Tag: law

 Of course it is. Assuming that he’s still the President….

A simple majority of US Senators have voted to recognize the impending impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump as constitutional. Trump’s legal team insisted the chamber lacks the jurisdiction to try an ex-president. Six Republicans joined Senate Democrats on Tuesday to give the go-ahead for Trump’s second impeachment trial. Mitt Romney, Bill Cassidy, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Pat Toomey broke with the rest of their party to guarantee the trial moves ahead. The task was not daunting, as only a simple majority was needed, with the final vote tally being 56-44.

Lawyers love to talk tough about how they’ll fight to death for their clients, in much the same way that journalists love to talk tough about their commitment to free speech. But both groups are not only made up of paper tigers, on average, both tend to have commitments that are best described as transient and mercenary, as this account of President Trump’s legal team demonstrates in an account that rings disturbingly true.

After some time (20-30 minutes), three lawyers appeared together. They did not introduce themselves, and stood huddling in the back of the Oval Office, listening. In addition, Mark Meadows and someone else joined us by speaker phone. Eventually the lawyers in the back began muttering things to make their displeasure and disagreement evident. Finally President Trump said something indicating this was new to him, wondering why no one had shown him this route through the impasse. I said again, “Sir, again, CEO to CEO, you are not being served well by those around you in the White House. I’ve gotten to know staffers in your White House, and they tell me they are being told that leadership here is telling them to get you to concede.”

Trump started to say something to Mike and Sidney, but he stopped himself and turned back towards me. “Who?” He asked angrily, “Who wants me to concede?”

I was taken aback by his anger, because I thought what I was telling him was common knowledge. I thought it was generally understood that about half the White House was in on the program of getting him to concede, for that was the estimate I was repeatedly told. “Sir, I am surprised you’re surprised…. In your White House leadership is telling junior staff this everywhere. I am told that this fellow Pat Cipollone [indicating the lawyers behind me as I spoke, not knowing which was Cipollone] has been telling people since November 4, ‘Just help us get the President to concede.’ And for the last couple of weeks, Mark Meadows has been telling staff, ‘Help get the President into transition mode.’”

Trump turned to White House General Counsel Pat Cipollone, who began sputtering. “Mr. President, you know how hard I work, you know how many hours I have been putting in…” Both of which were mealy-mouthed, and neither of which was a direct denial, as was obvious to everyone in the room.  Trump faced him, his face darkening in anger.

“Sir,” I continued, “in 30 minutes I can have a number of staffers from within your White House  here to tell you that those are quotes from Pat Cipollone and Mark Meadows. This guy is lying to you through his teeth. They want you to lose.”

Trump turned, knowing I was correct. He indicated one of the other lawyers, said, “Did you know that this is his last day? He has a job starting Monday at a law firm up the street, getting paid 10 times what I can pay him here.” He continued wistfully, “Pat, can you imagine what I could have gotten done here, if I had not been fighting my own people?”

Cipollone and the other two lawyers scurried out the back door of the Oval Office. I heard them stay out in the ante room, caucusing. Meanwhile, the President, Sidney, Mike, Alyssa, and myself continued for a while walking through more of the details, reviewing some of what we had said earlier. At some point Allyssa, that quiet but razor-sharp female lawyer assisting Sidney, took over for a few points, and concisely explained aspects of the executive order, always clarifying with great precision whatever needed to be clarified.

After 10 minutes the three lawyers walked back into the room and stood, this time not in the back, but abreast and to the left of we four visitors: Alyssa, myself, Mike, and Sidney, sitting in chairs in a half-moon in front of the Resolute desk. Mike continued taking operational questions that arose, while Sidney and Alyssa handled the legal questions that arose. The three male lawyers edged closer to the front, and then as though as some hidden signal, they all started being bitches.

First was some comment about it not being right to use the National Guard. “The optics are terrible, Mr. President,” said one. “It would have to be the DHS.”  I liked the National Guard idea because we needed to reestablish trust of the American people in the electoral process, and the US institution with the most trust is the one where people dress in military uniforms. Yet the National Guard is local, they are all around us, our colleagues at work, our “Citizen Soldiers”. But perhaps in a sign of flexibility, Flynn and Sidney allowed as how one could use the DHS instead of the National Guard.

“The press would tear your apart,” predicted Pat Cipollone at one turn in the conversation. Sidney said what Mike and I were both thinking: The press is going to tear him apart? Really? What are they doing now?

At some point Cipollone objected, “Never in American history has there been this kind of a challenge to an election!” Flynn responded, “Never in American history has there been a situation like this, with counting being shut down for hours, foreigners connecting to our equipment, …..” and so on.

“He does not have the authority to do this!” Cipollone thundered eventually. Sidney rejoined, “Of course he does,” citing EO 13848 (and something else signed by Obama). “Without question he has the authority.” Alyssa whipped out EO 13848 again and showed the relevant language that we had just covered. Trump looked at Cipollone with an expression that said, You never even brought this to my attention, Pat. He said to Cipolloner, “You know Pat, at least they want to fight for me. You don’t even fight for me. You just tell me everything I can’t do.”

Fortunately, you can reliably tell when a lawyer is BS’ing you, as they transition from discussing the genuine legal issues to the practical implications without even noticing that they have done so. Once they do that, you know you can safely disregard everything they are saying, since lawyers tend to know considerably less about the practical realities than their clients who actually work in the real world. 

The mistake most people make is allowing their lawyers to make strategic decisions for them, which usually doesn’t work out well for the obvious reason that lawyers are trained to think in a purely tactical manner. My advice is that if you have a lawyer who prefers telling you what you can’t do instead of helping you figuring out what you can do, don’t hesitate to get rid of him.

If you wrote a negative review of Robinhood, and you were truly one of their customers, file an arbitration against them. If they had 100,000 filed in one day, they’d tank. They require arbitration. They wont allow group actions. So, let them get consumed by piranhas!

– Marc Randazza

Not all of them, of course. But as a general rule, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that even highly successful lawyers are considerably less intelligent than successful entrepreneurs and even modestly accomplished computer programmers. What compounds their mediocrity is the fact that they are trained to not think, but rather, to do the legal equivalent of “skim until offended”. As one lawyer explained it to me, in law school they are trained to look for “the magic sentence” in the case law upon which the argument depends, then regurgitate it for gold stars and favorable decisions. At no point is any contextual thinking or holistic understanding taught, required, or encouraged.

This is why Patrick Byrne’s account of encountering Rudy Giuliani and his team rings absolutely true, as well as why we were correct to have no faith whatsoever in Team Giuliani’s legal approach to attacking the 2020 election fraud.

 I explained to him carefully the outline of what we understood at that point, an outline such as the reader might have after watching this presentation by the MIT Math PhD Dr. Shiva, or the exposition by Seth Keshel, as well as the cascade of stories of porous security in election software all referenced above. I feared overwhelming him, so I tried to simplify. Given that he sat grunting stoically as I spoke, it was difficult to judge what was sinking in. Yet after only 10 minutes I saw Rudy checking his multiple phones for texts, right in front of me as we sat talking. Conversing with one of his assistants, sending someone on a side errand, or receiving a report back. It felt rather strange to be talking to a man who was paying so little attention to me, but the Commish, sitting on the side, motioned for me to continue. After no more than 30 minutes I was ushered out of the office, but told to hang around.

Eventually I was brought back into a smaller room with Mayor Giuliani, and again asked to explain what I think happened. Realizing I may have overwhelmed him with my earlier explanation, gotten him lost in the forest for the trees, I broke it down simply and slowly, like one would for, well, one’s 76 year old Grandfather. Again within 5-10 minutes he was fidgeting, grunting on occasion, sending people on unrelated side errands, checking his multiple phones for texts and typing some people back…. Meanwhile, I tried to stay on track. Yet there was a moment 15 minutes in when I got a whiff of something in that small office…. Medicine? Booze? Just as I was taking a sniff to decide, someone rushed in with something unrelated issue, and I was escorted from the office.

Again I wandered around among the staff, most of whom were professing to know nothing about what was going on, and many others of whom were packing up desks in bankers’ boxes.  I was perplexed, and found myself drifting around the convoluted office space. 30 minutes later I was strolling outside some other conference room down the hall, when I heard Rudy’s familiar voice saying, “…don’t understand a fucking thing this guy’s telling me…” drifting out of a doorway. Startled, I looked around the corner, and there was Rudy talking to whatever group of staffers happened to be sitting worshipfully in that conference room to which he had moved.

Several staffers pulled me aside in a hallway. What Mayor Giuliani  is going to need, one told me, is a one page summary. Very simplified.

Another added, but with graphs and data.  

Another piped up, And bulletpoints. The Mayor likes bulletpoints!

But no more than one page! Repeated the first.

Insulted at Mediocrity and the 20-something staffers who were telling me how to write, and giving such asinine advice in the process, I promised I would get them something by the end of the weekend. 48 hours. I asked them for one favor: any requests that came from them should be orchestrated through one of their people, who would call one person whom I would designate among my cyber-team, and that way we would have some structure, and keep track of deliverables as we sought to accommodate their needs, so that it would not all turn into a shit-show.

Then I left and drove back to DC. By late that evening, I had learned that there were three different open requests from three people on Rudy’s team to various of my colleagues within the Bad News Bears. One was only going to handle passing requests of this type, one only wanted to handle passing on requests of that type… And the shit-show began.

I do not want to claim that everybody in that large but melting office space was incompetent. As I said, there were three competent, skillful lawyers (a fourth if one counted a Constitutional law scholar who was in and out).  But the atmosphere was one of despair, there was zero leadership shown, staffers were wondering around in the dark, and the meetings seemed like sophomore bull sessions rather than anything organized and disciplined.

From occasional contacts with several of those solid staffers over the weeks that followed, I learned what had had happened that day just before I arrived. Rudy had declaimed that, “You can never prove election fraud in a courtroom!” and had declared it was not going to be the strategy. The strategy was going to be to challenge things on procedural grounds: “This county in this state had one set of rules, this other county in that same state used a different set of rules, that violates due process and Equal Protection of the 14 Amendment.” So I was correct: just before I arrived there had been a huge blow-up between Rudy and Sidney in front of everyone, with Rudy ending by shouting at Sidney Powell and sending her away, in front of an office of dozens of people. Declaring that none of this was going to be about election fraud, and putting his lawyers to work on their procedural filings.

I don’t think Giuliani was taking a dive. I don’t think he ever had the ability to do any better. My impression is that his legal campaign was little more than a feint to keep the media distracted. Only time will tell. 

The legal team of The New York Times sounds a little… panicked.

The New York Times filed a “Motion to Dismiss” request in an attempt to toss out the lawsuit and evade their wrongdoing.

Maggie Astor, The New York Times reporter who wrote the defamatory article, affirmed in her piece that the Veritas videos have “solely” unnamed sources. 

“The video then claims that Democratic operatives connected to Ms. [Ilhan] Omar’s campaign paid voters to hand over blank mail-in ballots and filled them out. This would be illegal, but the allegations come solely from unnamed people who speak with Project Veritas operatives in the video and whose faces are not shown,” she said.

In an affidavit, Astor said that the videos have “many” unnamed sources.

“Many of the individuals featured in the Video were unnamed, and there was no way for me to verify the claims that the unnamed sources purport to make in the Video,” she said.

Astor said she relied on Project Veritas’ “reputation” when making her unfounded claims.

“I know of Project Veritas and, before writing my articles about the Video, I knew that it had a reputation for publishing deceptively-edited videos and had been publicly criticized many times for doing so,” she said.

While arguing to dismiss the case, The New York Times’ legal team cited Wikipedia.

“Project Veritas bills itself as a ‘prominent independent journalistic organization,’ but it is described on its Wikipedia page (and just about everywhere else) as ‘an American far-right activist group founded by James O’Keefe’ that ‘uses undercover techniques to reveal supposed liberal bias and corruption and is known for producing deceptively edited videos about media organizations, left-leaning groups, and debunked conspiracy theories,’” they said.

Wikipedia themselves admit that their website is not a reliable source of information.

New York Times’ legal team also labelled Astor’s article an opinion piece to avoid Project Veritas’ charges of defamation.

Now, I’m no legal expert, but even a humble consumer advocate knows that if your defense against a charge of defamation involves relying upon Wikipedia, you’re probably in trouble. 

For the lawsuit, anyhow. The California Superior Court informs us that Patreon dropped its lawsuit against the Bears on January 13th.

2021-01-13 DISMISSAL OF ENTIRE ACTION OF ALL PARTIES AND ALL CAUSES OF ACTION WITH PREJUDICE

2021-01-13 NOTICE RE REQUEST FOR DISMISSAL WITH PREJUDICE FILED BY PLAINTIFF PATREON, INC.

More sovereign states should follow Uganda’s example and completely ban the seditious big social media companies from operating inside their borders:

The government of Uganda has disabled Twitter within its borders for election interference, days after oligarch Jack Dorsey took initiative to suspend accounts supportive of President Yoweri Museveni.

President Museveni is known as a devout Christian, and has been the target of animosity from western governments and global corporations his his staunch opposition to homosexualism. Uganda’s election is scheduled for Thursday, and the state has suspended Facebook and Twitter’s services for systemic bias against his National Resistance Movement.

“That social channel you are talking about, if it is going to operate in Uganda, it should be used equitably by everybody who wants to use it,” Museveni said of Twitter and Facebook. “If you want to take sides against the National Resistance Movement, then that group will not operate in Uganda.”

The Big Tech platform commenced to whine up a storm after facing consequences for censorship, conveniently dismissing the reality that they were engaged in a wide-ranging campaign to censor figures associated with President Museveni, just days before a national election.

What a pity President Trump hasn’t yet shown himself to be as courageous a leader as President Museveni. Twitter really has no grounds for complaint. Uganda is a sovereign nation and a foreign corporation like Twitter has no right to operate there if the Ugandan government doesn’t wish to permit it to do so.

Lin Woods calls for two Supreme Court resignations.

Chief Justice John Roberts & Justice Stephen Breyer should resign from their positions on the United States Supreme Court by Noon ET tomorrow, January 2, 2021.

Well, they have another 20 minutes or so, though I’m not holding my breath.

 Patreon confirms that its lawsuit against the 72 Bears isn’t complex.

PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that Plaintiff Patreon, Inc. does not oppose Defendants’ Motion to Designate Case as Not Complex, filed December 9, 2020.  The parties stipulated on October 7, 2020 that this case should not be designated as complex. 

So as I surmised at the time, the belated designation of the Patreon case as complex litigation was just a mistake by the Clerk of the Court rather than shenanigans on anyone’s part. That mistake has been corrected and the only real consequence of this is the delay of what is best understood as a motion to dismiss being heard by Judge Schulman from December 16 to January 20.

The result of that hearing are not seriously in doubt, since as the Legal Legion has explained it to me, Patreon’s lawyers have never grasped that California law generally does not permit two simultaneous iterations of the same proceeding in different jurisdictions. Their lawyers appear to have misunderstood the case law that permits questions of arbitrability to be heard by a court BEFORE an arbitration begins in much the same way that an arbitration award can be challenged AFTER an arbitration ends.

But, as Judge Schulman’s order on the preliminary injunction has already explained, the courts are not generally permitted to, nor can they reasonably be expected to, interfere with ongoing arbitration proceedings once they have begun. So, the most likely outcome is that Judge Schulman will throw the Patreon case out for being untimely, and tell them to challenge the awards in the future if they don’t like the way the arbitrations turn out.

Which they probably won’t. The fact that Patreon has recently changed its terms of use to preclude arbitration rather than mandate it, and has removed its illegal forced waivers of jury trials and class actions, would appear to provide a fairly reliable guide to how Patreon thinks the arbitrations are going.

And they certainly don’t make strategic decisions. But this report by Patrick Byrne concerning a recent meeting at the White House would sound a lot more concerning if it wasn’t obviously limited to the President’s legal team:

“I was there for the full 4.5 hour meeting. Claims military coup/martial law were discussed is 100{e61d147451bc60549e96d95b5c07be35845e0345eab7ed5d54cc3d49f812ab5c} fabrication. Trump is lied to by his own advisers, who tell staff “get the president to concede“ while they stall Trump. Meadows + Lawyers Eric, Derek, GC Pat Cippollone (leaker).”

“Meadows and legal staff led by GC Cippolone reflexively shoot down every sober discussion or idea presented. Their frame of mind is automatic: “we better not try that, it may not work, it would hurt your reputation in the press…“ No kidding, they say stuff like that. Tell DJT.”

Byrne named the advisors he believes are hurting Trump, “Pat Cippollone and two other lawyers. Eric and Derek. Meadows wants him to concede and transition also.”

Responding to a poster who offered an opinion on why the establishment is intent on getting rid of Trump, “I’m convinced the US Establishment including the Republican Establishment have decided to end the Trump era. They want Biden/Harris and the Globalist Reset. The reason they have resorted to such extreme measures is because the Reset is time critical. They need the US on board now,” Byrne replied, “Correct.”

Byrne responded to several questions about the meeting and Trump’s attitude, It is 100{e61d147451bc60549e96d95b5c07be35845e0345eab7ed5d54cc3d49f812ab5c} winnable. No martial law required. Sydney and Flynn presented a course that I estimate has 50{e61d147451bc60549e96d95b5c07be35845e0345eab7ed5d54cc3d49f812ab5c} – 75{e61d147451bc60549e96d95b5c07be35845e0345eab7ed5d54cc3d49f812ab5c} chance of victory. His staff just try to convince him to do nothing but accept it. As a CEO, my heart broke to see what he is going through. He is betrayed from within.”…”He truly believe he won and he truly did win. I did not vote for him, but I don’t want to see our country hijacked in a psyop.”…”Too nice. Thinks he will look bad in press. Nonsense like that.”…He wants to fight on. They are bending over backwards to come up with reasons to tell him he can’t do anything. He needs to fire them all or he loses.”

One thing I’ve learned over the last few years is that lawyers are, for the most part, among the most cowardly people on the planet. They’re only the big tough intimidating courtroom giants they are portrayed as being on television when they are on the offensive and believe they are untouchable because the conflict doesn’t directly concern them. They tend to fold the minute that even the slightest criticism is directed at them personally; I’ve heard genuine panic in the voice of a top lawyer from a very high status firm when she was simply told to “stop lying”. The Legal Legion is most definitely not even close to the norm in the legal world.

Basically, they live in complete terror of the judges all the time, and unless a strategy offers a 100-percent chance of success, they don’t like it. “It may not work so we better not try it” rings absolutely true. They really don’t like genuine conflict and they are not accustomed to it; they remind me of point fighters facing the prospect of going into the full-contact ring for the first time.

That being said, there is zero chance that this group, with that lawerly mindset, has anything whatsoever to do with the NSA and military intelligence teams that set the election trap and is reported to “have it all”. So, while I think Byrne’s report is likely real, I don’t think it is as relevant as it sounds, because I think this is the legal plan team, as opposed to the legislative plan team, as opposed to the defend-the-Constitution team. And I doubt President Trump has much confidence in them, because he has a lot more experience with lawyers and knows far more about them than I do.