And yet another lawyer, this one an expert on traffic citation law, is getting a plea deal for couping in Georgia. Only the best people!
Open Thread
Another lawyer getting another plea dealPost + Comments (88)
by David Anderson| 88 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Crime Syndicate, Trump Crime Cartel
And yet another lawyer, this one an expert on traffic citation law, is getting a plea deal for couping in Georgia. Only the best people!
Open Thread
Another lawyer getting another plea dealPost + Comments (88)
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Trump Crime Cartel, All Too Normal, Lock Him Up...Lock Them All Up
Nearly two weeks ago, media reported that Donald Trump reportedly revealed information about U.S. nuclear submarine capabilities to Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt. And on Sunday, 60 Minutes Australia played recordings of secret tapes where Pratt… pic.twitter.com/VWCWCf0Wsg
— Isabel Santos 🟧🟦🌊🌊🟦📙 (@Busyisaworkshop) October 22, 2023
Mr. Pierce, at Esquire, sums it up:
The Cardboard King sings songs of graft.
The Australian version of 60 Minutes ran an interesting segment on Anthony Pratt, who used to talk cardboard and national security secrets down at Mar-a-Lago with Fulton County (Ga.) Inmate No. P01135809. It adds to the bargeload of evidence that the former president* is a) very corrupt, b) very reckless, and c) very disgusting…
Per Rolling Stone, here’s the Ginger Tintin his own self — “Billionaire Brags About Trump Sharing Secret Information With Him”
…[O]n Sunday, 60 Minutes Australia played recordings of secret tapes where Pratt disclosed other non-public information Trump shared with him, including information about U.S. military operations in Iraq and Trump’s conversations with the presidents of Iraq and Ukraine.
According to Pratt, Trump shared a lot with him, such as information about U.S. bombings in Iraq before they were publicly reported. “I hadn’t even heard it, it hadn’t even been on the news yet, and he said, ‘I just bombed Iraq today,’” Pratt said Trump told him…
[Full 16min clip at the link]“He’s outrageous. He just says whatever the fuck he wants, and he loves to shock people,” Pratt, a businessman with a reported net worth of $9 billion, said of Trump. Pratt is listed as a potential witness to testify against Trump in a case brought by special counsel Jack Smith regarding his mishandling of classified information, and he reportedly shared information with prosecutors about Trump revealing to him sensitive intelligence regarding U.S. nuclear submarines, including how many warheads the subs usually carry and how close they could get to Russian submarines before they are detected.
Pratt also bragged on tape that Trump shared with him some of the contents of a private conversation with then-president of Iraq Barham Salih. According to Pratt: “[Trump] said, ‘I just bombed Iraq today, and the president of Iraq called me up and said, ‘You just leveled my city.’ And I said to him, ‘OK, what are you going to do about it?’”…
The billionaire said of Trump, “He knows exactly what to say and what not to say so that he avoids jail, but gets so close to it that it looks to everyone like he’s breaking the law. Like he won’t go up to someone and say, ‘I want you to kill someone.’ He’ll say, he’ll send someone, to tell someone, to kill someone.”…
Pratt, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, courted Trump to garner influence, even paying an inflated cost of $1 million on tickets to a the Palm Beach club’s New Year’s Eve gala — far above the actual $50,000 cost per ticket, a witness told prosecutors, according to The New York Times. Pratt also tried to get close to Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, paying him almost a million dollars to attend Pratt’s 60th birthday. The appearance was later cancelled due to Covid, but Pratt said on the recording that Guiliani calls him regularly. “Now he rings me once a week,” the Times reported Pratt as saying on the recordings.
“Rudy is someone that I hope will be useful one day,” Pratt said on tape. “Plus I just think he’s cool. It’s not all just sort of like seat of the pants shit. I think that [Trump] and Rudy are like that, and they’re plotting all this out.”
Now the NYTimes is on the story, more in sorrow than anger:
… Their interactions were ultimately swept up in one of the two federal criminal cases that the special counsel Jack Smith brought against Mr. Trump. Prosecutors have interviewed Mr. Pratt in the case in which Mr. Trump is charged with taking classified documents with him from the White House when he left office and obstructing efforts to retrieve them. Mr. Pratt is listed as a potential witness who could testify against Mr. Trump at a trial next year…
New details of how an American president and an Australian billionaire bonded over their mutual self-interest help to document the transactional ethos of the Trump presidency, and show how Mr. Trump melded his White House with his personal business in a way that, according to prosecutors, had ramifications for national security.
Mr. Pratt was hardly the only favor seeker circling Mar-a-Lago, which became the fulcrum of the president’s two overlapping worlds, and a marketplace of sorts where favors, secrets and opportunities to lobby the president over clubhouse burgers were treated as currency. But Mr. Pratt, who rode in Mr. Trump’s motorcade and attended a White House state dinner, played the game better than most…
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Trump condemned prosecutors and said the information was coming from “sources which totally lack proper context and relevant information.”…
(Does Maggie Haberman share a byline? Are a bear’s sanitary facilities located conveniently to its woodland demesne?)
If I’m reading the SMH article correctly, Pratt *does* seem to be the kind of billionaire TFG aspired to be: more Rupert Murdoch, less Fredo Corleone. Doesn’t seem to be good for his own image back home, though:
Anthony Pratt, the Australian billionaire who says Trump revealed to him sensitive information about submarines, reportedly paid Rudy Giuliani "about a million bucks" to attend Pratt’s birthday party. https://t.co/RPTwn6YbFN
— Seth Hettena (@seth_hettena) October 22, 2023
by David Anderson| 227 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate, Trump Crime Cartel
MSNBC reports that Ken Chesebro has also pleaded guilty to couping in Georgia.
Kenneth Chesebro on Friday pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case, the day after Sidney Powell did the same.
The lawyers charged in the sprawling racketeering case were set to be the first to face trial. Now, three of Donald Trump’s 18 co-defendants have pleaded guilty, following Scott Hall‘s plea last month.
Much like Powell, the plea deal requires full testimony but no jail time.
And another lawyer pleads guilty for coupingPost + Comments (227)
by David Anderson| 171 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Trump Crime Cartel, Trump Indictments
CNN reports that Sidney Powell, one of the intellectual featherweights behind the coup pled guilty today in Georgia:
Sidney Powell has pleaded guilty in the Georgia election subversion case, one day before her trial was set to start.
Fulton County prosecutors are recommending a sentence of six years probation. Powell will also be required to testify at future trials and write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia.
As part of her guilty plea, Powell is admitting her role in the January 2021 breach of election systems in rural Coffee County, Georgia.
I would have hoped for jail time but if probation and likely getting disbarred is the cost of getting a cooperative witness, good enough.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Republican Venality, Trump Crime Cartel
NYT: Trump appears to have shared sensitive information about American submarines with billionaire member of Mar-a-Lago, Anthony Pratt.
That could help prosecutors establish that Trump has a long habit of recklessly handling classified information.https://t.co/t6gKQoaofU
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) October 9, 2023
The inimitable Alexandra Petri, at the Washington Post, on Lord Marred-A-Largo and the Ginger TinTin — “How long can YOU be near Trump without learning secret information?”:
The more that comes out about Donald Trump’s post-presidency conduct, the clearer it becomes that the real challenge was not prying confidential information out of Trump but avoiding receiving confidential information.
I think I see the problem. Donald Trump has two modes of conversation. He is either ranting about all the things he intends to do when he becomes dictator of the country — so many rights to strip away! so much vengeance to extract against his enemies! so many guardrails to dismantle! — or he is volunteering classified information. Those are really it. If you don’t want one, you have to buckle in for the other.
Which brings us to the news from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation that Donald Trump apparently shared sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with an Australian billionaire. You might be wondering: Is this a private party, or can anyone play? Yes! All you have to do is pay money to be around Donald Trump by, say, attending a fundraiser or joining Mar-a-Lago, the most valuable golf club on the planet, valued at approximately $6 billion more than the sun, and you, too, can take the Trump Top Secret Challenge! See how long you can go without having Donald Trump just hand you some classified information…
Anyone can try! If you win, they give you a T-shirt (printed all over with state secrets), but nobody has won it yet. Somebody came close, once, because she was at Mar-a-Lago during a weekend when Trump was absent, but she made the mistake of visiting the wrong bathroom and — boom! Nothing but boxes of classified documents. Now she knows all our sources and methods. She wasn’t even interested in the sources and methods, but she hadn’t brought her phone into the bathroom with her, and she needed something to read.
Presumably the Australian billionaire who reportedly learned about our nuclear submarines was also trying to do the Trump Top Secret Challenge. He thought he had a shot. Here he is, a foreign national, a cardboard magnate, with no obvious interest in naval warfare. (Usually, you can tell if a man has interest in naval warfare. That is one of the first things you know about him, usually.) Going into the challenge, his fear was that, knowing his passion for cardboard, Donald Trump was going to rush him to the bathroom and start showing off his collection of boxes, asking for his opinion on their absorption power and shape stability, and he might accidentally glimpse a secret that way. He had girded his loins against that possibility. What he was not prepared for was the fact that Donald Trump, any time there is a lull in conversation, will just tell you how close our nuclear submarines can get to a Russian submarine without detection…
It is one thing to walk into a meeting in the Oval Office and, say, be Russian. Everyone knows that Donald Trump loves to impress Russia. The odds were heavily against them. But researchers working on a book about somebody else mistakenly thought they had a shot. They weren’t even at Mar-a-Lago. That seemed promising. But no! Moments into the conversation at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and the former president is waving classified documents at them. “Secret,” said Donald Trump. “This is secret information. Look, look at this!” Those are actual quotes.
This game is hard! But if you are willing to pay for proximity to the ex-president, you can play as many times as you like! Eventually, you’re bound to lose!
So Republicans blew a gasket when Barack Obama rocked his tan suit – but when Trump revealed sensitive nuclear submarine secrets to Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt at Mar-a-Lago who shared that info with dozens of other people – they’re crickets. pic.twitter.com/RlCBNOIsQI
— anyone_want_chips (@anyonewantchips) October 6, 2023
Monday Evening Open Thread: Remember The Submarine Chatter at Mar-A-Lago?Post + Comments (77)
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Open Threads, Trump Crime Cartel, Trumpery, Schadenfreude
Donald J. Trump was entitled to receive a jury trial in his NYC civil fraud case.
While Trump wanted a trial by jury, HIS attorneys DID NOT correctly fill out court paperwork.
Instead, Trump will receive a bench trial solely decided by a judge he's repeatedly attacked. pic.twitter.com/MW4gemybr1
— Stephanie Winston Wolkoff (@SWinstonWolkoff) October 2, 2023
No, really. Per the Messenger, which seems to have been first on this story:
… It’s unclear whether a jury trial would have been available under New York Executive Law 63(12), the statute under which the case was brought, and may legal experts believe it likely would not have been. But the judge noted that neither side litigated the issue.
Earlier this year, New York Attorney Letitia James filed a form with a checkmark next to the field: “Trial without a jury.” Trump’s legal team didn’t file a corresponding form, and the former president may have regretted that inaction ever since.
Long before the trial, Engoron found Trump in contempt of court for discovery violations in the investigation that preceded the AG’s lawsuit. Last week, the judge found Trump, his family members and his business associates liable for a massive fraud and ordered the dissolution of Trump’s New York business empire, an action known as the “corporate death penalty.”
Trump lashed out against him extensively at a makeshift press conference outside the courtroom, calling for Engoron to be “investigated for what he’s done is undervaluing these properties.”…
Engoron will decide whether to issue an order disgorging hundreds of millions of dollars in allegedly ill-gotten gains — and barring him from ever serving as a director of a New York corporation.
When you realize that the attractive lawyer who flattered you on TV is horrified bc she passed on a jury trial…
…and the lawyer who made you pay his full fee up front can't stop smiling.#MondayMood pic.twitter.com/K5S9K6Ok7T
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) October 2, 2023
Monday Evening Open Thread: <em>Tragedy Tomorrow — Comedy Tonight!</em>Post + Comments (164)
by Betty Cracker| 153 Comments
This post is in: 2020 Elections, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Trump Crime Cartel, Trump Indictments
Fulton County Judge McAfee is creating a hellish charcuterie board, and the cheese doesn’t want to be paired with the crispy Kraken, but the judge says that’s too damn bad. (Daily Beast)
Attorney Kenneth Chesebro, the alleged architect of the so-called fake elector scheme launched in a frenzied attempt to keep former President Donald Trump in office, just can’t get away from Sidney Powell.
After ruling last week that the two will be tried together, Fulton County Supreme Court Judge Scott McAfee on Thursday further ruled that their trial will be conducted apart from Trump and 16 other co-defendants in the sprawling racketeering prosecution brought by District Attorney Fani Willis over attempts to subvert the state’s 2020 presidential election returns…
“Mr. Chesebro has never physically met Sidney Powell; Mr. Chesebro has never sent an email to Ms. Powell; Mr. Chesebro has never received an email from Ms. Powell; Mr. Chesebro has never called Ms. Powell; Mr. Chesebro has never received a phone call from Ms. Powell; Mr. Chesebro has never texted Ms. Powell; Mr. Chesebro has never received a text message from Ms. Powell; and Mr. Chesebro has never communicated with Ms. Powell through any social media or telecommunications application,” Chesebro’s motion stated. “In sum, there has never been any direct contact or communication between Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell. Similarly, there is no correlation or overlap between the overt acts or the substantive charges associated with Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell.
The defense lawyers consulted for the article (i.e., not affiliated with either coup plotter) imply the Cheese Bro is desperate to separate himself from the Kraken Lady because he expects a lot more damning evidence to emerge in her case and fears it will taint him in the eyes of the jury. Unfortunately for Cheese Bro, the judge interpreted his severance motion (and Kraken Lady’s much less vociferous one) as evidence that the risk of evidence overlap is minimal.
It’s starting to look like that speedy trial motion will not redound to Chesebro’s benefit. Womp-womp-womp-woooooomp!
Open thread.