[Discussion] Hope to Remember The Trump Administration Thread as being 'transparent and honest'

Let's follow and discuss what our newest presidential administration gets up to, the good, the bad, the lawsuits, and the many many indictments.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Lawyers Lin Wood & Sidney Powell have been sharing the same martial law suggestions.

At first I was like, "YEAH!!"

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/yq60FHm/sammo.jpg)

Holy crap! I didn't know Sammo Hung was in a tv show.

My wife often declares marital law.

How Dozens of Trump’s Political Appointees Will Stay in Government After Biden Takes Over

ProPublica wrote:

Overall, some progressive advocates don’t think the conversion of political appointees into career positions will be as deep or as influential as it was in the second term of the Bush administration, when 139 officials found their way into civil service jobs, the GAO reported. However, even a few people can make a difference.

“Bureaucrats can slow down the administration’s policy efforts. It’s minor, but the more of them there are, it’s sort of cumulative,” Hartl said.

And even if the number of conversions doesn’t seem unusually high, the types of positions are more political than in the past. But since the documents are not released publicly and so many names are redacted, it’s difficult to tell who’s ending up where until the transfer is approved. For that reason, Troy Cribb, director of policy for the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, thinks the OPM’s burrowing lists should be more transparent.

“Having eyes on this is part of the accountability,” Cribb said. “And not having these be public really undermines that.”

Trump ally banned from Justice Department after seeking sensitive election intel: report

The official serving as President Donald Trump’s eyes and ears at the Justice Department has been banned from the building after trying to pressure staffers to give up sensitive information about election fraud and other matters she could relay to the White House, three people familiar with the matter tell The Associated Press.


Trump aide banned from Justice after trying to get case info

AP wrote:

Stirrup is accused of approaching staffers in the department demanding they give her information about investigations, including election fraud matters, the people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

The effort came as Trump continues to level baseless claims that he won the election and alleges without evidence that massive voting fraud was responsible for his defeat to President-elect Joe Biden.

Stirrup had also extended job offers to political allies for positions at some of the highest levels of the Justice Department without consulting any senior department officials or the White House counsel’s office and also attempted to interfere in the hiring process for career staffers, a violation of the government’s human resources policies, one of the people said.

Hah, nice. Jinx and all that. Leaving mine up for amusement's sake.

Paleocon wrote:

My wife often declares marital law.

What? No Martian Law?

Spoiler:

Hmm, I can't seem to find it on YouTube.

r013nt0 wrote:


Trump aide banned from Justice after trying to get case info

AP wrote:

Stirrup is accused of approaching staffers in the department demanding they give her information about investigations, including election fraud matters, the people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

The effort came as Trump continues to level baseless claims that he won the election and alleges without evidence that massive voting fraud was responsible for his defeat to President-elect Joe Biden.

Stirrup had also extended job offers to political allies for positions at some of the highest levels of the Justice Department without consulting any senior department officials or the White House counsel’s office and also attempted to interfere in the hiring process for career staffers, a violation of the government’s human resources policies, one of the people said.

Their freaking name is Stirrup?!?!
Screw you 2020.

lunchbox12682 wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

My wife often declares marital law.

What? No Martian Law?

Spoiler:

Hmm, I can't seem to find it on YouTube.

OG_slinger wrote:
lunchbox12682 wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

My wife often declares marital law.

What? No Martian Law?

Spoiler:

Hmm, I can't seem to find it on YouTube.

It was audio only, so I skipped that one.
I know the full episodes are on Hulu.

/tangent

Perhaps the most notable thing to me about Trump's bizarre Facebook video from the other night is how little I've seen anyone talking about it. The mainstream news media seems to have turned its focus back to the pandemic, political gab has focused on pardons, and GWJ D&D has returned to its natural state (various flavors of the left doing a Spider-Man meme of blame). For a guy whose tweets used to light up my phone with alerts, it's remarkable that he just delivered a major address to assert that the whole election was fraudulent... And no one cares. It must be just killing him to lose the spotlight and attention.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Perhaps the most notable thing to me about Trump's bizarre Facebook video from the other night is how little I've seen anyone talking about it. The mainstream news media seems to have turned its focus back to the pandemic, political gab has focused on pardons, and GWJ D&D has returned to its natural state (various flavors of the left doing a Spider-Man meme of blame). For a guy whose tweets used to light up my phone with alerts, it's remarkable that he just delivered a major address to assert that the whole election was fraudulent... And no one cares. It must be just killing him to lose the spotlight and attention.

I saw a Trump campaign press release on Twitter today that bragged that they had now raised $207.5 million since Election Day, up from $150 million just a few days ago.

Trump put his speech out on Facebook because he knew MSM wouldn't carry him and--worse--fact check everything he said.

Doing it through Facebook just mainlined his crazy and completely seditious speech to members of his cult, several of which are certainly stockpiling 5.56 rounds, Googling how to make a pipe bomb, and generally eagerly embracing their new role as future domestic terrorists while thinking of themselves as the most patriotest Americans in history.

I don't want far right sh*t being spread by MSM, but I most definitely want people knowing what poison and lies they're spreading if only because I don't what people going "wha happen?" when the next Oklahoma City bombing happens or a right wing militia succeeds in kidnapping a governor.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Perhaps the most notable thing to me about Trump's bizarre Facebook video from the other night is how little I've seen anyone talking about it. The mainstream news media seems to have turned its focus back to the pandemic, political gab has focused on pardons, and GWJ D&D has returned to its natural state (various flavors of the left doing a Spider-Man meme of blame). For a guy whose tweets used to light up my phone with alerts, it's remarkable that he just delivered a major address to assert that the whole election was fraudulent... And no one cares. It must be just killing him to lose the spotlight and attention.

Apparently Newsmax was airing it a bunch, too. Trying to give it """"""credibility"""""" and making it look like it was a press conference or something rather than a masturbatory Facebook monologue.

Surprising nobody, that didn't aid it in gaining mainstream traction.

IMAGE(https://i.postimg.cc/15fDJvhj/55-E4-CA40-D1-DF-428-A-8-A85-7-D39-B32-AF783.jpg)

JC wrote:

Just, wow....

Giuliani's "star witness"

Yeah, she's something.

I feel bad for the state legislators, who probably aren't experienced or trained enough to effectively shut down her nonsense. They were way too polite and lenient in the clips I saw.

Also been seeing comparisons to Cecily Strong's "Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started Talking to at a Party"

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/3JjNGVD_d.webp)

JC wrote:

Just, wow....

Giuliani's "star witness"

It's actually way worse.

She just came off a year of probation for a charge of using a computer to commit a crime and had a charge of first degree obscenity and disorderly conduct dropped. Apparently stemmed from her having an affair with a married man (who she's now engaged to) during which she videoed the two of them having sex and then emailed the video to his wife and then claimed the wife had hacked her and stolen the videos. We know this because the man's son outed this whole mess on Facebook.

And one of Giuliani's "elite strike force" of lawyers--the one he was next to when he ripped a wet fart on mic during testimony--isn't quite so elite.

WSJ wrote:

In her online bios, Ms. Ellis has portrayed herself as “an experienced defense attorney who was formerly an attorney for the U.S. Department of State and a Colorado prosecutor.” She also has described herself as a constitutional-law attorney and as having “extensive experience in litigation in both trial and appellate levels.”

Ms. Ellis’s work as a prosecutor lasted about six months, during a stint in Weld County, Colo., that started in September 2012, about a year after she graduated from the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia. She handled traffic cases and other misdemeanors, the Weld County District Attorney’s office said.

Ms. Ellis confirmed she was fired as a Weld County prosecutor in early 2013. She said she was fired because she refused to bring a case to trial that she believed was an unethical prosecution. A spokeswoman for the Weld County district attorney’s office declined to comment, citing human-resources rules.

As for the State Department, she doesn’t appear in federal payroll records as an agency employee. She was listed in one contract-dispute case decided in 2013 as a lawyer for IE Discovery, a firm providing legal-discovery help to the State Department. The State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Ellis confirmed she worked for IE Discovery, saying she was there about six months.

After leaving the Weld County prosecutors’ office, Ms. Weld worked as a criminal-defense attorney in Colorado in several small local practices. In Colorado court records, she was listed as a lawyer in about 30 state-court cases, mostly representing defendants in low-level felonies or misdemeanors initiated between 2012 and 2016. One of those cases was before an appeals court.

“I would describe that as someone who moonlights in legal practice,” said Matthew Haltzman, a Colorado attorney who has never met or worked with Ms. Ellis. “If this is someone the administration is relying on to guide them through complex litigation, this is not what we’d expect as far as a case history.”

...

As for Ms. Ellis’s claim to be a constitutional-law attorney, a search in federal courts database PACER doesn’t turn up any listing of Ms. Ellis as an attorney in any federal case. She isn’t currently permitted to practice in federal court in Colorado because she didn’t pay a fee the court assesses to lawyers practicing there, a federal-court staffer said.

Ms. Ellis began building her national profile through conservative Christian legal circles, carving a niche as a self-identified constitutional-law specialist. In 2015, she self-published a book, through WestBow Press, “The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution: A Guide for Christians to Understand America’s Constitutional Crisis.”

In the book and in subsequent public talks, she has argued that the Constitution can only be interpreted through a biblical lens.

WSJ wrote:

Ms. Ellis confirmed she was fired as a Weld County prosecutor in early 2013. She said she was fired because she refused to bring a case to trial that she believed was an unethical prosecution.

Normally I'd be all about a prosecutor refusing to bring a case to trial which they felt was unethical. However I'm going to go super far out on a limb here and assume that there's a massive chasm between our definitions of unethical.

There it is! Maybe not every single time, but religion always seems to be involved an awful lot...

WSJ wrote:

Ms. Ellis began building her national profile through conservative Christian legal circles, carving a niche as a self-identified constitutional-law specialist. In 2015, she self-published a book, through WestBow Press, “The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution: A Guide for Christians to Understand America’s Constitutional Crisis.”

In the book and in subsequent public talks, she has argued that the Constitution can only be interpreted through a biblical lens.

OG_slinger wrote:

In the book and in subsequent public talks, she has argued that the Constitution can only be interpreted through a biblical lens.

Yeah she might want to read... well, anything... written by our founders.

She could start with the first amendment.

Go from that to the Treaty of Tripoli.

Stele wrote:

Yeah she might want to read... well, anything... written by our founders.

The bits about it being okay to own people are super Biblical.

Maybe someone should hand her a copy of the Jefferson Bible.

Judge Questions Whether Trump’s Pardon of Michael Flynn Is 'Too Broad'

The Article wrote:

A trial judge raised the possibility that another federal judge overseeing Michael Flynn’s case could find that President Donald Trump’s pardon of Flynn is too broad, if it unlawfully protects the former national security adviser from future prosecutions.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said at a hearing Friday that he doesn’t think U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, his colleague presiding over the Flynn case, “has a lot of options in reference to what he does” after the pardon was granted, “unless he takes the position that the wording of the pardon is too broad, in that it provides protections beyond the date of the pardon.”

“I don’t know what impact that would have, what decision he would make, if he makes that determination that the pardon of Mr. Flynn is for a period that the law does not permit. I don’t know if that’s correct or not,” the judge continued. “Theoretically, the decision could be reached because the wording in the pardon seems to be very, very broad. It could be construed, I think, as extending protections against criminal prosecutions after the date the pardon was issued.”

“I don’t know if Judge Sullivan will make that determination or not,” Walton added.

Walton made the comments in a public records case over FBI interviews from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller III’s investigation. CNN and BuzzFeed News, represented by Ballard Spahr’s Charles Tobin at Friday’s hearing, want the records from Flynn’s FBI interviews to be reprocessed in light of the pardon, revealing information that was initially shielded due to an exemption tied to ongoing prosecutions.

The pardon granted last week shields Flynn from “any and all possible offenses” tied to the criminal information against Flynn, as well as Mueller’s investigation. The act of clemency also states that it protects Flynn from any charges that “might arise, or be charged, claimed, or asserted” from his criminal case.

Presidential pardon powers are effectively unlimited, with no mechanism for oversight for acts of clemency within federal courts or Congress.

The Department of Justice on Monday told Sullivan the pardon moots the criminal case against Flynn. “No further proceedings are necessary or appropriate, as the court must immediately dismiss the case with prejudice,” government attorneys said in a filing. Sullivan has not acted in the case since the pardon.

On Friday, DOJ attorney Courtney Enlow asked the judge to give government officials until February to reprocess the Flynn documents. She said that many government officials who might be involved in the process will be out of the office in December, and she said the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act processing unit next week will go to half of its normal staffing levels due to the pandemic.

Walton rejected Enlow’s recommendation, as well as Tobin’s suggested production date of Dec. 22. “However, I do think that the pardon is a very contentious issue,” he said, adding that he wanted the information to be released “while this administration is still in office.” The judge ordered the reprocessed records be released by Jan. 15.

Walton also denied a request from Tobin to issue an order that any relevant records in the case be reprocessed in the instance of future pardons from Trump, saying he didn’t believe he had the authority to do so.

Flynn’s criminal case captured mass attention, after the former national security adviser last year fired his legal team at Covington & Burling, withdrew his guilty plea and hired attorney Sidney Powell to lead his defense.

The Justice Department earlier this year also filed a motion to dismiss the criminal information, questioning whether the case should have ever been brought forward. Sullivan had not ruled on that motion before Trump granted Flynn the pardon.

IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/Nw8z2olm0nGHC/giphy.gif)

Despite Trump's misuse, it seems to me that a pardon should preclude all future prosecution for events that occurred prior to the pardon, if the pardon includes those acts.

That doesn't mean he can pardon future malfeasance, however. If Flynn does something illegal after the date the pardon was signed, the Feds can land on him like a ton of bricks.

It includes anything even related to those acts. Which could theoretically block future prosecution for things we aren't even aware of yet. This isn't a double jeopardy thing, I don't think, so much as it is providing full immunity for Flynn and donald himself.

It is a stupidity broad power to begin with. To pardon him for any offense discovered in the pursuit of the original investigation is just dumb.

If, while investigating his for treason they found a video of him killing someone, found a body, and even found a murder weapon since it was only discovered because of the original investigation he couldn't be changed. That seems kind wrong.

Someone should probably have that power in government. The fact that we gave it to Donald Trump is a damning indictment of the American people, not the power of pardon.

Malor wrote:

Someone should probably have that power in government. The fact that we gave it to Donald Trump is a damning indictment of the American people, not the power of pardon.

The government in aggregate should maybe have that power.

One person shouldn't. It's an invitation to corruption.