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
https://t.co/9svEW2USXP 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 …
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 …
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 …
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Republican Venality, Trump Crime Cartel
(Clay Jones via GoComics.com) 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 …
Monday Evening Open Thread: Remember The Submarine Chatter at Mar-A-Lago?Post + Comments (77)
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
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, …
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 …