trump – Page 139 – Lone Candle

A right-wing judge just threw out a case against Trump in a brazen abuse of power

Posted on July 17, 2024July 17, 2024 by Lone Candle

“In her ruling, Cannon argued that because Smith had not been appointed a special counsel by the president and confirmed by the Senate, his appointment violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause.
Smith, a longtime government prosecutor, was made a Special Counsel by US Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022 to oversee the classified documents case. Trump pleaded not guilty to all 37 counts in the indictment Smith and his team eventually filed, including willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act and one count of false statements and representations.

Smith was also appointed as special counsel in the investigation into the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. Smith later charged Trump with four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. That case is ongoing, but after the US Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that the president has broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts performed in office, it’s an open question whether he can be prosecuted for his actions related to the insurrection.

Cannon’s ruling, which relies on a stringent reading of the Constitution and represents a brazen break with precedent, has come under heavy criticism from legal scholars. Under her ruling, the appointment of prior special counsels would have also come into question, from Archibald Cox, who investigated the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation, to Robert Mueller, who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“It’s breathtaking audacity for a trial judge who has clearly shown that she wants to delay and, if possible, get rid of this case,” said Jed Shugerman, a Fordham Law professor and the author of The People’s Courts.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/360735/trump-classified-documents-case-cannon-dismissed-indictment

This is how you get escalation

Posted on July 16, 2024 by Lone Candle

“Roughly two hours after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) blamed President Joe Biden.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” Vance, the odds-on favorite to be Trump’s vice president, wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Vance was not alone. Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) wrote that “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote that “Democrats wanted this to happen.” Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said something similar. So did Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).

All of this happened Saturday night, before we knew a single thing about the shooter’s identity or motive. Since then, the Secret Service has identified him as a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man named Thomas Matthew Crooks, and we still don’t know much about his motive.

Federal data shows he gave $15 to a progressive PAC in 2021, but more recent Pennsylvania voter records list him as a registered Republican. A classmate told local news that he was a bullied loner who frequently wore “hunting” outfits to school. None of these crumbs establish why he might have targeted the former president, and so far no one has found any online accounts under Crooks’s name that could help make sense of his actions.

So we can be confident that none of this speculation was even remotely connected to the facts at the time it happened. Prominent Republicans were conjuring up a Democratic boogeyman, all but openly telling their supporters that Biden and his allies were behind the attack on Trump’s life.

That’s dangerous. Very, very dangerous. And it should cause us to reflect more broadly on how our political leaders should respond to political violence in our country.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/360557/trump-assassination-attempt-republican-response-political-violence-irresponsible

What J.D. Vance really believes

Posted on July 16, 2024July 16, 2024 by Lone Candle

“Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump’s scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump.”

…

“This worldview translates into a very aggressive agenda for a second Trump presidency. In a podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law.
“You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,” he declares.

The President Jackson quote is likely apocryphal, but the history is real. Vance is referring to an 1832 case, Worcester v. Georgia, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the US government needed to respect Native legal rights to land ownership. Jackson ignored the ruling, and continued a policy of allowing whites to take what belonged to Natives. The end result was the ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Natives — an event we now call the Trail of Tears.

For most Americans, this history is a deep source of shame: an authoritarian president trampling on the rule of law to commit atrocities. For Vance, it is a well of inspiration.

J.D. Vance is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps, are justified in response. He sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.”

…

“J.D. Vance wasn’t always like this.

He grew up poor in Middletown, Ohio — escaping a difficult childhood to make it to Yale Law and, subsequently, to the lucrative world of venture capital. This narrative served as the backbone of his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy, that turned into a mega-bestseller: a book that seemed to explain Trump’s appeal to America’s downtrodden. It put Vance on the national map.

The Vance of Hillbilly Elegy was very different politically. Back then, he took a conventional conservative line on poverty, describing the working class as beset by a cultural pathology encouraged by federal handouts and the welfare state.

2016 Vance was also an ardent Trump foe. He wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Mr. Trump Is Unfit For Our Nation’s Highest Office,” and wrote a text to his law school roommate warning that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

Eight years later, Vance has metamorphosed into something else entirely. Today, he pitches himself as an economic populist and cosponsors legislation with Sen. Elizabeth Warren curtailing pay for failed bankers. In an even more extreme shift, he has morphed into one of Trump’s leading champions in the Senate — backing the former president to the hilt and even, at times, outpacing him in anti-democratic fervor.”

…

““The through line between former J.D. and current J.D. is anger,” McLaurin told me. “The Trump turn can be understood as a lock-in on contempt as the answer to anger” — specifically, contempt directed at Vance’s political enemies.

McLaurin’s comments suggest that Vance’s conversion to Trumpism is genuine. I’m inclined to agree, though the timing of his MAGA conversion surely is convenient: He converted to right-wing populism just in time to run for a vacant seat in Trumpy Ohio.

Ultimately, whether Vance truly believes what he’s saying is secondary to the public persona he’s chosen to adopt. Politicians are not defined by their inner lives, but the decisions that they make in public — the ones that actually affect law and policy. Those choices are deeply shaped by the constituencies they depend on and the allies they court.

And it is clear that Vance is deeply ensconced in the GOP’s growing “national conservative” faction, which pairs an inconsistent economic populism with an authoritarian commitment to crushing liberals in the culture war.

Vance has cited Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley monarchist blogger, as the source of his ideas about firing bureaucrats and defying the Supreme Court. His Senate campaign was funded by Vance’s former employer, Peter Thiel, a billionaire who once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

He’s a big fan of Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor who recently wrote a book calling for “regime change” in America. Vance spoke at an event for Deneen’s book in Washington, describing himself as a member of the “postliberal right” who sees his job in Congress as taking an “explicitly anti-regime” stance.

Vance is also an open admirer of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a right-wing politician who has systematically torn his country’s democracy apart. Vance praised Orbán’s approach to higher education in particular, saying he “made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.” The policies in question involve using national dollars to impose state controls over universities, turning them into vehicles for disseminating the government line.

In a profile of Vance, Politico reporter Ian Ward quotes multiple leading Republican figures — specifically, the leaders of the faction trying to turn these postliberal ideas into practice — saying that they see Vance as a leading advocate for their cause.

Top Trump advisor (and current federal inmate) Steve Bannon told Ward that Vance is “at the nerve center of this movement.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the driving force behind Project 2025, told Ward that “he is absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.””

…

“There is little doubt that Vance will continue in this role if elected vice president. He would enable all of Trump’s worst instincts, and put a brake on none — deploying his considerable intellectual and intrapersonal gifts toward bending the government to Trump’s will.

In Trump’s first term, he faced considerable opposition from inside his own administration. People like Defense Secretary James Mattis and Vice President Mike Pence served as brakes on Trump’s most radical impulses, challenging or even refusing to implement his (illegal) directives.

Vance’s ascendance represents the death of this “adults in the room” model. Backed by people drawn from the lists of loyal staffers being prepared by places like Heritage, Vance would not only support Trump’s radical impulses but seems likely to spearhead efforts to implement them.

He would be a direct conduit from the shadowy world of far-right influencers, where Curtis Yarvin is a respected voice and Viktor Orbán a role model, straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean described himself as hailing from “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” If the GOP under Trump has indeed evolved into an authoritarian party, then Vance hails from its authoritarian wing.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/360283/jd-vance-trump-vp-vice-president-authoritarian

The Supreme Court’s disastrous Trump immunity decision, explained

Posted on July 10, 2024July 10, 2024 by Lone Candle

“Broadly speaking, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion reaches three conclusions. The first is that when the president takes any action under the authority given to him by the Constitution itself, his authority is “conclusive and preclusive” and thus he cannot be prosecuted. Thus, for example, a president could not be prosecuted for pardoning someone, because the Constitution explicitly gives the chief executive the “Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.”
One question that has loomed over this case for months is whether presidential immunity is so broad that the president could order the military to assassinate a political rival. While this case was before a lower court, one judge asked if Trump could be prosecuted if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival” and Trump’s lawyer answered that he could not unless Trump had previously been successfully impeached and convicted for doing so.

Roberts’s opinion in Trump, however, seems to go even further than Trump’s lawyer did. The Constitution, after all, states that the president “shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” So, if presidential authority is “conclusive and preclusive” when presidents exercise their constitutionally granted powers, the Court appears to have ruled that yes, Trump could order the military to assassinate one of his political opponents. And nothing can be done to him for it.”

…

“Roberts’s second conclusion is that presidents also enjoy “at least a presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for a President’s acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.” Thus, if a president’s action even touches on his official authority (the “outer perimeter” of that authority), then the president enjoys a strong presumption of immunity from prosecution.

This second form of immunity applies when the president uses authority that is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, and it is quite broad — most likely extending even to mere conversations between the president and one of his subordinates.

The Court also says that this second form of immunity is exceptionally strong. As Roberts writes, “the President must therefore be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.’”

Much of Roberts’s opinion, moreover, details just how broad this immunity will be in practice. Roberts claims, for example, that Trump is immune from prosecution for conversations between himself and high-ranking Justice Department officials, where he allegedly urged them to pressure states to “replace their legitimate electors” with fraudulent members of the Electoral College who would vote to install Trump for a second term.

Roberts writes that “the Executive Branch has ‘exclusive authority and absolute discretion’ to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute,” and thus Trump’s conversations with Justice Department officials fall within his “conclusive and preclusive authority.” Following that logic, Trump could not have been charged with a crime if he had ordered the Justice Department to arrest every Democrat who holds elective office.

Elsewhere in his opinion, moreover, Roberts suggests that any conversation between Trump and one of his advisers or subordinates could not be the basis for a prosecution. In explaining why Trump’s attempts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to “fraudulently alter the election results” likely cannot be prosecuted, for example, Roberts points to the fact that the vice president frequently serves “as one of the President’s closest advisers.”

Finally, Roberts does concede that the president may be prosecuted for “unofficial” acts. So, for example, if Trump had personally attempted to shoot and kill then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in the lead-up to the 2020 election, rather than ordering a subordinate to do so, then Trump could probably be prosecuted for murder.

But even this caveat to Roberts’s sweeping immunity decision is not very strong. Roberts writes that “in dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” And Roberts even limits the ability of prosecutors to pursue a president who accepts a bribe in return for committing an official act, such as pardoning a criminal who pays off the president. In Roberts’s words, a prosecutor may not “admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself.”

That means that, while the president can be prosecuted for an “unofficial” act, the prosecutors may not prove that he committed this crime using evidence drawn from the president’s “official” actions.

The practical implications of this ruling are astounding. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in a dissenting opinion, “imagine a President states in an official speech that he intends to stop a political rival from passing legislation that he opposes, no matter what it takes to do so,” it follows from Roberts’s opinion that the ensuing murder indictment “could include no allegation of the President’s public admission of premeditated intent to support” the proposition that the president intended to commit murder.

Monday’s decision, in other words, ensures that, should Trump return to power, he will do so with hardly any legal checks. Under the Republican justices’ decision in Trump, a future president can almost certainly order the assassination of his rivals. He can wield the authority of the presidency to commit countless crimes. And he can order a subordinate to do virtually anything.

And nothing can be done to him.”

https://www.vox.com/scotus/358292/supreme-court-trump-immunity-dictatorship