Kingmaker-38 - Big IF! (True)

Skeptical, crusty old lawyer

[Leslie McAdoo Gordon 🇺🇸 @McAdooGordon]

Bolton pleading guilty is not a surprise if you listen to the McAdoo Crew, (me, @shipwreckedcrew & @KingMakerFT). 👇🏻

[Jeff Clark @JeffClarkUS]

+1 Fresh off threatening DOJ lawyers to resist Trump or be chased to the ends of the earth and find themselves disbarred, Harry Litman is now warning new lawyers who are needed to fill DOJ vacancies -- vacancies he and his ilk are the ones creating using terror tactics -- that they should turn down offers to join DOJ, or their careers will be "tarred."

Instead, if they help Trump, they will not be able to get high-paying legal work when they leave DOJ.

Watch as he claims it's a black mark on your record, if you agree to work for @DAGToddBlanche. (Only working for Merrick Garland or Eric Holder can advance your career in BigLaw.)

Summary: Communist legal pressure groups are trying to create their own vicious cycle to destroy DOJ and undermine the presidency. If they can't run the place as a Democrat majority operation, then the place must be destroyed. That's their evil attitude.

I illustrate the negative cycle they are trying to create below. And note, they gin up these acts of destruction all while claiming that they really love the institution of DOJ. No, what they love is their own power. Nothing else matters.

No one can disagree with them about permissible options under the law or they will destroy the professional reputations and livelihoods of those who would stand in their way.

It is not an exaggeration to call these Bolshevik/Alinskyite tactics.

[Mollie @MZHemingway]

@JohnCornyn @WSJopinion The weaponization perpetrated against conservatives by the DOJ is a massive, republic-threatening problem and letting them get away with it scot free with the help of "Republican" senators is disgusting, actually.

[Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley]

Senators Schumer and Gillibrand responded to the Graham Platner scandals by simply saying that he would deliver Maine and give them back Senate control. In other words, we found the right Nazi-tattooed, sex-texting, rape-dismissing, veteran-defaming, self-proclaimed communist...

[Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley]

...Chuck Schumer refused to answer questions and simply declared, “We’re going to ... take back the Senate.” To paraphrase Man for All Seasons moment, "Why [Chuck], it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for [Maine.]" https://t.co/W0def0AwAH

[Jeff Clark @JeffClarkUS]

🚨🚨🚨Putting this out again because it didn’t get enough attention:

* Watch the clip.

* Democrats are saying that in 2029+ they will go to the ends of the earth to disbar Assistant United States Attorneys.

* This is highly dangerous and a dagger aimed at having to engage in political competition, the life’s blood of what keeps us free.

* It points directly to a goal of running a one-party government, just like Communist China.

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

One of Van's main jobs as a lifelike algorithm is to "reluctantly" justify troubling Dem behavior so people can go ahead & engage in the behavior with fewer qualms.

He is a very specific sort of tool, like so many other big political commentators.

What a weird way to be human.

[Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley]

In a letter from the church and the Rev. Erin Splaine, residents were told the traditional celebration on the Fourth would be canceled to better address the “on-going process within the congregation to better understand our own whiteness.”... https://t.co/AkddT9rFVx

[Donnie Cope @dcopechatter]

Few know how Judge Lewis Kaplan manipulated the ruling of the E. Jean Carroll case. The truth behind the ‘judicial forgery’ will disgust you.

The first jury said no to r*pe. They found only s*xual assault. They never identified any specific act. In New York State, ’s*xual assault’ could be anything from an wanted advance to verbal taunting in sexual malicious manner.

But in this ruling the context of ‘s*xual assault’ was left open to interpretation.

Judge Kaplan filled the gap himself. He declared the jury must have found 'digital penetration’ as the primary ‘assault’ because the damages award was too large for anything less. No jury ever said those words. Kaplan supplied them.

By putting a monetary value on it. Once that was established, Kaplan took it further.

He then ordered the second jury to treat his invention as established fact. Accept it as true. Move on. He used the word “r*pe” in describing the “assault.”

Issue preclusion requires what the jury must have decided, not what a judge prefers it decided. Kaplan acted as both judge and jury. That is a Seventh Amendment violation.

The specific act mattered. The first jury's "no" on r*pe could have meant it rejected Carroll's full story. Kaplan chose the inference that advanced the narrative and discarded the rest.

Rule 49(a) is not a tool for post-verdict fact creation. No court has ever given preclusive effect to a finding made to resolve a remittitur motion. Until Judge Kaplan.

This is outcome engineering from the bench. The second verdict was built on sand the judge poured himself.

[Hans Mahncke @HansMahncke]

The entire lawfare era might never have grown into what it became had it not been for Mike Pence.

Before he fired General Flynn, President Trump tasked Pence with reviewing Flynn’s phone call transcript to confirm that Flynn had, in fact, lied. For reasons that remain unexplained, Pence claimed that Flynn had lied when the transcript said the opposite.

Pence has never been asked about that. But now that he’s being asked whether the victims of the lawfare he helped set in motion should receive some compensation, of course he’s against it.

[Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley]

The ethics complaint against Todd Blanche is the latest example of the left’s self-perpetuating lawfare machine. It is no accident that this hit job on Blanche called upon the New York courts and bar to deliver the coup de grâce. https://t.co/kkT9Z9HHa8

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

There is a sly self-deprecating satirical feel to these ads which goes unappreciated. They make sophisticated subtle fun of LA's own self-deluding superficiality, including that of Pratt's own milieu. This self-awareness is what makes them such striking popular art -- and irresistibly persuasive. "It's our fault for being such fools, Mandy, but we're waking up, aren't we? It feels like a dream. It's so bizarre!"

The vibe reminds me of 50s bikini teen movies crossed with Dragnet episodes.

Beach Blanket Break-In.

Gidget Steps on a Needle.

Freaking genius.

[Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew]

Leonie Brinkema -- the single-most wacky Judge on the Eastern District of Virginia District Court has entered an Order re a briefing schedule on a "Weaponization Case" case WITHOUT setting forth any basis for finding that the plaintiff has standing or that she has jurisdiction to do anything.

Now, at the very outset of a case a Court can presume standing and jurisdiction for the sole purpose of having briefing on the question of standing and jurisdiction. I suspect that is what will play out now.

BUT, sometimes the lack of standing and jurisdiction are self-evident from the four corners of the complaint, and can be dismissed on the Court's own order.

That is what she should have done here.

But welcome to Brinkema-World.

Strap yourself in -- it can be a wild ride.

[Athan xanthis @TheRealCurly5]

This document is a National Security Action Memorandum No. 55, and it is basically JFK’s "never again" moment after getting burned by the CIA at the Bay of Pigs. Signed in June 1961, this directive completely shifts the balance of power by stripping the CIA of its monopoly on covert, secret warfare and dumping that responsibility straight onto the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kennedy explicitly demands "direct and unfiltered" advice, making it clear he was done with the intelligence community sugarcoating operations or hiding behind plausible deniability. By forcing the traditional military to oversee paramilitary Cold War programs, JFK was trying to claw back control and ensure that if a covert operation blew up in his face again, the military would actually have to own it. It’s a massive turning point that shows his deep, growing distrust of the national security establishment a move that created permanent, bitter enemies inside the very apparatus he was trying to rein in.

[Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew]

Yes but...

I don't attribute it to "nuttiness."

I think her writing, although somewhat legally incoherent at times, reflects the modern post-liberal leftist orthodoxy in legal academia.

She actually breaks with Kagan and Sotomayor in her view of the role of the judiciary -- that is the ground she is staking out with her dissents.

I think she has legal academics in her ear -- maybe through her clerks -- telling her that her dissents will be a point of demarcation for the 25 years after a liberal majority takes control of the court, in the same way Scalia's early dissents staked out a path for today's Court.

Her lack of legal rigor, however, makes some of these efforts comical.

[Kingmaker-38 - Big IF! (True) @KingMakerFT]

@ArchieOReilly_ Great article. In the words of Al Unser Jr., “You don’t know what Indy means.” This piece captures it.

[Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew]

Re an investigation of E. Jean Carroll:

She testified in a deposition -- under penalty of perjury -- that no third parties were funding her lawsuit against Trump.

A civil deposition can -- itself -- be introduced as evidence in a trial. That's why the "Oath" is significant -- it's the same oath that a witness in trial before a jury swears to.

Suppose the investigation uncovers via a grand jury subpoena or other process dozens of text messages or emails back and forth between Carroll and Reid Hoffman in the days or weeks in the time frame of the deposition discussing the money he was giving her to pay her attorneys.

Maybe there was an understanding expressed that she would not confirm that fact in the deposition.

Worth DOJ looking into? Or does perjury and a fraud on the court mean nothing?

[Kingmaker-38 - Big IF! (True) @KingMakerFT]

@DLand91 To what extent did the rain and resulting red flag affect the average? Do we know what the numbers of viewers were before and after the race was stopped? I’m sure some viewers changed the channel, thinking the stoppage would last longer than it did.

[Tim Fattig @timfattig]

In the summer of 1978, a couple of HSCA investigators, Dan Hardway and Gaeton Fonzi, interviewed the career CIA officer William Morris Kent, whose pseudonym was “Douglas Gupton” while he worked at the Agency’s sprawling Miami station, JMWAVE. (Kent had experience in both Panama and Venezuela, and by the end of his career was an expert on Chile. In 1967, however, he was suddenly detailed to the Agency’s New Orleans office.)

Although he accumulated many glowing internal evaluations over his nearly 30-year-long career with the CIA, Kent did not stonewall or play dumb; in fact he did not hesitate to explain to the committee men the considerable difficulties of trying to supervise the unsupervisable.

Knew of Manuel Salvat, never met him.

Knew of Paul Bethel, never met him.

Never met Pedro Diaz Lanz.

“…he had never heard of Celluma [sic] Fantasma or Alpha 66.” Only ever heard about the leafleting ops against Cuba— some CIA-organized, others emanating from the private sector— after the fact.

“He stated that he did not know Joseph B. Smith or Frank Fiorini Sturgis. He did know E. Howard Hunt.”

Knew David Atlee Phillips very well and called Phillips “his boss in Washington.” Phillips visited JMWAVE “quite often.”

“…Phillips did a lot of things on his own out of Washington that he did not let Gupton in on…Gupton stated that there were two sets of operations. [JMWAVE] operations were ran out of Miami and he kept Phillips informed. Phillips ran a second set of separate operations personally out of Washington and he did not keep Gupton briefed on these operations…”

“Gupton said that the sketch of [alleged CIA officer Maurice] Bishop did not look like anyone he knew. He said that he had never heard the name Bishop in Miami.”

https://t.co/rkl6EMjKnf

[Kingmaker-38 - Big IF! (True) @KingMakerFT]

@JoeyBarnes85 I suspect the rain-induced red flag, which followed a number of laps under the yellow, brought the average down. What were the averages before and after that red?