September 25, 2022
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Here are the top stories from this week that I think you will want to read:
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It never ends: New York AG Letitia James files anti-Trump civil suit
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Mar-A-Lago raid: special master gets to work
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It happened again: FBI confiscates phone of Lindell associate
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House Oversight: PROOF Joe Biden involved in Hunter's CEFC
And after you read my Sunday Standard, please leave me a comment.
It never ends: New York AG Letitia James files anti-Trump civil suit
This was originally published on 9/22.
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Wednesday that she's bringing a $250 million civil suit against President Trump, three of his adult children, and Trump Organization executives Allan Weisselberg and Jeff McConney for inflating Trump’s net worth and the values of his properties. We learn several things from this:
1. Letitia James is up for re-election on November 8.
2. Letitia James is trying to fulfill her original campaign promise to “get Trump.”
(Yes, she actually ran on this very issue in 2018–- but try as she might, she didn’t have evidence for a criminal case. If she had, she would've brought one.)
3. Letitia James shows us that the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy extends into some of the states as well, certainly her own.
(During her campaign, she said she “would join with other attorneys general across this nation in removing this President from Office.”)
4. Letitia James is up for re-election on November 8. Did I say that already?
5. It’s a good thing --- if you’re Letitia James talking about President Trump –- to say a duly-elected President is illegitimate.
(In a campaign ad from 2018, she said, “I’m running for attorney general because I will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate President, when our fundamental rights are at stake.”)
6. Last but not least, did I mention that Letitia James is up for re-election on November 8?
See how much we learned? During her campaign in 2018, she smiled into the camera and said, “Oh, we’re going to definitely sue him. We’re gonna be a real pain in the a--. He’s going to know my name personally.” (In other words: Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime. We’ll figure out the charges later.)
A footnote in this new court filing says she’s passing along her findings to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who could possibly open a criminal investigation into bank fraud. Never mind that the Manhattan DA’s office has been investigating Trump and his family for years and finally declined to press criminal charges.
James, in her press conference Wednesday, said she’s going after Trump for such nefarious activities as exaggerating the size of his apartment square footage. He did this to “deceive banks and deceive the people of the great state of New York.” She even came up with this really, really clever turn of phrase that no one’s ever thought of before: “the art of the steal.” Isn’t that creative?
Legal expert Harmeet Dhillon said on Tucker's show that James seems “obsessed” with Trump and denies the legitimacy of his election. (Note: it’s fine when Democrats are “election deniers.”) Dhillon noted that James is trailing in the polls and suggested this is really about boosting her ratings. James absolutely could not find any crime on which to indict Trump, so she’s filed a 220-page complaint and gone the civil-suit route instead.
As Dhillon pointed out, fraud has a statute of limitations of six years, and what James is looking at goes back even to before Trump was in office. It’s “stale, old stuff,” she said, “that nobody bothered about until this time.”
And this is key: “What we’re really talking about is valuation of assets that were heavily negotiated with banks.” James’ complaint displays “a shocking naivete about the realties of business, about the realities of how properties are financed...” This is “small-potatoes stuff.” The banks never even complained; there was no victim. If anyone else had done it, it would not be singled out. This is “entirely political,” she said, and “not how an attorney general in the United States should be using their awesome power.”
This report from THE DAILY CALLER includes the statement from Trump attorney Alina Habba. “Today’s filing is neither focused on the facts nor the law,” she said. “Rather, it is solely focused on advancing the Attorney General’s political agenda.”
https://dailycaller.com/2022/
Kurt Schlichter has some fun with this development in a series of tweets predicting how this “dog’s breakfast of a complaint” will go. He reminds us that you can’t have a civil suit without allegations of harm: “You cannot sue if you did not suffer a loss.” He says “there are reasons to dismiss that just leap off the page.”
RELATED: I don’t always agree with what former Attorney General Bill Barr has to say, but when he’s right, he’s right.
https://www.
Barr recognizes a “political hit job” when he sees one, and when a politician’s children are dragged into it, that’s a tip-off, he says. Trump’s kids wouldn’t know the details of his personal financial statement.
He thinks this attack on Trump could backfire in a big way, with Trump seen as a sympathetic figure. He said this was “another example of of people piling on because of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Letitia James has got it so bad, she really should stay quarantined indefinitely.
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Mar-A-Lago raid: special master gets to work
This was originally published on 9/21.
Judge Raymond Dearie, the “special master” appointed to go through the presidential documents seized from Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home, circulated what’s called a “draft case management plan” among the parties involved ahead of the preliminary conference that was held Tuesday afternoon at his Brooklyn courthouse.
According to the court filing, the draft case management plan “requires that the Plaintiff disclose specific information regarding declassification to the Court and to the Government.” Trump’s attorneys responded that their client would do better to wait for a “Rule 41” motion “that specifically alleges declassification as a component of its argument for return of property.” Such a motion assumes that in order for documents to be brought back to Mar-A-Lago, they would have to have been ruled declassified, so those two issues would be taken up together.
Trump has claimed that he personally declassified documents that had been previously marked classified, by his authority as President. (Of course, some other documents might be protected under attorney-client privilege.) If the special master is looking for evidence that Trump did declassify those documents while he was still President, we wonder what form the special master thinks that proof should take. Would it be enough, for example, for former White House aide Kash Patel to say under oath what he has said publicly, that he was there when Trump was at the White House and witnessed him doing this?
Margot Cleveland has written an outstanding summary of what’s happened since U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon appointed Judge Dearie last Thursday. The best thing you could do to understand all the legal angles here would be to read her piece. She argues that trust in our ‘Justice’ Department has fallen so far that their appeal to the 11th Circuit Court to dispense with the special master should be denied. The arguments they’re sticking to on this have already been rejected by Judge Cannon, she says; they offer nothing new that’s persuasive.
The DOJ also fails to make their case that the 100 documents purportedly marked “classified” should be withheld from view by the special master. Judge Cannon has already said that she is unwilling to “adopt” the Government’s premise that those documents are necessarily classified. Cleveland elaborates on this, saying that some of them might not even bear marks of classification, and those that do might have been classified at one time but no longer need to be a state secret. (Example: the itinerary for Trump’s November 2019 trip to Afghanistan to visit the troops.) She also cites what might be copies of Crossfire Hurricane documents that Trump has already publicly declassified. If those are included in the 100 supposedly “classified” documents, not only are they NOT CLASSIFIED, they are Trump’s personal property. These possibilities require the decision of a special master; the court can’t just take the government’s word.
Might it be copies of Crossfire Hurricane documents –- again, not classified and the President’s personal property –- that the ‘Justice’ Department is really most interested in? For all we know, those papers were the actual reason for the raid; there’s good reason to suspect it. And if that’s the case, it makes sense that they SURE wouldn’t want some judge to see them, especially after they’ve made such a big deal about “national security.”
That’s the one way I can think of that letting someone else see the “classified” documents might actually cause the DOJ harm. The catch is, it’s also the one reason they can’t admit to the court.
It happened again: FBI confiscates phone of Lindell associate
This was originally published on 9/21.
After having his cellphone seized by the FBI, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is finding himself in an ever-expanding club.
The latest to have his phone confiscated is an associate of Lindell’s, math teacher Dr. Doug Frank, who has spoken publicly about election anomalies that cast doubt on the 2020 election. (Shame on him for being such a threat to our democracy!) Two FBI agents met him at the airport after his flight landed on Thursday, and they had a warrant to take the phone. He’d been expecting this after what happened to Lindell, so he and the agents even had a knowing chuckle over it. Since he had chosen to be cooperative and friendly, they behaved reasonably and even let him give his wife a call. These were just a couple of young-ish field agents, he said, who seemed not to know much about the case. (Of course, that might just have been a strategy.)
Like Lindell, Dr. Frank had a connection to Tina Peters, the Mesa County, Colorado clerk who faces charges for allowing a data analyst to come in and back-up 2020 election records. Since the election, the FBI has intently focused on her and, apparently, anyone who has talked to her. Dr. Frank had spoken with her, advising her to do a full forensic back-up of the voting machines –- which would pick up everything, even the deleted files –- of her computers. She hadn’t known how to do that.
https://lobbyistsforcitizens.
One particularly interesting observation from Dr. Frank: He says that right after his phone was taken, CNN, the WASHINGTON POST and THE NEW YORK TIMES were all trying to get hold of him for comment. He strongly suspects they were tipped off by their dear friends at the FBI.
Here’s his first interview since the experience, on LINDELL TV. I hope you’ll take the just-over-25 minutes to watch this when you have the time; there’s a lot of good information here.
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House Oversight: PROOF Joe Biden involved in Hunter's CEFC
This was originally published on 9/21.
Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee say they have evidence that Hunter Biden was working on a deal with CCP-controlled energy company CEFC to sell American natural gas to China. Ranking member James Comer of Kentucky says he has obtained a PowerPoint presentation from 2017 outlining the proposal, and a whistleblower has come forward to say that, YES, then-Vice President Joe Biden was involved in that deal.
In a committee meeting Tuesday morning, Rep. Comer presented a resolution to require President Biden to hand over about 150 documents currently held by the Treasury Department after being flagged by them for suspicious activity. To no one’s surprise, the Treasury Department has previously refused to cooperate on this with the Republicans on the committee. But this lack of cooperation is apparently something new, as normally the policy would be to release suspicious activity reports to Congress, under the Bank Secrecy Act. In other words, Hunter does appear to be getting special treatment.
The Treasury Department has finally offered its reason, but Comer says they’re stonewalling. On May 25, Comer wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen asking for the records, but got nowhere. His request of July 6 was also ignored. Finally, on September 2, he heard back. His request had been stamped “DENIED” by the assistant treasury secretary for legislative affairs, who explained that the information was what they call “tip and lead,” just to help investigators, and must be kept within the executive branch. (So much for oversight.) “Unauthorized use or disclosure of confidential information,” he said, “whether intentional or inadvertent, can also undermine potential or ongoing investigations or proceedings.”
As you know, Hunter is supposedly being investigated by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware over his finances, though it's hard to tell how serious that investigation is. Last we heard, a couple of weeks ago, former business partner Tony Bobulinski still hadn’t been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury, and it’s been TWO YEARS since he went public with his information about “the Big Guy,” who according to an email on Hunter's laptop was to pocket 10 percent of the profits from the CEFC deal.
Of course, Democrats, who make up the majority on this and all committees, were not expected to go along with Comer’s resolution, and indeed they killed it, but at least all of them will be on record regarding this look into the Bidens’ business ties. Do we want transparency, or do we want it all hidden away? It’s obvious who wants what.
Read Rep. Comer’s prepared remarks given during the meeting, here.
As reported by THE DAILY SIGNAL before the vote was taken, “Comer’s resolution is meant to ensure that Congress receives information needed to conduct oversight of the Biden family’s international business deals when Joe Biden was in federal office, including his eight years as Vice President and 36 years [!] in the Senate.” Recall that Biden’s papers from his years in the Senate are held at the University of Delaware, apparently in a vault hundreds of feet below the surface of the Earth, where they are still safe from scrutiny.
Rep. Comer appeared on Sean Hannity’s TV show Tuesday night to discuss the resolution. We all know, of course, that the FBI tried to deep-six Hunter’s laptop before the 2020 election and enlisted their media minions to dismiss it as Russian disinformation, but that it’s actually the real deal and implicates our current President multiple times in sketchy foreign business deals. Though President Biden has repeatedly lied and said he never even spoke to Hunter about his business, the laptop contains evidence that he met numerous times with his son’s associates.
Comer told Hannity there is proof, by way of emails and also whistleblower confirmation of the validity of bank transactions, that Hunter’s company Hudson West was negotiating a deal with Chinese energy CEFC to allow them to purchase American natural gas.
“There was a map in their PowerPoint, that was written in Chinese,” he said, “that highlighted all the natural gas providers across the United States. And what Hunter Biden was trying to do was negotiate the sale of liquified natural gas to China.” Beyond that, he explained, CEFC’s “main objective” was to start purchasing interest in the drillers as well, to be able to have more control over American natural gas prices.
Rep. Comer also has email confirmation that Biden told CEFC his father would be a “major investor” in the company and that part of the deal involved getting both Joe and Jill Biden keys to their new office digs. Take a look...
https://twitter.com/i/web/
In fact, by going to the following page of the website for the House Oversight Committee Republicans and scrolling down the column on the right, you can see the various pieces of information they’ve gleaned about the Biden Family’s dealings with the CCP---I mean, CEFC.
https://republicans-oversight.
More specifically, here’s their page detailing the areas they’re investigating and their findings so far.
https://republicans-oversight.
Rep. Comer told Hannity that the investigation of Hunter Biden has now shifted to his father. It’s confirmed that after Hunter told CEFC of his father’s involvement in his company, CEFC transferred $5 million to them. Hunter also gave them his father’s personal cellphone number.
Reading about the work done by the GOP members of the Oversight Committee should impress on everyone how important it is to get these folks in the majority. Right now, no matter what they manage to find out –- with no subpoena power –- they’re essentially powerless to do anything about it. (What are they supposed to do with these findings, take them to the media?) That has got to change, and soon.
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