So I’ve been thinking about this lately.
It has always been clear that Jack Smith chose his charges very carefully in both the D.C. case and the MAL documents case. What charges he brought. Who he indicted, and who he left as an un-indicted. For the time being, at least. He seemed to want the cleanest, slimmest cases possible, to insure conviction and increase the likelihood that the trials could happen in time.
So I can’t help but wonder what happens if it becomes crystal clear that one or both of these cases will not go to trial before November 2024. Will we see superseding indictments? After the recent Supreme Court ruling, I wouldn’t be surprised if we do.
In a similar vein, I also wonder what their contingency planning is at the DOJ. How many cases are there against insurrectionists in Congress, that are either being investigated, or perhaps are ready to be charged, sitting there under seal because they wanted to keep things as simple as possible – to ensure the big Trump trials could happen before November 2024.
If Trump were to win in November, then he could make sure that any cases that were still pending as of Jan 2025 would be dismissed. But a case that has already been filed and is in the hands of the courts would be a different situation, right? Cases already assigned to a judge would be totally out of the hands of what would surely be a corrupt DOJ if the worst would happen in November.
If there are cases like that, I am guessing that the DOJ would have to unseal them before the magic DOJ” 2 months ahead of an election’ rule. So early September would be my guess.
Even if it’s not exactly this, surely there is contingency planning going on at the DOJ to help preserve the rule of law if the worst were to happen in November. I would think so, at least but not having ever been part of government, I don’t really know.
Just to be perfectly clear, I am not suggesting that we will be defeated in November – I believe that we will win the presidency, the House and (likely) the Senate, but contingency planning is what you do when the outcome isn’t CERTAIN. So I really hope that folks in government are doing it.
Anyway, just sharing some thoughts that have been rolling around in my head. Pretty sure no one will hold back if you think otherwise.
NBC News Confirmed That The Probe Into Notorious Deleted Secret Service Text Message Scandal Is Officially A Criminal Investigation https://t.co/OcOTHL7SNI
— Karol Cummins (@karolcummins) March 5, 2024
Oh, and as a bonus – Mary Trump:
Today, millions of Americans voted to make Donald Trump the Republican nominee for president of the United States. I’m calling on them to reflect on the following:
You just voted for a man who:
1. Relentlessly attacks our institutions and has promised he will be a dictator on “day one”, determined to destroy our democracy for the sole purpose of enriching himself and staying out of prison.
2. Has been found liable for rape, and is accused of many other acts of sexual misconduct and assault.
3. Uses increasingly violent rhetoric to divide us and endanger anybody who doesn’t support him.
4. Traffics in anti-Semitism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant hatred, in order to divide us.
If you’re a Republican who voted against my uncle, thank you.
But if you voted for him, perhaps it’s time to ask yourself whether you really care about America as much as you think you do.
See you in November.
Open thread.
Sister Golden Bear
Unfortunately, if Trump is re-elected he could order the DOJ to stop all work on any cases, including those in court. IIRC, it’s happened before with civil cases.
Which might give Jack more incentive to unveil more indictments now. Yes, Trump could order the DOJ to drop the cases, but the pushback against stopping cases in court would (hopefully) more than for stopping investigations that haven’t reach court.
edited
WaterGirl
@Sister Golden Bear: Judges would have to agree before cases could be dropped
edit; I think you might be missing a word?
TBone
#SeeYouInRoevember
Sister Golden Bear
That said, given that there’s high odds that Ginni Thomas may be indicted, that might be an incentive to Jack to issue indictments now rather than later, given her husband didn’t recuse from the CO decision. Not that Justice Thomas would voluntarily recuse himself from future Trump crime cases, but there might be enough pressure for him to do so.
Sister Golden Bear
@WaterGirl: I have omitted a word. Between insufficient coffee and rotator cuff pain, I’m not all there.
But in past civil cases, the DOJ simply filed a noised that they would no longer litigate the case. So the other side ended up winning by default. No judges involved. Might be different in criminal cases — I’ll defer to the lawyer jackals.
randy khan
I would expect Trump to pardon himself and therefore make all of the federal cases against him disappear. There’s nothing a judge can do about that. (And, frankly, DoJ probably could just drop them and ultimately a judge probably can’t stop that, either, but the pardon is the way to bet.)
As for anyone else indicted in those cases, DoJ probably just stops prosecuting them, but Trump could pardon those people as well if he wants to put a bow on it.
Villago Delenda Est
Over at the Pentagon, they do contingency planning out the ass for just about everything.
I would hope that DOJ follows the Pentagon’s lead on this.
They care about Amerikkka, not the United States of America.
WaterGirl
@Sister Golden Bear: I can add the word if you tell me where – I would like to understand the point you were making.
WaterGirl
@Sister Golden Bear: I don’t remember which specific case, but for one of the cases Billy Barr wanted dropped, the judge definitely had to sign off.
Chris
@randy khan:
Such a terrible fucking legal system.
Narya
I have long thought that Jack has multiple plans.
Leto
@WaterGirl: possibly the Michael Flynn case?
Bugboy
I’ve spent decades in county government, and let me tell you there is a lot going on that no one is privy to, because it’s not exciting or glamorous to cover. If that happens at the county level, then it’s plausible to assume something similar is happening at the state and federal level.
I have faith that at least for now, there are still a great number of committed career employees left at the federal level, who toil away behind the scenes on contingency planning. For now..
ETA: While the election happens in November, nothing will happen in government until January in response to that election. A lot can happen in those few short months.
cmorenc
A DOJ under a Trump AG may not so easily dismiss all pending insurrection or classified docs cases, but they could effectively tank them, unless SP Jack Smith has true independent status and ample already committed budget and staff resources.
TBone
Just watched Liz in ‘Ivanhoe’ deliver her speech to the Court who has condemned her to burning at the stake for the crime of Jewish witchcraft. Inspiring.
From her obit: “When the eccentric RKO boss Howard Hughes became interested in her, he sent his lawyer to Mrs Taylor with an offer of $1m to arrange a marriage with her daughter. At being told of the offer, Elizabeth laughed out loud.”
Donatellonerd
@Sister Golden Bear: That is exactly what I was inspired by WG’s post to think: indict Ginny! that might be enough to get him to recuse himself and maybe even resign.
Chris
@TBone:
Good movie.
TBone
@Chris: 👍 it’s a nice escape hatch. Her obit in The Guardian is great, too.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/mar/23/elizabeth-taylor-obituary
bbleh
At least from what I’ve seen recently, the MAGAts will turn on “disloyal” Republicans in an instant, and they’ll do so as ferociously as they oppose and criticize Libruls.
MAGA is identity as much or more as politics. Even if you don’t say you’re really on board with it —actively supportive — and of course much less if you say you’re against it, then you hate them. All that rhetoric about how they’re beleaguered and oppressed because Libruls hate them? I’m increasingly convinced that more and more of them have come around to believing it.
It’s a cult
(ETA: I note that Moscow Mitch has now signed the Loyalty Oath to the Führer.)
Sister Golden Bear
@WaterGirl:
Written: “Which might give Jack more incentive to unveil now. Yes, Trump could do this,”
Intended to write: “Which might give Jack more incentive to unveil more indictments now. Yes, Trump could order the DOJ to drop the cases”
CaseyL
I very sincerely hope there’s a LOT of contingency planning – and not just at DOJ.
Marcopolo
Just saw drop out Dean finally dropped out about a half hour ago. Think he had a glowing endorsement of Biden, lol 😂. Fool!
Too early in the day to do this yet, but I’ll be celebrating a little later tonight. Also, always good to see women (Nikki Haley declining to endorse) showing more spine than men (Turtle Mitch who just did) in standing up to Trump. I suppose between now & Nov it’s possibly Haley bends the knee, but not yet, not yet.
Anonymous At Work
Mary Trump gets one thing wrong. The people voting for Trump do love “America” but the “America” that never existed, anchored in the past, and full of abominations that were/are ignored. Like Jim Crow, like back-alley abortions, like women hiding black eyes or nursing broken arms, and all the other hidden sins of a society dedicated to uplifting only certain types of people, not everyone.
You can’t disabuse MAGAts of their fantasy anymore than you can get them to acknowledge reality with words alone. They need sunshine and consequences. They need information that doesn’t come from FOX, Facebook, or “doing their own research.”
We just don’t know to make it happen. We can’t force the horse to the water when so many forces, like the Charles Kochs, the Harlan Crows, the Leonard Leos, and the Rupert Murdochs of the world purposefully offer simple, easy, and false alternatives. And we can’t force the horse to drink the water, because the First Amendment exists to prevent abusive indoctrination.
rikyrah
I honestly believe Jack Smith needs to indict all those muthaphuckas and let the chips fall where they may.
rikyrah
@Sister Golden Bear:
He should indict them all
Albatrossity
I know someone will correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that any Trump AG nominee should be tied up in the Senate confirmation process for maybe 1-4 years…
Baud
@Marcopolo:
Good news about Dean. Time to get serious.
WaterGirl
@Leto: Yes, that’s the one.
Citizen Alan
@bbleh:
And they would be right about that where I’m concerned. I DESPISE MAGAS. I consider them nothing less than the enemies of the human race.
WaterGirl
@Sister Golden Bear: Fixed now, I think I got it right!
Citizen Alan
@Albatrossity: That assumes 51 Dem Senators. If Shitgibbon wins and has a 50-50 Senate with whatever homunculus he picks as VP, the Senate would confirm convicted serial killers if he nominated them.
WaterGirl
@Marcopolo: Why is Dean a fool for the glowing endorsement? Or maybe he’s a fool for having run in the first place, compounded by staying in too long?
Chris
@bbleh:
Oh, they absolutely believe it. Been that way since long before Trump.
The first political blogger I ever followed was a wingnut (as, back then, was I). Long after I stopped reading him regularly, I’d still go back from time to time and reread what he wrote or just see where he was at now, and at some point it really struck me just how much his entire self-worth was tied up in his political identity. He claimed an origin story that was the opposite of mine (liberal when young, then became conservative), and it’s just remarkable in an almost cringeworthy way how much his telling of it is “I used to be insecure, geeky, self-loathing, ignorant – you know, a LIBERAL, haha! – but then I grew up and become a strong, sexy, confidant, Republican Real Man.” Their membership in the MAGA tribe doesn’t just stop at being their political worldview, it’s also their church, their hobbies, and their Viagra all rolled into one.
Of course they take it as a personal insult and consider themselves victims of a hate crime when you disagree with their leaders or their politics. They are their leaders and their politics. It is a personal attack on them, because once you take that away from them, there’s nothing left.
Parfigliano
I am confident Clarence will never recuse on anything involving his wife. Im positive this Court will never allow Trump to be convicted of anything.
Believe people when they show you who they are. Especially christopathic fascist Judges.
WaterGirl
@Albatrossity: That’s an excellent idea. Except that Trump liked having Acting people, didn’t he, so he/they didn’t have to follow the rules?
WaterGirl
@Chris: Are you the Chris who was on BJ long ago, back when there was a Chris and a chris?
Or are you an entirely new Chris?
Albatrossity
@WaterGirl: I don’t think he can nominate someone to be Acting AG without first nominating a real AG. Regardless, the Senate should treat all of his cabinet nominations the same way McConnell treated Merrick Garland’s nomination.
Albatrossity
@Citizen Alan: Yes, the Ds would have to control the Senate. Yet another reason to work hard to get out the vote in every down=ballot race
Marcopolo
@WaterGirl: Fool for entering in the first place, as his apparently sincere endorsement shows zero distance between them politically. Dunno what sweet nothings (emphasis on nothings) were being whispered in his ear to goad him into it but seems he lacks humility & common sense…thus fool.
Steve in the ATL
@Citizen Alan: fyi I’m on a flight to Mississippi right now. #blessed
Chris
@WaterGirl:
I’ve always been Chris with a capital C, but I can’t swear I was the only one, even with a capital C.
I discovered and started posting on Balloon Juice in the early Obama years, mostly fell out of the habit of posting here sometime in the early Trump years, and started posting here again last year.
So definitely not entirely new, but I don’t know if I’m who you’re thinking of.
Mag
If you look at the NBC source article about the deleted Secret Service text messages that the regurgitation ‘news’ click-generator site/xitter cited, then you will see it is from July 2022.
The teaser from the article says: “Results of the investigation could be referred to federal prosecutors, the sources said, depending on the results.”
No new information about the investigation or its conclusion has been reported since April 2023. The Washington Post reported that the “probe widens into federal watchdog over missing Jan. 6 Secret Service texts“.
And then the National Archives and Records Administration kicked off their own investigation in Jun 2023 into the DHS Inspector General, as reported in the Hill: “Archives ignites investigation of DHS inspector general following deleted texts.”
So no boom yet and maybe never. I doubt before November 5, 2024.
Quadrillipede
A couple of brief and overly general observations:
[ETA: those were intended to be bullet points, but the editor is refusing to fix that…]
Princess
If indictments that were dropped X and Y months ago will be delayed until after November, I don’t see how dropping new indictments now will lead to trials before the election. Surely they’ll be subject to all the delays of the earlier cases with the added disadvantage of having been started later.
jackmac
Something to think about:
If Democrats keep control of the Senate and reclaim the House and IF Trump somehow is elected and pardons himself and shuts down cases against him, that puts the country right back into impeachment territory.
Maybe the third time is the charm and there’s a Senate conviction. Unfortunately, whatever odious creature Trump picks as his running mate becomes president. And I find the prospect of, say, a President Kari Lake extremely unsettling.
mrmoshpotato
@Sister Golden Bear:
I think this is wishful thinking. Especially given that he’s been offered a million dollars a year for life AND a 2.4 million dollar motorhome in exchange for fucking right off the Supreme Court and has shown no interest.
narya
@rikyrah: yes. I have wondered if he’s holding that as an option if, say, SCROTUS says he’s immune. It would get all of the info in the open.
Doug R
I’m a fan of the theory that Jack Smith specifically picked the documents in the Maralardo case to be sensitive enough to warrant serious prison time but not so sensitive that they reveal sources and methods.
He can always charge later in NY, NJ and DC.
Mag
@jackmac: Senate Republicans will not vote to impeach Trump nor any other Republican president in the White House. Ever.
piratedan
@Princess: my thought regarding dropping the other shoes that have been waiting to fall is two-fold.
It lets us know that the DOJ has enough on these people to believe that they not only broke the law, they believe that they have the proof of getting a conviction. So now anything that is said by these people now gets the ominous “under indictment by the DOJ” preceding any statements.
two, if there are lawmakers and media and spouses of SCOTUS included in those indictments, it now opens another front in the war against fascism as all of these people now have to give a modicum of attention to defending themselves and hiring lawyers and tapping finances to deal with it. This means that there will also be media coverage, of various amounts of veracity and some of it may actually lead to conversations about what these people actually did.
This also allows less time for Governmental coup part II.
My guess is if we do go down the Government Coup Part II road, the MAGA will be fully armed and damned the consequences, there’s going to be a damned sight more bloodshed.
Chris
@jackmac:
At this point, I don’t believe in impeachment. (Or at least, I don’t believe in conviction or a credible threat thereof). I don’t mean for Trump, I just mean in general. It’s simply unthinkable that there will ever in my lifetime be a situation in which any president, from either party, could be impeached without 34 or more members of the Senate saying “I don’t give a shit what he’s guilty of, I’m not convicting him, if only because that would end my career.”
You can come up with scenarios, but they require a political reality so different from our own that it would either take multiple generations to get there or that things have gotten so bad we’ve got much bigger problems.
Could a Democratic president who’d done what Trump did get impeached and removed today? Oh yeah, easily. But any Democrat who was one-fiftieth as criminal and fascist as Trump would never get within twelve parsecs of the White House. And if the Democratic Party had changed so much that that was no longer true, it would probably have changed so much that its members would no longer be honest enough to vote for impeachment either.
Could Republicans successfully Jim Crow enough states to where two-thirds of the Senate belong to them and they can now just impeach any Democrat as soon as he’s elected? That’s unpleasantly possible, but if that were true, not only would we have bigger problems, but it’s vanishingly unlikely that any Democrat would be able to make it into the White House to be impeached in the first place.
Could either Republicans or Democrats one day, through sheer popularity and with no Jim Crow shenanigans at all, end up with 67 seats in the Senate all of whom would feel comfortable impeaching the President? That’s very unlikely in the current polarized climate, but if it ever happened, again, it’s hard to imagine how a party with that much control in the Senate wouldn’t also have control of the White House.
WaterGirl
@Marcopolo: Fair enough!
WaterGirl
@Chris: I wish WordPress could be case-sensitive. It allows Chris and chris, and even Chris and Chris, assuming that the two Chris people have different email addresses.
As always, the best systems aren’t necessarily the ones that get the market share.
WaterGirl
@Mag: Good work.
WaterGirl
@Quadrillipede: Fixed your bullet points.
WaterGirl
@Princess: I don’t think the trials have to START before them, but they have to be court cases and assigned judges. There’s certainly time for that.
MomSense
This was always ALWAYS going to be decided by the voters. Even if all these cases had already been tried, we would still be going through appeals and SCOTUS would still say that Congress needs to pass legislation to make the 14th amendment enforceable. That’s never going to happen.
This will be decided by the voters.
feebog
Well, one trial is going forward for sure. This month. Most pundits have poopooed the importance of the Stormy Daniels hush money case but I’m not so sure. It has two out of three of the essential elements for a sensational case, sex and money. Just imagine Stormy Daniels on the stand testifying in graphic detail about their sexual encounter. So long as Michael Cohen doesn’t stray off the reservation, this is a very strong case. TFG is going to have to run as a “convicted felon” regardless of the rest of the cases going forward.
trollhattan
@jackmac: Senate requires 2/3 vote to impeach, which is why we’ll never see a president removed from office via impeachment.
Villago Delenda Est
@trollhattan: Nixon only resigned because he was told by Barry Goldwater and others that he would be convicted if he were to be impeached, and he was going to be impeached. Once the “smoking gun” tape came out, Republicans who had been supporting him said they’d vote to impeach.
Miss Bianca
@randy khan: I keep wondering how, exactly, a President has standing to self-pardon.
Quadrillipede
@WaterGirl: Thank you! 😊
rikyrah
@piratedan:
They were only as successful as they were because of the lack of law enforcement
The Capitol Police were not fully staffed that day.
We know that it took almost 2 hours for the National Guard to be dispatched.
I refuse to believe that this will be the case if they try it a second time.
rikyrah
@feebog:
And, they are felony charges.
patrick II
@Miss Bianca:
Do you think appealing a self-pardon to the Supreme Court would help?
sab
@Sister Golden Bear: Late to the thread, but yikes about rotator cuff pain.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: They are felony charges.
AND
This was election interference, part 1. Not just a hush money scandal – the hush money was used to hide information that would have affected Trump’s electability.
piratedan
@rikyrah: I fully agree if they follow the same game plan the results would be much different.
I am probably chasing at shadows a bit here with the following, but my guess is that if there is a second attempt, it would be different. There still may be some elements of a trojan horse type move, perhaps involving the Secret Service who may not have had all of their Trumpist elements purged, effectively taking out POTUS and MVP, leaving them with Mike Johnson as the de facto head of the Government. Is this likely, I dunno, but with the amount of fascism that permeated our government over the last decade, I wouldn’t discount it… especially since those elements that would be clued into something like that happening (the DOJ and FBI) haven’t exactly proven to be free of authoritarian influences.
Sister Golden Bear
@WaterGirl: Thanks!
Sister Golden Bear
@sab: Thanks. Slowly improving, but definitely not fun at all. The thing that really sucks is that it’s not a rotator cuff tear, rather it’s overall degeneration from using the computer for three decades. Having to learn to mouse with my opposite hand, both for the short-term and long-term.