“”The government tried for over a year, quietly and with respect, to get them back, which was essential that they do, and he jerked them around,” Barr said. Trump remained recalcitrant even when he faced a federal subpoena seeking all the documents with classification markings stored at Mar-a-Lago.
“He didn’t raise any legal arguments,” Barr noted. Instead, according to the indictment, “he engaged in a course of deceitful conduct” aimed at hiding records covered by the subpoena. “If those allegations are true,” Barr said, Trump’s conduct was “outrageous” and “a clear crime.”
Barr called the evidence supporting the charges against Trump, which include obstruction of justice and willful retention of national defense information, “very strong,” noting that much of it “comes from his own lawyers.” Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran’s notes, for example, indicate that his client was inclined to defy the subpoena.
Consistent with that impression, Trump had boxes moved out of a Mar-a-Lago storage room before Corcoran could search them for relevant documents. Barr said he also believes Trump lied to the Justice Department by averring that he had fully complied with the subpoena—another crime listed in the indictment.”
“There is nothing inherently illegal about accepting money from foreign interests if you are a private citizen and your dad is a famous, powerful person. But you do have to pay taxes on it. And according to the New York Times, a federal inquiry into whether Hunter had properly paid his taxes began back during the Obama administration. Then, in 2018, the tax inquiry became a broader federal criminal investigation into Hunter.”
…
“In 2018, during a period in which Hunter has admitted to having a serious drug addiction (he wrote a book about it), he bought a gun. In connection with that purchase, he filled out a federal form and attested that he was not a drug user. The gun became an issue when his sister-in-law became concerned he might harm himself and threw it in an outdoor trash can, where it was discovered and reported to police. Texts from his laptop make clear he was not particularly stable at the time, but no one was hurt.”
“An indictment is a document that lays out crimes a grand jury — a group of 16 to 23 people selected at random — believes someone committed. Trump’s announcement on Thursday means at least 12 members of a federal grand jury were convinced, given the evidence provided by the Justice Department, that there is probable cause Trump committed a federal crime and should face a trial if prosecutors continue to pursue the case.
The decision to indict doesn’t necessarily indicate guilt on Trump’s part; his innocence or guilt will be decided at a trial. It also doesn’t stop him from running for president.”
…
“The indictment says that Trump then “endeavored to obstruct the FBI and grand jury investigations” into his retention of the documents and to “conceal” that he had done so by directing his staff to move the documents around his properties, and by proposing that his attorneys lie about him having the documents. Trump also is accused of having suggested hiding or destroying them, at one point telling his lawyers, “Well look isn’t it better if there are no documents?””
“An indictment..alleges that Trump, with the help of his body man Walt Nauta, flouted a subpoena requiring him to surrender highly sensitive documents that he kept in unsecured locations at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida — and that the men concealed this from federal officials as well as Trump’s own attorneys. The documents allegedly contained national defense information, including plans to attack an unidentified foreign country, and US nuclear weapons capabilities.”
“None of those figures ignored a subpoena to turn over classified material concerning highly sensitive matters of national security and then sought to conceal it from federal officials and their own attorneys, as is alleged of Trump. And in fact, history suggests that if Trump complied with that request, as some of his peers did, prosecutors may not have pressed charges.
The case against Trump is not so much about the fact that he retained documents he had no right to keep — but that he allegedly did so knowingly and brazenly defying the federal government while putting US interests at risk. That puts Trump in a class of his own.”
“a Texas jury found Army Sgt. Daniel Perry guilty of murdering Garrett Foster, a protester he encountered at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in July 2020. Less than 24 hours after that verdict, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he would pardon Perry if asked.
Abbott’s hasty announcement, which seemed to be driven by conservative complaints that Perry had been unjustly prosecuted for shooting Foster in self-defense, illustrates how political prejudices convert empirical questions into tests of team loyalty. That bipartisan tendency is the antithesis of what jurors are supposed to do when they are confronted by the clashing narratives of a criminal trial.
Abbott took it for granted that Perry’s account of what happened the night he killed Foster was accurate. Texas has “one of the strongest” self-defense laws in the country, the governor wrote on Twitter, and that law “cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”
Contrary to the implication, the jurors who convicted Perry did not ignore the state’s self-defense law, which allows someone to use deadly force when he “reasonably believes” it is “immediately necessary” to protect himself against the “use or attempted use of unlawful deadly force.” The jurors simply did not believe the circumstances of Foster’s death met those requirements.”
“A Jan. 6 defendant wanted on misdemeanor charges opened fire at sheriff’s deputies..as they checked on him ahead of his expected arrest, leading to a lengthy standoff”https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/20/jan-6-defendant-fired-on-deputies-00093158
“Former President Donald Trump is appealing a jury’s verdict finding him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump’s lawyers filed a notice of appeal in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday, two days after the nine-person jury ordered
“there’s a problem with DeSantis’s attacks on Democrats’ policies on crime: It’s not clear that crime is lower in Florida than in some of the cities he has criticized. In some Florida cities, the data shows murder rates are significantly higher than in blue cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. Experts say there’s also no evidence to support that some of DeSantis’s signature public safety policies, including doubling down on cash bail, are effective in reducing crime, and other DeSantis crime policies involve considerable trade-offs and uncertainties.
As he preps a potential 2024 presidential run, DeSantis has also eliminated permit requirements to carry a concealed weapon in Florida, where mass shootings have become more common than in any other state except California and where gun deaths are on the rise. The governor signed the law last week, following a recent mass shooting at a school in Tennessee and amid a spate of gun violence in Florida. Given that data suggests spikes in violent crime in recent years were driven by gun violence, DeSantis’s efforts to make guns more easily accessible should be seen as an affront to public safety.
DeSantis’s claims about public safety in his state are based on a report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that the state’s total crime fell more than 8 percent to a 50-year low in 2021, compared to an estimated 1 percent nationally. However, neither of those figures is reliable, in part because of a shift in how the data was reported that year.
Still, tapping into voters’ fears about crime might be an effective campaign strategy”