37 Counts — Florida grand jury nails Trump to the wall

37 Counts

Florida grand jury nails Trump to the wall

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 12^th 2023

http://www.zeppscommentaries.online

The indictment is utterly damning. I know that pundits world wide have been saying that very thing thousands of times on the vast majority of news outlets around the world, but that’s only because it is so self-evidently true.

Yes, it’s 49 pages long, but it’s double-spaced and with a lot of images and lists, I would be surprised if it contains 8,000 words. Perhaps a dozen pages single-spaced and without images or annotations.

So perhaps a twenty-minute read. And the language is clear and straightforward, lacking either legalese or obfuscation. The laws cited are clear and direct, and the evidence that demonstrates violation of those laws is about as clear as it can possibly be.

Of course, Republicans are refuting it. The very worst of them are making veiled and sometimes not-so-veiled demands for violence and insurrection. Some of them, including a couple of Congressmen, might expect visits from the FBI in the not too distant future. Clay Higgins, in an act bordering on treason, tweeted, “President Trump said he has ‘been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.’ This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this,” he wrote. “Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.” Andy Biggs tweeted, “We have now reached a war phase. Eye for an eye.” I doubt either of them will actually lead any kind of armed protest, but if they did, and got arrested by National Guardsmen or Police defending the courthouse, I wouldn’t shed a tear.

Gym Jordan made the amazing claim that Trump declassified the documents before he stole them, which Trump himself directly contradicts on tape. Some of the more-ordinary-but-still-bloody-stupid Republicans are whining about “witch hunts” and how Trump is being persecuted by a “weaponized DoJ.” Most of them aren’t smart enough to come up with their own talking points and get their pretense at knowledgeability from the likes of Tucker Carlson and OANN.

Mind you, these are the same Republicans who demanded the death penalty for Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Katherine Gun, Erin Brockovich, and Julian Assange. They screamed “Lock her up” because they believed Hillary Clinton had secret documents on a server and, with no evidence, that she leaked them. They want a full investigation of Joe Biden over documents, but curiously not for Mike Pence who, like Biden, had some classified materials in his possession, and like Biden, notified the Archives as soon as he realized he had them. Unlike Trump, who concealed them and lied about it.

We don’t know who Trump shared the documents with. We know he liked to boast about possessing them, and we know he had suspicious relationships with the leaders of Russia and Saudi Arabia, neither of whom are friends of the United States. We know that the boxes were in areas that weren’t even remotely secure, and we know that Mar-a-Lago was a favorite target for spies familiar with Trump’s fecklessness and corruption.

We also know some of the material in the wrong hands could do immense damage to the United States, and to intelligence and military personnel involved with any of the secret activities the documents detailed.

We also know that Trump will stop at nothing for money or power, and personally, I have no doubt he will gleefully sell us out and do damage to the country for material gain.

Trump’s arraignment is on Tuesday, and I plan on writing another piece after that occurs. While I won’t try to predict the actual court proceedings themselves, I will predict what will become of the crowd that are calling for demonstrations and resistance on Trump’s behalf.

Nothing much.

Oh, a few hundred might turn up, and they might be noisy and even bellicose, but they will be out-numbered, not just by police but by counter-demonstrators chanting “Lock him up.”

The Trump MAGA movement has been slowly deflating over the past year. All the predicted horrors of a Biden tyranny failed to come to pass, and indeed, the economy is in amazingly good shape. We aren’t at war, not even with the Republicans who want war against Americans. Gas stoves aren’t banned, and nor are ICE vehicles. They will be phased out, but that’s called “progress.” Horse and carts didn’t get banned, either, but you don’t see them on the freeways.

Further, Trump’s self-pitying screeches and bellows are getting boring beyond belief. Even his followers are getting bored. It doesn’t help that he turns ANY occasion into a chance to whine about his alleged victimhood. Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Easter, any time people stop to think about things that really matter to them, here’s Donald, whining, trying to make it all about himself. The schtick is as dead as Vaudeville.

And there’s a growing realization that the law really is catching up to him. He was found liable in that defamation case. He has 31 counts arrayed against him in New York State on tax fraud. He has pending indictments under consideration for January 6^th and for vote tampering in Georgia.

And Faux News is fully discredited because of it’s lying on his behalf. They still do lie, of course, but they’re a lot more circumspect about it. Like Trump, they still face massive legal sanctions for their behavior surrounding the 2020 election. As for some of the other right-wing flacks and outlets that tried to raise a revolution against democracy and America.

Finally, there’s the fact that a lot of Donald’s remaining followers are certifiable. A lot will stay away because of a conspiracy theory that the feds are holding the arraignment as a trap, with Trump as the honey pot. They’ll round up Trump supporters, the theory goes, and do unspeakable things to them to make them disappear. Something lurid, no doubt, and painful. MAGAts, let your imaginations run wild!

But Tuesday should be, for the rest of us, gratifying, and perhaps a bit amusing. And above all, reassuring. If the law can’t apply here, it is worthless.

The Beginning of the End — Fire and Fury as Trump Regime Collapses

The Beginning of the End

Fire and Fury as Trump Regime Collapses

Nov. 3^rd 2019

In a spectacle never seen before in American politics, 30 Republican congressmen stormed the secure rooms where testimony into the impeachment inquiry was being conducted. Their claim was that the meetings were secret, which was wrong, and that Republicans had no say in the matter.

In fact, the meetings were secret because House rules, set up by Republicans during the Obama administration, said it was ok to do so. And not only did the 38 or so Republicans that were on the four committees involved in the hearings have full access to those meetings, but 13 of the Republicans who staged the Brooks Brothers Riot II had access. Even by Republican standards, this reached new levels of hypocrisy, dishonesty, and sheer stupidity. The thirty Republicans involved are liars and clowns, and the Dems need to make the footage of them making their phony and ridiculous grandstanding a huge part of the election campaigns in each of their districts this coming year.

This past week, the Democrats, as planned, staged a vote to make subsequent hearings open and public. Every Republican voted against that, including the thirty mendacious clowns who protested for open and public hearings. They aren’t Congressmen. They aren’t even loyal Americans. They’re cornered rats.

Steve King re-tweeted a clever graphic of the shapes of red and blue states rearranged to resemble two rock’em-sock-em figures. Somewhat less clever was the caption, which was that the red states had something like nine trillion bullets, and so who was going to win?

Red states may have bullets, but blue states have brains. My money is on the blue states, if it comes to that. Louie Gohmert spoke openly of civil war. Louie doesn’t know his ilk lost the Civil War. And World War II.

In the meantime, a rapidly-unraveling Trump has been tweeting demands to know the identity of the original whistleblower (and some of the trash right have come up with names, putting lives at risk—in one instance, fingered by the neonazis at RedState based on the fact that he knew John McCain) and threatening retribution against whistleblowers, leakers, those called to testify and those testifying under subpoena. Each and every one of those threatening tweets is, in and of itself, a felony, and impeachable. But Trump is far too out there to understand it. In fact, he’s probably never had a non-psychotic view of how these things work.

The person who first reported to the DoJ about the Ukraine phone call has an attorney, and the attorney, with good reason, is afraid that these feckless, criminal assholes in the administration, Congress, and amongst the trash right media are going to get his client—and probably others—killed with their feverish attempts to protect their mad lump of a leader. So he contacted Devon Nunes, putative congressman and presumptive leader of the cowardly and criminal conspiracy to unmask the whistleblower, with a unique offer: the client would submit answers in writing but under oath to questions sent to him by the Republicans. Republicans only, for some unknowable reason. He would not answers pertaining to his identity. Nunes, being the kind of man he is, will probably turn down the offer, because he needs conspiracy theories and large fogbanks of disinformation in which to carry out his tawdry existence.

It’s a sign of how desperate and rat-cornered the right has become when Faux News Harpy Jeanine Pirro snapped that it was none of our business what the President does, legal or not. Someone told me she used to be an American once. Must not have been a very good one.

But this is nightmare week for Trump and the Republicans. White House attorney Eisenberg is defying a subpoena to testify under oath to the House committees. In time, he’ll probably be stripped of his license to practice law and perhaps get 30 days for contempt of Congress, but he’s of no real importance; just another corrupt and bent lawyer in a sea of pseudo-legal slime.

The main thing that has to be done is Congress must present a case so compelling that it will totally unravel any Republican political will to resist. Not only must they have sound legal evidence (which they have) but they must have such a compelling case that public and party support for Trump and his criminal administration collapses entirely.

The House moves to the open sessions, with attorneys doing examination and cross, instead of vainglorious and partisan congressional hacks shouting ‘Lookitme!” for five minutes at a time. Combined with what is already known, Trump’s guilt is beyond any possible reasonable dispute.

The release of new information from the Mueller investigation, deeply implicating Pence and Sessions and McConnell, should also provide many sweaty sticks of political dynamite.

Trump and the Republicans for now will defy any law, and most standards of civilized behavior, in order to prevent this onrushing train of judgment.

It’s up to us to make sure they don’t derail it.

If they do manage to derail it, America is lost. They don’t want to govern. They want to rule.

For a thousand years.