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All The President's Lawyers: No Bill Thrill?

September 19, 2019 by Ken White

This week: did a grand jury no-bill DoJ? Link here.

Last 5 posts by Ken White

  • Now Posting At Substack - August 27th, 2020
  • The Fourth of July [rerun] - July 4th, 2020
  • All The President's Lawyers: No Bill Thrill? - September 19th, 2019
  • Over At Crime Story, A Post About the College Bribery Scandal - September 13th, 2019
  • All The President's Lawyers: - September 11th, 2019
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Filed Under: Law

Comments

  1. En Passant says

    September 20, 2019 at 9:15 am

    Finally got around to listening to the whole thing at one sitting.

    Thanks for the analysis of several of Trump's lawyers in civil cases against him, and the conspicuous absence of any criminal indictment announcement by a federal grand jury.

    One contextual thing strikes me as broadly applicable to all the cases brought against Trump. Your mention of Nixon's long ago invoking executive privilege brought it to mind, just because you said Trump and Nixon in more or less the same breath.

    In the Nixon affair, the congressional investigation was fairly narrowly focused: Did the president authorize his campaign staff to commit burglaries against the Democratic National Committee, or not? There was one primary lawsuit brought by the DNC against Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President.

    Granted that there were some important but lesser issues and suits. But there was not a huge proliferation of suits filed.

    The numbers of suits or congressional investigations in the Nixon matter(s) pales in comparison to the numbers of suits and investigations into Trump. For lawsuits, I've lost track at about 35.

    So, it's no surprise that Trump has lots of lawyers.

    One need not be a Trump supporter to wonder whether the Democrats have reasoned, "we can't beat him at the polls, so we'll file a ton of lawsuits to make it as difficult as possible for him to actually preside and do what presidents ordinarily do: appoint SC Justices, propose legislation, appoint federal agency chiefs, etc."

    The current plethora of lawsuits against Trump reminds me of Jonathan Swift's Lilliputians attacking Lemuel Gulliver by tying him down with thousands of threads.

  2. Untermensch says

    September 21, 2019 at 3:06 am

    You don’t actually believe any of this legal action could be dinsingenuous do you? I mean, it’s not like some folks were calling for Trump’s impeachment even before he took office or anything like that. (Apparently under the theory that impeachment would result in HRC getting into office or something like that.)

    I don’t like Trump much, but it’s readily apparent that much, of not most, of the legal action is as En Passant states: a tactic to bog Trump down. Even as the Dems are secretly loving the precedents Trump has set for the unitary executive and salivating at the thought they get to pick up where he leaves off.

  3. An says

    September 21, 2019 at 6:37 pm

    https://youtu.be/KCQqpSskeDU

    ^ Ukraine's foreign minister speaks out on the latest Trump scandal.

  4. An says

    September 24, 2019 at 5:07 pm

    Federal Judge Anthony J Trenga has thrown out the conviction of a Mike Flynn’s partner Bijan Rafiekian from the Flynn Intel Group and granted the defendant's motion to acquit.

    Ruling here:

    https://www.scribd.com/document/427282559/Rafiekian-Dismissal-Memo

    How this plays into Flynn's new strategy will be interesting.

  5. Teemu Leisti says

    September 28, 2019 at 6:29 am

    An hour-long special edition of this excellent podcast, titled "President Trump. Ukraine. Joe Biden. Impeachment.", now available.

  6. An says

    October 1, 2019 at 9:14 am

    Flynn now says he pled guilty under duress. A copy of the filing can be found here:

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/10/01/smart-move-flynn-lawyer-tells-judge-motive-behind-why-flynn-took-guilty-plea/

  7. An says

    October 2, 2019 at 6:59 pm

    Someone has been leaking grand jury info:

    https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/f191002a.pdf

    Given the political fights over a lot of grand jury info lately, I have to wonder if this is related.

  8. An says

    October 25, 2019 at 9:51 am

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/10/25/stunning-potentially-game-changing-court-filing-by-flynn-defense-lawyer-sidney-powell/

    Flynn has a new motion out. It reads like a long form version of "don't talk to cops."

    As I understand things, the FBI has a policy of deliberately not recording interviews. Filings like this call that policy into question. It seems odd to continually edit the FD-302 (interview notes) long after the interview, especially when these form the basis of 18 USC 1001 charges.

  9. An says

    October 29, 2019 at 1:21 am

    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/28/nick-sandmann-covington-catholic-student-washingto/

    “The Court will adhere to its previous rulings as they pertain to these statements except Statements 10, 11, and 33, to the extent that these three statements state that plaintiff ‘blocked’ Nathan Phillips and ‘would not allow him to retreat,’”

    Covington defamation lawsuit has been reopened. Can statements like the above really be considered 'opinions' in some contexts? I confess to being utterly mystified by what the court was smoking in its original ruling, but at least they reversed themselves before the appellate courts did.

  10. Richard says

    October 29, 2019 at 5:03 am

    They're not opinions; instead, they're accurate representations of what Phillips said.

    If it's defamation, Sandmann should sue the person who misrepresented his actions (Phillips), not the paper which accurately reported Phillips's characterization of the events, and which properly attributed that characterization to Phillips.

  11. An says

    October 29, 2019 at 1:36 pm

    > They're not opinions; instead, they're accurate representations of what Phillips said.

    I read the articles, some of those are not clearly set out as statements by Phillips, especially with respect to the opinion piece after the original story which said, basically, that the video changed nothing. That story also did *not* link to the video, at least not that I could find. I think that, in particular, the opinion agreeing with Phillips after the video came out and after everyone was giving a public opportunity to retract anything they wished to, is what I find the most troubling.

    Finally, it's not me marking these as "opinions," that's the rationale I heard reported for the earlier statements, which seemed very wrong to me. I can only hope that I just got confused by bad reporting somewhere and the judge didn't actually write that.

  12. Richard says

    October 30, 2019 at 5:26 am

    @An: from the article that you linked:

    The three statements identified by the court were:

    A quote in three articles from Mr. Phillips saying that Nicholas “just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat,” a statement attributed to Mr. Phillips saying that the teen “was blocking him from moving,” and a tweet using the quote from Mr. Phillips saying that Nicholas “just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”

    The three statements which Sandmann is being allowed to sue for are all explicitly claims that Phillips made, that the paper was just reporting on.

  13. An says

    October 31, 2019 at 12:31 am

    @Richard I can't find the actual ruling (which I would love to read), but this is approximately reporting I saw. Note the quotes around the word opinion herein:

    "Bertelsman dismissed the suit in July on the grounds that the Post’s initial coverage didn’t specifically mention Sandmann by name, that its language was constitutionally-protected “rhetorical hyperbole,” and that while Phillips’ version of events may have been “erroneous,” the Post reporting on his “opinion” fell within the First Amendment’s scope."

    I know the WaPo was quoting the guy, but they also wrote an opinion article after the video came out saying, in essence, that they stood behind the earlier story and there's some evidence that they already knew this guy was not exactly reliable.

    If the newspaper goes and interviews some local guy known to be full of crap and he tells me that you surrounded him and called him racist things and they put your picture all over the world, then stand behind that story once video comes out showing that you were just waiting for your bus, you didn't even move, and some group completely unrelated to you was chanting, then I think that paper owes the world at least a clear retraction saying that the video refutes the story you were originally told.

    Defamation law aside, that's what I would expect from a reputable newspaper, so I'm disappointed, if not surprised.

  14. An says

    November 5, 2019 at 9:06 pm

    Major WTF moment in the Flynn case. The feds are now saying that for the past two years, they've misattributed Strzok & Pientka's notes on the Flynn interview and they should have been attributed to opposite parties.

    You can find a copy of the letter they sent here:
    https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog/status/1191860980554354688

  15. Tyler says

    November 6, 2019 at 8:29 pm

    How this plays into Flynn's new strategy will be interesting.

    Since Flynn was charged for making false statements in a completely separate investigation, it's hard to see how it will play at all.

  16. Tyler says

    November 6, 2019 at 8:42 pm

    The feds are now saying that for the past two years, they've misattributed Strzok & Pientka's notes on the Flynn interview and they should have been attributed to opposite parties.

    Ummm…thats a gross exaggeration of what they are saying.

  17. R. Penner says

    November 16, 2019 at 6:10 am

    As news stories which substitute the maximum statutory penalty for a realistic estimate based on the federal sentencing guidelines is a Popehat topic of special interest:

    I spotted the link/editorially curated headline to a news story which read: "Trump confidant Stone guilty on all counts, faces up to 50 years in prison"

    Actual article has the somewhat tamer:

    Stone faces a legal maximum penalty of 50 years in prison — 20 years for the witness tampering charge and five years for each of the other counts, although a first offender would face far less time under federal sentencing guidelines.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/roger-stone-jury-weighs-evidence-and-a-defense-move-to-make-case-about-mueller/2019/11/15/554fff5a-06ff-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html

  18. An says

    November 22, 2019 at 9:25 am

    The Covington defamation case just got more interesting. Sadly, nobody is posting all the court docs that I can find. I wish Popehat would follow it, but I'm sure that Ken has a lot of things on his plate.

    =====

    Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/nov/21/nick-sandmann-covington-catholic-teen-nbcuniversal/

    > “[T]he court finds that the statements that plaintiff ‘blocked’ Phillips or did not allow him to retreat, if false, meet the test of being libelous per se under the definition quoted above,” said Judge Bertelsman in his order.

    […]

    > Sandmann attorney Todd V. McMurtry said the judge’s order “identifies a clear path to liability for the media defendants.”

    > “If we prove Nathan Phillips lied, it is defamation per se,” Mr. McMurtry said. “Then, all we have to do is prove that the media negligently republished those defamatory statements.”

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