (but with no golf clubs visible), Twitter leaped to the conclusion that they could identify Nunes and McCarthy and other Republican-adjacent figures among the group. It later seemed obvious that most of the collection were known golf-related employees, and that they were probably talking over plans for an upcoming tournament.

Now it's obviously still possible that a Trump visit to DC involves some shady shit, but we should all be careful about the enthusiastic conclusions that erupt in exclamation points.

After all, the Marshal of the Supreme Court would want it that way.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Holman »

Smoove_B wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:14 pm This feels like a big deal

NEW: The Mar-a-Lago search warrant has been further unsealed — and it reveals the DOJ subpoenaed surveillance MAL footage from Jan 10, 2022 to present. In other words, DOJ has visuals on every foreign asset that visited the Nuclear Spy at his Espionage hotel in 2022. MAGA can’t be thrilled about this. Jared Kushner can’t be thrilled about it either. 8 months of footage to sort through.
It's a big deal until we learn that the relevant security cameras suffered very convenient battery failures, over and over again.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by malchior »

Alefroth wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:29 pm Did they actually get the footage?
Yeah seriously. It's like no one thinks any of this through to any logical conclusion. You can request anything you want but that only matters if it still exists and they actually produce it. Assuming MAL keeps 18 months of video archives for all their cameras seems...unlikely.
Last edited by malchior on Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Smoove_B »

Alefroth wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:29 pm Did they actually get the footage?
Unknown - we now just know how long they're looking to collect info for - which suggests to me they think (and a judge agreed) that all kinds of shenanigans were going on for a while.

I could see it going either way - he has it all (and more) -or- it was all magically erased.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

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There have been headlines like this for several days. It really looks like DOJ is going hard on higher-level Jan 6 participants.

Question, though:

Let's say I'm Roger Stone and I have dozens of texts to people all over Trumpworld coordinating plans to employ fake electors and fake legal strategies to subvert the election. Since I'm not an idiot, I delete them all as soon as it starts to look like the plan has failed.

Of what worth is my phone to the FBI twelve or eighteen months later?
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

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That's just what we call pillow talk.
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The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Zarathud »

You have to remember that MAGA-Ts are pretty brazen and stupid idiots. Some of them will keep those texts because they have nothing to hide.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Carpet_pissr »

Holman wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:30 pm
Roman wrote: Sun Sep 11, 2022 11:08 pm Twitter is ablaze with questions as to why trump flew into Dulles today….
Indictment? Grand jury testimony? Illness(Walter Reed)?
The Trump-arrival episode is a good cautionary tale about overreacting. Twitter was full of people claiming to see that he exited his plane with a jacket draped over his shoulders, which *of course* must have meant that he was in handcuffs. (He wasn't.)

When later pictures appeared of Trump on his VA golf course with a sizable entourage (but with no golf clubs visible), Twitter leaped to the conclusion that they could identify Nunes and McCarthy and other Republican-adjacent figures among the group. It later seemed obvious that most of the collection were known golf-related employees, and that they were probably talking over plans for an upcoming tournament.

Now it's obviously still possible that a Trump visit to DC involves some shady shit, but we should all be careful about the enthusiastic conclusions that erupt in exclamation points.

After all, the Marshal of the Supreme Court would want it that way.
I feel like Twitter is the online equivalent of the National Enquirer these days. All the slimy ‘I can’t believe this just happened!’ Tweets and the way so many use it now has really amped up the noise to signal ratio (for me).
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by malchior »

Filtering Twitter is simple nowadays - it's like spam. Misspelled? Clearly written to inspire an emotional reaction? A 6-second video without context? Trump is finally getting his!? Pause and look for more data. But Twitter is still a great source of information if you can avoid the shit takes.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Carpet_pissr »

Yeah, my point was exactly that the shit to good content ratio has risen to unacceptable levels.

Similar to how I just gave up trying to go through my email spam folder every day in case something got tagged by accident: The volume of spam has so far outweighed the volume of legit emails in that folder, it’s no longer worth it.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Smoove_B »

Or (hear me out) we're collectively so desperate to read some genuinely good news for once that the bar for interest is a hair's width off the ground.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Carpet_pissr »

Smoove_B wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 10:04 pm Or (hear me out) we're collectively so desperate to read some genuinely good news for once that the bar for interest is a hair's width off the ground.
Good point, and that’s actually related: all the ‘OMG Trump is finished now’ or ‘I can’t believe this!’ type tweets are clearly designed for my particular political interests, and it’s just fucking slimy. FB levels of slimy bs.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by LordMortis »

malchior wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:52 pm
Alefroth wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:29 pm Did they actually get the footage?
Yeah seriously. It's like no one thinks any of this through to any logical conclusion. You can request anything you want but that only matters if it still exists and they actually produce it. Assuming MAL keeps 18 months of video archives for all their cameras seems...unlikely.
If you are doing shady shit, I can't see keeping them for more'n 90 days in any official capacity and probably have a quality statement that says as much.
Holman wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 8:32 pm
Of what worth is my phone to the FBI twelve or eighteen months later?
That's my general thunk.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Pyperkub »

Holman wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 8:32 pm

There have been headlines like this for several days. It really looks like DOJ is going hard on higher-level Jan 6 participants.

Question, though:

Let's say I'm Roger Stone and I have dozens of texts to people all over Trumpworld coordinating plans to employ fake electors and fake legal strategies to subvert the election. Since I'm not an idiot, I delete them all as soon as it starts to look like the plan has failed.

Of what worth is my phone to the FBI twelve or eighteen months later?
Or one just upgrades to a new phone every apple cycle (see also Secret Service wiping phones)... the main thing is that the co-conspirators (ALL, if a group chat) need to have done the same... one poor/lazy bastard can still have all the records on a phone (or will have kept screenshots of them for blackmail, cooperation deals, etc).
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by El Guapo »

Pyperkub wrote: Wed Sep 14, 2022 1:43 pm
Holman wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 8:32 pm

There have been headlines like this for several days. It really looks like DOJ is going hard on higher-level Jan 6 participants.

Question, though:

Let's say I'm Roger Stone and I have dozens of texts to people all over Trumpworld coordinating plans to employ fake electors and fake legal strategies to subvert the election. Since I'm not an idiot, I delete them all as soon as it starts to look like the plan has failed.

Of what worth is my phone to the FBI twelve or eighteen months later?
Or one just upgrades to a new phone every apple cycle (see also Secret Service wiping phones)... the main thing is that the co-conspirators (ALL, if a group chat) need to have done the same... one poor/lazy bastard can still have all the records on a phone (or will have kept screenshots of them for blackmail, cooperation deals, etc).
Yup. Also a lot of people don't realize that if (for example) they're using an iPhone, that their messages are being backed up in their iCloud.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Pyperkub »

Most of the Stone group were on Signal as I recall ( and also recommend, especially for anyone, such as lawyers, who need confidential texts).
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by malchior »

Putting on my cybersecurity investigator hat - phones are an absolute *WEALTH* of information in many matters. It is the modern briefcase. There are possibly texts, phone call logs, contact information, nicknames, documents, pictures, applications, and loads of other data in there. I've had cases where data from years ago was on a phone and even migrated between phones. Even if you attempt to hide your activities there is often metadata or trace information that still resides on devices. It is usually a treasure trove for investigators.

As an aside, getting a search warrant to seize a phone typically has a very high bar because there is so much risk of 4th amendment issues. For those of you who use their phones for work, this is why as a matter of course private companies often have policies that require Mobile Device Management applications that allow the company to purge/recover data in the company "jail" on the phone. You want a way of doing it indepedentaly because getting a judge to allow seizure of the phone is effectively impossible for private companies. For law enforcement it is necessarily easier but still extremely difficult.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Zaxxon »

Nice work by the Hardee's social media team.

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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Holman »

Apparently Mike Lindell said that the FBI agents were very friendly and talked to him for 20 minutes before requiring that he hand over his phone.

I haven't checked in on Popehat, but I'll assume he has thoughts on friendly talks with the FBI.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

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Judging on Lindell's mental capacity, he probably thought the FBI was trying to get dirt on Hunter Biden.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by Grifman »

Trump goes on Hugh Hewitt’s show and confesses to the crime:



He doesn’t realize that whether the documents were classified or not is irrelevant to the applicable federal statues under which he can, and hopefully will be, charged. No wonder no lawyer wants his case.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by malchior »

I see a lot of menace there. It was a staged conversation. He wants to put forth this absurd claim not to the legal system. It is to his masses. (To paraphrase) - "Don't listen to the deep state, I had the right to do this because I was KING. I am still the KING. That election was illegitimate. My people won't stand to see the KING torn down. Anyway I'm just saying it...it'd be a shame if something bad happened to your nation."

This is all intentional and the longer he is allowed to run around and do more damage the worse it'll be. FWIW I think that's why we're so much noise all of sudden from DOJ. They thought they could appease him and treat him with kid gloves and he'd just stew in MAL. And now they've got an undercover diplomatic crisis, they have a fascism problem, and they realized they might have royally underestimated the danger.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by El Guapo »

Grifman wrote: Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:49 am Trump goes on Hugh Hewitt’s show and confesses to the crime:



He doesn’t realize that whether the documents were classified or not is irrelevant to the applicable federal statues under which he can, and hopefully will be, charged. No wonder no lawyer wants his case.
Well, sort of. One of Trump's arguments is that he has some oral standing order that everything that was taken to MAL was automatically declassified through the act of taking it there. There is zero evidence that such an order existed, and as I understand it such an order would be illegal under classification laws / procedures (because that 'procedure' wouldn't match what is required to declassify). BUT if there was such an order, and it was somehow valid, then he wouldn't have taken any classified material to MAL, because by virtue of removing it the material would have become declassified.

Also, him being a terrible client is a big factor, but I think the bigger factors are: (1) he has a history of not paying people who work for him; and (2) he's so radioactive that for most firms they would probably lose more business than they would gain (and lose some valuable staff) by taking him on as a client.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by malchior »

El Guapo wrote: Thu Sep 15, 2022 12:23 pmWell, sort of. One of Trump's arguments is that he has some oral standing order that everything that was taken to MAL was automatically declassified through the act of taking it there. There is zero evidence that such an order existed, and as I understand it such an order would be illegal under classification laws / procedures (because that 'procedure' wouldn't match what is required to declassify). BUT if there was such an order, and it was somehow valid, then he wouldn't have taken any classified material to MAL, because by virtue of removing it the material would have become declassified.
Right. It ties into the ridiculous argument the right-wing is throwing around that this is just a dispute over errant records. They have aligned on a full fascist, Orwellian defense that is clearly being coordinated. Real grim stuff.

In any case, he is pissing in the 'rule of law' pool with these ridiculous pronouncements. He wants to make it hard as possible to prosecute him, extort some protective force field premised on societal scale violence, and also increase chances he'll be able to seize power. He is an immense source of danger and damage to our national prestige (which was already in the dumps). We have to deal with him.
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Re: The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

Post by pr0ner »

El Guapo wrote: Thu Sep 15, 2022 12:23 pm
Grifman wrote: Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:49 am Trump goes on Hugh Hewitt’s show and confesses to the crime:



He doesn’t realize that whether the documents were classified or not is irrelevant to the applicable federal statues under which he can, and hopefully will be, charged. No wonder no lawyer wants his case.
Well, sort of. One of Trump's arguments is that he has some oral standing order that everything that was taken to MAL was automatically declassified through the act of taking it there. There is zero evidence that such an order existed, and as I understand it such an order would be illegal under classification laws / procedures (because that 'procedure' wouldn't match what is required to declassify). BUT if there was such an order, and it was somehow valid, then he wouldn't have taken any classified material to MAL, because by virtue of removing it the material would have become declassified.
Counterpoint:

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