Group items tagged

One may ask: why did it take so long to get around to executing search warrants? We don't know for sure, and likely never will given the confidentiality around internal deliberations involving criminal investigations at DOJ, but The New York Times is reporting that there may have been politically motivated action taken to delay and then refuse to approve the warrant under the Trump administration. Search warrants involving lawyers like Giuliani carry particularly onerous approval requirements, because of concerns around breaching the attorney-client privilege by gaining access to communications between a lawyer and his client.

That means that these particular warrants would have been sent through the chain of command at the US Attorney's Office, up to Acting US Attorney Audrey Strauss, and then down to the Justice Department in Washington for another set of approvals.

Thus, in this case, before presenting the warrant to a judge, the Giuliani and Toensing search warrants also would have been approved by DOJ's second-in-command, now Lisa Monaco. Once approval is given, prosecutors take the application to a federal judge, who must be satisfied that there was probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed and that the evidence sought would be relevant to proving that crime.

But I expect -- as we saw when another Trump personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was served with a search warrant as part of his criminal investigation by SDNY -- that Giuliani will challenge them every step of the way.

Once the legal challenges are dispensed with and the investigative team is able to review the evidence they collected, they will conduct any necessary follow-up investigation before making a charging decision. And while the FARA charges described above may be the most likely at this moment, new and additional offenses often come to light as an investigation proceeds, so it's impossible to say where authorities may end up.

while executing a search warrant certainly was a major event in the already lengthy saga of the investigation of Rudy Giuliani, there remains a long road ahead before we will know whether Giuliani faces arrest and criminal prosecution

Giuliani is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a position he once held, for his activities in Ukraine.

Prosecutors are eyeing whether he violated federal lobbying law by not registering as a lobbyist for entities who were seeking various actions related to Ukraine, including the removal of the American ambassador under Trump.

Oetken noted that prosecutors suggested the electronic devices seized from Giuliani and Toensing should be handled the same way as Cohen’s “in light of the parallels to this matter.”

Giuliani’s lawyers argue that the search of his iCloud — which was not known to Giuliani for about 18 months — may have violated his attorney-client privilege and the right of Trump as president to have his communications with his lawyer protected.

The U.S. added 164,000 jobs in April, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent.

James Sullivan is an ardent Trump supporter, according to his Facebook page. He is also the co-founder of Civilized Awakenings, a civil rights organization that seeks to help Black conservatives "find real solutions to the problems the Black Americans are facing." In a brief interview with CNN, a spokesperson for Civilized Awakenings confirmed Sullivan had spoken at a Proud Boys rally in Portland but stressed neither he nor Civilized Awakenings are part of that group. The spokesperson also confirmed Sullivan has been in contact with Rudy Giuliani, but declined to discuss the details.

In the now-removed Tweet, Giuliani included a screenshot of a text purportedly from Sullivan's brother James in which the sender claimed to be working with the FBI "to expose and place total blame on John" and more than 200 members of Antifa.

The "Antifa" argument is just one of a number conspiracy theories Giuliani has pushed on behalf of Trump since the November election. Giuliani, who is still expected to play a role in Trump's impeachment defense even though the President has told staff not to pay him, did not respond to CNN's requests for comment.

During the siege, John Sullivan recorded the mayhem and provided commentary on what was going on. He was charged with disorderly conduct, interfering with law enforcement, and knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building, according to a criminal complaint. He was taken into custody in Utah, where he lives.

According to the complaint, Sullivan told the FBI he was an activist and journalist who filmed protests and riots, "but admitted that he did not have any press credentials."

Once inside, he can be heard on audio arguing with police and telling them to stand down or that they might get hurt, according to the affidavit.

"You are putting yourself in harm's way," he allegedly told officers. "The people have spoken."

Federal authorities have not identified John Sullivan as a member of Antifa, and he denied supporting Antifa in an interview with a Utah newspaper last week. Sullivan said in the same interview that he didn't encourage violence or vandalism.

The paper, The Deseret News, also reported in July that Sullivan is part of a group called "Insurgence USA" and took part in a protest in June in which he and others demonstrated in opposition to a scheduled pro-law enforcement demonstration.

"We [expletive] about to burn this [expletive] down," he told the crowd. "We got to rip Trump right out of that office over there."He then led the crowd in a chant of, "It's time for a revolution."

"By no means am I there on the Trump side or the Biden side," he told Anderson Cooper.

The GOP's embrace of patriotism and American exceptionalism ramped up after 9/11 and especially when Democrats began to question the war in Iraq. Some on the right fought back by arguing that this was unpatriotic or that war skeptics opposed U.S. troops.

And it was a fixture of the opposition to Barack Obama, whom Republicans regularly accused of "apologizing" for America.

This was a major theme of Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign against Obama, and back in 2015, Rudy Giuliani accused Obama of believing "that American exceptionalism is no more exceptional than the exceptionalism of any other country in the world."

Giuliani is now a key Trump confidant, and Trump is espousing almost that exact view that Giuliani ascribed to Obama. And now the likes of Giuliani and Pence are left to explain it.

The United States has the second-most cases with 85,228.

Earlier on Saturday, the Dolan Family Foundation agreed to donate $1 million to Madison Square Garden's event staff who are unable to work because of the spread of the virus.

In addition, three members of the Philadelphia 76ers organization and one in the Denver Nuggets organization have tested positive.

ESPN NBA color commentator Doris Burke has also tested positive.

Gobert was the first person in the Association to receive an official diagnosis, which in turn led the NBA to suspend play March 11.

The revocation of a Trump-era policy that restricted federal funding for "sanctuary cities."

under Attorney General Bill Barr, the department repeatedly blocked SDNY prosecutors from executing a search warrant for Giuliani's electronic records in the final months of 2020,

"It changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County," Giuliani said

Giuliani's team is also making absurd claims of a massive, centralized, Democratic conspiracy involving long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Cuba, China, the Clinton Foundation and George Soros to throw the election.

"The problem is, he's speaking for the President of the United States," veteran Republican elections lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg told CNN's Wolf Blitzer."It is a sweeping, totally unsubstantiated attack on one of the basic foundations of the country -- our free elections."

"I am worried that any lawmakers who attend this ridiculous meet and greet are really attending a conspiratorial meeting to steal the election," Tribe told CNN's Erin Burnett. "There's no question that the meeting that is being held is illegal. There is no question that it really is designed quite corruptly to take away people's right to vote."

"It's quite clear that Republican, as well as Democratic judges, are going to follow the law when there is no ambiguity," Tribe said. "The only guy who seems to be uninterested in the law is Rudy Giuliani, and God knows what he is auditioning for."

Trump would need to cancel out Biden's victories in multiple states to come anywhere near the 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency.

CNN election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his website that the President's meddling with the Wayne County election officials "is very dangerous for our democracy, as it is an attempt to thwart the will of the voters through political pressure from the President."

Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have given the President latitude to challenge the result without mounting a credible case, now begin to look as though they are facilitating his most extreme assault yet on US democracy.

"That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're lucky," Krebs wrote.

CNN's Dana Bash and Gloria Borger, for instance, quoted sources as saying that the President, who believes that the Russia investigation dented his own legitimacy, is now trying to ruin Biden's presidency. And in the end, the courts -- and the institutional system that Trump has relentlessly pummeled over the last four years -- still seem likely to hold firm against his power-hungry schemes.

"It's going to be another incident where he will go down in history as being one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history. ... It's just outrageous what he's doing."

The US on Thursday hit another one-day record for new cases -- more than 182,000, according to tallies from Johns Hopkins University.

while the optimism of officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx over a coming vaccine were genuine, their warnings that Americans should not gather this Thanksgiving as the virus rages comprehensively debunked Trump's claims the pandemic is already over.

After hundreds of voters called into the canvass board Zoom meeting to express outrage about the potential effort to disenfranchise Detroit-area voters, the two GOP board members relented and voted to certify the results Tuesday night, but they then filed affidavits Wednesday asking to "rescind" their action -- which is not expected to have any practical effect on the certification.

President-elect Biden, watching from Wilmington, Delaware, as he builds out his Cabinet, said that Trump was sending "incredibly damaging messages" to the rest of the world about how democracy works.

He made a racist argument that election results should be overturned by tossing out hundreds of thousands of votes in large cities dominated by Black voters, including Detroit and Philadelphia, where he claimed the number of voter fraud cases "could fill a library."

"The only surprise I would have found in this is that Philadelphia hadn't cheated in this election, because for the last 60 years, they've cheated in just about every single election. You could say the same thing about Detroit," Giuliani said at one point. "Each one of these cities are cities that are controlled by Democrats, which means they can get away with anything they want to do."

One affidavit Giuliani highlighted has already been rejected by a judge, and many have been vague, contradictory and devoid of evidence, showing isolated incidents or suspicions of illegal behavior not rooted in facts.

Highlighting the Trump campaign's naked effort to disenfranchise voters, the judge explicitly noted that there was no evidence of fraud related to the ballots the Trump campaign was seeking to throw out: "There exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots," Baldi wrote in his opinion. "There is nothing in the record and nothing alleged that would lead to the conclusion that any of the challenged ballots were submitted by someone not qualified or entitled to vote in this election."

"Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election," Romney said in a statement posted to Twitter.

"It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President."

CNN reported on Tuesday that associates in Trump's orbit, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, have approached the President to seek preemptive pardons.

The President has also been talking with advisers about preemptively pardoning several people close to him, including his children and son-in-law, the White House adviser Jared Kushner.

Donald Trump Jr., the President's son, was under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller for contacts he had with Russians, but was never charged. And Kushner provided false information about his foreign contacts when applying for his security clearance, but Trump issued him one anyway.

Nine individuals in Trump's orbit, including his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and longtime friend Roger Stone, have been indicted or found guilty of crimes related to a constellation of alleged criminal conspiracies.

The pardoning discussions come on the heels of the President's decision to grant Flynn a full pardon, absolving him of charges related to lying to federal agents over his contact with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Meanwhile, the White House said in March it didn’t know of the payment, and in April Trump himself said he didn’t know about the payment. Giuliani had a clever explanation for this, too: Trump really hadn’t known about the payment, and had only learned of it in the last two weeks

This still left some implausible holes. Giuliani claimed that Trump had paid Cohen as part of a normal retainer agreement, yet Cohen said he had to take funds out of a home-equity line of credit to pay Daniels. How many lawyers take out loans while waiting for their normal pay to clear? There was a deeper problem, too: Giuliani’s aim had clearly been to show that Trump hadn’t violated campaign-finance law with the payment

But Giuliani destroyed any impression that he had a cleverly elegant solution the following morning on Fox and Friends. Giuliani said first that the payment had nothing to do with the campaign, an essential part of his argument that no campaign-finance laws could have been broken.“This was for personal reasons,” Giuliani said. “It wasn’t for the campaign. It was to save their marr—not their marriage so much, but their reputation.”But moments later, he blew his own argument apart, acknowledging the concern that the Daniels story could have emerged and hurt Trump in the home stretch of the campaign.“Imagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton,” he said.

We still don’t know whether Trump really reimbursed Cohen, when he did so, and when he learned what he was reimbursing Cohen for. All we know is that the president’s lawyers and associates have misled the public in the last three days, and some of them knowingly. Trump is in the latter camp, since he conferred with Giuliani and confirmed his account, then said it wasn’t straight. Giuliani’s statements are also at odds with each other, so he was not telling the truth in at least one case.

Earlier this month, Republican commissioners in one Ohio county sought to block the county election board's purchase of new Dominion equipment. A Dominion employee who was forced into hiding due to death threats has sued Giuliani, Powell and the Trump campaign. Another voting systems company, Smartmatic, has also filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News.

Some see these legal fights as another way to take on viral misinformation, one that's already starting to show some results although some journalists are uneasy that a news organization could be targeted.

Skarnulis hopes that in addition to helping Coomer clear his name and return to a normal life, the suits will also serve as a warning.

The number of defamation lawsuits and the large damage claims associated with them is novel, said journalism and public policy professor Bill Adair, head of the journalism program at Duke University.

He does worry that using defamation suits to combat untruths spread by media outlets could become a weapon against journalists just doing their jobs. "As a journalist, I'm a little bit nervous. The idea of using defamation lawsuits makes us a little bit concerned."But even with that discomfort, Adair has come to believe the lawsuits do have a role to play.

The defamation suits already do appear to be having an effect. An anchor for Newsmax walked out on a live interview with My Pillow CEO Lindell when he started making unsubstantiated claims about Dominion voting machines. Fox News, the Fox Business Network and Newsmax also aired segments that contradicted the disinformation their own hosts had amplified.

Last month, Fox Business also cancelled a show hosted by Trump ally Lou Dobbs, who had amplified the conspiracy theories and interviewed Powell and Giuliani about them.

One challenge for the plaintiffs is that defamation lawsuits are difficult to win. They need to show the person they're suing knew a statement was false when she made it, or had serious doubts about its truthfulness.

Media organizations have a First Amendment right to report the news, and that includes repeating what important people say, even if those statements are false, said George Freeman, the former in-house counsel for The New York Times, who now heads the Medial Law Resource Center.

Pro-Trump outlets are likely to claim that constitutional protection for their defense but Freeman believes they may have crossed a legal line in their presentation of election fraud claims and in some instances applauding obvious falsehoods.

Still Freeman said he thinks the strongest defamation cases aren't against the media companies, but against one of the people they gave a lot of airtime to, Rudy Giuliani.

In a January call announcing the lawsuit against Giuliani, Dominion's attorney, Tom Clare, said that the court can consider circumstantial evidence too. The complaint includes a detailed timeline that shows Giuliani continued to make his claims in the face of public assurances from election security experts, hand recounts, and numerous court rulings rejecting fraud cases.

While the current lawsuits could have an impact in this instance, experts on misinformation say there are several reasons why defamation cases aren't a central tool in the fight against falsehoods.

Many conspiracy theories don't target a specific person or company, so there's no one to file a lawsuit against. Legal action is also expensive. Coomer's legal team expects his bills will exceed $2 million. And when a victim does sue, a case can take years.

The parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting have filed multiple defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones of the conspiracy site, InfoWars. But after numerous challenges and delays, the cases are all still in the pre-trial phase. With Dominion and Smartmatic vowing not to settle before they get their day in court, this approach to fighting election misinformation may still be grinding forward even as the country enters the next presidential election. But for Adair and others, any effort to discourage future misinformation campaigns is worth pursuing.

It's "a return to business as usual for DOJ -- and not DOJ swinging as frantically to an anti-Trump agenda as it did to the pro-Trump one that I and many other observers abhorred,"

"I appreciate the independence. I don't always agree with the positions," said Eisen, who would like to see more released by the Justice Department. "They're going to act with that same independence in defense of what they perceive to be in the long-term interests of the executive branch."

The Biden administration now has control over three high-profile documents that are still central to Democrats' court fights related to Trump: Trump's tax returns, held by the IRS; grand jury material underpinning the Russia investigation; and the key internal memo to former Attorney General William Barr justifying the decision not to charge Trump with obstruction in former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

Trump's taxes have been the white whale of Democratic investigators for years,

Trump's tax returns are no longer completely under lock and key, either. The Manhattan district attorney obtained them earlier this year through a lawsuit of his own.

Last week, Garland's Justice Department partly sided with Barr. The department partially appealed a judge's order to release a 2019 memo written for Barr about how to handle Mueller's findings on Trump and obstruction of justice. The Justice Department tried to offer some transparency: A federal judge had slammed the department for considering the optics of the Mueller report's rollout, and the department made that section public.

But the department is now fighting to keep redacted six-and-a-half pages of legal analysis on whether a criminal case against the then-President was merited, even if he could not be charged under Justice Department policy.

Congressional Democrats urged Garland not to appeal the judge's decision.

"There is this institutional rivalry between executive and legislative branches that overlays or perhaps underlays the misbehavior that the judge found within the department,"

The Justice Department's stance shouldn't be a surprise, given that Biden came into office with a team that was vowing to move on from the Trump-era controversies.

The House committees that investigated Trump, however, have vowed to keep pursuing their cases that are tied up in court.

The Supreme Court was set to hear an appeal from the administration as it sought to keep grand jury documents cited in the Mueller report under seal, after the House won access in court. That hearing has been postponed.

The House's push for financial documents and Trump's tax returns has another obstacle beyond the Biden administration: Trump himself. The former President's involvement in the cases, now as a private citizen who has several teams of lawyers protecting his interests, may be one reason for the stalemates.

The President later released a stronger video denouncing the incident, but sources told CNN that Trump later appeared to regret making the video.

Although Trump has enjoyed widespread support from police unions in the run up to the 2020 election, even law enforcement organizations that endorsed him for reelection -- such as the powerful Fraternal Order of Police -- were appalled at the Trump-fueled January 6 attack on the Capitol.

In a strongly worded statement imploring the President to speak out against the Capitol violence, the group said, "the images coming in from the United State Capitol Building today are heartbreaking to every American. We call on President Trump to forcefully urge these demonstrators to stop their unlawful activity, to stand down, and to disperse."

With less than a week remaining as president, Trump's ceaseless false claims of mass voter fraud continue to threaten and make life more difficult for law enforcement in America.

"When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon. You see them thrown in rough," Trump said, adding, "Please don't be too nice."

The Gainesville, Florida, police department said Trump had "no business endorsing or condoning cops being rough with arrestees and suggesting that we should slam their heads onto the car while putting them in." The department added that Trump's remarks "set modern policing back and erased a lot of the strides we have made to build trust in our community."

Trump's caustic comments about the investigators working to uncover Russian influence stood at odds with his attempted "pro-law enforcement" image, as did comments made by the President's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, when he compared career FBI agents to murderous Nazis.

While addressing a group of police officers early in his presidency, Trump encouraged those in attendance to be "rough" with suspects.

As the nation prepares to inaugurate Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, federal law enforcement agencies have transformed the nation's capital into a veritable fortress -- fearful that pro-Trump supporters could stage an attack along the lines of the Trump-inspired violent insurgence at the US Capitol on January 6.

"He did the same thing in China. And he tried to do it in Kazakhstan and in Russia," Mr Giuliani reportedly added.

Three other witnesses summoned by the House committees were not expected to appear.

David Hale, the third most senior official at the state department, began his testimony at congressional impeachment hearings on Wednesday. He will reportedly seek to explain the agency’s failure to defend the ambassador to Ukraine as an act of realpolitik.

All the state department witnesses, who have defied administration orders not to cooperate with the investigation, have corroborated a whistleblower report about an attempt by Trump and his circle to pressure the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, into announcing specific investigations.

The congressional committees are examining whether the president abused his office by seeking to use leverage on Ukraine to investigate his political opponents. Part of the inquiry concerns the removal of Yovanovitch from her ambassadorial post, after she refused to take part in Giuliani’s effort to implicate former vice-president Joe Biden and his son in corruption.

Several witnesses have also testified that security assistance to Ukraine was suspended in July as part of a pressure campaign on Kyiv to investigate the energy firm that hired Biden’s son, Hunter.

Hale was reportedly planning to tell investigators that the state department’s leadership decided that battling Giuliani and the White House over Yovanovitch would expend political capital it needed to persuade Trump to restore the military aid.

Sondland was accused on Wednesday of making up meetings and conversations.

The image of someone carrying the flag of secession into the Capitol shocked lawmakers and the public alike. House Democratic Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said on CNN that this specific flag was never formally adopted by the Confederacy, but has since been used by the KKK, neo-Nazis and various other white supremacist groups. 

“That is something that will stay with me,” Allred told the newspaper. “They set up a noose and scaffolding on the Capitol Hill. This event has to be a wake-up call.”

In addition, authorities in Pinellas County, Florida arrested Adam Christian Johnson, who they said was the man who appeared in viral photos carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern. 

In 2018, Mr. Cohen tricked the former G.O.P. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama into giving him an interview for the Showtime satire show “Who is America?”