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wildcat09

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by wildcat09

  1. Is there anything in life you haven't ever felt absolute certainty about?
  2. Not even House Republicans think Joe Biden did anything wrong:
  3. He wants to murder everyone there so bad.
  4. The last Republican president attempted a violent coup and he and his co-conspirators wanted to deploy the military to violently suppress the public backlash they anticipated. More recently, the political campaign for the "moderate" that the Republican establishment wanted to replace Trump created a campaign video that featured this image: Yeah, they're fucking nazis. And you vote for them, which makes you one too.
  5. Fuck these people. Roe was the compromise.
  6. Every accusation truly is a confession.
  7. She's made what ought to be a fairly routine matter into a month-long fight. How many more routine matters turned months-long fights before we're looking at a trial date some time in 2026?
  8. Y'all notice he doesn't dispute that he's knowingly allying with neo nazis.
  9. Not just that, he affirmatively decided that he’d prefer to side with the party that was openly allying with neo Nazis.
  10. Aileen Cannon Working Hard to Protect Stan Woodward; Doing Nothing to Protect Walt Nauta or Carlos de Oliveira: A filing submitted from DOJ shows that I was right. It also shows that Judge Aileen Cannon and Walt Nauta attorney Stan Woodward are engaged in a game that is doing nothing to ensure that Nauta’s getting unconflicted legal representation, but it is protecting Trump’s protection racket. Let’s review the timeline. On August 2, DOJ filed their original motion for a Garcia hearing, describing, generally, that Yuscil Taveras had testified against Nauta, which presented a conflict for Woodward, even before you consider the three other possible trial witnesses — of seven remaining witnesses — he also represents. DOJ submitted a sealed supplement with information on those three as well as other information, “to facilitate the Court’s inquiry.” Five days later, Cannon ordered that filing stricken, stating that, the government had, “fail[ed] to satisfy the burden of establishing a sufficient legal or factual basis to warrant sealing the motion and supplement.” In her drawn out briefing schedule on the question, she instructed Stan Woodward to address, “the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate and/or to seek post-indictment hearings on matters pertinent to the instant indicted matter in this district.” On August 17, Woodward responded. He contended that Garcia hearings only covered when an attorney represented two defendants, but ultimately argued that, rather than adopt a more traditional method of resolving such a conflict (such as replacing Woodward), Judge Cannon should exclude Taveras’ testimony. The government’s reply — filed on August 22 — is the one that made public more, damning, information on what went down in June and July. Three more days passed before Woodward submitted a furious motion requesting opportunity to file a sur-reply. In it, filed 23 days after DOJ’s original submission and sealed filing, he accused DOJ of contravening, “a sealing order issued by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia,1” though in a rambling footnote, he admitted maybe DOJ had requested to unseal this ex parte. In a fit of Trumpist projection, Woodward also complained that DOJ was doing things that might lead to tampering with witnesses. Projection, projection, projection. Well, it worked. Judge Cannon granted Woodward’s motion, even giving him one more day than he asked, until August 31 instead of August 30 (remember that she scheduled a sealed hearing sometime in this timeframe). Which will mean that because of actions taken and inaction by Aileen Cannon, Walt Nauta will go the entire month of August without getting a conflict review. Meanwhile, on August 16, DOJ filed a motion for a Garcia hearing to discuss the three witnesses represented by Carlos De Oliveira’s attorney who may testify against him. Best as I can tell, Cannon is simply ignoring that one. Fuck De Oliveira, I guess. After Cannon assented to yet more delay before she addressed the potentially conflicted representation of two of three defendants before her (someday, Cannon may even have to deal with conflicts Todd Blanche has, since he also represents Boris Epshteyn), DOJ submitted notice sharing a filing they submitted before the DC grand jury, assenting to Woodward’s request, filed just yesterday morning (that is, three days after their reply), asking to unseal stuff that was already unsealed. It includes the Woodward filing, from which DOJ’s reply quoted, that Woodward claims DOJ cited out of context. The full filing doesn’t help Woodward. Indeed, Woodward’s own filing suggests that if Taveras wanted to cooperate with the government, that would entail seeking a new attorney. And the filing makes clear that DOJ addressed at more length the conflict presented because Woodward was being paid by Save America PAC; while I’m uncertain about the local rules in SDFL, in DC there is a specific rule 1.8(e), requiring informed consent when an attorney is paid by someone else. While Woodward addressed it (see below), Woodward’s own description that Taveras could get another lawyer if he wanted to cooperate would seem to conflict with that rule’s independence of representation, and when he addresses the rule, Woodward doesn’t address confidentiality. Furthermore, when Woodward addresses why being paid by Save America PAC is only natural for Taveras because Taveras worked for Trump, he makes an argument that wouldn’t explain the entirety of his representation for Nauta — or, for that matter, Kash Patel, a known Woodward client who testified in the stolen documents case. Taveras is only a witness because Trump paid him to do IT work. But for much of the conduct about which Kash must have given testimony, represented by Woodward, he was the Acting Chief of Staff at the Pentagon. That’s the period when, per Kash, Trump conducted a wild declassification spree in his last days as President before packing up boxes to move to Mar-a-Lago. And while most of Nauta’s exposure as a witness (and now defendant) arises from things Nauta did as Trump’s valet after both left the White House, ¶25 of the superseding indictment, describing the process by which Trump and Nauta packed up to leave, entails conduct from before Nauta left government employ. If Trump were to be charged with 18 USC 2071, Nauta would be a witness to that. In other words, brushing off the financial conflict with Taveras is one thing, but this conflict is also about Nauta. And Nauta is now being prosecuted for conduct that may have begun when American taxpayers were paying him, not Donald Trump. One of the things Nauta may be hiding by not cooperating are details about Trump’s overt intentions as they both packed up boxes. And that’s not even the most damning part of the filing DOJ submitted yesterday. DOJ also submitted its initial motion to unseal grand jury materials, submitted on July 30, in advance of the Garcia motion. That motion reveals, first of all, that DOJ informed Judge Cannon of the conflict hearing on June 27. As DOJ noted in its reply, that’s what the sealed docket entries 45 and 46 are. That is, Aileen Cannon knew this was happening in real time. DOJ wasn’t hiding anything from her. That motion to unseal also describes that DOJ intended to file “all information related to the conflicts hearing,” including the appointment of Michelle Peterson to represent Taveras, in a sealed supplement to its motion for a Garcia hearing. In other words, these two docket entries that Judge Cannon ordered be stricken, five days after they were posted and therefore made available to both Cannon and Woodward? They include the material that, Woodward claims, he had never seen before DOJ’s reply. Judge Cannon just gave Woodward another bite at the apple, as well as another six days before his client gets a Garcia hearing, based off Woodward’s claim that he had never seen information DOJ had shared (and which would have been available to Woodward for five days) but then Cannon herself had removed from the record. DOJ did provide this information in its initial motion. But because of actions Cannon took — the judicial equivalent of flushing that information down the toilet — Woodward (after waiting three days himself before first asking Judge Boasberg to share the information) claimed that he had never seen it before. DOJ may have had a sense of where this was going, because back on July 30, in the same paragraph where they asked for permission to submit this information as part of a sealed supplement, DOJ also asked for permission to share it in unsealed form if things came to that. Things did, indeed, come to that. And Woodward may have gotten notice of all that from Judge Boasberg’s order on July 31. Things are going to get really testy going forward (if they haven’t already under seal) because, in a filing that DOJ did not first ask permission to file (but which I suspect would be authorized by a sealed order elsewhere in the docket, not to mention general ethical obligations requiring DOJ to inform her of everything going on in DC), DOJ just revealed that Judge Cannon threw out precisely the information that she’s now using to grant Woodward’s request for a sur-reply and — between the three days he waited to ask and the six she granted him to respond — nine more days to delay such time before Walt Nauta might be told about the significance of all the conflicted representation Woodward has taken on. But I also expect that this will escalate quickly in one or another forum. Aileen Cannon was informed weeks ago of two significant conflicts in the representation of defendants before her, and rather than attend to those conflicts (or decide, simply, that she was going to blow them off, which in some forms might be an appealable decision), she has helped Woodward simply stall any resolution to the potential conflict. Remember how I’ve promised I would start yelling if I believed that Cannon was doing something clearly problematic to help Trump? I’d say we’re there. Update: Corrected my own math on the delay, which I said was 11 days but is 9. Ignoring that Cannon asked for lengthy briefing on a topic that most judges would just issue an order on, the key delays are: 5 days before Cannon flushed the sealed supplement down the judicial toilet 3 days between the DOJ reply and Woodward’s panicked demand for a sur-reply based on a claim that DOJ hadn’t previously raised the things Cannon flushed 6 days of delay before Woodward will submit his sur-reply
  11. A pretty good critique of the David Brooks piece: The thing about this piece, the thing about anything ever written by David Brooks or any of the other pablum written by well-respected center-right pundits with prime space in the op-ed pages of our largest newspapers, isn't that it's necessarily wrong. It's that it appears to be a serious intellectual exercise, but it is fundamentally empty. It may even touch on something interesting, but will never actually investigate that or grapple with any contrary facts. Because the purpose isn't actually to to inform. The real purpose is usually to tell the readers (who are overwhelmingly college educated, upper-middle to upper class and range from center-right to center-left in political ideology) that the status quo is fine, and when that becomes too hard a sell it shifts to telling them that it's not their fault. All in all, it's not really much different from how conspiracy theories appeal to their adherents: they both present an alternate world that somewhat overlaps with our own but is a more comfortable place, psychologically speaking. Just as it's actually easier for some people to believe that there was a huge conspiracy to spread a pandemic rather than the truth that there's a lot of shit humanity still can't really control, it's also easier for a lot of people like us to believe that the problems today are as simple as a decrease in institutions of "moral formation," and not a result of a much more complex story that goes back to the beginning of the settlement of this continent by Europeans. A story that would force us to reconsider what we were taught about many of our country's most revered figures and that just might force us to engage in some critical introspection about whether the values we think we hold are really the values we've supported with our votes and in how we've lived our lives.
  12. This is a little more dismissive of Russia's acomplishments than I think is appropriate. They've produced many very talented adult film actresses.
  13. It was public knowledge that the DC grand jury remained ongoing and why should be obvious to everyone: because those clowns committed like 1,000,000 crimes in DC, and had only been indicted in Florida for a few that also connected to Mar-a-Lago.
  14. Stop embedding fucking Krassentstein tweets. There's hundreds if not thousands of other options, don't engage with those grifters.
  15. I have only vague memories of him as a poster from years back, but I remember thinking he was a normal dude. 2020 just absolutely fried some people's brains.
  16. Sure, whatever. The point wasn't that there's one better alternative, the point was that his line that "it doesn't make a difference what the marginal rate is" is absurd.
  17. Then you should have no problem with increasing marginal rates on high income levels and on capital gains.
  18. Has @Lidig8r explained what was so reprehensible about Southwest's conduct yet?
  19. wildcat09

    LBGTQ

    Just like all of the trauma inflicted on pregnant women since Roe was overturned, Ana thinks this is good but will pretend he doesn't.
  20. @TwiceHorn, my brother in Christ, you have got to stop giving Cannon the benefit of the doubt.
  21. I just don't understand why so many people love to fuck around when every single one of them hates the finding out part.
  22. You've never heard of Heritage? They're an incredibly influential Republican think tank, that was traditionally one of the more staid Republican think tanks. Them going full pro-Russia is yet more evidence that there are no "respectable" factions left within the GOP.
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