Bill Maher came out following the Stormy court appearance to completely dispute her contentions. He explained how he interviewed the actress in 2018, and when he gave her the chance to take the victimhood path, she sternly refused.

Daniels: "I have no idea. It is not a me too case. I wasn't assaulted. I wasn't raped. I wasn't attacked or raped, or coerced or blackmailed. They tried to shove me in to the #MeToo box to further their agenda. And first of all, I didn't want any part of that because it's not the truth, and I'm not a victim in that regard."

That is not only 180 degrees in opposition to her testimony, but on the stand, her account of the affair dropped many of the buzzwords and phrases heard from the movement. //

Steve Krakauer @SteveKrak
·
A journalism "tell" - look for what stories DON'T get covered.

On CBS' marquee Sunday show "Face the Nation," the NYC Trump trial didn't get mentioned at all. On CNN, only a passing reference. NBC relegated it to the final panel segment.

Doesn't bode well for the prosecution.
3:37 AM · May 13, 2024

Dexter Taylor, a Brooklyn-based software engineer, has been sentenced to a decade in prison for building firearms in his home using parts purchased legally. He was arrested after a SWAT raid in 2022, and a jury convicted him of 13 counts last month. Now, he is set to spend up to ten years behind bars for what many perceive as an egregious violation of his Second Amendment rights.

The sentence was handed down on Monday by Judge Abena Darkeh, who presided over Taylor’s trial. The judge’s handling of the case has been criticized, especially her decision to prohibit mention of the Second Amendment in the courtroom during the trial. //

“She told us, ‘Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.’” //

Taylor recalled that it “seemed like we had three prosecutors in the courtroom, the two [assistant district attorneys] and the judge working in concert.”

Indeed, in a previous interview, Varghese characterized Judge Darkeh as “the most aggressive prosecutor in the room.” //

Interestingly enough, Taylor said some of the officers who escorted him into the holding cell behind the courtroom after the verdict was read began discussing politics. “Literally, they were all talking about how this is nonsense. ‘Of course, you have a God-given right to keep and bear arms,’” he recalled the officers saying. He discussed his case with another sergeant who “thought it was a travesty.” //

When asked about the possibility that Taylor could get bail pending appeal so he could fight his case from outside of prison, the lawyer said, “It’s something that Dexter and I will have to discuss further. The chances are slim to none.”

It looks like the ‘strongest’ legal case against Trump is based on yet another set of lies from corrupt federal agencies. //

Recent court disclosures give two indications that federal employees could have planted the classified documents used to mire Trump and several aides into a sprawling investigation and an election-interfering court case. The first is the explosive evidence revealed Friday: For 11 months, the special counsel’s office hid that it misplaced some — we don’t know how many or which — of the same allegedly classified documents it claims Trump criminally possessed at Mar-a-Lago. //

Second, there’s the also newly uncovered fact that a federal agency sent “two pallets” of documents to Mar-a-Lago while the National Archives and Records Administration was setting up this documents case. It’s unknown who all had access to these document boxes during their packing, temporary storage in Virginia, and transit to Trump’s home. Were those boxes a setup too? Imagine if some boxes the feds sent amid NARA’s dispute with Trump were also boxes the DOJ can’t verify as being in their original state. //

We also learned just last week that the White House and Department of Justice lawyers colluded with NARA to develop what became the special counsel’s classified documents indictment, starting an entire year before the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, according to documents reviewed by reporter Julie Kelly. Just the News reports the collusion between NARA and the White House could have begun as early as a few weeks into the Biden presidency, according to White House visitor logs.

So of course the classified documents case didn’t arise from concern over legal improprieties, as the complete lack of prosecution for the same conduct from Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and DOJ leakers also proves. It was a political hit from the beginning, using federal agencies and resources to strangle Democrats’ top political opponent and override the votes of half the country. Talk about an insurrection.

Simon Ateba
@simonateba
·
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Ahead of Michael Cohen’s testimony against Trump Monday, @CNN legal analyst says, “I’ve never seen a witness who’s lied to Congress, who’s lied to court, who’s lied to the IRS, who’s lied to the Southern District of New York, who lied to his banker.” WATCH

3:49 PM · May 10, 2024 //

GBenton
10 hours ago
Alvin Bragg's running the biggest bluff in history and he's got nothing. I can see why they didn't want this case to go first. Between that lying harlot and Cohen and the judges disgraceful gag order and allowing reversable errors, they're boosting Trump's cred with the voters and possibly heading for an aquittal since at least two of the jurors are lawyers and know that this is a sh1tshow from top to bottom - not to mention there is no crime and Bragg has no jurisdiction to prosecute federal crimes.

I think Bonchie's hunch might be right. Hung jury or found not guilty since this case was NEVER ready for prime time and they just wanted to bloody up Trump with salacious nonsense like the Billy Bush tapes.

Florida case, toast. GA case, not likely to happen before the election. DC case - Gonna call it now, Supremes either send it back to the lower courts and it doesn't happen before the election or they rule he's got enough immunity to void that case outright.

And Trump is vindicated -- Jack Smith gets charged for his shenanigans and Biden destroys the Dem party by proving Trump right that the system is totally corrupt.

That's what it looks like right now. Far cry from what the Dems probably thought -- I think their goose was cooked when fatass James didn't bankrupt Trump with her fake fraud case and instead he's billions richer, lol.

One would think that the media would spend days, if not weeks reporting those details if they could verify that Trump was that president. But he wasn’t. That president was the mythical King of Camelot, the icon of the Democrat Party, and an equal to Lincoln in stature. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was that adulterous cad of a chief executive. //

A washed-up porn pin cushion and her story about blacking out and not remembering what happened should never have seen the light of day or the inside of a courtroom. Her new claims that it wasn’t “about the money” and her insistence that she was an apparent unwilling victim are equal parts garbage, legally irrelevant, and clearly intended to prejudice the 12-person jury. The scandalous testimony Judge Merchan allowed has been, without doubt, utterly irrelevant to the case at bar. Merchan is sheep-dogging a kangaroo court, a political show trial that the KGB’s Lavrenty Beria would be proud of.

I got your attention by leading with a false suggestion. Misdirection. That’s what the prosecution is doing in Manhattan. Trump wasn’t “banging” interns. And this trial isn't about Daniels or her claims. It's [supposed to be] about business documents. But the prosecution got what it wanted. A false suggestion that Trump may have raped Daniels.

Orange Man bad.

Byron York explains:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with falsifying bookkeeping records of a nondisclosure payment in order to commit or conceal another crime, Bragg still hasn’t revealed what that other crime is. It’s really the key to the whole case. Without the other crime, there would be no charges against Trump in this matter. The fact that we — and that includes the defendant — still don’t know what the other crime is is one of the great injustices of a felony prosecution that never should have happened...[Bragg's] theory is that if Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in the fall of 2016 to keep her from going public with her story that she and Trump had a sexual encounter and then Trump repaid Cohen in 2017, then that was a campaign contribution and should have been reported to the FEC. The payments were made “for the purpose of influencing any election,” the theory continues, and the Trump campaign should have filed a document with the FEC listing among its campaign contributions and expenditures that it received and spent $130,000 for “hush money.”

If you think that sounds a little odd for an FEC disclosure, you’re right. That’s where one of the critical witnesses to be called by the Trump defense comes in. Bradley Smith is a former chairman of the FEC, and on many occasions, including long before Trump, he has argued that there are all sorts of things a candidate can spend money on that are not legally classifiable as “for the purpose of influencing any election.” ... Smith, having headed the FEC, has many examples from the commission’s enforcement of federal election law that illustrate his point. He knows what he is talking about, and it seems clear that his expert opinion is that paying off Daniels, no matter what one might think of it, is not a campaign expenditure or donation that FECA requires a candidate to disclose. The Trump defense plans to call Smith as a witness. Not because he has any personal knowledge of the Trump transaction but because he understands, and has enforced, the campaign law that Bragg’s prosecutors appear to be planning to use against Trump. But Merchan has forbidden Smith from testifying about most of the issues involved in the case.

Maximus Decimus Cassius writeofcenter
3 hours ago edited
For the left, the end justifies the means--any means. And the fact that the legal community writ large is not up in arms about this travesty of justice tells us all we need to know about the ethics, morals and integrity of the "legal community".

These are events that took place three and a half years ago. This indictment could have been brought three years ago, or two years ago. There is a reason why it is being brought right now. It is to freeze the Arizona Republican Party so that they cannot organize themselves to win that Senate seat. //

Proft (05:30):

So then, we should expect since Dana Nessel, the AG of Michigan, has a similar investigation ongoing. We should expect that indictment maybe right after Labor Day?

WAJ (05:40):

Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s what’s going on this year. All of these Trump indictments, with the exception of the Mar-a-Lago one, where the events took place later, all of these lawsuits, criminal prosecutions are regarding events that took place over three years ago. They are brought so that the trials will take place in this election year, including the one that’s ongoing now in Manhattan, [which] involves events six or seven years ago. //

Going to the merits of it. the claim is that there was a fraud perpetrated on the Congress and the public regarding the Arizona election. The problem with that, is that there was no deception. No one was deceived…

This took place in plain sight. It was in the media. People were on TV. //

Proft (09:35):

Well, it’s more than freezing. What they’re really going to do is now they’ve got this indictment, and now they’re going to run tens of millions of dollars of ads saying the Arizona Republican party leadership has been indicted for trying to steal the 2020 election. //

So I say that as somebody who disagreed with John Eastman at the time, on the record. But you know, they have not only criminalized politics, they have now criminalized lawyering if you’re a Republican lawyer.

So people make aggressive arguments in court all the time. People make arguments for the extension of the law. I think Eastman’s argument was wrong. I don’t think it rose to such a frivolous level that you should lose your Bar license over it. //

There is a group, I think they’re called the 65 Group or something like that, which is going around the country trying to get Republican lawyers disbarred. They have weaponized not just the Democrat prosecutorial offices, they are now weaponizing Bar counsel and they’re now weaponizing the disciplinary process. And they have said explicitly, they advertise it, that they want to make Republican lawyers toxic in their communities.

So people need to wake up. What’s going on in this country is really totalitarian, and it is an attempt to not enforce the rule of law, but to destroy the rule of law and to prevent Republicans from ever mounting an election challenge again. What Republican lawyer, if there is an alleged fraud in the next election, is going to dare to raise legal arguments against it knowing that John Eastman has now been disbarred for that? //

Subotai Bahadur | April 26, 2024 at 11:01 pm
The actual charge is, I believe, “objecting to election theft while Republican”.

Subotai Bahadur

On Monday, Judge Aileen Cannon released an unredacted version of former President Trump's motion for discovery in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. The document appears to show collaboration between the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Justice Department, and the Biden administration to develop the case.

A scathing report by three federal judges on the “misconduct” of plaintiff lawyers in a challenge to Alabama’s ban on gender-transition medicine for minors illustrates something we learned a long time ago: Many on the far Left, including radical lawyers employed by self-proclaimed civil rights organizations, believe the ends always justify the means and that rules of ethics don’t apply to them. //

After the case was assigned to Judge Burke, the lawyers dismissed the lawsuits, then refiled almost immediately to get a different judge. //

Yes, Charles—a lawyer who now works for the Department of Justice—lied to the panel of judges under oath until he was confronted with hard evidence that exposed the lie.

The 34 charges against Trump were magicked into felonies by the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who contends there's an overarching federal election crime at play. //

The New York State legislature made a similar move for E. Jean Carroll so the founder of LinkedIn and ardent leftist Reid Hoffman could bankroll a new round of lawfare. //

In the fraud case that isn't fraud and which defrauded no one, //

And we haven't even touched on the FBI's Mar-a-Lago raid over documents Trump is allowed to have under the Presidential Records Act. Or the attempt to get Trump off the ballot using the 14th Amendment. Even the U.S. Constitution is fungible to these leftists.

And now we're in jury selection in Trump's latest case, which is literally a bookkeeping case in which Trump paid his attorney over time for services rendered that included making sure Stormy Daniels and another woman signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and were paid for them. Daniels has never been charged with extortion for breaking her NDA and demanding more money or she'd tell the media... //

Trump's being publicly humiliated and kept off the campaign trail — a feature, not a bug of this lawfare — because he booked payments to his lawyer in 2017, which, let's note for clarity, is after the 2016 election. Bragg contends these payments were in furtherance of stealing an election. //

Maximus Decimus Cassius
8 hours ago edited
We're in a phase where people have not quite figured out what is going on. I suppose that is understandable to a degree, but the fog, normalcy bias and refusal to accept reality is a bill which is going to come due someday, and I don't think anyone will like the cost.

The Ruling Class / left / Democrats, et al, are not afraid of the American people, but they are terrified of Donald Trump. The Covid-19 gaslighting, forced vaccinations of an experimental drug with minimal benefit but astonishingly severe side-effects, the inhumane lockdowns and omnipresent censorship with minimal resistance, together with the jackbooted thuggery against J6 patriots, again, with almost zero protest after the Stasi arrests started, leaves no doubt that the DC Junta does not fear the peasants.

But these absurd kangaroo legal persecutions of Donald Trump clearly demonstrates the elites' fear should PDJT reclaim the White House. And the Ruling Class will stop at nothing to prevent Trump from reclaiming the White House. After all, what is stopping them, or better yet, who is going to stop them?

IMO, the only way out of this and survive is for the Ruling Class, elites, etc. to become suddenly very, very fearful of We the People.

"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." //

aminahyaquin CarriedtheM-16forAmerica
6 hours ago
Yes we shouod call it the Biden regime in absentia since Biden is non compos mentis and has clearly, cognitively left the arena.

ModernDayJeremiah aminahyaquin
6 hours ago
Biden is full compost mentis. He has the Mierdas Touch. Whatever he touches turns to crap.

Ultimately, Trump isn't who is on trial here, it's the public's adherence to the American philosophy and foundational principles of governance that are being weighed and decided upon. //

Douglas Proudfoot
10 hours ago
Which Amendments in the Bill of Rights apply to Trump? If they don't apply to Trump, how can you be sure they will apply to you?

The indictments all depend on the false bookkeeping concealing another crime. However, the indictments don’t specify what the other crime is. Without the other crime, the NY State felonies become misdemeanors with a 2 year expired statute of limitations. If the other crime turns out to be a misdemeanor federal finance violation, the statute of limitations has already expired on it. How can 2 misdemeanors, one not even in NY jurisdiction, add up to over 30 felonies?

The judge has ruled that Bragg doesn't have to specify what the concealed crime is.

If this travesty causes Trump to lose the election, we will never have a free election for president again. The Bill of Rights will protect noone. The rule of law will become one Party rule. America game over.

To this point, the conservative justices have shown some skepticism of the government's case, which U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is presenting. On that front, Justice Neil Gorsuch asked a question that many of us have been pondering. Namely, he asked whether Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who pulled a fire alarm before an important House vote and impeded a congressional proceeding, could be charged under the same statute. Astonishingly, the government responded with a "no." //

Returning to Bowman, he pulled a fire alarm during a voting session in the House of Representatives. Congressional members had to be evacuated, and the vote was postponed. That is a textbook example of obstructing an official proceeding, and the government's justification for not charging him is basically "because we say it doesn't count." //

etba_ss
an hour ago
I'm not sure they really care at this point. They've milked and milked and milked J6 as much as they can. They've set an example and a standard that they can do whatever they want to you if your politics do not align. The time to have been providing relief in these cases is not April 2024, but in April 2021.

I don't mean to say that it doesn't matter, but this is one of those issues that the damage has largely been done on. The whole point of J6 is to influence elections and suppress dissent, including covering up fraud and electioneering during the 2020 election. All serious efforts at exposing the issues in 2020 stopped after J6. That was the main purpose and it was instantly successful.

The time is coming where Governors, state legislators, sheriffs, etc. decide if they will follow the law and the Constitution or the federal government and the court system. The two things are not the same. We shouldn't ignore the courts for "light and transient causes", but if our Founders were willing to pick up a musket and risk the very real possibility of being hung for traitors, telling the federal government and/or the federal courts "no" isn't too much to ask. Again, you don't do this because you disagree with some largely irrelevant statute, but when it comes to such basic things as border security, liberty and political prosecution, those things aren't "light and transient causes", but ones that are fundamental to the existence of a constitutional republic. //

etba_ss Hallen
38 minutes ago edited
The problem with the court upholding the law, even if they thought it was valid and could be applied is that selective prosecution violates a higher law. The Constitution is supreme to the court or to any Congressionally issued statute or law. The Constitution includes "equal protection under the law". Selective prosecution on the basis of political connections or ideology is a direct violation of the US Constitution. So Congress could pass a law saying that it is illegal to be a Republican. That law would violate the Constitution and be thrown out.

So either the law itself must be thrown out, or at least its application in this case must be thrown out. It is a gross violation of the Constitution, which is what Gorsuch is pointing out.

Remember Nicholas Roske, the guy who attempted to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh? Apparently, the Justice Department doesn’t, which is why they seem to have forgotten that they are supposed to be prosecuting him. //

So, if this is such a “slam dunk” case, why is the DOJ slow-walking it? Are there political considerations in play, or are they just too busy trying to prosecute former President Donald Trump and pro-life protesters? //

Cynical Optimist
2 hours ago edited
The same reason that Peter Navarro is in prison for defying a subpoena while Hunter Biden has not even been charged. The same reason that peaceful Pro lifers have been convicted while those who firebombed Federal buildings in Portland Oregon have not even been charged. The same reason hundreds of those who protested Biden's election have spent and will spend years in prison while those who protested Trump's election not only were never charged but were paid money from a lawsuit.

Libertarians aren't anarchists, we're minarchists. It's the general libertarian belief that there should be hard and fast rules for society, but not a lot of them. The vast majority of the rules that are created should be applied to the government which can easily spiral out of control the more room it's given. The government is like a child, and it has to be watched, monitored, and given strict boundaries, or else it will [wreak] destruction upon you, your home, and itself. //

I'm a big fan of basic rules. God gave us 10 that are conducive to a happy, healthy life and our American system is broadly based on these rules. A few more could be added here and there, but if I'm being honest, at the end of the day it's not the laws that matter.

It's the people's willingness to follow them.

In order for society to function we have to agree to have a functioning society. This means following, not just the laws, but the unwritten rules that usually come with tradition and societal expectations. If even a fraction of the population suddenly disagrees with these rules, society starts to collapse. //

America — and the Western world in general — seems to have gotten to a point where it's perfectly fine with shrugging off propriety and common decency. It puts endless laws on the books, empowers its own government, and is even now willing to ban entire platforms off the internet, but it has very little concern about enforcing many of the basic rules already on the books, especially if the person not following them is of a certain identity.

People in America aren't following basic rules anymore because they aren't being enforced. Even when someone defends people against someone willing to violate these rules, the defender gets in trouble. //

We're encouraged to be passive while aggressors roam around us.

Then we wonder why everything is so trashy and our society is degrading.

We've shrugged off the rules in order to avoid being labeled as one thing or another, but as we pat ourselves on the back for being "tolerant" and "inclusive," we crumble.

The DOJ’s position on this matter once again shows their blatant two-tiered view of justice—Peter Navarro sits in a Miami prison cell for defying a subpoena, but Hunter Biden is walking around a free man and enjoying the White House Easter Egg roll despite blowing off his own order to appear. Meanwhile, the Department is counseling its own lawyers to defy the House.

John Kennedy
@SenJohnKennedy
·
Follow
Adeel Mangi is not qualified to be a federal judge because he supports organizations that celebrate people who kill law enforcement officers, hate Americans, and hate Jews.

It’s not Islamophobic to recognize that. It’s our job.

5:29 PM · Mar 22, 2024

There is no doubt that our criminal justice system is far from perfect. As someone whose name escapes me once put it, "It's not a system, and it has nothing to do with justice, but it is criminal." That said, sometimes the reason people draw long prison sentences for a very good reason that has nothing to do with systemic racism or bad lawyers.

We want to believe in rehabilitation and redemption, but we also have to realize that the patterns of behavior and personality traits that send a man to prison for several decades are rarely made better by incarceration. We should be surprised that a man who drew a 50-year sentence for violent crimes killed someone in the same way that we would be shocked that a poisonous snake bit someone. //

How much risk are we willing to inflict upon society so we can feel good about ourselves?

Mike Ford
30 minutes ago edited
Let me clarify this for folks unfamiliar with business and residential real estate valuation....Bottom Line...in some locales and instances, it is quite legal and proper to double or even triple actual measured square footage, as a sort of an algorithm to account for the value of very high ceilings....which Trump stated. Here is a clip from that vaunted conservative rag, the WaPo

Talk about a Pandora’s box. You open up a huge can of worms when you start talking about square feet. Let’s start with the bottom line: There is no uniform method across the country to measure square footage in residential homes. We wish there was one precise method for measuring that was agreed to all over the country, but there isn’t.
In some municipalities, vaulted ceilings will double the square footage of a room.
https://www.washingtonpost....

Hope this clears things up. As for the charge of perjury...what likely happened is that although there was no plea for a smaller crime...there was almost certainly a background threat.

Bottom line, Trump is entirely correct to state such measurements when obtaining a loan....as long as he states the reasoning....then it's up to the banks to either accept or deny that algorithm.

Here's some more info on how some of the "ephemerals" can increase "value" for loan purposes.

The author of the below piece, is familiar with pricing in the Palm Beach area and used to live 2 blocks up Fram Mar-a-Lago

https://afnn.us/2023/11/09/...

Side note: I came upon this little bit of arcane information when I heard Trump responding to some question about this as he remarked (words. to the effect) "It's because it has very high ceilings..."

I thought that was strange and thought it was just The Donald bloviating...then I did some asking around and poking around the internet....lo and behold, it's not an uncommon practice and legal in certain circumstances..

Engoron easily could have employed a non-fraudulent, apples-to-apples methodology. That method would calculate Trump’s purported “ill-gotten” interest “savings” by comparing the recourse loan rates that Trump actually received from the lenders with the recourse loan rates Trump would have received had he not allegedly overvalued his assets. But the problem for Engoron is that applying this proper economic analysis would result in $0 of “ill-gotten gains” for Trump. //

Unlike Trump’s purported “overvaluations,” Engoron’s financial manipulation has actual victims — Trump, his family, and the Trump organization. But the harm goes much deeper than that. Made in an election year against a front-running major party candidate, Engoron’s ruling is a financial fraud on America.