The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today allowed Virginia to continue its purge of more than 1,600 ineligible voters from the state’s voter rolls. [pdf ruling here]
The stay was issued 6 to 3, along ideological lines, with leftist Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting with the opinion that illegal aliens and ineligible voters should be permitted to cast ballots.
BACKGROUND – On August 7th, Virginia’s Governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order expediting the removal of noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls. The state maintained that the program followed only removed those who were ineligible to vote due to lack of citizenship. These were self-declared ineligible voters.
Earlier this month the Justice Department and advocacy groups intervened, suing the state. They contended that Virginia had purged some eligible voters and that it did so in violation of a federal law that bars removals from voting rolls in the 90 days prior to an election.
The overall prosecution attempt by Jack Smith was fundamentally deconstructed when the Supreme Court ruled mostly in favor of President Trump carrying ‘presidential immunity’ for officials acts while in office. The ruling meant Smith had to go back to Judge Tanya Chutkan’s court and work through a process of outlining what is and is not an ‘official act’ according to the DOJ.
The result of that approach was made public yesterday, when Judge Chutkan revealed a new 165-page indictment [SEE HERE], essentially a list of evidence the DOJ claims as proof of “unofficial acts” allowing them to jump the hurdle of “official acts.” However, the reality of Jack Smith’s filing is a story without much legal value. Instead, it is a 165-page Lawfare story created for media promotion.
Many followers have accepted that Jack Smith is not necessarily the person constructing the legal filings. There is a solid argument to be made that Andrew Weissmann, Norm Eisen and Mary McCord are the Lawfare allies tasked with writing the material. When you read the filing, the manipulation of legalese to shape a narrative story is clear.
As former DOJ Asst AG Jeffrey Clark has noted, the filing attempts to obfuscate the legal requirements of “state of mind” by projecting what President Trump must have thought, as expressed by the opinion of unknown advisors. Jack Smith says President Trump thought this, without actually providing any evidence of what President Trump thought. Additionally, this Lawfare approach toward including redacted quotes amounts to written testimony, which would never pass muster in any court.
The accused has a right to confront witnesses; however, in written text that questioning becomes impossible. In essence, Jack Smith violates the principle and stated purpose of the sixth amendment. This is one of the ways you can tell the filing itself is not intended to outline evidence, but rather to outline a story. The claimed “evidence” is simply a story the Lawfare team want to deliver in October of an election year.
This is so typically DC; the irony is a little grimacing on many levels. Apparently a not very smart carjacker pulled a gun and tried to steal a car belonging to a federal marshal while he was on the protective detail of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s condo in DC.
In response, the marshal fired “several shots” at the carjacker along with shots from another officer on the detail. The young ‘dindunuffin’ was not seriously injured but suffered a major hemorrhaging in street credibility amid the local DC thug population. Meanwhile, Justice Sotomayor is fine and continues to Build the Better World that surrounds her.
(WASHINGTON DC) – A deputy U.S. Marshal tasked with protecting Supreme Court justices’ homes shot an alleged armed carjacker near the Washington residence of Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor last week, authorities said Tuesday.
The suspect, 18-year-old Kentrell Flowers of Southeast D.C., allegedly pulled a handgun on the marshal, who was in a parked car in the Northwest section of the city around 1:15 a.m. ET on Friday, the Metropolitan Police Department said in a press release.
The marshal drew his own gun and “fired several shots at the suspect,” the MPD said. Another marshal in a separate vehicle also fired at Flowers, who suffered non-life-threatening injuries, police said. (read more)
Lord, please help me not to laugh about this because none of it is funny, yet for some reason I cannot stop snickering.
I always got in trouble when I was a kid for laughing at the wrong stuff.
Do not let it go unnoticed that foreign leaders are watching the USA President give a national address shouting about a need to “save democracy” while simultaneously trying to jail his political opposition. These are not just odd hypocrisies that make good fodder to intellectually beat leftists in western social media battles; these are actual realities with real world consequences for billions of people living in it.
Decrying the lack of constraints on executive power while expecting us to forget how the same executive office holder mandated gene therapy for all workers under threat of government punishment, seems a little odd. However, this is the era of Great Pretending, and I’m here to underline the bold examples of it.
Joe Biden has the audacity, the nerve, the political tone deafness which can only come from an echo-chamber of ideological idiots, to use his official office to protest against his political opposition under the guise of a Supreme Court ruling the entirety of his leftist tribe doesn’t like. It really is pathetic how low-grade and unintellectual our republican form of government has become. WATCH:
…“The President is not above the law. But Congress may not criminalize the President’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the Executive Branch under the Constitution.”…
In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court of the United Stated ruled that presidents have “absolute immunity” for official “actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority.” [SEE RULING HERE] Also, “official acts” cannot be used as evidence against the president in a criminal case.
As expected, the high court instructed the lower trial courts to hold specific evidentiary hearings on each anti-Trump criminal count, and determine which counts, if any, related to official or unofficial acts.
The Supreme Court is essentially telling the lower courts to go back and look at each citation and review which claims are official acts and which claims related to unofficial acts. The Supreme Court ruled that presidents may not have immunity for non-official conduct. However, when the judicial review cannot differentiate, the court cannot look at motives for the decisions.
In a major 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court has finally addressed the expansive regulatory use of executive agencies to create law through interpretation. The 40-year-old Chevron ruling granted the executive agencies of government the ability to interpret laws and apply restrictions/regulations based on their own rules and definitions therein.
The Supreme Court put the judicial branch back into the equation by ruling that courts will decide what laws apply when the legislation is ambiguous on detail. This shift in prior precedent could have major ramifications. [MORE AT SCOTUS BLOG]
In another big case, the court ruled in favor of Joseph Fischer a Pennsylvania police officer charged in the January 6th protest with “obstructing an official proceeding.” [FULL RULING HERE]
The law at the center of Fischer’s case is 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), and as noted by Julie Kelly, “The statute … has been applied in roughly 350 J6 cases; it also represents two of four counts in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s J6-related criminal indictment of Donald Trump in Washington.”
Julie Kelly – […] In a 6-3 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the “c2” subsection is tethered to the “c1” subsection that addresses tampering with a record, document, or “object.”
Roberts was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Amy Coney Barrett authored the dissent (!) joined by Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
The issue of presidential immunity is being tested in the DC political Lawfare case against President Donald Trump.
As the Jack Smith prosecution claims President Trump tried to “overturn the results of the 2020 election,” the issue of presidential actions intended to secure & protect the legitimacy of election outcomes becomes a focus.
The legal counsel for President Trump has stated any action by the president to ensure election security falls within official acts, and is therefore subject to immunity from prosecution. The special counsel claims the act of reviewing an election outcome is a private benefit to the president and not part of presidential immunity.
The Supreme Court is now involved in determining whether the President of the United States has immunity from prosecution, or whether any/all future presidents can be prosecuted for their action while in office. Inside the debate is the larger question of whether the “bureaucratic state” controls the president, or whether the office of the president controls the executive branch bureaucratic state.
The leftists and communists agree with former AG Bill Barr, that institutions run the government, and the office of the President is simply a figurehead within it. In essence, the DC institutions are omnipotent and powerful, and the president is simply occupying space the deep state allows. That’s the core ramification within the immunity argument.
In this video, Justice Brett Kavanaugh asks several questions about limiting the immunity of the president and some of the ramifications that will surface for future presidents. WATCH:
Interestingly, at 2:30 of the video, Justice Kavanaugh notes the current Lawfare approach – crowdsourcing for prosecution angles with the DOJ, which was the same Lawfare approach used by the beach friends to attack Kavanaugh’s nomination. Judge Kavanaugh uses that hidden reference point – very subtlety – but its inclusion shows that he knows exactly what is taking place here.
I also like the part where the DOJ argues President Obama is not guilty of murder, via drone strike, because the type of murder created by Obama in that situation was “lawful murder.” Collateral killing via drone strike is considered by the DOJ to be: the lawful murder of another person with malice of forethought and specific intent to kill.
Gee, what could possibly go wrong with the DC administrative Deep State having the power to determine what is “lawful conduct” vs “unlawful conduct” by their political opposition? Oh wait, it’s done by DOJ statutory interpretation, lolol… now I feel better. Good grief, can people not see where this ends.
That said, here’s what the SCOTUS is going to do… I’m 95% certain of this.
[Oh, and Steve Bannon’s insufferable legal analysis, by Mike Davis, is GASLIGHTING. Davis is an idiot and totally dishonest legal mind (wants to be AG – God, help us), who only tells MAGA what they want to hear; so, I would suggest ignoring his claim that SCOTUS will rule support for Trump with absolute immunity. Mike Davis is totally wrong.]
Oral arguments were heard today in the appeal of the government against the states of Louisiana, Missouri and seven plaintiffs who claim that Biden officials, including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media platforms to suppress or delete content about COVID-19 that federal officials found objectionable.
The Biden administration had an extensive communication pipeline into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube and various subsidiary tech companies where instructions, the government says “encouragement”, were/was given about the removal of content critical of the government position, and the removal of content providers – American citizens. Full Hearing Audio:
Making the case for the Biden administration, Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher led the way. “We don’t think it’s possible for the government — through speech alone — to transform private speakers into state actors,” he said.
Fletcher said the government didn’t engage in coercion — which he said would be unconstitutional — just encouragement and persuasion for the social media platforms to enforce their existing rules at the time barring Covid-19 misinformation. “If it stays on the persuasion side of the line — and all we’re talking about is government speech — then there’s no state action and there’s also no First Amendment problem,” he said. “I think it’s clear this is exhortation, not threat.”
Louisiana state Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga, arguing for the plaintiffs, said the speech the platforms were suppressing wasn’t their own speech but those of third parties, ordinary Americans. Aguiñaga also said the users often had no idea they were being impacted by the federal effort to prod the platforms to take down content. “The bulk of it is behind closed doors. That is what is so pernicious about it,” he said.
The questioning by the majority of the Supreme Court justices appeared to favor the government, in large part due to the inability of the plaintiffs to outline direct actionable harm to them as an outcome of the regulation of their speech by the tech platforms. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision in the case by late June.
For some reason CBS Sunday Morning put Christine Blasey-Ford back into the media cycle with an interview about her life after accusing Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh of sexual assault. {Full Interview Here} The CBS motive appears to be restimulating the gender vote in an election year.
Blasey-Ford comes across as she did in the original 2018 fiasco; detached from the information and regretting she ever participated. For those who know the entire deep weeds backstory of the Rehoboth “beach friends,” former and current DOJ people who are now constructing political Lawfare, it is well accepted Blasey-Ford was a tool for their use. Heck, the accuser never even penned the letter she was conscripted to write to the Senate Judiciary Committee. [Hook, WATCH]
The resurfacing of Blasey-Ford may be intended to stimulate the gender vote, but has the potential to backfire if people start to dig deep into this prior storyline. Within the 2018 background, and with the application of hindsight, all of the Lawfare “beach friends” become visible.
Names like Mary McCord, David Laufman, Monica McLean and Michael Bromwich all swirl around the construct that used Blasey-Ford as the vessel for their hit against Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee. The Senate investigation into the Blasey-Ford accusations was quickly dropped by the media after the investigative staff began to discover the network and connections.
The Supreme Court has granted certiorari and accepted the case of President Trump arguing presidential immunity from prosecution for official acts while in office. At the heart of the issue the court will determine if the charges brought by Jack Smith need to be dropped, or if the case against President Trump can continue forward.
If the Supreme Court begins defining what types of immunity exist for Presidents in office, they are beginning to open the door to multiple Lawfare efforts against the chief executive by agencies of the administrative state. This could be extremely troublesome for the future abilities of the presidency far beyond Donald Trump.
WASHINGTON DC – In a one-page order Wednesday, the court set an expedited schedule to hear the immunity issue, with oral arguments to be set during the week of April 22. In the meantime, proceedings in the trial court will remain frozen.
