The Judge who'll preside over Jim Comey and Tish James' challenges to Lindsey Halligan's appointment, Judge Cameron McGowen Currie, just ordered that the government provide her with all the grand jury materials in those two cases. That could be very damning to Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer. The post “The Indictment Signer:” Lindsey Halligan’s Time in the Grand Jury appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
Jim Comey's response to prosecutors' bid to access his privileged communications reveals that John Eckenrode and Miles Starr may be engaged in the same kind of corrupt investigative tactics used on the Durham investigation. The post Donald Trump’s [Miles] Starr Chamber appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
DOJ's most prominent effort to criminalize doxing had a setback today when the case against one of the defendants, Ashleigh Brown, collapsed when her attorneys discovered the non-disclosed criminal background of her alleged victim. The post Bill Essayli Moves to Dismiss Key “Assault” Case before DOJ Has to Explain What It Knew appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
Trump's attempts to extend his power by force -- to replace American hegemony with personalized coercion -- are and will continue to backfire, diluting the power of that coercion. The post Love in the Time of Hegemonic Suicide appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
White CHRISTIAN nationalist, my foot. It's obvious Trump would have no compunction about shooting an angel in the face on Fifth Avenue given his administration's policies and actions. The post A Lapsed Catholic’s Sunday Bible Study appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
I want to talk about some implications of this Annie Karni story, describing the background to what is plain as day: Donald Trump, who jokes in private that he — not Mike Johnson — is the Speaker of the House, runs the nominal Speaker. Karni pitches the story in terms of Johnson’s “decision” to keep […]| emptywheel
The day before Tish James was arraigned, her attorneys complained about the Signal text trolling she did of Anna Bower.| emptywheel
Make Trump supporters own their fear of freedom. The post Examples Of Not-Free People appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
In a motion asking Judge Jamar Walker to order Lindsey Halligan to stop leaking to the media, Abbe Lowell notes that Judge Walker could hold Halligan in contempt, but Attorney General James is not asking for that. Yet. The post A Tale of Three Footnotes for “Purported Interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan” appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
Trump-GOP's refusal to negotiate on health care subsidies is a Dickensian death panel: "If they would rather die, ...they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." The post Trump’s GOP Death Panel in Progress appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
American Oversight just sued to get the Signal texts Lindsey Halligan has been unlawfully deleting.| emptywheel
Kash Patel has ratcheted up his efforts to turn his past shoddy propaganda into prosecutions.| emptywheel
Imagine if Stephen Miller started applying atrocious John Yoo opinions from 2001 to his fabricated war with Tren de Aragua? It would look pretty similar to what we saw in the raid of a South Shore building in Chicago.| emptywheel
One of the January 6 rioters Trump pardoned was arrested Sunday for making terroristic threats against Hakeem Jeffries.| emptywheel
Judge Michael Nachmanoff's order denying the loaner prosecutors in the Jim Comey case a quick filter review discloses that the main FBI investigators may have already sneaked a peak into Comey's privileged communications. The post Taint appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
According to the legal opinion Aileen Cannon adopted to give Trump Defense Attorney Lindsey Halligan her first big legal win, Lindsey Halligan cannot legally appear before a grand jury.| emptywheel
Jim Comey's motions to dismiss his indictment reveal almost nothing about the discovery he has received so far. The post 60 Pages of Animus: Jim Comey’s Motions to Dismiss His Prosecution appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
The loaner prosecutors doing Lindsey Halligan's dirty work are insinuating that Patrick Fitzgerald -- and not Halligan herself -- has a conflict on this case. The post Lindsey Halligan Lectures Someone ELSE about Conflicts appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
If the Supreme Court allows Trump to invade Democratic states based on transparent fabrications, we're in real trouble. But Trump spent the weekend proving how unreliable he is. The post Shit-Posting All the Way to SCOTUS appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
Stephen Miller is incredibly powerful and so fascistic that Trump even hesitates to describe his ambition. But he is also downright slovenly. Increasingly, The post Stephen Miller’s Trains Don’t Run on Time appeared first on emptywheel.| emptywheel
Trump's authoritarianism is drowning out coverage of the shutdown.| emptywheel
Weaponized DOJ 60 Pages of Animus: Jim Comey's Motions to Dismiss His Prosecution| emptywheel
As Trump attempts to look strong in the face of Vladimir Putin's intransigence on Ukraine, consider the twin pillars of compromise Putin has on him.| emptywheel
Trump Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller announced yesterday that rather than doing the most basic things to try to prevent further school shootings, he will target people who had nothing to do with the shooting of Charlie Kirk.| emptywheel
Shortly after Ghislaine Maxwell claimed that Jeffrey Epstein's brownstone wasn't wired to take video, a mysteriously sourced NYT story proved that is false.| emptywheel
It's funny that Todd Blanche decided that Dan Bongino needs a babysitter at FBI. But the guy who'll serve as "co-Deputy," Andrew Bailey, has already proven his desire to infringe on Democrats' constitutional rights.| emptywheel
The hold Putin has over Trump is existential for Trump. And unless we can expose that, the US will increasingly become a mere satellite of Russia.| emptywheel
In 2018 in Helsinki, when Vladimir Putin utterly humiliated Trump publicly, Trump still had competent Russian advisors to advise him. Today, after years of chasing a manufactured grievance against the Deep State, Trump walks into a solo meeting with his KGB handler having rid himself of any competent advisor.| emptywheel
And all we're waiting to see on Trump's Friday meeting with Putin is what kind of deceit Trump adopts to pretend that his coming betrayal of not just Ukraine -- but the US itself -- is instead the peace deal Russia floated nine years ago.| emptywheel
Scott Bessent confessed to Larry Kudlow how the Trump Administration is trying to sustain their illegal tariffs: by collecting enough revenue from them (and lying about how much they're really collecting) that SCOTUS won't dare uphold the law.| emptywheel
Donald Trump just moved the woman who "stole" his spa girls and turned one into a sex slave into comfier prison digs to prevent her from revealing the dirt she has on him, and yet he has the gall to suggest DC's brown residents are "filth."| emptywheel
In rejecting Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche's bid to unseal the Ghislaine Maxwell grand jury transcript, he called out the degree to which this request was an attempt at diversion.| emptywheel
Today, Trump will claim to care about people who commit assaults in DC, like the hundreds of his supporters he pardoned after they assaulted cops. But Trump means teenagers from DC, not people like Cory Mills, who has been implicated this year in misconduct involving two girlfriends.| emptywheel
How conveniently the story about Vance's canoe trip popped up just about the time the Epstein conspiracy meeting was making too much trouble for Trump and his conspirators.| emptywheel
Kash Patel and Pam Bondi said they wouldn't release details about what Trump knew about Ghislaine Maxwell stealing girls from his spa, recruiting one into a sex slavery, because such disclosure would not be "appropriate or warranted." But Kash adopted radically different rules last week when he smeared SVR victim Julianne Smith with his release of the Durham classified annex.| emptywheel
Joke's on us! Nine years into this influence operation, that phrase, "put more oil into the fire," a phrase that someone at the FBI should have recognized as a Russian idiom at least five years ago, is still ripping the country to pieces.| emptywheel
We talked about Ghislaine Maxwell and Emil Bove.| emptywheel
If you believe it's a crime for a political ally to gin up FBI noise about a foreign hack during an election -- the most that John Durham's purported Clinton Plan substantiates (and he falls far short of substantiating that) -- then you believe Jim Jordan should go to prison.| emptywheel
There are really better ways to fight fascism than focusing on what magical ponies we'll ride if we "win." But if you're going to do that, consider what would need to happen to actually reverse the tide.| emptywheel
Trump is so mad that Ghislaine Maxwell "stole" his girls and turned at least one of them into a sex slave that he's saying the same thing about pardoning her that he did about pardoning Paul Manafort and Roger Stone before he rewarded them for lying to protect him.| emptywheel
Emil Bove's confirmation to a lifetime appointment on the Third Circuit hones Trump's criminal protection racket in a bunch of ways, both by rewarding those who engage in abuse for him and by punishing those who don't.| emptywheel
In the guise of complaining about politicized spies exercising undue due diligence yesterday, Tulsi Gabbard just parroted Russian reports written by Russian spies -- reports that either rely on intercepts of an American citizen or just make shit up -- as if they reflected the American intelligence community's beliefs.| emptywheel
To assemble an album of letters from Trump's "pals" for his 50th birthday, Ghislaine Maxwell would have sent letters about letters. And those may well remain in her custody.| emptywheel
Go stare at the ocean and prepare to pick yourself back up again.| emptywheel
In an attempt to sustain his argument that the FBI was overly hasty in opening an investigation into Trump's Coffee Boy, John Durham whitewashed many of the details about George Papadopoulos, including that he himself found the Coffee Boy's communications with Sergei Millian to be "creepy."| emptywheel
It's crazy enough that Bill Barr treats George Papadopoulos' hoaxes seriously. It's crazier still that those hoaxes derive not from Papadopoulos' first hand knowledge, but from what he read, often in propaganda sites. Craziest of all, even George Papadopoulos tells us not to believe the main source for one of those hoaxes.| emptywheel
Whistleblower X, the IRS agent claiming misconduct in the Hunter Biden investigation, did provide evidence of that Presidential misconduct had killed the case. But that evidence implicates Donald Trump, not Joe Biden.| emptywheel
Already, in Trump's first term, crony US Attorneys managed to claim evidence was the opposite of what reality said it was. But in a Matt Gaetz DOJ, a willingness to sustain Trump's myth would be the price of admission. Trump's myth cannot fail, it can only be failed.| emptywheel
In motions in limine in advance of the Alexander Smirnov trial, Leo Wise and Derek Hines made a superb case they're treating Alexander Smirnov differently than the gun shop owner who doctored the Hunter Biden gun purchase form after the fact.| emptywheel
Around the same time someone downloaded Hunter Biden's iCloud account, someone restored his contacts list.| emptywheel
In January 2019, the Gmail account Hunter Biden used to contact sex workers took over his iCloud account and ordered all his content for download. The next month, the data on the Hunter Biden laptop was deleted.| emptywheel
Kamala Harris is in good shape as she heads into the Democratic Convention. But there are a lot of distinctly possible developments that could upend the race.| emptywheel
Just a week after Elon Musk used Xitter to sow political violence in the UK, Donald Trump returned to Xitter.| emptywheel
Jack Smith probably asked for a delay of the status report on Trump's January 6 case to figure out how to approach the two obstruction charges against him in light of SCOTUS' ruling on Fischer. But a delay until August 30 allows for the possibility Jack Smith might supersede Trump's indictment.| emptywheel
Republicans were hoping to use Josh Shapiro and his faith -- whether he was selected or not -- as a way to recreate divisions in the Democratic party. And that plan to divide first left them flat-footed and unprepared, once again.| emptywheel
The two reports WaPo had done last year, assessing the "Hunter Biden" drive forensically, are two of the only available reports that might explain anomalies disclosed by IRS agents in testimony to Congress. But unlike the Washington Examiner, WaPo won't release those reports.| emptywheel
Hunter Biden's Uber account was arranged from December 2018 through February 2019 in a way that may have made it possible for "Hunter Biden" to be in two places at once, even in DC, having a car accident, while his assistant believed he was in Massachusetts.| emptywheel
In an opinion that tries to cloak his power grab with an appeal to President Washington, John Roberts has suffocated the greatest thing Washington gave the United States, the presumption that Presidents would cede to the power of elections.| emptywheel
David Weiss appears to have submitted a photo of a photo of sawdust taken by a Keith Ablow client and claimed it is a photo of "apparent cocaine" taken by Hunter Biden. That's going to make the forensic challenges of prosecuting Hunter Biden using the laptop far more difficult.| emptywheel
