THE CROOKED CLOWN SHOWS ROLLS ON

 

Saltz

 

Maddow

 

WEIRD DOESN'T BEGIN TO DESCRIBE THIS SICK CREEP

 

 

Jack Smith's Request GRANTED

Jack Smith asked the court for permission to exceed the page limit for his immunity brief, and Judge Chutkan granted it while denying Trump's request to toss out the case entirely.

MuellerSheWrote

Three days ago, Jack Smith filed a motion seeking permission to exceed the 45 page limit with his immunity brief due 2 days from now - informing the court he anticipates that he’ll need about 180 pages to fully brief on immunity because the vast amount of evidence he needs to submit for consideration.

In that motion to exceed the page limit, Jack Smith informed us that Trump opposes letting him file 180 pages, and that he wanted to file that opposition, which the Judge granted. Three days ago, I predicted his motion opposing exceeding the page limit would look something like this:

How DARE the lawless Special Counsel attempt to exceed the page limit to file an already lawless brief that he shouldn’t even be allowed to file because the court should reconsider the September 5th scheduling order and dismiss the case outright because the Mike Pence stuff is totally immune. Not to mention, everything in the Office’s false indictment is official acts, and we contend that the immunity is not just presumed, but absolute! So even though zero pages should be allowed to be filed, the court should deny the page limit exception and dismiss the whole shebang immediately, and if you don’t, you should delay the immunity brief until 2032 and force the Special Counsel to answer for his discovery violations! WE DEMAND STUFF THAT DOESN’T EXIST, YOU’RE BIASED AND VINDICTIVE, AND WE THINK YOU’RE STUPID!

Well, here’s what Trump’s opposition actually looks like:

The Office wants desperately to bar President Trump from the opportunity to make that showing so that they can improperly air their biased list of grievances.

These defects in the prosecution arise from, among other things, the absolute nature of immunity, the immunity attaching to the Office’s allegations relating to Vice President Pence.

The Court may not “adjudicate” superfluous Presidential immunity issues, including by allowing the Office to file this monstrosity, if President Trump can establish at the outset that immunity requires dismissal of the entire case

For all of these reasons, the Court should deny the Motion and reconsider the September 5, 2024 scheduling order by rejecting the Special Counsel’s lawless request to file a 180-page public defense of their defective Superseding Indictment before they are in compliance with their discovery obligations.

So I was pretty close. lol

Today, Judge Chutkan GRANTED Jack Smith’s request to exceed the page limit, and had a few other words for Trump, denying his request that she reconsider her September 5th scheduling order:

For the second time in a week, Defendant urges reconsideration of the current pretrial schedule in a brief intended to respond to a separate issue, and without actually filing a motion to that effect.

Defendant’s argument against the requested page limit expansion comprises a single statement that the Government’s request “would quadruple the standard page limits in this District.” The rest of the nine-page opposition rehashes Defendant’s position that immunity briefing should not begin until he files a motion to dismiss several months from now.

For completeness, however, the court will address more broadly Defendant’s new and sundry arguments about the pretrial schedule, none of which articulate a cognizable prejudice. First, he protests that the Government “aims to proffer their untested and biased views to the Court and the public as if they are conclusive.”

But allowing a brief from the Government is not “contrary to law procedure, and custom,” as Defendant claims; it is simply how litigation works: Each side presents arguments and proffers evidence on disputed issues—here, whether Defendant’s charged conduct involved official acts and receives immunity.

Second, Defendant asserts “that there are dispositive threshold legal questions . . . that can and should be resolved first,” including “the absolute nature of immunity, the immunity attaching to the Office’s allegations relating to Vice President Pence,” and the lawfulness of the Special Counsel Office’s structure.

[The threshold questions] both necessarily require the very briefing that the court has ordered. In ascertaining whether any charged conduct qualifies for immunity— absolute or otherwise—the court must first determine that it “qualifies as official.”

Third, Defendant argues that immunity briefing “is particularly improper” before the resolution of pending discovery disputes. …recognizing Defendant’s interest in obtaining lawful discovery that could bear on his own arguments and factual proffers related to immunity, the court has frontloaded discovery briefing in its schedule.

And this is the part about how much of the 180 pages will be filed under seal:

And the court did not accept the Government position that Defendant decries—“that even materials marked ‘nonsensitive’ under the Protective Order” should be kept under seal—instead extending that protection only to sensitive materials. The court likewise rejects Defendant’s unsupported assertion that publicly docketing nonsensitive materials during the immunity briefing would impermissibly “impact potential witnesses and taint the jury pool.” Moreover, and once again, Defendant offers no reason why the same predicted harms would not result from his own proposal, which would include immunity briefing with presumably the same materials.

She’s saying that both Jack Smith and Donald Trump wanted even nonsensitive stuff filed under seal, she rejected that and will only allow sensitive stuff to be filed under seal. We’ll know more when Jack Smith files his motion to file certain materials under seal.

And finally, I love this part:

Fifth and finally, Defendant claims that the Government’s forthcoming brief violates Department of Justice policy. He asserts that the brief “would be tantamount to a premature and improper Special Counsel report.”

This is especially hilarious given Trump tried to pressure Bill Barr to have John Durham release an “interim report” ahead of the 2020 election - causing Durham’s number two to resign in protest. The interim report was never filed.

Judge Chutkan goes on to say:

And he argues that the brief would run afoul of the Justice Manual, which prohibits federal prosecutors from “select[ing] the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election. The court need not address the substance of those claims. Defendant does not explain how those putative violations cause him legal prejudice in this case, nor how this court is bound by or has jurisdiction to enforce Department of Justice policy.

Perfect! The court is NOT BOUND by Justice Department policy! lol

She concludes: For these reasons, the Government’s Motion for Leave to File Oversized Motion is hereby GRANTED, and Defendant’s requests for reconsideration of the pretrial briefing schedule are DENIED.

Next steps? Jack Smith will file his motion for permission to file certain sensitive materials under seal in his 180 page brief - and that massive brief is due September 26th. I wonder if he’ll ask for more time, or if he’s ready to go. You can find trump’s unhinged opposition to the oversized brief here, and Judge Chutkan’s ruling today here.

Thanks for reading! Andy McCabe and I will go over all of this on the next episode of the Jack podcast. See you then!

~AG

STOP MAKING BIG TECH THE ENEMY

 

Stop Making Big Tech the Enemy

We're in a critical fight to stay ahead of China and India in A.I., yet our government and its regulators keep targeting the companies that are critical to winning. It's time we all played on the same team. 

Expert Opinion By Howard Tullman, General managing partner, G2T3V and Chicago High Tech Investors @howardtullman1

Sep 24, 2024

Election years are notorious for cheap stunts, useless hearings and the annually recurrent attacks on the tech and pharmaceutical industries. There's no lower-hanging fruit for these pointless pontificators than Big Bad Tech, and Big Pharma isn't far behind.

Nothing good ever comes of these abusive sessions except that they permit groups of know-nothing legislators to attempt to humiliate the leaders of some of the most important companies in America. They also consume loads of key management hours which - in these hyper-competitive times - is costly, counterproductive, and actively damaging to America's global market position.

Why anyone thinks these clown shows are productive has never been explained. Although in fairness, the price caps on insulin prices and prescription drugs that the Biden administration has executed are major and long-overdue accomplishments. They were so material and beneficial that the Orange Monster now claims that he was responsible for these new policies. He wasn't. The MAGAts had nothing whatsoever to do with it, but that's just another lie in Trump's vast portfolio of untruths.00:0001:49

The "gotcha" questions in these made-for-media harangues by idiots like MTG (R- GA), Lauren Boebert (R- CO) and James Comer (R-KY) are mostly for the benefit of right-wing cable networks. But they rarely result in anything more than displays of the ignorance of GOP hardliners. In 2018 Orin Hatch asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg how his company could sustain a business model where its users didn't pay for the service. Zuck answered, "Senator, we run ads." Congressman Louie Gohmert (R- TX) once opined that climate change legislation requiring climate-controlled environments for computers could affect the Earth's orbit.  It's often hard to tell the monkey from the organ grinder in these boring bouts of one-upmanship.

And remember when Fox host Bret Baier tried to gotcha Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg by asking him why Tesla wasn't invited to a White House session on tailpipe emissions? Imagine his surprise to learn that EVs don't have tailpipes. There's a quote attributed to Abe Lincoln that goes, "It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt." Apparently, there are plenty of politicos and pundits where Abe's warning never got through to its intended audience.

One of the most vocal and insufferable of these congressional clowns is coup conspirator "Gym" Jordan (R-Ohio) who at last count - over a six-year period - clocked more than 565 appearances on Fox and has written exactly zero pieces of legislation during that period. This idiot appears to be preparing additional hearings on nonsensical subjects and is once again planning to seek the speakership in the House if Mike Johnson, the current holder, falls by the wayside because he partnered with the Democrats to avoid the pre-election government shutdown that Trump has been demanding.

Intelligent people might simply ignore these theatrics and the millions of dollars shredded by these stupid shows, but sadly the constant noise and attacks have had two more serious and destructive effects. They have turned substantial portions of the public against the tech industry and they have encouraged and empowered long and very costly litigation by various governmental and regulatory agencies with their own agendas, who never seem to learn their lessons either.

In a digitally connected and fundamentally borderless world of increasing global competition, our own government continues to be short-sighted enough to sue, hamstring and interfere with the operations of our best and brightest businesses in a number of critical tech areas. Decades wasted in pursuit of Microsoft led nowhere, just as breaking up AT&T did absolutely nothing to help the consumer. Threats to break up Amazon and spin out AWS are a bad joke, especially since AWS presently operates more of the U.S. government's back-end computing power than the government itself. The next obvious and very precarious battlefront - with the meetings and hearings already starting - is going to be artificial intelligence, where our edge is already being seriously challenged by China and India.

Only five or six major U.S. tech companies are sufficiently resourced to do battle on our country's behalf in these massive, expensive and complex technology spaces. I've previously explained how challenging it is for smaller operators, entrepreneurs and new business builders to go up against the power and ubiquity of these major players. And that contest seems to be largely over already. Nothing that the U.S. government does in the way of trying to restrict or interfere with their growth is likely to help us in the long run.    

It doesn't take an A.I. prompt engineer to figure out that it's not really a fair fight when the government is on one side of the battle, even if the biggest and most successful tech companies in the U.S. are on the other. And, sadly for our country, it's a more obvious problem and threat when the government in question isn't even ours. The officials and regulators of the People's Republic of China are sponsoring, funding and leading the charge against the U.S. tech industry on behalf of their own China-based businesses as they try to compete with us in the critical industries of the future - especially in the area of artificial intelligence.    

Instead of the government tearing these tech leaders down with stupid hearings and pointless litigation and further slowing our country's growth and initiatives in A.I., we need our political leaders to implement programs and strategies that permit and encourage collaboratives, consortiums, and other shared efforts to put all our resources behind a concentrated effort and a single goal - a U.S. win. Or we can count on being overtaken and outrun by China in the A.I. global marketplace.