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Posted
50 minutes ago, royiv said:

Calling Trump frugal is the most ridiculous thing ever. The man has the most garish taste where gold plated and things being yuge equate to classy. He’s not frugal, he’s a deadbeat welcher.

"Frugal" is a very nice way of describing behavior we've pointed out about Trump here and elsewhere: It's not that he doesn't buy; it's that he won't pay afterwards.

Posted
25 minutes ago, LTbear said:

To clarify, no one time sexual encounter is worth 130k. If that's what someone has to pay for divorce to get out of a shitty marriage, so be it. 

Eh, if that much money were the only thing between me and a night of intimate and slippery bliss with Mila Kunis, I'd be on the phone with my bank to convert equity to cash that minute.

23 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

Karen McDougal is damn hot 🔥🔥🔥

She was reasonably okay before she became Trump's sloppy seconds. She ain't hot enough to overcome that.

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Posted
12 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Or another.

 

 

 

Someone who could show him how to walk like an Egyptian. I reckon $130k would be a bargain.

Posted

Justice Jackson presses Trump’s lawyer about why presidents, uniquely among the numerous government officials who make life and death consequential decisions, can’t be constrained by the risk of prosecution if they commit a crime. She fears that future leaders would be "emboldened."

 

If immunity is taken off the table wouldn’t presidents be emboldened to commit crimes, Justice Jackson asks. “I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is of turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminality,” she says.

 

“If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table, wouldn’t there be significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they are in office?” Jackson asks, adding: “Once we say ‘no criminal liability, Mr. President. You can do whatever you want,’ I’m worried we would have a worse problem than the problem of the president feeling constrained to follow the law while he’s in office.”

 

Justice Jackson steps in to question the assumption that presidents should be immune even for their official actions. Why, she asks, should a president not have to follow the law while doing his or her job? Sauer responds that a president is required to follow the law but what is the remedy if there’s a crime committed? Should the president be sent to prison for a bad decision, he asks.

 

Justice Barrett asks why presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for official acts unless convicted at impeachment — Trump’s theory — when other officials subject to impeachment, like Supreme Court justices, are not. Trump's lawyer, Sauer, invokes the view of the former solicitor general Robert Bork, when he was helping Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal in 1973. Here is the brief Sauer was referencing.

 

By my count, there are now at least two justices — Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — who have expressed interest in holding further proceedings to determine whether the allegations in the indictment are presidential acts or private acts. Even holding proceedings would be a victory for Trump because they could easily take months to complete and all but ensure there would be no trial until after the election.

 

Justice Kavanaugh is asking about the “clear statement rule.” The idea is that if a criminal law is going to apply to an official act by a president, rather than just applying to ordinary people, Congress would have to clearly state in the statute that lawmakers meant for it to apply to the president’s official acts.

 

Sauer deflects on the answer about whether a president can pardon himself, saying that the central concern is actually whether a president will be able to make bold decisions as the country’s leader without worrying about whether his political opponents may come after him.

 

Out of left field, Justice Gorsuch asks whether presidents can pardon themselves as a way to prevent successor administrations from prosecuting them.


Here is an article exploring whether presidents can pardon themselves, something none has ever purported to do so there is no court precedent about whether it can be done.

 

Justice Kagan is pushing Sauer to take a position on whether a president ordering the military to stage a coup to keep him in power could be considered an official act. Sauer clearly does not want to answer question, saying it depends on circumstance.

 

Kagan seemed displeased by the exchange with Sauer saying there is no presidential immunity in the Constitution and the framers could have put one in if they had wanted to. “Wasn’t the whole point that the president wasn’t a monarch and the president wasn’t above the law?” she asked.

 

Sauer, Trump’s lawyer, is falling back on their theory that ex-presidents can be prosecuted for official acts if they were first convicted by the Senate at an impeachment trial. Lower courts have found implausible the notion that there is a link between the political impeachment process and criminal law.


Notably, at Trump’s second impeachment trial, when he was no longer president, his lawyers urged the Senate to find that he was not subject to conviction because he was no longer in office. Many of the Republican senators who voted to acquit him cited that as their reason. Justice Kagan points out that a former president who left office before impeachment would thereby be immune for, say, having ordered the military to stage a coup.

 

The issue of timing now emerges squarely. Justice Sotomayor suggests that the question of what is an official act and what is a private act could be argued at trial in front of a jury. If the court ends up deciding in that way, it could mean that the election interference case goes to trial before the election in November.

 

Justices Alito and Justice Sotomayor are getting at an important issue: If the Supreme Court says there can be no criminal liability for official actions (e.g. Trump talking to the Justice Department), could prosecutors still introduce evidence of the official actions at the trial? Those actions, Sotomayor points out, are still relevant for inferring what Trump’s mental state was for his private actions. Sauer, Trump’s lawyer, wants prosecutors banned from even bringing up official actions to a jury.

 

If you’re just joining in, the justices have been hearing from Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, in the first part of the oral argument. The justices, both liberal and conservative, have focused much of their questioning around whether a president can face criminal prosecution for private actions taken while in office, as well as how to draw the distinction between private and official acts.

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Posted
10 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

It's mostly because Merchan holds a mental health court on Wednesdays and considers it too important to push off.

Good for him.

For the next six weeks every day is going to be mental health court for him

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Posted
19 minutes ago, Willfully Horn said:

 

The Senate majority leader, in 2020: (approximately “Convicting on impeachment charges is not necessary. We have a criminal judgement system which is the proper forum for these charges.)” 

 

Trump’s lawyer, arguing before SCOTUS: “The only remedy for illegal acts committed by POTUS is impeachment. It has been exactly so for over 240 years.”

Fuck these fucks in their fucking fuckholes.

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Posted (edited)

A part of this exchange between Justice Alito and the Justice Department's lawyer, Dreeben, gets at a pressure point in American-style democracy and the rule of law. One of the safeguards against illegitimate prosecutions of ex-presidents, Dreeben says, is that if the Justice Department has advised the president that doing something would be lawful, the department could not later turn around and prosecute the now-former president for relying on that advice and doing that thing.

 

Alito points out that this creates an incentive for presidents to appoint attorneys general who will just tell them that anything they want to do would be legal. Indeed — that is a critique of the Office of Legal Counsel system, in which politically appointed lawyers decide what the law means for the executive branch.


An example: During the George W. Bush administration, memos about post-9/11 surveillance and torture were written by a politically appointed lawyer with idiosyncratically broad views of a president’s supposed power, as commander in chief, to authorize violations of surveillance and torture laws. The Justice Department later withdrew those memos as espousing a false view of the law, but held that officials who had taken action based on those memos could not be charged with crimes.

Justice Alito suggests that there is a risk to our stable democracy if presidents who lose close elections would not be allowed to retire in peace but could face prosecution. He has essentially flipped the situation under consideration upside down: that Trump is being prosecuted for having used fraud to remain in power after losing a close election.

 

Much of the discussion this morning has swirled around the question of whether, without immunity, presidents will be hounded by their rivals with malicious charges after leaving office. Alito and other conservatives on the court seem concerned that the Trump prosecutions will open the door to endless attacks against future presidents.

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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Posted (edited)

Back in NYC:

 

The jurors are still on break but the lawyers have been arguing for some time about a complex legal matter involving hearsay in certain exhibits. We’re not going to get into the weeds of the issue — the defense appears to have succeeded in not allowing in text messages about Trump's election between Dylan Howard, who was the editor of The National Enquirer in 2016, and a family member. But Juan Merchan, the judge, also continues to endorse — out of earshot of the jury — the prosecution’s interpretation of Pecker’s arrangement with Trump and Michael Cohen as a conspiracy.

Pecker has just returned to the stand, and prosecutors and defense lawyers have made clear he’ll still be there tomorrow.

 

With David Pecker back on the stand, we are turning to the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape.

 

The tape, which Pecker is describing, featured an outtake of Trump on that show from the 2000s, boasting about grabbing women’s genitals. Pecker describes it as “very embarrassing, very damaging” to the campaign. It was released on Oct. 7, 2016.

The jurors are mostly maintaining poker faces, but they look incredibly focused.

Trump muttered something out loud when Pecker offered this analysis.

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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Posted
8 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Justice Alito suggests that there is a risk to our stable democracy if presidents who lose close elections would not be allowed to retire in peace but could face prosecution. He has essentially flipped the situation under consideration upside down: that Trump is being prosecuted for having used fraud to remain in power after losing a close election.

Seems like the fix there is to nullify the DOJ memo, rather than create a king every 4 years

Posted (edited)
12 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Much of the discussion this morning has swirled around the question of whether, without immunity, presidents will be hounded by their rivals with malicious charges after leaving office. Alito and other conservatives on the court seem concerned that the Trump prosecutions will open the door to endless attacks against future presidents.

 

It is very sobering that one colossal piece of shit American is close to dismantling 250+ years of American democracy in such a short period of time. Maybe this was always coming and Trump is simply the useful idiot for those who've been plotting this for a long time.

Edited by C-Man
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Posted
44 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Alito suggests there are not enough legal safeguards in place to protect presidents against malicious prosecution if they don’t have some form of immunity.

Maybe I missed it in the NYT synopsis, but the rebuttal to the notion that a motivated prosecutor could indict even a presidential ham sandwich with Dijon, is that presidents are afforded abundant legal counsel, and the precedent is that if an empowered government official declares an action legal, then an individual cannot be charged, much less convicted, for that action.

 

Who knew so many high court justices were DT posters? Holy shit, with their skin crawling they sharply rebuke any mention of the particulars of Trump’s indictments. The claim that what’s important is the abstract, the general effect of their eventual ruling. Hey fuckwads, if the meta doesn’t address this micro, then it is bullshit.

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Posted
1 minute ago, Willfully Horn said:

Maybe I missed it in the NYT synopsis, but the rebuttal to the notion that a motivated prosecutor could indict even a presidential ham sandwich with Dijon, is that presidents are afforded abundant legal counsel, and the precedent is that if an empowered government official declares an action legal, then an individual cannot be charged, much less convicted, for that action.

 

Who knew so many high court justices were DT posters? Holy shit, with their skin crawling they sharply rebuke any mention of the particulars of Trump’s indictments. The claim that what’s important is the abstract, the general effect of their eventual ruling. Hey fuckwads, if the meta doesn’t address this micro, then it is bullshit.

Uh, all of us. And for a long time now. Watchu talking 'bout, Willis?

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Posted
32 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Back to NYC, and I'm going to go fetch some lunch:

Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor, just brought up Hope Hicks, Trump’s former communications aide, asking about an email chain that was forwarded to her the day after the Access Hollywood tape came out. Steinglass also asks Pecker if he’s ever known Trump to use email. The answer was no (although Trump has, in the last 18 months or so, started texting with people for the first time).

 

A lot of key characters are being introduced right now, including Stormy Daniels, a.k.a. Stephanie Clifford, whom Pecker identifies as a porn star. Joshua Steinglass, the prosecutor, asks Pecker: “How do you know of her?” Then he laughs and says he’ll ask the question in a different way. He takes a slightly safer approach, and Pecker begins to describe how his employees came to be in contact with Daniels.

 

David Pecker describes an urgent call from The National Enquirer's editor, Dylan Howard, in October 2016, in which he was informed that Stormy Daniels was shopping a story of a sexual affair with Trump for $120,000.

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Posted
Just now, SydneyCarton said:

Uh, all of us. And for a long time now. Watchu talking 'bout, Willis?

Gotcha. I was surprised that one Justice would so readily interrupt, and cut off, another Justice. I have little experience with SCOTUS arguments.

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Posted
1 minute ago, Js1 said:

God this pisses me off

We had 44 presidents before Trump and NONE of them were ever prosecuted for what they did in office.  The only fucking moron who opened that door was Trump - BECAUSE HE DID ILLEGAL THINGS THAT WERE NOT OFFICIAL ACTS

Fuck, no one in Obama's DOJ even seriously entertained prosecuting Bush for war crimes.  Because going to war is within the purview of the office of the President.

Attempting to overturn an election that went against you and inciting an insurrection is not part of the office. 

How are they going to use this to grant him immunity from illegal acts he has done and been indicated for from before and after his presidency (stormy payment laundering and moving of documents)?

Posted

If the supreme court gives the President immunity from prosecution, the next President can act with an assumed impunity.  That's true regardless of who is elected in November.  It could be true for the current sitting President.

Which makes me wonder, what are the odds either Biden or Trump2 is assassinated before leaving office?

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Posted
1 hour ago, Red Five said:

Sydney Sweeney. $130k. Hmmm.

Does that require a catch and kill point man?  Because I'd want everybody to know.

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Posted (edited)

And I'm back.   From NY:

We have our first mention of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser.


Pecker says he was walking outside Trump Tower when Kushner “tapped me on the shoulder.” Pecker adds that Kushner said:  “I’ll get you upstairs.”

 

David Pecker is now describing a post-election meeting he had with Michael Cohen at Trump Tower. Pecker said Cohen told him he had not been reimbursed for his payment to Stormy Daniels. Cohen, who also wanted to be paid a bonus for the year, asked Pecker “if I would talk to the boss on his behalf.”

 

David Pecker has at least three times described Michael Cohen as warning him that “the boss” — meaning Trump — would be “angry” if Pecker didn’t do whatever was being asked of him in that moment. Prosecutors, who have focused on Trump’s tendency to intimidate people in asking for a gag order, know what they’re drawing out here.

“I wanted to protect my company, I wanted to protect myself and I wanted also to protect Donald Trump. ”
David Pecker, former publisher of The National Enquirer

Pecker reiterates the importance of keeping Karen McDougal’s story quiet, in a striking comment that relates directly to the prosecution’s argument that he conspired with Trump to help him get elected.

 

Prosecutors showed jurors this article, which I co-authored while at The Wall Street Journal. It revealed The National Enquirer’s $150,000 payment to Karen McDougal. It was published four days before the 2016 election and first introduced the term “catch and kill.”


Pecker, before a tense and focused courtroom, is recounting Trump calling him three days before election day, after the Journal article was published. He was “very upset, saying how could this happen, I thought you had this under control, either you or one of your people have leaked the story,” Pecker says. The call ended with no goodbye from Trump.

 

David Pecker, Michael Cohen and others frequently contacted each other on an app called Signal. For those who don’t know it, it’s a free encrypted messaging service that goes to great lengths to keep electronic communications private.

As the testimony about Stormy Daniels picks up speed, Trump is growing more animated. He has motioned to both of the lawyers sitting next to him, adjusted his shoulders and crossed his arms over his chest.


The jury seems largely rapt as the Daniels tale starts to unspool. I did notice one yawn, however, from a juror as we slide towards lunchtime.


As Pecker testifies about conversations he and Michael Cohen had about Stormy Daniels, he keeps his eyes glued to the exhibit and to the prosecutors. I have not seen him glance over at Trump once. He takes a big sip of water and continues to answer questions.

 

Joshua Steinglass has seemed at ease during this direct examination of David Pecker. He is the most recent addition to this prosecution team but he is a veteran prosecutor at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He previously led the effort to convict the Trump Organization in 2022 and also secured a conviction against two Proud Boy extremists for a violent brawl in 2019.

 

David Pecker says he didn’t want The National Enquirer associated with a porn star, meaning Stormy Daniels, because one of the tabloid's biggest distributors was Walmart, where a lot of families shop.

 

 

David Pecker says that he refused to pay $120,000 for Stormy Daniels's story, noting his previous payments to a doorman shopping an apparently false story about a child fathered by Trump and to Karen McDougal, who said she had an affair with him. “I am not a bank,” Pecker said, explaining his decision.


Since the Stormy Daniels story would never have been published, Pecker’s assertion that it would have offended its readers doesn’t make sense — unless he was focused on building a case for plausible deniability were anyone to suggest the payment was an illegal campaign finance violation.


Pecker is explaining why he and The National Enquirer wanted nothing to do with paying Daniels for her story: “After paying out the doorman, after paying out Karen McDougal, we’re not paying out any more monies,” he told Michael Cohen. And he says he suggested to Cohen “that you should buy this story and you should take it off the market.” He added to Cohen: “If you don’t and it gets out, I believe the boss is going to be very angry with you.”

 

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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Posted

And from DC:

The oral argument lasted nearly three hours, as the justices tangled with a lawyer for the former president and a Justice Department lawyer. A majority of the justices appeared skeptical of the idea of sweeping presidential immunity. However, several of them suggested an interest in drawing out what actions may be immune and what may not — a move that could delay the former president’s trial if the Supreme Court asks a lower court to revisit the issues.

Many of the justices seemed to be considering the idea that presidents should enjoy some form of protection against criminal prosecution. The devil however will be in the details: How should that protection extend?


And that question will have profound relevance not only for future presidents, but much more immediately for Donald Trump. The court could decide to draw those rules itself in a broad way for history. Or it could send this case back to a lower court to set the rules of what form immunity could take. If the case is sent back for further proceedings, it could have a dramatic effect on the timing of Trump’s trial, pushing it well past the election in November.

 

Looking back, one of the main points of discussion turned on the question of which situation would be worse: a world in which presidents, shorn of any legal protections against prosecution, were ceaselessly pursued in the courts by their rivals in a never-ending cycle of political retribution, or allowing presidents to be unbounded by criminal law and permitted to do whatever they wanted with impunity.

 

Sauer, Trump’s attorney, declines to offer a rebuttal. The argument is over.

 

If the court finds that there is some immunity for official actions, one of the most important questions will be whether prosecutors can still present evidence to the jury of Trump’s official actions (like pressuring the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence to do certain things) as evidence that helps illuminate Trump’s knowledge and intent for his private acts as a candidate. Dreeben says the jury needs to understand the whole “integrated conspiracy” but prosecutors would accept a jury instruction in which the judge would say they cannot impose liability for the official actions but may consider them as evidence of his knowledge and intent for the other actions. That’s how courts handle protected speech that is evidence to a larger conspiracy, he notes.

 

Justice Barrett picks up the question of timing again. She suggests that if prosecutors want to take Trump quickly to trial, they could simply drop those parts of the indictment that seem to be his official acts as president and proceed with only those parts of the indictment that reflect Trump’s private actions taken as a candidate for office. Dreeben is not wild about that idea.


Dreeben suggests that allegations in the “private acts bucket,” as Justice Jackson just called it, would include things like the scheme to create fake electors and the way in which Trump fomented a mob of his supporters to violently attack the Capitol on Jan. 6.

 

Justice Barrett seems to signal that she is less likely to find that presidents have blanket immunity for their official acts. When Dreeben says the system needs to balance the effective functioning of the presidency and accountability for a former president under the rule of law, and the existing system does that pretty well or maybe needs a few ancillary rules but that is different from the “radical proposal” put forward by Trump’s legal team, she says: “I agree.”

Dreeben, in a balancing act that seems to acknowledge that the court is looking for some form of criminal immunity for presidents, says he is trying to do two things at once, neither of them easy. He wants to design a system to find some rules that preserve the “effective functioning of the presidency” but that still allows for “accountability” if presidents violated the law.

 

Kavanaugh asks Dreeben about Obama’s drone strike that killed an American citizen suspected of terrorism, Anwar al-Awlaki, which Trump’s lawyer invoked in his opening. Dreeben notes that the Office of Legal Counsel analyzed the question and found that the murder statute did not apply to presidents when they were acting under public authority, so authorizing the strike was lawful. This is the way the system can function, he said — the Justice Department analyzes laws carefully and with established principles.

 

Justice Kavanaugh signals that he is likely to find that presidents must have immunity for their official actions. He talks about how the threat of prosecution by independent counsels (under a law that lapsed in 1999) hampered Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton, and says a 1984 ruling upholding that structure as constitutional was one of the Supreme Court’s biggest mistakes. (Notably, Kavanaugh was a prosecutor on the staff of independent counsel Ken Starr during his investigation into President Bill Clinton, before becoming a White House lawyer under President George W. Bush.)


Dreeben tries to push back on Kavanaugh’s argument by saying that even after Watergate, even after all of the independent counsel investigations mentioned above, the legal system has survived without “having gone off on a runaway train” of actual criminal prosecutions against former presidents.

We are now over the two-hour mark of the Supreme Court’s arguments in the Trump immunity case. The Justice Department lawyer has continued to face skeptical questions from many of the court’s conservatives, several of whom appear particularly focused on how to draw the line between a president’s core powers and non-core powers. In other words, what actions by a president might be shielded from prosecution and what would not. The questioning suggests that some of the justices may favor a ruling that could lead to more lower-court proceedings, perhaps delaying the trial.

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Posted (edited)

NY, Continued:

 

Seemingly important question here, as prosecutors ask David Pecker whether Trump was concerned about his wife or family finding out about his alleged affairs when he was campaigning for office. Pecker responds no. This suggests that Trump’s worries were electoral, not personal.

 

We are breaking for lunch. Back at 2:15 pm.

 

Pecker said that during that meeting, Trump referred to McDougal as “our girl” when discussing her.

One of Trump's hallmarks, as he became president, was his tendency to treat all aspects of his world as flat and the same. He did not differentiate between the F.B.I. director and the head of a supermarket tabloid in terms of their obligations to him.

 

In front of Comey, the head of the F.B.I., Trump thanked Pecker for purchasing the stories — and committing at least one crime in the process, as Pecker well knew. This is a wild, wild scene we are hearing about.

 

Pecker has just given us a very detailed description of Jared Kushner walking him into Trump Tower, and then into Trump’s office, shortly before Trump's inauguration as president. In the office were four noteworthy people: James Comey, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus and Mike Pompeo. Three were Republicans who would go on to work in the Trump administration, while the fourth, Comey, would eventually become one of Trump’s chief adversaries. Into that tableau walks Pecker, to be asked about Karen McDougal by the president-elect.

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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Posted
15 minutes ago, Goredho said:

If the supreme court gives the President immunity from prosecution, the next President can act with an assumed impunity.  That's true regardless of who is elected in November.  It could be true for the current sitting President.

Which makes me wonder, what are the odds either Biden or Trump2 is assassinated before leaving office?

 

There's a part of me that wants them to rule for the immunity so Biden can then assassinate all the conservative justices by proclaiming its an official act as he wants to replace them all.

Then he just sits it out for another 4 years and due to his age he'll likely never face any real consequences when his new Supreme court rightly overturns this Calvinball court.

That would be a nice chef's kiss.

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Posted
1 hour ago, Rimbo said:

Eh, if that much money were the only thing between me and a night of intimate and slippery bliss with Mila Kunis, I'd be on the phone with my bank to convert equity to cash that minute.

She was reasonably okay before she became Trump's sloppy seconds. She ain't hot enough to overcome that.

/Scarface/Her womb is sooo polluted./Scarface/

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Posted
2 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

Karen McDougal is damn hot 🔥🔥🔥

 

Had a girlfriend of mine who was one of Playboys Houston area rep in the mid 90s early 00 and I met her a few times at events, she is one the hottest woman I've ever met

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Posted
The questioning suggests that some of the justices may favor a ruling that could lead to more lower-court proceedings, perhaps delaying the trial.

And there’s the rub… if they don’t find a way for immunity to specifically apply only to Trump, they’ll succeed in continued can kicking with the assumption that their rat fucking in the coming election makes all this moot.

Dissolve this court and nuke every Roberts decision from orbit… it’s the only way
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Posted (edited)

Lunch break over:

 

We’re back for the afternoon session, and David Pecker will return to the stand.


Trump is back in the courtroom, with his coterie of lawyers and aides.

 

Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s legal adviser who was indicted yesterday in Arizona, is in the courtroom.

Epshteyn is aggressively using his cell phone, which is barred in court. The court officers who patrol journalists doing the same don’t seem to notice as they walk by the aisle.

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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Posted

Is there anyone in Trump's orbit who hasn't either already gone to jail, or is facing the prospect of going to jail? 

The POD guys today were talking about how a majority of this country isn't really fazed by the republican nominee for President going on trial for committing felonies, six months before the election. That is how much this fucking shit has been normalized. But Biden had a teleprompter mishap! That's the real story today!

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Posted (edited)

We don’t often notice the jurors looking directly at the former president: They look at the prosecutor, the witness, the floor, the ceiling, their notes. But they really seem to try to avoid, for the most part, looking straight at Trump.

 

David Pecker is now describing a conversation he had with Trump more than a year after he was elected president, prompted by Karen McDougal having given a television interview. “I thought you had — we had — an agreement with Karen McDougal that she can’t give any interviews or be on any television shows,” Pecker recalls Trump saying then. When Pecker explained that he had amended the agreement, he says, “Mr. Trump got very aggravated.” To emphasize, again, Pecker is saying that the president of the United States continued to monitor McDougal’s movements while in office.

 

Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor, is guiding David Pecker through testimony about a dinner that Trump invited Pecker and his wife to at the White House. Pecker’s wife didn’t want to go, so The National Enquirer's top editor, Dylan Howard, and others.


The dinner, prosecutors establish, was in July 2017. By then, Trump was under investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller after firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey, amid the investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians.

 

Trump was slumped in his chair at the beginning of Pecker’s afternoon testimony. He muttered to his lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, after Pecker detailed a conversation he had with Trump at the White House. He says Trump asked “how Karen is doing.”


Prosecutors showed a photo of Trump and Pecker walking together on the White House grounds. Pecker says they were discussing Karen McDougal at that moment.


This was a real wow moment for me. The photo was taken from behind, the two men were clearly deep in conversation. Now Pecker tells us that the conversation was, at least in part, about Karen McDougal. “How is Karen doing,” Pecker says Trump asked him. She is doing well, he says he responded. “She is quiet.”

 

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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Posted (edited)
14 minutes ago, Red Five said:

Is there anyone in Trump's orbit who hasn't either already gone to jail, or is facing the prospect of going to jail? 

The POD guys today were talking about how a majority of this country isn't really fazed by the republican nominee for President going on trial for committing felonies, six months before the election. That is how much this fucking shit has been normalized. But Biden had a teleprompter mishap! That's the real story today!

Because he's been screaming about the "witch hunt" since he was first impeached -- it's been burned into their smooth brains at this point. Somebody posted a few weeks back about Russian psy-ops during the Cold War that it took X number of months of repeatedly telling somebody a lie over and over and eventually it became fact to that subject. This is 100% what has happened with the hard-core MAGA believers, the non-wealthy ones who don't stand to benefit by Trump's "platform."

Edited by C-Man
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Posted
2 minutes ago, C-Man said:

Because he's been screaming about the "witch hunt" since he was first impeached -- it's been burned into their smooth brains at this point. Somebody posted a few weeks back about Russian cy-ops during the Cold War that it took X number of months of repeatedly telling somebody a lie over and over and eventually it became fact to that subject. This is 100% what has happened with the hard-core MAGA believers, the non-wealthy ones who don't stand to benefit by Trump's "platform."

I go through this shit in real life. They go on and on about how Biden is senile and corrupt, etc. I let them finish and then say something like "How do you feel about Trump's 91 felony counts and being found liable for rape?"

They waive it off like I just mentioned a speeding ticket from 30 years ago. Just fucking amazing.

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Posted (edited)

Prosecutors are now asking David Pecker to walk through his non-prosecution agreement in connection with the 2018 federal investigation into the actions of Michael Cohen and American Media Inc., The National Enquirer's parent company.


Justice Merchan tells the jury that this is being offered to provide context and to help them assess Pecker’s credibility. He adds that this is not evidence of the defendant’s guilt.

 

Pecker is still reading the non-prosecution agreement into the record. It is soporific.

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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