There was a story yesterday about a hearing over the NRA's claim of bankruptcy. Just filing for bankruptcy doesn't mean a court will grant some.  Not only does the court have to be convinced that the person filing isn't trying to avoid paying what it's required to, but sometimes an application for bankruptcy is made so that the petitioner can delay a separate court proceeding against it.  In this case, the state of New York is attempting to shut down the NRA -- since corporate-owned lobbying organization was based in the state but has subsequently moved to New York, and some feel that the NRA is trying to avoid the lawsuit.

One of the issues in the hearing that came to light is about a deposition with the NRA's executive director, Wayne LaPierre, who has had charges of massively excessive spending made against him.  And in the deposition, he was asked about how after the Sandy Hook and Parkland school gun massacres, he spent time living on a 108-foot yacht -- not the usual residence of those who are bankrupt.
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"They simply let me use it as a security retreat because they knew the threat that I was under," LaPierre told the court in his deposition, later adding, "And this was the one place that I hope could feel safe, where I remember getting there going, 'Thank God I'm safe, nobody can get me here.'  And that's how it happened. That's why I used it."

The best response to LaPierre's deposition came from Shannon Watts of Moms Demand.  She tweeted that "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good friend with a yacht?"

Of course, it's possible that LaPierre is telling the truth.  There are two big problems with that profoundly unlikely theory..

The first is that if true, it would be a massive admission by the executive director of the corporate-owned NRA that people with guns who are upset with others put them at the risk of their lives, and the public shouldn't feel safe and needs to go in hiding.

The other is that if Wayne LaPierre actually felt so unsafe whenever there was a gun massacre that he had to retreat to a yacht, then he would be spending his life for the past decade on a yacht.

And since he doesn't actually live on a yacht, it doesn't appear true.  And since he spent his tenure as executive director of the NRA saying how safe guns are, he clearly doesn't appear to believe the other either.

There is a gun massacre on average every other week.  And yes, there was another one just days ago.  The good news is that by the law of averages, we should all be safe for about another 10 days.


https://www.rawstory.com/yacht-lapierre/

Yesterday, I read a tweet from the MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that I thought was so hilariously lunatic that I posted what I believed was a pretty benign quip.

But manl  At the moment, it has gotten around 2,500 "Likes.:

And far too many wing nuts insisting that, oh, no, it's Dominion who should be terrified of the discovery process.  Because there's so much proof against them.  Like in Michigan where they found voter fraud.  And why would Mike Lindell countersue twice if he didn't have the evidence?  And the Trump lawyers had their cases dismissed by they didn't have standing.  And Democrats couldn't get anything on Trump, so they're going after him this way.  And yabba yabba yabba yabba on and on and on yabba yabba endlessly.  (One person added to the yabba quotient by insisting Sidney Power has never backtracked and strongly defends the charges she made, 

I didn't answer everyone -- there were far, FAR too many.  And responding to them all would be like playing megalomaniacal version of Whack-a-Mole.  But a few stood out, and I did reply.  Generally, I only replied once because then you get sucked down the rabbit hole into oblivion.  So, I'd answer, explain too that I didn't debate delusion, and offered a fond goodbye. And then muted them.

The general thrust of my answers were:

The State of Michigan did an official audit -- by hand -- in the county in question and determined it was not a machine error at all, but a human error by a clerk...and the vote total was 100% correct.  Read the news.

The Trump Team lost 60 cases, and in those that were dismissed it was because what they were offering as "evidence" didn't have merit -- not because they didn't have standing.  Courts have standards that must be met in order to offer evidence to be considered, or else lawyers can be sanctioned.  Read the news.

Sidney Powell's lawyer filed a brief in court about her statements making those charges that "reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact."  Read the news.

The Mueller Report said that there was collusion -- but it couldn't be proven by a legal standard because there also was obstruction which blocked investigators from the evidence.  Read the news.

And a majority of the U.S. Senate (including Republicans) voted to convict Trump, though two-thirds is required.  Read the news.

And no charges were ever filed against Trump when in office because the Justice Department has a guideline that says you can't charge a sitting President with a crime.  Read the news.

But mainly, as for Mike Lindell, the very person who started this all --.the reason he countersued is because he is nuts.  For starters, just look at the statement that was the whole point of my original tweet:  that Trump would be back in office by August!!!

Okay, so, honestly, how in the world is that supposed to happen??  How?!!!  Seriously, how does Mike Lindell actually believe Trump will be president again in only four months???  For starters, any lawsuit that challenges the election results won't likely even be heard by August.  And that doesn't taken into consideration that all 50 states have certified the results.  But lets create a monumental fantasy world where a lawsuit is actually filed (none has been yet, of course.)  And after motions to dismiss and debate about that, the trial is granted to go forward by the court.  And discovery, finding jurors, and hearing witness all take place in just days.  And after a very fast deliberation, that the verdict goes goes in Trump's favor.  All within just four months.

Do these people not think there would be...oh, an appeal?  And that after that long process, whatever the verdict is, it would not get appealed to the Supreme Court?  But that if it actually did, the Justices would call an immediate session and decide on whether or not to hear the case?  And would then agree to hear it immediately.  And that the lawyers would have to start without time to prepare?  And it would only take days?  And the Justices would deliberate for a few hours -- and decide in favor of Trump, who would be sworn in the next day??!  All so that he could be back as president by August?

Seriously?  Or do they just think a district court will make a quick, emergency rule on behalf of Trump, and everyone would agree that, okay, that settles that, and the next day Trump would be president?

As I said, I think it's fair to refer to Mike Lindell as nuts because we're only using his own words 

And no, you don't get to use the Trump Gambit of "Oh, no, he didn't actually mean that, you're taking his words literally, and he doesn't mean they're actually literal.  It's just sort of the general idea.  'By August' just means some other vague, distant time."  Like, perhaps November, 2024.

And yes, I actually did reply to a lot of people with a combination of these responses.  Not most, thankfully, but far too many.  And the answer to "Why in God's name did you did that?" is basically..."I don't know.  Probably because it was a slow day.  They were so stupid that it was easy.  And it probably annoyed them.  But I don't know.  We're still in a pandemic, and I'm still sort of sheltering at home, what else would I do to fill up my time?"

And I did, thankfully, eventually give up reading them.  Though had to fight responding when my eye did spot a loony reply scroll by.  (That's the downside of getting thousands of Likes or replies -- you still have to look to see if someone is writing to you for a completely separate reason... And since you do give up looking at everyone, any of these separate tweets stand a good chance of being missed.)

I don't particularly regret answering the people I did.  Not a great choice, but okay, it was sort of fun, if too numbing.  And it's who I am.  But what I come closer to regretting is posting that first quip.

Closer to regretting -- but not enough regret to not do it again.  Besides, it mostly got a tidal wave of positive comments, which were a treat to read.

And in truth, I really do look forward to Mike Lindell's testimony under cross-examination.  As someone responded in one of those many positive replies, they should put it on pay-per-view.  It would take in a bundle.

If you missed Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on Sunday, the Main Story was a look at police raids and how they've been abused.  It's a particularly interesting report that, as always, he and the show's writers are able to get humor in there, as well.
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On this week’s Al Franken podcast, his guests are former U.S. Attorneys Joyce Vance and Preet Bharara.  They hold a very interesting discussion of the legal problems ahead for Trump, the rioters, and also Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.  As Al describes it, this is “A Blow-by-Blow Assessment for Two of our Greatest Legal Minds (Not Al).”

It wasn't that the Supreme Court didn't support the crack Team Trump filing on Pennsylvania yesterday that leaped out to me -- it's that the entirety of their decision was:

"The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied."

That's it.  No explanation.  Just 18 words.  I have this suspicion that Justice Alito did begin to write a ruling about why the decision was reached -- this was about the presidential election, after all.  He probably got maybe halfway down the page, working hard to make the legal thinking not too insulting -- this was about the presidential election, after all.  And then, after an hour he perhaps stopped, thought, "What the hell am I doing??!" and crossed it all out, and then just wrote, "The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied."

There, he likely thought, that's much simpler.  Clean.  I don't have to say how insanely stupid and insulting this filing was, and how incredibly close we came to sanctioning the lawyers.  Just say "Denied," stamp it and leave it at that.

The thing is, this statement is far more insulting than it may otherwise appear in its surface simplicity.  The fact that this was about the presidential election, after all, and no explanation for dismissing the suit shouts volumes insultingly, because it says that no explanation is needed  Because the filing was insanely stupid and insulting.

Now, granted, this wasn't a Supreme Court ruling.  Those do go on for pages and pages.  And I'm sure when the Supreme Court decides not to hear a case, one sentence is all many such filings get.  But -- again -- this is about a presidential election, after all.  One sentence for something coming in at that high a level is the Supreme Court equivalent of "Don't bother me, go ask your mother."  And your mother is peering at you with a glare that says, "We talked about this already, don't you dare ask me again."

And worst of all for Trump is that from the beginning it's been widely accepted that the Trump Team strategy was, "Okay, we're going to get crushed in the popular vote, and lose the Electoral College, but that's okay because we're going to go to the Supreme Court -- and we have three justices who I appointed and hold the Court by a margin of 6-3."  The Supreme Court was a slam-dunk for the Trump administration.  Except that Trump was the only one who got slammed.

Certainly, this isn't the end of Supreme Court challenges for the crack Trump Legal Team.  There likely will be others.  And some may get passed "Denied."  But with this start, it shows the Court's hand on what they require, and "This is from Trump, just give it your OK" clearly isn't good enough.  They'll need an actual case with actual evidence.  And so far, their record in lower courts is is a horrendous 1-50.  And the one case they won was to allow observers to move four feet closer -- which was actually a horrible thing to want, since we're in a pandemic, and the reason for the farther distance was social distance safety.

When Trump ran for office, he declared that the country would get tired of winning,  Losing the popular vote twice, losing his second election by seven million votes, and losing 50 of his 51 court challenges is just a recipe for Loser..

'Tis the season for pardons.  Fa la la...

And so, as the Pardon Season starts to crank up, Trump has started things off by pardoning former National Security Director Michael Flynn.

A few brief comments:

First, accepting a pardon is the legal equivalent of making a guilty plea.  Related to this, Flynn already pled guilty twice in court.  So, this is a Flynn Trifecta.

Second, It is my hope that voters in Georgia make note that Trump pardoned someone who was the National Security Advisor and twice pled guilty to lying about illegal dealing with our adversary Russia -- and the two Republican senators in the run-off seem just fine with that. 

And finally  -- and importantly -- by accepting a pardon Flynn no longer has a Fifth Amendment protection and therefore will be required to testify in full and honestly if he is ever subpoenaed in court.  And if he doesn't do so, he can be tried for obstruction of justice, which is not covered by the pardon.

As a sort of addendum to my article this morning, here is a bit more today about the crack Trump Election Legal Team, headed by Rudy Giuliani.

It's wonderful.

Leaving out the headline so as not to give it away, here’s the opening passage from a story in RawStory about a new filing by the Giuliani gang.  (And I love how they, too, refer to them as the "crack legal team" as I did yesterday.)  The article begins –
 
“You just cannot make this stuff up.
 
“Donald Trump’s crack legal team Thursday filed a lawsuit alleging Michigan fraud that cited a list of seemingly irregular township voting percentages. Unfortunately, the data in a supporting affidavit might have been more persuasive had it not come from two states away in Minnesota.
 
“Yes, it appears ‘MI’ for Michigan is easily confused by ‘MN’ for Minnesota if the lawyers on your ‘elite strike force’ legal team aren’t actually all that elite. In this case, the grievous error was flagged by none other than Powerline.com, a blog authored by some extremely conservative attorneys.”
 
The article on the Powerline.com website was titled there, “Do Trump’s Lawyers Know What They Are Doing?”
 
And one of the passages in their article reads –
 
“This is a catastrophic error, the kind of thing that causes a legal position to crash and burn. Trump’s lawyers are fighting an uphill battle, to put it mildly, and confusing Michigan with Minnesota will at best make the hill steeper. Credibility once lost is hard to regain.”

Actually, it's even worse than this.  And yes, it can be worse.  That's because the counties the Giuliani Gang pointed to where they suspected voter fraud was not in Blue Democratic counties in Michigan...but Red Republican counties in Minnesota.  So, if there actually was voter fraud -- which is highly unlikely -- it would be fraud by Republicans.
 
 You can read the full article here.

Over the weekend, after hearing a lot of discussion about Trump being pardoned, I began thinking more closely about the subject, and a thought occurred to me -- Trump getting a pardon is a lot more problematic for him than is generally being discussed, on several levels.

The starting point is something that is generally accepted:  that accepting a presidential pardon only protects a person from federal charges, not state indictments.  And as we know, there are already investigations of Trump by the New York state Attorney General and New York City D.A.  But there's more at risk for Trump when it comes to him getting a pardon.

There are three ways that Trump could receive a presidential pardon.

The first is that he pardons himself.  The huge risk for Trump here, though, is that it's not known whether this is legal or not.  In fact, many legal experts and constitutional scholars who I've heard say that there's precedence against it being legal, based on the long-held, indeed historic legal principle that a person cannot be a judge of himself.  So, if Trump does decide to go the "self-pardon" route, he is risking his legal protection on a very thin thread.  If courts up to the Supreme Court don't allow it (even with Trump's appointees on the bench), then he's out of office without a presidential pardon.

(And to those who think, oh, the Trump Supreme Court will always rule to protect him -- keep in mind that the Justices would know that letting a president pardon himself would be precedent-setting for all future presidents.  And what that precedent would be is that a president could do pretty much anything when in office, indeed regularly commit any federal crime, and then pardon himself.  I'm not so sure I'd want to rely on the Supreme Court voting in my favor over setting such a precedent if I was in Trump's position.)

The second way Trump could get a presidential pardon is if he resigned right before leaving office with the agreement that Mike Pence would pardon him.  This may be the safest bet for Trump -- but it comes with another huge problem for him.  He would have to resign from the presidency.  And I'm not sure if the ability to do that is in his emotional makeup. As we've seen, being a "loser" is perhaps the worst thing a person could be, and Trump would have to actively make the decision to become only the second person in U.S. history along with the disgraced Richard Nixon to quit as president.  Yes, he would get his pardon -- but it would come with a shame and embarrassment that would stick with him for the rest of his life, and for the rest of American history.  Would Trump accept that reality?  It's certainly possible.  But knowing that a presidential pardon doesn't cover state crimes and therefore doesn't fully protect him, it's equally possible that the humiliation of resigning wouldn't be worth it.  I don't know.  I only know that, again, a pardon this way comes with its own risk.

That leaves the third way Trump could receive a presidential pardon -- and that's if President Joe Biden pardons him.  There is precedent for that, of course, when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.  And Joe Biden does have the same depth of decency as Ford who did want to put the country through seeing a former president on trial with the possibility of jail. But -- Nixon and Ford were from the same party, Trump and Biden are not.  More importantly, the crimes that Trump seems on the edge of being accused of are far more substantial towards the protection of the Union than were Nixon's.  Trump also pushed the nation towards fascism and the destruction of democracy.  He spent a year smearing Biden personally and trying falsely to make literally a federal cause of Biden's son being a criminal.  Trump also smeared soldiers as "losers," something that has galled Joe Biden on general principle, but also personally since his other son, now deceased, served in the military.  Moreover, Trump has been impeached by the House of Representatives.  And as added factor, Biden knows how vilified Gerald Ford was for pardoning Nixon.  The point is that relying on Joe Biden's huge decency to pardon him is yet another major risk for Trump.

So, while there are three ways Trump could get a presidential pardon, all three come with a significant risk and uncertainty.

And added to that significant risk, as mentioned, is that even if he does get his presidential pardon from one of those three sources, it doesn't protect him from being indicted by a state court or charged in local city courts, let alone sued in civil court.  

But there's even two other downsides Trump would face with getting a presidential pardon.

​The first of these is that accepting a pardon is the legal equivalent of pleading guilty.  Now, to most people, that would probably be worth the trade-off of getting a pardon.  But this is Trump, and as we've noted, being considered a "loser" is the worst thing for a person.  Moreover, we pretty much never have seen him admit flat-out that he was wrong about anything or take responsibility for his actions.  Admitting guilt by accepting a pardon would be a personal torment.  He may likely take it despite that, but it would probably tear him up inside, Being Trump, he would probably block out that it's an admission of guilt -- but it's an admission of guilt.

The second downside is that if a person accepts a pardon, you can have no Fifth Amendment jeopardy, and therefore you are required by law to testify openly, fully and honestly in court, even about your own actions, if you are ever subpoenaed as a witness.

​Now, one thing we can be pretty sure of -- there will be a lot of Trump-related criminal cases and lawsuits that will come after Trump leaves office.  And being Trump, it is reasonable to assume that Trump will be called to testify.  That means, under oath, he will have to admit to crimes and other malfeasances he committed.  He might not be able to be prosecuted for any of them because of his pardon, but it will be on the sworn record, which would be devastating to any of his future plans.  And if he lies about his actions while under oath, and that can be proven by other testimony and evidence, then even with a pardon he could be tried for obstruction of justice.  And here's the thing about that last "if" -- Trump is a pathological liar.  He has lied over 20,000 documented times, according to the Washington Post.  It's not a matter of "if Trump lies under oath," it's a question of whether Trump would be unable not to lie under oath.

The point here is not whether Trump will get a presidential pardon, or if such a pardon would impact his life after he leaves the White House.  The issue is that as much of a panacea as getting a presidential pardon would appear to be for Trump, it all comes with huge risks and problems, even if he gets and accepts a pardon.

​It is what it is.

If you missed Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, his Main Story was on immigration, but specifically about asylum.  It was an extremely interesting show -- much more angry than most, even his shows about the pandemic, and with less humor, though there is definitely its share of funny off-handed comments blended throughout.  But I think many will find what Oliver and his staff present to be teeth-gnashing infuriating.
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On this week’s Al Franken podcast, his guest is Brian Fallon of Demand Justice, and they discuss the Amy Coney Barrett hearing.  As he writes, the two “weren’t happy with any part of the damn thing.”

By the way, speaking of which -- after initially saying she would not vote to confirm Amy Coney Barrett, but then yesterday announcing yes, she would -- it turns out that this year for Halloween, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) will be dressing up and going as Susan Collins.