MSNBC Panel Stunned by Trump Lawyer’s ‘Admission’ on Fox News

 https://www.thedailybeast.com/msnbc-panel-stunned-by-trump-lawyer-john-lauros-admission-on-fox-news?ref=home

“What President Trump said is, ‘Let’s go with option D,'” Lauro said on The Ingraham Angle. “Let’s just halt, let’s just pause the voting and allow the state legislatures to take one last look and make a determination as to whether or not the elections were handled fairly. That’s constitutional law. That’s not an issue of criminal activity.”

Lauro said basically the same thing on Newsmax a bit later.

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell was surprised at the revelation.

“That is a Trump criminal defense lawyer quoting Donald Trump committing a crime,” he said. “Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer tonight added information to Jack Smith’s 42-page description of Donald Trump’s crimes. The conversation that John Lauro just described appears on page 34 of the indictment against his client.”

‘Jack Smith Has Made Sure That the System of Laws Still Holds’

 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/02/trump-indictment-roundup-00109391

It’s important for any democratic nation to hold criminal behavior accountable, to show that our Constitution and institutions and law will be defended when assaulted. It would have been better if Republicans in the Senate had risen to the occasion shortly after Jan. 6 and voted to convict Trump when he was impeached. But some accountability is better than none, and it is important for our civic health that, as someone once said, our democracy doesn’t present the sorry spectacle of justice without a sword or unable to use a sword. The willingness to stand for justice and the rule of law matters. So the indictment seems to me an important civic moment for the nation, if not necessarily a decisive one for our immediate politics.

Trump's attorney tells NPR how he plans to defend against the latest charges

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1191627739/trump-charges-indictment-attorney-jan-6-probe

It's embedded in the statute that they have to prove corrupt intent under 18 U.S.C. 1512, which is the obstruction statute. And corrupt intent means that you don't believe in, not only that you don't believe in the position that you're advancing, but you're doing it for a corrupt purpose, you're doing it to obstruct a government function rather than a truth-seeking function. And here, what we will argue to the jury, and we'll win, is that President Trump was arguing for the truth to come out in that election cycle rather than the truth to be denied. Even at the end, when he asked Mike Pence to pause the voting, he asked that it be sent back to the states so that the states, in exercising their truth-seeking function, could either audit or recertify.

Legal scholars pan Alan Dershowitz’s defense of Trump

 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/20/politics/dershowitz-trump-legal-analysis/index.html

CNN legal analyst Ross Garber, one of the leading impeachment experts in the country, also rejected Dershowitz’s reasoning. In recent years, Garber defended four Republican governors who faced potential impeachment, three of whom eventually resigned from office.

“I’m not sure of anybody who’s defended more impeachments than I have, and even I think Dershowitz is wrong on this,” Garber said Monday on CNN. “I don’t think you need a technical criminal violation for there to be an impeachable offense, and there are lots of reasons for that.”

One reason, Garber explained, was that there weren’t many criminal statutes on the books when the Constitution was adopted. Another reason came from history, Garber said: The phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors,” was used in England before the framers included it in the US Constitution, and it wasn’t understood to require a criminal offense for impeachment.

Devon Archer to Tucker Carlson: Hunter Biden speakerphone calls with father were ‘abuse of soft power’

 https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4133902-devon-archer-to-tucker-carlson-hunter-biden-speakerphone-calls-with-father-were-abuse-of-soft-power/

Last year, Archer was sentenced to a year and a day in prison after he was convicted of defrauding a Native American tribe. He has not yet been ordered to report to prison, and a letter from the Department of Justice over the weekend said Archer’s counsel plans to appeal.

Ex-AG William Barr says Justice Department has ‘legitimate case’ in latest Trump indictment

 https://nypost.com/2023/08/02/william-barr-reacts-to-latest-trump-indictment-legitimate-case/

Former AG William Barr said the Department of Justice is not abusing power in its case against Trump.

“They’re not attacking his first amendment rights, he can say whatever he wants he can even lie and tell people the election was stolen when he knew better, but that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy. All conspiracies involve speech and all fraud involves speech,” he said. “Free speech does not give you the right for fraudulent conspiracy.”

Barr said he wasn’t sure initially, but has since “come to believe that [Trump] knew well that he had lost the [2020] election.

“And, now, what I think is important is, the government has assumed the burden of proving that. The government, in their indictment, takes the position that he had actual knowledge that he had lost the election and the election wasn’t stolen through fraud,” Barr told Collins.

Chareidim and the reality of propaganda

 Have just tried to have a fact based discussion with a close relative from NY but whenever I asked the source of her beliefs it came down to Yated or Ben Shapiro

When I said it was simple propaganda with no relationship to established facts she responded - well all your information that disagrees with my perspective  is from Left wing propaganda. 

It is important to note that all English Chareidi  publication are mouthpieces for the Republican conservative perspective

Despite some nonsense written recently by Jonthan Rosenblum lamenting the lack of open debate in colleges. Mishpacha does not attempt to present all aspect of issues. Its token liberal lost his column a number of months ago. There is absolutely no free discussion in Chareidi sources. Binah magazine  is not embarrassed to publish anti-vaxxer nonsense. Mishpacha published a column presenting RFK jr as a serious presidential candidate - a Republican fantasy

Therefore it should not be surprising that Trump is presented as a hero who has been crucified by the senile and corrupt Biden family. Any appeal to established facts or legal norms is rejected as woke propaganda

Trump campaign likens Jan. 6 indictment to Nazi Germany

 https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-753356

"The persecution of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, and other dictatorial and authoritarian regimes," the campaign said, with a spokesperson of the former president saying that the investigation into Trump is "un-American," according to an Associated Press article. 

"This is nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the ongoing pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Justice Department to interfere in the 2024 presidential election, in which President Trump is the undisputed frontrunner, and leading by substantial margins.”

Six Things We Learned From the New Trump Indictment

 https://www.thedailybeast.com/six-things-we-learned-from-the-new-trump-indictment?ref=home?ref=home

Trump Was Trying to Delay Election Certification During the Jan. 6 Attack

During and After Violence at the Capitol, Trump and Giuliani Kept Pressuring GOP Lawmakers to Delay Certification

Trump Loyalists Welcomed Possibility of Widespread Violence and Suggested Martial Law

Trump Personally Reinserted Language Attacking Pence Into His Jan. 6 Speech

Trump Privately Said He’d “Give” a National Security Crisis “To The Next Guy”

Mike Pence Took ‘Contemporaneous Notes’ of a Damning Meeting With Trump.

The Death of Dilbert and False Claims of White Victimhood

 https://time.com/6259311/dilbert-racism-scott-adams/

The poll involved a small sample size and deployed a question loaded with language born from acts of racial trolling. “It’s OK to be white,” has recently appeared on Neo Nazi and alt-right groups’ flyers and websites and in some of their real-world speeches. Some of those polled may have recognized it. Rasmussen doesn’t appear to have asked why respondents agreed(53%), disagreed (26%), or were not sure (21%). Then there’s the fact that Rasmussen has a tendency not only to consistently produce results that vary widely from other polls querying similar things, but to lean consistently to the right and do so most significantly when conservative candidates or ideas are trailing elsewhere. Those are just a few of the issues the political scientist and political-behavior expert Alan Abramowitz warned of in an October 2016 blog post titled “Don’t Trust Rasmussen Polls.”

How White Victimhood Fuels Republican Politics

 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-white-victimhood-fuels-republican-politics/

With President Biden having just passed one full year in office, public opinion research shows that white Americans — and especially Republicans — see whites as victims of discrimination more than, say, Hispanic or Black Americans. According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, for example, only 17 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning Americans said there is “a lot” of discrimination against Black people in today’s society. That number rose to 26 percent when Republicans were asked whether they believed white people faced “a lot” of discrimination. And intense white racial resentment remains present both among Trump’s base and in our politics today. Case in point: Trump, who’s a (very, very early) favorite to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is still hitting that same drum; during a recent political event, the former president went so far as to falsely claim that white people were currently being discriminated against and sent to the “back of the line” when it came to receiving COVID-19 vaccines and treatment.

Trump is not the first white person to feel like a victim of discrimination or to make claims in that spirit. This phenomenon started long before him. But in the U.S., if we look at things like the racial wealth gap, mortgage denial rates, COVID-19 vaccination and illness rates, police violence rates or myriad other data sets, we quickly see plenty of systemic biases against Black Americans and other minority groups (such as increasing hate crimes against Asian Americans). You can’t, however, find such widespread evidence for anti-white discrimination. So why have many white Americans started to see themselves as the victims of racial discrimination?

The dangerous Republican freakout about Trump’s indictment

 https://www.vox.com/2023/6/9/23755171/trump-indictment-republican-reaction-doj-documents-mar-a-lago

The entire Trump phenomenon was, from the very beginning, about conservative fear of losing America. Study after study after study has found that Trump voters in the GOP primary and electorate are motivated by a concern that the United States is becoming literally unrecognizable: populated by people who look different and think differently than they do.

Why there’s nothing hypocritical about the GOP’s defense of both Trump and ‘law and order’

 https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/trump-gop-law-and-order-18152219.php

There is 50 years of hard evidence to indicate the Republican evocation of “law and order” is selective and self-serving at best, and anti-Black and craven at worst. Those reporting on the GOP’s embrace of Trump’s criminality should say as much, rather than feigning confusion about a hypocrisy that doesn’t, and never has, existed. 

Why No Amount of Evidence Will Make Republicans Admit Trump’s Guilt

 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/trump-indictment-why-republicans-will-never-admit-his-guilt.html

What is shocking, and carries the ominous reek of banana-republicanism, is the response by the opposition party to the news. Kevin McCarthy, the highest-ranking Republican leader, depicts the charges as a personal plot by Joe Biden — “It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him” — and a “grave injustice.” Trump’s leading Republican opponent denounces the charges as “political bias” and “the weaponization of federal law enforcement.”

What is distinctive about these remarks is how little fear these leaders have of embarrassment by the facts. They are dismissing out of hand an indictment they have not seen, the known contours of which suggest persistent criminal misconduct. Trump, according to news reports, repeatedly defied orders to return classified documents, repeatedly lied about what he held, and appears to have engaged in a cover-up, evidence of which may include surveillance-camera footage, potential testimony by his underlings, and a recording of Trump contradicting his best legal defense. Trump’s attorney confirmed he is facing seven criminal counts, including conspiracy.