DL Open Thread: Saturday, March 16, 2024

How Delay Tactics Have Worked For Trump For Decades.

When facing legal woes, as he has for decades in civil courts, Mr. Trump seeks to manipulate the schedule. Whether or not the facts are in his favor, he plays a game of calendar calculus to pit one case against the other, in hopes of pushing them past the election.

Mr. Trump, who as president helped reshape the federal judiciary, has already persuaded the Supreme Court to delay his trial in Washington. His lawyers have buried judges in Florida and Georgia in enough legal motions and procedural complaints that his cases there have no set trial dates, either.

Until the election, his goal appears to be to manufacture the prosecutorial equivalent of a four-car pileup at the busiest legal intersection in America. And despite Mr. Trump’s laments about a cabal of Deep State liberal prosecutors putting their heads together to conspire against him, the reality is that there is no single cop directing traffic.

Would be nice if the Department of Justice played that role, but never mind.

Mr. Trump has exploited that gap, proposing delays in one case that have ultimately affected other cases and assigning the same lawyers to multiple matters, only to then turn around and argue that their schedules conflict.

It’s Trump’s FBI.  Good article from Bloomberg:

Rumors have long swirled that FBI agents at various field offices had been sympathetic to Trump even as the bureau launched investigations into his campaign and his business dealings. The claims were always attributed to anonymous sources. An email I obtained last year after a separate FOIA lawsuit related to the Jan. 6 Capital riots backs up those assertions.

“There’s no good way to say it,” read the email to deputy director Abbate. “So I’ll just be direct: from my first-hand and second-hand information from conversations since January 6th there is, at best, a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol and said it was no different than the BLM protests of last summer,” the person wrote a week after the riots.

Agents, especially those who work counterterrorism cases, he said, sympathized with the insurrectionists’ “frustration” and chalked it up to “everyone having been quarantined at home for months” due to COVID, losing their jobs and “fake news,” for example.

“A senior analyst from my first unit who retired less than 2 years ago has a Facebook page full of #StoptheSteal content. These are not one-off events – they are representative of a larger group within” the FBI, the agent wrote.

Stoopidest Column Of The Week?  Yes. I think so.  This wordsmith thinks Kamala Harris should step down ‘for the good of the country’:

The Democratic Party’s indulgence of identity politics has proved successful in building a diverse organization, but its strategy of courting (and pandering to) minority voters is the road to ruin.

I could just stop there.  But I won’t:

This is not a partisan suggestion. I said the same about Sarah Palin in 2008 when it became clear, as I wrote, that she was “out of her league.” No one would have blamed Palin for wanting to spend more time with her family, including a new baby, I said. I ended the column with these words, “Do it for your country.”

Right. Because Palin’s and Harris’ bios are pretty much exactly the same.  I think Harris is actually becoming more of an asset–she doesn’t meet with Benny Gantz w/o Biden’s approval.  She doesn’t campaign at a women’s health facility w/o the campaign’s knowledge.

I don’t know anything about this Kathleen Parker–except, she sucks at her job.

Today, I suck at my job.  Got places to go, things to do.

What do you want to talk about?