Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Elections aren’t won by handwringing, cowering, and/or bashing your own candidates.

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

The choice is between normal and crazy.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

When we show up, we win.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Not all heroes wear capes.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

The frogs are rarely mistaken.

You are here: Home / Oh And Then There is This

Oh And Then There is This

by | 96 Comments

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Rough news cycle for the Republican Crime syndicate:

Rep. Duncan Hunter and wife, Margaret, were indicted Tuesday on charges related to the misuse of $250,000 worth of campaign funds for personal expenses and the filing of false campaign finance records.

The charges of wire fraud, falsifying records, campaign finance violations and conspiracy were the culmination of a Department of Justice investigation that has stretched for more than a year, during which the Republican congressman from California has maintained his innocence.

Duncan Hunter is actually more of an asshole and dumber than his father, which is hard to fathom.

Reader Interactions

96Comments

  2. 2.

    Roger Moore

    If you’re a Republican and you had to be indicted, today’s a good day for it to happen. At least you know the indictment won’t lead the news.

  3. 3.

    Frankensteinbeck

    While we’re talking crime, I wish to pluck the brains of our Balloon Juice legal analysts, for book writing purposes.

    Hypothetical scenario: Person X is accused of a crime. All evidence relates to Person X. During the trial, it is revealed that Person Y has been brought by the police to the trial by mistaken identity. For further complication, Person X is dead. Supervillain life is weird.

    How does that go legally? Neither innocent nor guilty, just release the person who’s not on trial anyway?

  9. 9.

    Cheryl Rofer

  10. 10.

    debbie

    Boy, everyone thinks they can be a spokesperson:

    Jim Acosta
    (@Acosta)
    Lara Trump at Trump rally attacks Russia investigation saying it makes her angry: “it should make you angry too.”

  12. 12.

    PJ

    @Frankensteinbeck: The prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused committed the crime, i.e., that Person Y did it. Person Y would have the same defenses anyone else would – I’m not Person X, none of the evidence implicates me, alibi, etc.

  14. 14.

    pk

    So I listened to CBS news for one minute regarding the Manafort verdict. Heard this pearl of wisdom, “divided country, divided verdict”. Is it possible to be more stupid? No wonder a significant percentage of people in this country are fucked in the head.

  15. 15.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    Is it wrong to pleasure ones self while reading news?

  17. 17.

    smintheus

    This is right out of Pence’s playbook. Mike the Saint Pence lost his seat in Congress after he was caught spending campaign funds on personal expenses like his car payments. We should be reminding voters in the fall which Republicans are specifically which kinds of crooks. We could really use an Aristotle to draw up a typology of the many species of Republican crook.

  18. 18.

    Yarrow

    Since we’re talking about other Republicans let’s remember that Pence was Manafort’s choice. Pence headed the transition team. Pence is a traitor. He somehow keeps out of the spotlight but that won’t work forever. His time is coming.

  19. 19.

    SRW1

    Happenings today are such that the news of the case brought by three Russian oligarchs against Christopher Steel of Trump dossier fame being thrown out is a C-list event.

  20. 20.

    Mary G

    I was just pushing Duncan’s opponent for CA50, Ammar Campa-Najjar, in the last thread. Rock star. Lived in the district his whole life. Mexican-American mother, Middle East immigrant father, active in his mother’s (Christian) church since childhood, worked for Obama Labor Department. People have been dissing him because he is so young, but this gives him legs. Donate if you can – I am going to email Doug to ask for a thermometer, but you don’t have to wait.

  22. 22.

    JPL

    What about Larry Kudlow entertaining the head of Vdare the white supremacy blog at his house? This is a good day for Duncan and Kudlow, because it won’t even make the network news.

  23. 23.

    Baud

    @Mary G:

    Lived in the district his whole life. Mexican-American mother, Middle East immigrant father, active in his mother’s (Christian) church since childhood, worked for Obama Labor Department. 

    And unindicted!

  24. 24.

    Cermet

    Cohan’s guilty plea is THE news since he is accepting responsibility and naming the president chump as guilty. But the other news items are icing on a cake.

  28. 28.

    Mary G

    @Baud: Handsome as fuck, also too. First job was a church janitor. He only got 17% in the primary, but I think he has a chance with this.

  31. 31.

    MoxieM

    Please, I hope there isn’t so much good, i.e., bad, i.e., catching the bastids who are chewing on our Republic … that it just washes over the great unwashed and fails to make a dent. In other words, I really hope that all this hard work, and convictions, and indictments registers during the upcoming election, and sweeps some of the crud out of Congress (and State and locals too.) Tinkerbell, this is my wish!

    (Also my name etc still fails to register. I’m running Chrome on OS X, disabled the ad blocker to see if that helps.)

  32. 32.

    psycholinguist

    Hah. I read that at first as Jimmy Duncan, my TN rep, who is ALSO being investigated for he and his wife misusing campaign funds.

  33. 33.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Frankensteinbeck: If person Y isn’t the guy on trial (that’s X), then the trial ends or the go after X in absentia.

    Alternately, the prosecution should make the case that given Supervillains and their propensity for mind-switching and disguise, the trial should proceed under the argument that Y is really X.

    …If you haven’t read Astro City, there’s a comic about a mob lawyer who deploys these kinds of arguments in service of a mobster who literally shoots someone in a restaurant with 30 witnesses present. It’s stupendous, but it might give you some ideas on how to handle this.

  34. 34.

    TenguPhule

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    How does that go legally? Neither innocent nor guilty, just release the person who’s not on trial anyway?

    i would think that Person X, being legally dead, is not subject to another trial unless it turns out they were Not So Dead after all.

    Person Y, unless they actually did the crime, would not be subject to charges. If they did do the crime, retried under their correct identity.

  36. 36.

    TenguPhule

    @debbie:

    Lara Trump at Trump rally attacks Russia investigation saying it makes her angry: “it should make you angry too.”

    Lara Trump makes me angry. Equal Opportunity Executions after conviction, I say!

  37. 37.

    TenguPhule

    @pk:

    Heard this pearl of wisdom, “divided country, divided verdict”. Is it possible to be more stupid?

    Sadly, Yes.

  42. 42.

    Mary G

    Adam Davidson in the New Yorker: Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency:

    In this way of thinking, any new information about his corrupt past has no political salience. Those who hate Trump already think he’s a crook; those who love him don’t care.

    I believe this assessment is wrong. Sure, many people have a vague sense of Trump’s shadiness, but once the full details are better known and digested, a fundamentally different narrative about Trump will become commonplace. Remember: we knew a lot about problems in Iraq in May, 2003. Americans saw TV footage of looting and heard reports of U.S. forces struggling to gain control of the entire country. We had plenty of reporting, throughout 2007, about various minor financial problems. Somehow, though, these specific details failed to impress upon most Americans the over-all picture. It took a long time for the nation to accept that these were not minor aberrations but, rather, signs of fundamental crisis. Sadly, things had to get much worse before Americans came to see that our occupation of Iraq was disastrous and, a few years later, that our financial system was in tatters.

    The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a small, sad global operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to money laundering and campaign-finance violations.

    I do so hope he is right.

  45. 45.

    jl

    @Mary G: I mentioned Ammar Campa-Najjar yesterday as a CA candidate I am rooting for. His pedigree might be a little to B Sanderish for some here, but I think we need to set that aside in a national emergency. I think he is smart, works hard, and will be his own person.

    Getting Hunder’s criminality out of the way now, might give him a chance in the general.

  47. 47.

    MisterForkbeard

    @jl: Is Campa-Najjar running against Hunter as the Democrat? We haven’t caught him being openly racist or harassing women? Then he deserves our full and instant support.

  50. 50.

    Gelfling 545

    @Cheryl Rofer: They’re trying here to foist Chris Collins onto some poor rural town since they can only take his nsme off the bsllot if he dies, moves out of the state or runs for or is appointed to another office.

  51. 51.

    lamh36

    @johnrobertsFox
    Follow Follow @johnrobertsFox
    More
    Source close to @realDonaldTrump tells Fox News “remember, the President cannot be indicted.”

    5:46 PM – 21 Aug 2018

  54. 54.

    Schlemazel

    @Baud:
    Dump got one win today. A pretty white girl in Iowa was kidnapped & murdered by a Hispanic man who may be here illegally.

    I think this may be his main talking point tonight

  55. 55.

    lgerard

    Hunter was supposedly the 2nd congressman to endorse trump, after the already indicted Chris Collins.

    i can imagine the 3rd guy is starting to sweat

  57. 57.

    smintheus

    @Yarrow: Since we’re talking about Republican traitors, lets’ mention that Rand Paul wants to give Russia a say in the matter of the size of NATO.

  59. 59.

    Mary G

    @jl: He seems a lot smarter than to hitch his wagon to Wilmer. He’s mostly going after the middle-aged and older women in sensible shoes set of voters and has a pretty big posse of them. The military and Jewish vote is what I am unsure of. He lived with his parents in Gaza for four years before it became too unsafe, so the Republicans will be going all out on scary terrorist infiltrating America to grind us all down with Sharia law oogitty-boogitty.

  64. 64.

    smintheus

    @Mary G: ‘Is a Christian’ and ‘good looking’ are high up on my list of things I don’t give a sh*t about when evaluating congressional candidates. If he’s literally ‘a rock star’, then that is on the same list just a little bit farther down it.

  65. 65.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Gods help me, I’m tempted to watch the Tweety Show just to see if (again, gods help me) Oma-Fucking-Rosa has anything worth seeing on video.

    Screw it, if she does, MSNBC will flog it for days.

  67. 67.

    Mary G

    Can’t be all good news:

    PRAYERS FOR CARTER — President Jimmy Carter has announced his recent liver surgery found cancer that has spread to other parts of his body.Spread the word and pray for our 39th President by sharing this image made by ABC 6. pic.twitter.com/yiKrzi9TPG— clae (@clae48) August 21, 2018

    Such a decent person.

  69. 69.

    lamh36

    More GOP profiles in courage:

    @jdawsey1
    Follow Follow @jdawsey1
    More
    Asked Paul Ryan’s office for their reaction to today’s news. Here’s the statement I just got. “We are aware of Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea to these serious charges. We will need more information than is currently available at this point.”

    5:56 PM – 21 Aug 2018 from Washington, DC

  70. 70.

    smintheus

    @lamh36:

    Source close to @realDonaldTrump tells Fox News “remember, the President cannot be indicted.”

    Remember, that is not true. The President could be indicted, or be a terrapin, for all the Constitution says.

  73. 73.

    Schlemazel

    @smintheus:
    Agreed but having done 60 years of politicking I can tell you those stupid things matter to a significant number of voters. I may hate them for it but have to recognize it.

  74. 74.

    Hungry Joe

    I live between Hunter’s CA-50 (to the east) and Issa’s CA-49 (to the north). Our CongressCritter is Susan Davis (D) in a safe seat, so I’ve been funneling time and money to Mike Levin (D) in the 49th because Hunter’s 50th is so deeply red that it seemed hopeless. But now … I dunno. I might have to drive out to East County — even though it’s HOT — and do a little precinct walking for Ammar. He might actually have a chance.

  78. 78.

    Elizabelle

    @Mary G: No other news source is reporting that Jimmy Carter’s cancer has spread. That tweet has an ABC logo but nothing else, and does not tie to any supporting link.

    It might be from a few years back, or it might be fake news.

    Viva Jimmy Carter! And Roslyn.

  79. 79.

    debbie

    Would any of Nancy Pelosi’s wannabe replacements state this so well?

    Today’s guilty verdicts against President Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and the guilty plea of Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, are further evidence of the rampant corruption and criminality at the heart of Trump’s inner circle.

    Cohen’s admission of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money ‘at the direction of the candidate’ to influence the 2016 election shows the president’s claims of ignorance to be far from accurate, and places him in even greater legal jeopardy.

    These convictions are further proof that the special counsel’s team and prosecutors in New York are conducting thorough and professional investigations, which must be permitted to continue free from interference.

    Congressional Republicans’ determination to cover up for the president and his criminal cronies betrays their oath of office and undermines their duty to the American people. House Republicans must abandon their complicity with president Trump and affirm that no one is above the law.

    The Trump administration and congressional Republicans’ unprecedented culture of corruption, cronyism and incompetence is characteristic of the dysfunctional political system in Washington.

    I think not.

    (from The Guardian

  81. 81.

    opiejeanne

    $600 To fly his pet rabbit somewhere. It doesn’t cost that much to fly a cat, about $100 and it rides in a soft carrier under the seat in front of you. What did he do, buy it its own seat?

  83. 83.

    Delia

    As an ex-Californian from Dana Rohrabacher’s district (R-Kremlin) I’m still waiting for news that he’s going down.

  84. 84.

    opiejeanne

    @Delia: We might have been neighbors! We lived in Huntington Beach from 2001-2003. I remember taking a look at him and wondering what in the what, what fresh new Hell is this?

  85. 85.

    JWL

    It won’t surprise me if the investigation began in earnest when Hunter, ostentatiously, and with an asshole smirk on his insufferably smug face, chose to vape at that congressional hearing, full well knowing the cameras were rolling. I wonder now how much he got paid for that little stunt?

  87. 87.

    Procopius

    @SRW1: Suing Steele? Good. Saw somebody commenting a couple of days ago that it’s hard to believe Buzzfeed had their lawyer(s) look that thing over to see if there was the slightest danger of libel, slander, or defamation. I guess they didn’t. I’d love his defense to be that it was fiction and it was purely accidental that he used names that happened to also belong to real people.

  88. 88.

    Ruckus

    @A Ghost To Most:
    Been a lot longer than 8 months for me but when the whole pile of shit catches on fire and people stand around and throw on gas to make sure, possibly then. So possibly next week?

  89. 89.

    Delia

    @opiejeanne: I lived in Los Alamitos and then in Cypress. I remember having a conversation with an elementary school counselor one time in which we danced around about politics a little until we established that we were both (gasp!) liberals. I moved to Oregon in 2004 and Peter DeFazio is my congressman now.

  90. 90.

    Amir Khalid

    @Frankensteinbeck:
    Don’t know how this works in America, but over here the charges against the late X would be dropped because X cannot defend himself in court and if convicted post mortem can’t serve any sentence. The victim of mistaken identity Y would obviously have to be released.

  93. 93.

    opiejeanne

    @Delia: We moved to Anaheim in 2003 and got a Democratic Representative, Loretta Sanchez. she sent us Christmas cards posed with her cat, Gretzky. She may not have been perfect but she was a tremendous improvement over Rohrabarker. I’m so old I remember him going to Afghanistan to support the Taliban against the Russians, when it was against the law for US citizens to do so. Dana’s been cuckoo for a very long time.

    In 2010 we moved to Woodinville, WA and our Democratic Representative is Suzan DelBene. Got to meet her last week at the primary watch party.

  94. 94.

    Delia

    @Dmbeaster: My kids both graduated from Los Al. In fact my son went down to Santa Ana and volunteered with Loretta Sanchez’s campaign the first time she ran. he was a junior or senior in high school. That was all a long time ago now. We’re all gone from behind the Orange Curtain, although my daughter moved back to L.A.

  95. 95.

    Procopius

    @Gelfling 545:

    He hasn’t been found NOT GUILTY on any counts.

    I didn’t know that was an option in out legal system. The Scots have the option of “not proven,” which I always wished for. We’re stuck with the binary choice. If he’s not GUILTY then the court regards him as NOT GUILTY. The jury on TV always says so specifically. Does that mean the prosecutor gets another crack at those counts?

  96. 96.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Procopius:

    The Scots have the option of “not proven,” which I always wished for.

    I was on a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh a couple of months ago. The charge list was a horror-show (sage advice: don’t have families, they never work out). If even a few of the major charges had been proven the accused would have spent the rest of his life in prison.

    In the end the accused was found not guilty by us on most of the charges since the the prosecution case was built on a series of interlocking accusations and when we found two witnesses totally not credible most of the other evidence didn’t meet the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. However on some other less serious charges we came to the old Scottish conclusion of “we think you did it but they didn’t prove it so you can go but we’ll be keeping an eye on you” hence we returned “not proven” on those. The bastard in the dock walked out of the court a free man.

    I’ve gone both ways on the “not proven” verdict in the past, thinking it a good thing and a bad thing at times. Having been on a jury in a serious case (worse than murder, some folks might say) I’m now firmly of the belief that it works, at least for the Scottish legal system.

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