Trump and His Supporters Cannot Obtain Justice in D.C.

If Trump is prosecuted and hauled into D.C. to defend himself, a conviction is practically guaranteed.

by Christopher Roach for American Greatness

The jury system is one of our treasured Anglo-American rights. Adding common people to the judicial fact-finding process ensures that state actors do not have all the power, that the sense of the community can be expressed, and that final judgments have some legitimacy because of the infusion of a democratic sensibility into the priest-like judicial function. 

Since the time of the Magna Carta, a jury is described as being of one’s peers. In other words, people from one’s community, one’s neighbors. It is supposed to represent “common sense.”  

One of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence against Great Britain was “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury” and “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.” Laws then permitted a variety of offenses against the King’s property to be tried in England, sometimes before military courts, without the benefit of a jury. 

The idea that juries should not be overly alien from the defendant is something with which we are all familiar. In the military, for instance, enlisted defendants can request that one third of the panel (which functions like a jury) be made up of other enlisted men, on the theory that the officers are likely to be harsher, more socially distant, and possibly more disposed to respond to command influence. 

In civil trials, both sides have substantial influence on the jury, in the form of strikes for cause and peremptory strikes. These are both designed to ensure a fair-minded jury, whose ultimate judgment either side can live with. 

A common criticism of yesteryear’s juries, particularly in the South, is the conviction of a black defendant by an “all-white jury”; there is a widespread feeling (and some evidence) that the absence of a defendant’s racial cohort on the jury undermines the legitimacy of a conviction in a racially mixed community. 

The Supreme Court, while not requiring racially representative juries, did forbid peremptory strikes based solely on race in the 1986 case of Batson v. Kentucky. There, the Court said, “For a jury to perform its intended function as a check on official power, it must be a body drawn from the community.” 

Quoting Blackstone, the Court added, “By compromising the representative quality of the jury, discriminatory selection procedures make ‘juries ready weapons for officials to oppress those accused individuals who by chance are numbered among unpopular or inarticulate minorities.’”

Destroying Trump and his supporters has become the raison d’etre of the Democrats under Joe Biden, as evidenced by his creepy call to arms against “MAGA Republicans” in Philadelphia. Even before this speech, Trump and his associates had been subject to an unprecedented level of harassment, culminating in the execution of a search warrant against Trump at his Florida home. 

The search originated, as did much other chicanery, in the FBI’s Washington, D.C. field office. This is where the earlier Russiagate witch hunt began, as well as harassment of Trump’s associates and lawyers. The current head of the office, Steven M. D’Antuono, was previously head of the Detroit field office which invented and sustained the Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot. 

It is possible, likely even, that the government will attempt to bring any charges against Trump in Washington, D.C.. After all, it appears to have the most compliant and ideological FBI field office. Also, the investigation arises from a dispute with the National Archives located in D.C.; this at least provides a plausible basis with which the government will try to justify bringing charges there. 

The aggressive actions of the Department of Justice are themselves ominous, but there would ordinarily be a check on this in the form of an independent judiciary and a jury made up of the defendant’s peers. Neither of these checks on government power is assured in a D.C. prosecution. 

As a prelude, the D.C. judiciary has been harsh and censorious in its treatment of January 6 defendants, in some cases invoking their political views as proof of their bad character and justification for additional punishment. The few jury trials of defendants have all resulted in conviction.  

It would be fairly easy, for Trump or any of his supporters, to face a jury made up exclusively of Biden voters because of D.C.’s lopsided Democratic partisanship. Ordinary Republicans are a minority in the District. Trump supporters are an even tinier minority. Ensuring a few local Republicans are on the jury will not guarantee reasonable treatment for Trump. Many of these nominal Republicans share the ethos of the “NeverTrump” movement and the broader managerial class’ contempt for Trump. Thus, the jury would perform none of its ordinary functions if Trump were hauled into Court there.

The social and political distance between D.C. and Trump Country could not be larger. Even the immediate environs of Maryland and Virginia have more diverse politics than D.C. In 2020, 92.1 percent of Washingtonians voted for Joe Biden; only 5.4 percent voted for Trump. This is the most lopsided ratio of votes in the country. In a town where the business is government, Trump’s stated ambition to “drain the swamp” is a threat to the livelihoods and an affront to the values of its citizens. 

There are alternatives. Florida, where Trump lives, is a true bellwether, with a nearly 50/50 divided electorate. It is not merely split politically, but it represents the sense of different regions of the country. A Florida jury would ensure that a variety of views are represented, because it lacks the ideological and economic uniformity of D.C.. But if the government pursues a prosecution, there is little chance this alternative will be used because of the Biden Administration’s maniacal focus on stopping Trump. 

If Trump is prosecuted and hauled into D.C. to defend himself, a conviction is practically guaranteed. The prosecution itself, along with the earlier search of his home, is a big enough affront to constitutional norms. Trying him in D.C. will render the proceedings a farce, an insult and an act of violence, the result of which deserves no respect from any American. 

And we Know, On the Fringe, and more- Oct 22

 

Enjoy tonight's Texas rally! Here's tonight's news:

Pillaging by Proxy

U.S. foreign policy leaders have become addicted to outsourcing atrocities.

by Martyr Made for the American Mind

In his 2011 farewell address to graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates raised eyebrows when he said that any future Pentagon chief “who advises the President to again send a big American land army into Asia or the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” He made the statement just months before NATO began its aerial assault on the Libyan state, and it would prove to be one of his last major speeches as Secretary of Defense. That fall, having lost the argument over whether to deepen U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war, Gates was replaced at the Pentagon by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta. Panetta was in turn replaced at Langley by unconventional warfare guru David Petraeus, who would run the covert regime-change war as Director of Central Intelligence.

The jihad against Syria was to replay the CIA’s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, except in reverse. In the 1980s, the agency worked with America’s Muslim allies, using existing madrassa networks to identify and radicalize potential mujahadeen recruits, train them, arm them, and transport them to Afghanistan. Young Muslim men were funneled out of slums from Karachi to Cairo to fight the Red Army, and helped turn Afghanistan into “the Russians’ Vietnam.” The sense that Operation Cyclone was an historic success hardened into dogma when the USSR commenced its collapse in 1989. The Soviets had been defeated, and it only cost the lives of people about whom no one cared, from places about which no one had even heard. Enthusiasm for the proxy war in Afghanistan was hardly even dampened by the mischief a few of our new friends caused on September 11, 2001.

When the Arab Spring hit the streets of Damascus in 2011, CIA Director Panetta and many others argued that it was a prime opportunity to finally rid the world of the troublesome Assad regime. President Obama was unenthusiastic about involving the U.S. military, but he was eventually sold on the idea that Assad could be toppled, and Syria liberated, without placing an American boot on the ground. If mujahadeen could be employed to defend a country like Afghanistan, why couldn’t they also be used to destroy a country like Syria? Gates was skeptical, arguing that proponents of the jihad were overestimating our ability to calculate and determine outcomes. His position reflected a general squeamishness at the Pentagon over arming and training the same type of people who’d flown planes into our buildings just a decade earlier. Though his position would be vindicated soon enough, Gates was out, Panetta and Petraeus were in, and the rest is history.

Young Muslim men from all over the world were trained and armed by America and its allies, then sent to take part in the ongoing destruction of Syria. The Islamic State (ISIS) was formed by a remnant of Al Qaeda-in-Iraq which had taken refuge in Syria and grew in the fertile chaos of the country’s civil war. While the overall composition of the Syrian “rebels” included people with a diverse array of backgrounds and motivations, virtually all of the so-called moderates were only interested in protecting their towns and neighborhoods amidst the worsening carnage. The only significant anti-Assad forces in the country were led by international jihadists of the worst kind, and a large portion of the weapons, supplies, and personnel we pumped into Syria ended up in their hands. U.S. military personnel, who had spent the last decade fighting such people, and knew a jihadist when they saw one, remained skeptical of this approach. In an interview on the War Nerd podcast, former Army Special Forces soldier Jack Murphy said that U.S. military trainers eventually came near to mutiny over being forced to arm and train the Muslim extremists being sent to them by the CIA. 

By the time the Russians and Iranians rode to the rescue, our pet jihadists had advanced to the outskirts of Damascus, and were on video announcing their plans to wipe out the infidels (in case there was any confusion after witnessing their sectarian purges on the way to the capital). In one such video, the leader of a group that received direct support from the U.S. and our allies was heard lamenting that God would surely punish the Muslims for not eliminating the Alawites sooner. After being liberated, survivors of the short-lived jihadist regimes in cities like Aleppo reported helplessly cowering in fear as undisciplined gangs of armed foreigners invaded their homes in search of their valuables and their daughters. War is always ugly, but there is nevertheless a set of rules, explicit or unspoken, to which civilized nations are supposed to adhere to prevent war from descending into hell. It is one thing to invade a country, and an entirely different level of atrocity to send a bunch of unregulated foreign extremists hopped up on hashish and Captagon to do the job.

Once Russian and Iranian air power helped turn the tide of the conflict, anonymously sourced newspaper articles appeared calling for the enforcement of a no-fly zone over Syria. According to official U.S. military doctrine, that would have meant destroying all Syrian, Russian, and Iranian air defense systems, and shooting down any of their aircraft that dared to fly. Even putting aside the danger of these acts of war, recent experience made it seem unlikely that U.S. intervention would hold to the narrow mission of enforcing a no-fly zone. In Libya, NATO had convinced Russia to sign off on a no-fly zone to prevent Gaddafi’s aircraft from being used against civilians, but instead attacked and destroyed Gaddafi’s military forces altogether, allowing the jihadist rebels to take over the country.

The Syrian conflict illustrates one of the great dangers of an unregulated covert operations agency like the CIA. With black budgets and covert fundraising capabilities, they have the resources to involve us in a fight without consulting the political process. After all, it is unlikely that the American people would have agreed to fight on the same side as an Al Qaeda affiliate before the new World Trade Center building had even been completed. When the intelligence community’s grand plans go awry, they use their propaganda power to try for a military bail-out. The Pentagon understood this, and in the final stages of the conflict restricted its support to working with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to destroy ISIS (which more than once meant attacking CIA-sponsored militants) in the far northeast of Syria.

Bashar al-Assad is not a man most of us would want as a neighbor, but the plain reality during the Syrian war was that all of the country’s Christians, Druze, other minorities, and even many Sunni Muslims who feared the jihadists were living under his protection in the Alawite-controlled portion of the country. Imagine if the Russians or Chinese were to fund, arm, and train a bunch of KKK, neo-Nazi, insert-bad-guy militias to overthrow the U.S. government, and on their way to Washington, DC they stopped to genocide or enslave all the blacks, Jews, and other minorities they encountered. 

It would be rightly considered not merely an act of war, but a war crime that could only have been conceived in the capitals of the most amoral and ruthless nations on earth. Unfortunately, our foreign policy establishment has become addicted to this filthy mode of war. Time and again, the regime has empowered violent, often genocidal groups and individuals, set them like mad dogs on a targeted regime, and then denied knowledge and responsibility when, as in Afghanistan, and Libya, and Syria, the dogs turned around to bite their owner. In the 1980s, we worked with Colombian drug lords to equip and train savage militias to use against socialist and Communist groups in Central America. When the 2014 Kiev EuroMaidan protests seemed to be losing steam, we lent our support to fascist and neo-Nazi militants who rewarded our confidence with a simultaneous sniper attack on both protesters and police, causing a massacre that took the lives of almost 50 people.

From the Ottoman Empire’s genocide of Armenians during the First World War to the Provincial Reconnaissance Units the CIA employed for the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, vicious regimes throughout history have often employed violent criminals to carry out dirty work from which disciplined soldiers might flinch. The use of extremist proxies, like military drones, makes the decision to go to war seem far too cheap and easy. Just as we never stopped using child labor, but merely transferred production to countries where we do not have to see or take responsibility for it, we continue to use extremists and criminals to engage in conflicts and commit atrocities the American people would not accept from our own soldiers. Americans were horrified by the macabre pictures that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, but few have given a thought to the countless prisoners we sent through extraordinary rendition to the torture dungeons of Egypt, Yemen, and, yes, Syria. Out of sight, out of mind.

This has to stop. We cannot wash our hands of the atrocities committed by our proxies. As someone interested in history, I imagine what people in the future will read about the United States, and what they will read matters to me. For too long, we have allowed ourselves to be ruled by people unworthy of leading a great nation. It is too late to save future history books from being marred by their villainy, but we can make sure that they do not write the final chapter.

Insufferable J6 Committee Files Political Subpoena for President Trump Testimony as a Midterm Loss Election Shield and Insurance Policy

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse 

Thursday, Politico noted President Trump had enlisted the law firm of Harmeet Dhillon as a proactive measure against a J6 subpoena. “Former President Donald Trump has hired a firm to engage with the Jan. 6 select committee on its forthcoming subpoena of him, POLITICO has learned.” {link} Less than a day later the J6 committee issued the formal subpoena.

Once again, the corrupt DC institutional system, and specific media participation, are identified by the leaks and recipients. The injustice system, DOJ/FBI always use the New York Times and Politico as their advanced public relations firms. The insufferable J6 subpoena details can be FOUND HERE.

WASHINGTON DC, J6 Committee – “Pursuant to a unanimous vote of the Select Committee, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) today announced that the Select Committee has issued a subpoena to former President Donald Trump for testimony under oath and records relevant to the Select Committee’s investigation into the attack on the January 6th on the United States Capitol and its causes.

In a letter to Mr. Trump, Chairman Thompson and Vice Chair Cheney underscored his central role in a deliberate, orchestrated effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of presidential power, a matter central to the committee’s investigation as it reviews the facts and considers recommendations to prevent a recurrence of the violence of January 6th.” {link}

The committee is giving President Trump until November 4th to comply with the document request, with a demand for testimony by November 16th.

No president (executive branch) has ever been forced to give testimony to a legislative committee (legislative branch) because the very foundation of the demand violates the separation of powers as established in the constitution.  This legal argument will take some time to work itself out, and the (un)likelihood of the subpoena being successful speaks to the political nature of the theatrics in advance of the 2022 midterm election.

That said, having been the recipient of two J6 subpoenas, successfully defeated – in part thanks to your support, I can provide some insight into why President Trump enlisted the Dhillon Law Firm.

At least from my experience, there are only a handful of potential lawyers or law firms who will even take the case of a fight against a J6 committee subpoena because: (1) it is just so fraught with politics, and (2) the entire enterprise is a litigious and financial black hole.

The weaponized J6 committee has a bottomless budget, the J6 targets do not.  Ultimately, the financial cost is the root cause of why Lawfare succeeds.  It’s just too damned expensive to fight them off, even with great lawyers.  I can only imagine how much Steve Bannon has spent, and how much President Trump will have to spend.

Even a simple responsive letter to the committee, depending on scale and scope, starts around $10,000 and goes up from there; that’s just for the initial response.  If the initial response isn’t successful, the fight retainer starts around six figures for the next round… and that’s just a single and simple case.  The more complex legal arguments are exponentially more costly for the targets.  Justice system? Yeah, good luck with that.

Now, given the J6 subpoena against President Trump is likely to fail on constitutional grounds, let’s talk about the motive for why they would do this.

The J6 Committee has a timeline that is now extended beyond the midterm election.  This is not accidental.  The midterm election is likely to result in the House flipping from Democrat control to Republican control.  Keep in mind both Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are lame ducks right now.  Additionally, the people inside the J6 committee machinery are Lawfare agents like Mary McCord.

The committee is timing their political effort to extend beyond the midterms in order to shield itself from Republican scrutiny.  The oft familiar “ongoing investigation” shield becomes a purposeful technique to protect themselves, a transparent motive surfaces for their timeline.

Post-election, the committee will lean heavily on the media to avoid any/all discoveries of their malicious targeting conduct if the midterm elections remove the Democrats from power. This is the way these conniving and corrupt political lawfare agents work.

Unfortunately, the Republican wing is not an opposing force against the Democrat wing.  They are both wings of the same DC UniParty vulture.  So, we should not anticipate any full combat in the post-election House by an angered GOP against Democrats.  Everything will be optics; nothing will be substantive.

Bottom line, the J6 subpoena against Trump should fail, but that’s not the real motive for the J6 to push the subpoena against Trump.  They are using this Trump subpoena, and the long battle that will ensue over it, as a shield against scrutiny by a flipped power structure in the House of Representatives.

If Republicans win the House, Nancy Pelosi will retire. Bookmark it. There is no scenario where Nancy Pelosi will remain in congress after all of the political manipulation, she has done in the past four years.  Adam Schiff will likely be minority leader.

New Democrat Cope Drops Over the Election, and the Goalposts Go Into the Sea

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

I warned you that things would get dumber for the election, and things are most certainly getting dumber. With the generic ballot shifting firmly in favor of the Republican Party and the toss-up senate races also looking better and better for the GOP, a new cope has emerged. Actually, several new forms of coping have emerged on the left, all of them absurd.

For starters, the goalposts themselves are getting tossed into the sea. Here’s a professor of political science from Vanderbilt announcing that if Republicans don’t win 40-45 House seats, that signals a Dem “overperformance.”

Apparently, this guy gets paid to share his political expertise with young minds full of mush. Perhaps that’s an arrangement that should be ended because suggesting that Republicans need to secure 255+ seats is absolutely insane. Remember that 2010 only resulted in 247, and that was one of the best outcomes for a political party since before World War II. If the GOP takes 240+ House seats this cycle, that is absolutely a wave, and while I get that Democrats want to make themselves feel better, I’m not sure leaning into “Yeah, Republicans blew us out, but not by quite as much as they could have” is going to provide much comfort.

But the real cope is coming from people obsessing over early voting returns.

There are two things to note here. One, that post claiming that Fetterman is “banking some mail votes in Pennsylvania” doesn’t seem to understand that the current split is actually worse than 2020. What happened in 2020? Joe Biden only won the state by one percentage point. Any small shift towards the GOP in early voting there would not portend good news for Democrats. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Then there’s the second post plugging the total number of mail-in ballots returned in Pennsylvania while comparing it to 2018. Guess what the state didn’t have much off prior to the pandemic. That would be mail-in voting. Any comparisons to 2018 are completely irrelevant.

Now, some of you may be old enough to remember the 2012 election, where Republicans actually did fairly well in early voting. Well enough, in fact, for some to suggest that election day turnout could push Romney over the edge. Instead, he got blown out. Why? Because early voting data is largely useless. People trying to make grand predictions off of it are kidding themselves. Even those that report party affiliation don’t show which candidate was voted for, which makes it a total crapshoot.

We can also look at the 2016 election, where Democrats did much better in early voting, leading outlets like The Washington Post to assert that Hillary Clinton was on track to win. How’d that turn out?

I can’t be any clearer. Early voting data tells us nothing, one way or the other. Republicans shouldn’t use it to suggest a red wave and certainly, Democrats shouldn’t use it to suggest a blue wave, as happened above.

Meanwhile, every poll and fundamental continues to shift and favor the Republican Party in the final stretch. I’m running out of ways to say “I told you so,” having predicted all this back in the summer while many in the GOP were dooming. Ignore the noise and get out there and vote.

Scary Scene as Biden Appears to Have a Physical Issue During an MSNBC Interview

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

Normally, when I write pieces on Joe Biden’s brain going on the fritz, I’m heavy on the snark and jokes about the White House not getting his drug cocktail right. But a newly released MSNBC interview with the president took things to a place where that doesn’t seem appropriate.

In the first clip, Biden appeared to have a physical issue when asked about running in 2024. You have to watch the clip to get the full effect, but the president not only goes silent, but his eyes droop down and he looks like he’s about to fall over for a second. It was so bad that the interviewer reacts in a startled fashion, obviously believing Biden was going to pass out.

It’s also worth noting that there’s an editor’s cut in that part of the interview. Was he actually out of it for even longer than the clip shows?

Eventually, after the interviewer seemed to jolt Biden back into consciousness, the president stumbled through his answer. His pacing was noticeably very lethargic while doing so, and his struggles continued in other parts of the interview.

I’m not sure exactly when this interview was filmed, but it either came right before or right after another incident where Biden spoke unintelligibly to a reporter in Pennsylvania without even realizing it. Something is definitely going on with him, and those in the media refusing to deal with the issue are now complicit in covering up what appears to be a serious issue with the president’s health.

This is really concerning stuff, and no amount of deflecting to Trump holding a glass of water with two hands will change that. What’s in that video should pique the interest of any fair-minded individual about Biden’s condition. The presidency is not a job for someone that should be in a retirement home, and even though we’ve all had our fun in the past, we’ve reached the point where this isn’t funny anymore.

There is no way Biden is actually functioning as the president. What kind of drugs is he taking? What is he doing when he runs off to Delaware every weekend (he’s currently there again)? Why do his energy levels appear to vary so wildly? These are questions that demand answers, and it’s high time the press corps put aside its partisanship and did its job. This is too important to keep sweeping under the rug.

Dr. Dementia Meets Frankenstein’s candidate

Biden’s visit to Pittsburgh was an in-kind

 contribution to the Oz campaign.

posted by Dianny at Patriot Retort

Okay, I’m just popping in quickly to comment on President Dementia traveling to Pittsburgh yesterday to meet with Frankenstein’s candidate. 

Did you see this picture?

I mean, what the Sam Hill is this?!

That isn’t photoshopped. That’s Frankenstein’s candidate in all his troglodyte glory.

His head is two sizes too small.

Now, I was going to photoshop that image giving Frankenstein’s candidate an even tinier head. But this morning before starting my paying job, I saw that Matt’s Idea Shop was already planning to do that on Twitter. 

TL;DR? pic.twitter.com/GAaYufDFz4

— Matt’s Idea Shop (@MattsIdeaShop) October 20, 2022

Ah, well. Great minds and all.

So old Joe heads to the ‘burgh to campaign with Frankenstein’s candidate and Frankenstein’s candidate didn’t say one word during the event.

But when Joe spoke, he pretty much confirmed what Rolling Stone writer Kara Voght said over the weekend, namely that Bride of Frankenstein is the “de facto” candidate.

Yup, Joe addressed Gisele Fetterman, telling her she would be a “great lady in the Senate.”

And after the event was over, Frankenstein’s candidate wouldn’t answer a reporter’s question. Instead, Gisele piped in, de facto candidate that she is, to tell the reporter that they weren’t taking any questions.

Oh, yeah. This is all completely normal.

This is so normal, I’d go so far as to call it Abby Normal.

Speaking of abnormal.

What in Lucifer’s reach is this old demented man saying here?!

Look, I’m no special pleader for Dr. Oz. Is he the ideal Republican candidate? No. But if I lived in Pennsylvania still, I would crawl over broken glass to vote for him just to stop Gisele Fetterman from sliding into the Senate on her pin-head husband’s gigantic coattails.