2020 Presidential Election

Blast from the Past: Civil War Squared

Featured image With the Civil War back in the news—both the first one in 1861 (one of the items that will be a major focus of this week’s Three Whisky Happy Hour podcast coming Saturday morning) and the prospective one today because of Trump’s supposed “Threat to DemocracyTM” (let’s start calling it Civil War 2, or Civil War2), it seems to me worth re-upping the column I published in the New York Post »

Mitrokhin Phone Home

Featured image “Ex-CIA analyst says intel agencies to be politically active again in 2024 election: ‘Significant problem,’” proclaimed the January 2 Fox News headline. The former CIA analyst is Georgetown professor John Gentry, who cites “ideology driven analytic errors” such as diversity, equity and inclusion policies. According to Gentry, Bill Clinton launched the DEI policy, formally established by an Obama executive order in 2011. Gentry flags former CIA boss John Brennan and »

Three damn things

Featured image In his post on Bill Barr, Lloyd Billingsley draws on One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General to mount a critique of Barr’s service as AG in two administrations, the second time at the behest of President Trump. Along with former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, I thought Barr was one of Trump’s most impressive appointees. If Trump were to be reelected in 2024, »

The Giuliani verdict [corrected]

Featured image Association with President Trump has led to the ruination of many of his supporters. Rudy Giuliani seems to me foremost among them, but I may be shortchanging some other prominent members of his team. These supporters of President Trump are nevertheless adults responsible for their own actions. In my opinion, the country would nevertheless have been better served by their counseling Trump to take another path than the one he »

Sidney Powell Pleads

Featured image News organizations are headlining Sidney Powell’s guilty plea in the Georgia case in which she is a co-defendant with Donald Trump as if it were significant news. It isn’t, except, of course, to Ms. Powell. The Georgia indictment accuses Trump and a number of others of conspiring to overturn the apparent result of the 2020 election in Georgia. I wrote about the indictment in detail here. The problem with the »

Still dirty after all these years

Featured image Former CIA Director Leon Panetta was a prominent member of the Dirty 51 — the former intelligence officials who signed the lying public statement (“letter”) asserting that the New York Post’s 2020 reporting on the emails found on the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s laptop “ha[d] all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” If you need a refresher, review Natasha Bertrand’s October 19, 2020 Politico story on the »

Shut up, he explained

Featured image The Biden administration has deputized Krazee-Eyez Killa Jack Smith to put President Trump away some time before the 2024 presidential election. The train keeps a rollin’, banana republic style. Last week Smith filed a motion in his District of Columbia 2020 election case against Trump. Smith’s motion is supported by a 19-page memorandum that is posted online here. Jonathan Turley criticizes Smith’s motion in “Gagging Donald Trump: Why Smith’s ‘Narrowly »

Mail-In Voting Is Here to Stay; GOP Must Adapt or Lose

Featured image In a perfect world, voters would be required to show up on Election Day to cast their ballots. Unfortunately, the pandemic handed Democrats a golden opportunity to implement mail-in voting and its close cousins, early voting and ballot harvesting, on an unprecedented scale. As dangerous and unpalatable as these activities may be, they are here to stay. By Election Day, Democratic candidates, who have been getting out the vote for »

Take a load off Fani: Stuck inside of Fulton County

Featured image Mark Meadows is one of the defendants in the Georgia state criminal case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis against President Trump and a cast of thousands. Meadows is Trump’s former chief of staff and the two crimes with which he is charged arise from his service to Trump. Meadows therefore sought removal of the charges against him from state to federal court under the federal officer removal »

Is Lindsey Graham a Ham Sandwich?

Featured image The familiar adage is that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Support for that idea comes from this story: “Georgia special grand jury recommended charges for Sens. Lindsey Graham, David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler.” A special grand jury recommended that Atlanta’s district attorney seek to charge three current and former US senators in connection with former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential »

The Party that Cried Wolf

Featured image Desperate to take the focus off the FBI’s investigation into her use of a private server during her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton and her sycophants strangled reality beyond all recognition to build the case that then-candidate Donald Trump was an agent of Russia. Although Clinton lost the 2016 election, their efforts mired Trump’s campaign and then his nascent presidency in scandal for three years. And to this »

Things that go Bump in the day

Featured image James Taranto observed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal apropos of the Dem/media assault on Justice Thomas that “[o]ne reason Americans don’t trust the media is that politically biased reporters routinely adulterate the news with tendentious language and prepackaged opinions. The result is crude propaganda—lousy opinion writing and unreliable information rolled into one and deceptively packaged as straight news.” Take the case of the Washington Post and Post “national columnist” Philip »

Hunter Biden’s sweetheart deal was even sweeter before news of IRS whistleblower

Featured image We were all appalled to hear in June that Hunter Biden had received a sweetheart plea deal from U.S. Attorney David Weiss. Under that agreement, Hunter would plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of tax evasion and enter into a pretrial diversion agreement on a felony charge of possession of a firearm by a user of illegal drugs. As we know, the deal fell apart in spectacular fashion at the »

I Read the Georgia Indictment, So You Don’t Have To

Featured image The Georgia indictment relates to Donald Trump’s (and 18 other defendants’) post-election efforts to reverse the apparent result of the 2020 election, in Georgia and elsewhere. That Trump made such attempts is not disputed. The question is, what did he do that was illegal? The indictment alleges a vast conspiracy, supported by 161 “overt acts,” that ultimately comprises Count I, a violation of Georgia’s RICO statute. The problem is that, »

Take a load off Fani

Featured image A Fulton County Georgia grand jury handed up an indictment of President Trump and 18 other staffers and lawyers including Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell in connection with the 2020 election. The sprawling indictment runs to 41 counts and 98 pages in all. Thirteen of the 41 counts charge Trump. A racketeering charge leads the indictment. Jonathan Turley comments: “District Attorney Fani Willis appears »

Amateur Hour In Georgia

Featured image Reuters reports that earlier today, the Fulton County state court posted a “Case Information” document that lists charges against Donald Trump. The document was subsequently deleted, but you can see it here. The District Attorney’s office stated: “The Reuters report that those charges were filed is inaccurate. Beyond that we cannot comment,” a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s office said. While the court was even less forthcoming: The court clerk’s »

Trump Indictment: Sad Story, Lousy Legal Theories

Featured image I have now read the Democrats’ long-awaited indictment of Donald Trump for his actions after the 2020 election. Here are some thoughts: * The indictment describes numerous instances of bad behavior by Trump. Trump’s conduct, as described with considerable supporting evidence, deserves criticism, censure, opprobrium. It implies that nominating him to run again for the presidency would be a catastrophic error. But whether the indictment describes crimes is a completely »