Jack Smith Eyes New Strategy To Convict Trump: Try the Candidate, Not the President

 The distinction between the two roles could make a difference in whether the 45th president can be convicted for January 6.

The Supreme Court’s ruling that a president’s official acts are presumptively immune makes prosecuting President Trump a challenge for Special Counsel Jack Smith. Candidates for office enjoy no such robust protection. That could be a loophole through which Mr. Smith charts a course to a conviction.  

The distinction could make a difference because Mr. Smith’s indictment covers the purgatorial period after the vote of November 2020 and before President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. To secure a conviction — or even to move to trial — the special counsel will be required to show that the evidence he has adduced is not immune. That is a high burden.

The Supreme Court, in Trump v. United States, held that in addition to the presumption of immunity for official acts, former presidents are entitled to “absolute” immunity for actions that are in their “conclusive and preclusive” areas of responsibility. Unofficial acts are entitled to no immunity because the “separation of powers does not bar a prosecution predicated” on them.

Judge Tanya Chutkan has set an August 16 hearing to determine how both sides wish to proceed with respect to the “mini trial” where the immunity issue will be addressed in advance of a jury being seated. She has also solicited briefings from both sides, suggesting that the contours of this unprecedented process have not yet come into focus. Never before has a district court judge been tasked with weighing presidential immunity in a criminal case. 

The high court mandates that “in dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives” because that kind of “inquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct to judicial examination.” That would frustrate what Alexander Hamilton termed, in 70 Federalist, a “vigorous” and “energetic” presidency. The chief justice indicated that immunity attaches to Trump’s conversations with Vice President Pence and Department of Justice officials.

Special Counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks, August 1, 2023, at Washington. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

With motives off-limits, Mr. Smith could try to build this second iteration of his case in a narrower fashion. Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz tells the Sun that the special counsel “could have narrowed the indictment at the beginning” to have avoided this constitutional snarl. Mr. Dershowitz adds that he “never understood why he didn’t go for that,” as it would have “mooted” the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.

Mr. Dershowitz’s advice to Mr. Smith is to edit his indictment — a prerogative of prosecutors — to “just deal with things totally partisan in nature.” One way to do that would be to focus on Trump’s efforts to retain office rather than exercise its privileges and responsibilities. In oral arguments, Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, conceded that the “alternate elector” scheme and efforts to pressure state officials were “private” and therefore not immune. 

While Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion explains that “a long-recognized aspect of Presidential power is using the office’s ‘bully pulpit’ to persuade Americans,” it also reckons that there “could  be contexts in which the President, notwithstanding the prominence of his position, speaks in an unofficial capacity — perhaps as a candidate for office or party leader.”

While Mr. Smith could be challenged to paint Trump as a candidate after the 45th president lost the 2020 election, such a characterization has succeeded in court before, albeit in a civil context. In a suit brought by Democratic lawmakers seeking to hold Trump liable for January 6, Judge Amit Mehta ventured that a “first-term President is, in a sense, always a candidate for office.”

Judge Mehta found that plans for the rally on January 6 at the Ellipse “took place largely through President Trump’s campaign organization.” The jurist added that  “the words spoken by the President — without delving into the motivation behind them — reflect an electoral purpose, not speech in furtherance of any official duty.” The Department of Justice weighed in — remarkably — against Trump’s contentions of executive immunity.

The United States appeals court for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld Judge Mehta, finding that “when a first-term President opts to seek a second term, his campaign to win re-election is not an official presidential act. The Office of the Presidency as an institution is agnostic about who will occupy it next. And campaigning to gain that office is not an official act.”

The DOJ, which is tasked with representing the government’s position, hedged in that case, saying, “any decision about how to define the limits of absolute immunity in campaign contexts should await a case in which the relevant issues have been fully briefed.” That occasion could well be now, in the case before Judge Chutkan.

https://www.nysun.com/article/jack-smith-eyes-new-strategy-to-convict-trump-try-the-candidate-not-the-president

A.R. HOFFMAN

Mr. Hoffman is an associate editor of the Sun, where he covers politics and culture. He holds a PhD from Harvard and a law degree from Stanford.

Veterans Will Not Be Fooled By Tim Walz

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall 

Kamala Harris’s disastrous and cowardly choice of Tim Walz as her running mate over Josh Shapiro – who was the logical pick and was shamefully passed over because he is Jewish – is simply more of the same with her. He’s a choice made from fear. She feared somebody who would be competition. She feared somebody who would be smarter, which really limited her choices. So she chose this guy, who no doubt told her exactly what she wanted to hear. This is her modus operandi. She’s afraid. She operates from fear, and now she has exactly the kind of sergeant major she wants by her side – one who will be sure to enable her worst instincts all the way to defeat.

You just know that Walz being in the Army checked a box for her – DEI hacks love checking boxes – and she didn’t look any deeper than that. No one around her did either. None of her flunkies ever served. None of them understand. They just thought that they could flash some pictures of Walz in his uniform strutting about, and that would be enough to nail down the votes of all the rubes with DD 214s. But what you don’t know can hurt you. And what she doesn’t know is that Tim Walz is going to alienate vets, except for the pinko blue falcons like the loathsome Vindmans and those Twitter goofs who insist you shouldn’t have an AR15 because they are experts, having once qualified “marksman” on an M4.

You can Google “blue falcon” if you want. Just don’t do it with kids around or on your employer’s computer.

Civilians aren’t going to understand this. It’s a veteran thing. Civvies will look at pictures of him in his BDUs or ACUs and think he looks STRAC. But vets know what they see when they look at this guy and it’s not good.

Am I questioning Tim Walz and his service? Yeah, because he has some questions to answer. He was in for 24 years. That seems impressive to civilians. It’s certainly not a bad thing. But you take one look at the guy through a veteran’s eyes, and you learn a little about his record (don’t worry, much more is coming out!), and he’s exactly the kind of guy vets despise. We all remember guys like him from our time in uniform. And like with John Kerry, his own compatriots are already blowing the whistle on him. You know, when your own peers serve you up, that’s an indicator.

He was a senior noncommissioned officer—a high-ranking sergeant who was frocked as a command sergeant major. You need to understand what a command sergeant major is. A command sergeant major is the man. He’s big. He’s the commander’s right hand, the one guy who can shut the door and tell the colonel to stop doing stupid things. I know because I had one, and I was successful because I listened to him. He was great. I know a lot of great sergeants. 

And I know some duds. Guys who get DUIs, like Walz did – I know that in my Guard units that, a DUI would ensure he never got E6, much less E9. And then there are the striving CSMs who get in front of the troops and start yelling about how “We are the most powerful, lethal force on earth!” and also that “Diversity is our greatest strength! Trans awareness is a combat multiplier!” These schmucks repeat the lies and nonsense of careerist generals instead of telling their bosses that the troops need to be training to fight instead of marching for pride. There is nothing worse than a go-along sergeant major. If he’s not an occasional pain in a commander’s butt, he’s not doing his job. But that’s not what Kamala wants. She wants a yes-man.

But a good CSM is anything but. There are two kinds of sergeants major. One tells the commander, “Colonel, I’ll take care of this and you go do your job,” and then he goes and takes care of it. And there’s another kind who says, “Colonel, I’ll take care of this and you go do your job,” and then he goes and hangs out at the coffee bar with his cronies, gossiping and scheming for advancement. Walz has the second vibe. You can feel it. You can see it when you watch video of him as a civilian pol regurgitating commie bullSchiff about how socialism is just being a good neighbor and flip-flopping from NRA hero to gun-grabbing zero. Like his brat boss, he will be whatever he needs to be to get what he wants.

He wasn’t in a war, though he claimed to be - in a Kamala HQ tweet no less. When talking about breaking his oath to support and defend the Constitution, this turd said “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.” What war was that? Was he helping win the Tet Offensive with his fellow Democrat Da Nang Dick Blumenthal?

He wasn’t an actual command sergeant major either, only holding the rank temporarily contingent on passing the Sergeant Majors Academy course. But he didn’t do that. He quit. He took a coveted slot in a career-crowning military school away from somebody else. That’s not good. And then his unit got activated to go to Iraq and he decided he had to run for Congress and retired. That rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

His one deployment was to Italy to provide security on American bases. I certainly don’t hold that against him. You go where you’re told to go. If you think I was thrilled to go to Kosovo, you are incorrect. But that’s where my unit was going and that’s where I went. I had already been to Desert Storm and I already had my patch on my right shoulder. I ran a heavily armed car wash in the Gulf, so don’t confuse me with Audie Murphy; I’m not even Peter Murphy. 

But being the unit’s senior NCO and not joining his battalion when it was alerted to be sent into combat will not get him a pass from the heroes of the global war on terrorism. They are free to question his service if they want to. They earned that right.

He’s just not going to play well with vets. When an officer vet looks at socialist Tim Walz, what they see is every NCO who ever screwed them over by not doing his job and by not supporting them. NCOs are going to resent him; they know his kind. And then there are the junior enlisted soldiers – in the Army, the privates and the specialists. The command sergeant major is supposed to take care of them. He’s not supposed to coddle them. He’s not supposed to pat them on the head, but he is supposed to be their voice and their advocate within the command. The command sergeant majors who don’t do that, who instead insinuate themselves in with the officer corps and refuse to stand up for the troops, are rightly despised. And the troops know those characters when they see them.

Kamala Harris picked Walz, in part, because he will kiss her fourth point of contact, and partly because he had been in the military. She thought that would instantly draw vets to the party that holds them in contempt. Not quite. There’s more to his story, and more will come out. 

The facts are going to hit them hard, and the regime media will hit back in service of their candidate. Look for a giant backlash about how dare we “question his service.” They will say we are swiftboating him, which is not quite accurate because at least John Kerry went to Vietnam. 

Regardless, we vets will do and say whatever the hell we want. We vets earned that right. We defended everyone’s right to speak freely, and we’re going to say whatever we damn well please. No one gets to give us orders anymore. Now that we’re out of uniform, our chain of command is God and then us, the end, and the regime media, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz aren’t in it.

We vets won’t be fooled by Walz like Kamala was. She made a huge mistake. And it’s time to counterattack and take advantage of it.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- August 8 Part 2

 

The Media Still Turn Tricks For The Democrat Party

posted by Joan Swirsky for American Thinker 

 There’s a good reason I wrote about the media’s prostitutes a few years ago, actually, seven years ago, with a preface that apologized to legitimate prostitutes who made an honest living.

What I reported then was based on the formidable work of ace journalist Ashley Lutz, who scrupulously documented her findings in a Business Insider report.

Lutz reported that in 1983, there were 50 media companies, but early in this century, as well as today, only six organizations are responsible for 90 percent or more of all the “news” we read, watch, and listen to! They include:

• GE (Comcast, NBC, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, et al)
• NewsCorp (Fox News, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, et al)
• Disney (ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Miramax, Marvel Studios, et al)
• Viacom (MTV, Nick Jr., BET, CMT, Paramount Pictures, et al)
• Time Warner (CNN, HBO, TIME, Warner Bros., et al)
• CBS (Showtime, Smithsonian Channel, NFL.com, Jeopardy, 60 Minutes, et al)

WHAT HAPPENED?

It used to be that, of those six gigantic corporations, only one of them was politically conservative—specifically, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. The rest were uniformly left or far-left propaganda machines.

Why? Because their bosses—Chief Executive Officers and billionaire owners—were all globalists, idealogues who fervently, passionately, megalomaniacally, and narcissistically believed and believe to this very nanosecond that it is they, these self-appointed Masters of the Universe, who should be running the world, and not the idiotic morons who continue to procreate, take up valuable space, drive gasoline-fueled cars, and waste fortunes of money on antiquated concepts like religion, the belief in two-parent families, the value of the 1st and second amendment rights of free speech and gun ownership, and so on.

And then, in 2015, Murdoch ceded a great deal of control of NewsCorp to his RINO son Lachlan and his leftist son James, who have moved their most reliable conservative media outlets significantly to the left, although not completely. Follow the money!

THIS IS HOW IT WORKS

Ms. Wide-Eyed Idealist and Mr. Upward-Mobility apply for jobs at their local or national radio or TV stations or newspapers, or maybe they “know someone” who facilitates an interview that leads to their being hired. A good example of the latter is the nice enough but remarkably untalented Chelsea Clinton, who landed an astronomically high-paying job with NBC that, mercifully for viewers, lasted about a minute.

Once hired, these wannabe journalists are thrilled to be on their way until they learn that their bosses don’t give a damn about anything they think, believe, want to convey to a hungry public. For most media employees, it soon becomes clear that they are expected—indeed, mandated—to reflect and convey the belief systems of their employers.

If they don’t do that, they are completely dispensable! One example is Alysin Camerota of CNN. When she was at Fox, she was Ms. Reliable-Fair-and-Balanced. But the very millisecond she moved to CNN, she became as rabidly partisan as any leftwing fanatic has ever been. Why? Because Ms. Alysin knew immediately that she was dispensable.

That’s how business works. Toe the line, or you’re out! The same can be said of all the self-important newscasters, anchors, and hosts whose media bosses quite literally give them their marching orders—or, more accurately, their talking orders. Not just talking orders, but word-for-word memes, which is why no matter which lefty network or cable show you turn to, they’re all using the same vocabulary, the same expressions, and the same keywords.

I first noticed this when Dick Cheney was chosen as George W. Bush’s VP candidate. Suddenly, the media talking heads discovered the word “gravitas”! We still witness this echo chamber every day.

Objectivity has never been part of the media’s agenda, only slavish obeisance to their bosses. Watch for yourself. In fact, take notes. There is a remarkable absence of originality in today’s political reportage. It’s all an echo chamber of talking points and leftist propaganda that the anchors and reporters have received beforehand and have literally been commanded to utilize at the risk of their jobs. There’s not an original word, phrase, or sentence!

And watch these [dispensable] media shills try to impress their bosses by competing in the categories of “best gotcha question,” “most [feigned] outrage,” most blank-faced faux objectivity,” and “most vilification toward President Trump,” whom these disrespectful [dispensable] employees insist on calling “Trump.”

WHY THE FEROCITY?

The question still remains: Why the fanatical, obsessive, literally crazed hatred of President Trump? The answer is quite simple: In every single case of what used to pass as politics as usual, he has single-handedly identified and challenged the following as bad for America:

• The prevailing powers-that-be and their collusion in the global agenda
• The Democrat Party,
• Treaties like NATO and others,
• The open-borders fetish,
• The global warming hoax,
• The rigged voting system,
• The irrelevance—and malevolence—of the United Nations,
• The monolith known as the American media.

How? By giving voice to what the American people have known and been angry about for decades, namely, that these institutions, events, and ideologies are corrupt, permeated with bribes and payoffs, self-serving, and, in too many cases, anti-American, anti the U.S. Constitution, anti the Judeo-Christian ethics upon which our exceptional nation was founded, and, quite openly now, virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-Jew!

WHAT’S NEXT?

For eight long years, the Left has conspired against President Trump, fabricating—and this is the short list—a Russian-collusion hoax, the Stormy Daniels fiasco, the preposterous impeachment attempts, the phony January 6 “insurrection” fiction, the classified documents at Mar-A-Lago scam, and an avalanche of lawfare suits pursued by career leftist prosecutors and decided by career leftist judges.

Nothing worked!

And then it was mid-July 2024—less than four months from the election—and the left’s arch-nemesis was not only still standing but commanding massive crowds in weekly rallies around the country and demonstrating an ebullient optimism about the future of America, which is tantamount to arsenic to Democrats whose glasses are always half empty and whose sky is always falling.

What to do? It’s probably not a coincidence that a cascade of inexplicable Secret Service failures paved the way for an almost-successful assassination attempt against Donald Trump. Indeed, Cherie Zaslawsky (and many others) theorize that our own intelligence services, rather than displaying a Freudian level of incompetence guarding a man many despised, may have facilitated the attempt.

To demonstrate just how craven and dishonest our media are, here is a small sample of the headlines that followed this history-altering assassination attempt:

A word of advice. Don’t believe anything you hear, read, or listen to on the so-called mainstream media—not a word, not a phrase, not a suggestion, not a theory. Their agenda, as we’ve learned over the past eight years, is to obey the moneybags’ globalists who prefer socialism-cum-communism to the glorious freedom that the Founding Fathers of America envisioned and actualized almost 250 years ago.

Yes, the media whores will still be with us, but when you decide to turn them off, they, too, will go the way of the dinosaurs they have always been.

Phony Kamala

Regardless of what she wants, 

no matter what she says, 

Phony Kamala is just that: insincere.

by Steve Gruber for American Greatness

Willie Brown’s ex, Kamala Harris, wants to head the executive branch. This rambling, cackling race hustler wants to be commander in chief. She wants to do a lot of things, none of them good, because she heads the Democrat ticket. Regardless of what she wants, no matter what she says, Phony Kamala is just that: insincere. Nothing she says is intelligible. Nothing she says about herself is true. Nothing she says about America or America’s place in the world is intelligent, because she knows nothing about domestic or foreign policy.

Things only worsen when she goes off script, when she has no lines to memorize or words to guide her. When she has no aides to prompt her or is without a teleprompter, when she has no help whatsoever, Phony Kamala makes Joe Biden sound smart. Nothing Democrats say on Harris’s behalf can make her sound credible. Nothing Democrats say against President Trump, no matter how incredible, can make voters believe Harris is capable. And yet Democrats will nonetheless try to convince us that Harris is sound, that she has the judgment to do what is right or the will to fight what is wrong.

No one should even try to convince us that Kamala Harris is worthy of the job of president. No one, after all, believes the White House should be a career center for Democrats. Or rather, no one who is not a Democrat believes Harris should be in the White House—because the presidency does not exist to serve the unhirable. The Oval Office is not WeWork for unemployable Democrats.

Democrats know this too, because this is not Harris’s first unsuccessful run for the presidency. She ran in 2020 without winning a single caucus or primary. She pulled out before she could be thrown out. She ran away, in spite of her attempt to sound like Lincoln. Her three-word campaign slogan, For the People, was not enough to fool even some of the people into voting for her.

No one was fooled when Harris announced her candidacy on January 21, 2019. She used Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a photo-op. She went on “Good Morning America,” and pretended to be African American. The act was an insult to the memory of Dr. King, who was shot and killed—who was murdered—because of the color of his skin. The act was also an insult to the content of the nation’s character.

By treating race as a fashion accessory, Kamala Harris insulted all races. She revealed herself to be both ignorant and superficial. Are we to believe she has changed for the better, that she is conversant in the history of the civil rights movement or fluent in the language of natural rights? Are we to believe she no longer panders to blacks or pretends she is black? Are we to believe she no longer panders to the worst among us, when she sounds no different than before?

Remember, too, that Harris believed the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax. She was for the hoax until she wasn’t, calling it a “modern-day lynching.” She was quick to believe the unbelievable, that a biracial, C-list celebrity—a guy who wouldn’t have lasted 15 minutes on The Celebrity Apprentice—was the victim of a hate crime. So much for Harris’s purported wisdom and experience.

Harris believed Smollett because she wanted to, regardless of the facts. That there were no facts, that Smollett’s attempt at race-baiting was like Harris’s exploitation of race, was irrelevant. So much for Harris’s purported insight as a lawyer or her skill as a prosecutor, or her tenure as attorney general of California.

The only other explanation is that Harris knew Smollett was lying but didn’t care. Either way, she is a horrible liar. Not for nothing does President Trump call her Phony Kamala. Were the stakes not so high, were the fate of the country not at stake, we could laugh at Harris and Smollett. But because so many Democrat prosecutors mistake talking points for truths, because they believe the lies they tell about President Trump, the stakes are high indeed.

If Democrats replace someone who is incompetent with someone who is incoherent, the result will be four more years of misery. If Harris wins, her words will suffice for truth. If she gets any worse, we will need to learn a new language.

Because leadership requires the ability to communicate, we expect presidents to be good communicators. Because we know a great president must also be a great communicator, we know why we support President Trump. In turn, we know Kamala Harris does not have what it takes to lead. She does not have what it takes to be president of anything, least of all president of the United States.

We refuse to pretend Phony Kamala is the best politician in the Democrat Party. We refuse to pretend she is smart or sound, or black once a year. We refuse to believe she is the heir to Roosevelt or Truman or Kennedy. We especially refuse to believe she speaks well.

Harris is not an orator. She is no Obama; Michelle Obama, that is. She is not Barack Obama at his worst either, because she shows no interest in the power of words or the principles of rhetoric. She shows no interest in democracy because she has no interest in winning her party’s nomination on her own.

Better for Democrats to accept Harris for who she is. Better for Democrats to accept the truth, because a candidate this phony—a politician this bad—is no good.

Better for the truth to prevail, because Phony Kamala is like Sleepy Joe Biden: an embarrassment. 

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

Welcome to 

The 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓 

Here’s a place to share cartoons, jokes, music, art, nature, 

man-made wonders, and whatever else you can think of. 

No politics or divisive posts on this thread. 

This feature will appear every day at 1pm mountain time. 

Anti-Gunners Get Bad News in New Report on Gun Sales After Trump Assassination Attempt, Harris Nomination

Jeff Charles reporting for RedState 

The anti-gunners aren’t going to like this one. Gun sales have spiked following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and the Democratic nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a new report.

Gun sales have remained at over one million per month since 2019,  the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reported. But they had leveled out before July 2024.

Historically high, gun sales had slowed month-over-month until the incident involving Trump and Harris' elevation to official Democratic presidential candidate, The Washington Examiner reported. The selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, an ardent proponent of gun restrictions, as Harris’ running mate has fueled more fears of government action on firearms among gun owners.

“Business picked up a few percentage points at the end of July into early August, and I think we can thank Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party for that,” said Justin Anderson, marketing director for Hyatt Guns in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The NSSF estimated that over the past five years, about 86,410,889 firearms have been sold. This is a significant increase since Biden took office. There appear to be indications that the attempt on Trump’s life may have contributed to the rise in gun purchases.

Matthew Miller, CEO of CashForArms.com, said:

While the incident itself triggered widespread anger, we saw relative calm in the days that followed, thanks to an uplifting and unifying Republican National Convention. Since that time, however, our customers have grown more and more suspicious about what took place that day.

Of course, Harris becoming the Democratic Party’s new standard-bearer has also had an impact given her opposition to gun ownership. Anderson predicted that “a Kamala Harris presidency will include some sort of ‘assault weapons ban,’” and said, “This is the first time in many years I’m confident in saying that.”

The assassination attempt likely brought with it fears of more politically-motivated violence given the country’s current political environment. As with 9/11, when there were fears of additional terrorist attacks, folks might be concerned about future assassination attempts against politicians or others. It makes sense that the shooting might motivate people to arm themselves.

Moreover, the details surrounding the shooting are a cause for concern. The fact that the shooter was not stopped by the Secret Service and law enforcement, even though rallygoers warned about his presence on the top of the building from which he opened fire, should make people lose even more confidence in the government. After all, if they can’t protect a former president from a troubled, 20-year-old individual, how will they protect us?

This, combined with crime rates that are still high, would be more than enough to motivate people to become first-time gun owners or to add to their arsenals. The upcoming elections could be pivotal for gun rights, depending on how the makeup of the White House and Congress shapes up. With the political climate becoming more uncertain, more people are realizing that it is high time to arm themselves, and that is a positive development.