Author: clearandpresentdanger

 

 

 

Yes, all you Republicon retards — I know “indictment” does not mean “guilty verdict.”  All indictment means is that a grand jury has listened to mountains of evidence and they have concluded sufficient evidence exists to believe that a crime was committed.

Yes, I know we are a long way from Trump behind bars.  In fact, if he is found guilty in this case, he likely will receive only a huge fine and possibly a bar to ever run for public office.

Meanwhile, three more cases are moving toward indictment:

1. Trump’s attempt to overturn election results in Georgia.
2. Trump’s theft of classified documents.
3. Trump’s part of an attempted coup, including the formation of fake slates of Presidential electors.
   

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Meanwhile:

Former President Donald Trump has been indicted by a grand jury empaneled by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office — the first time a former president has been criminally charged in the history of the United States.

The indictment is under seal, and the exact charges are unknown. However, they stem from a $130,000 illegal hush payment Trump is accused of facilitating through his former attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, to adult film star Stormy Daniels, to cover up an affair the two of them had during the 2016 presidential election.

Cohen was sentenced to prison in that scheme over charges of bank fraud, tax evasion, and campaign finance violations, and since being released has given information to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg in the case against his former boss.

The indictment of Trump comes after a long on-again, off-again investigation by New York prosecutors. Bragg originally declined to press charges against Trump as part of an investigation of his business practices, a move that generated controversy and led to criticism from former prosecutors in the office.

Ahead of the indictment, Trump called for his supporters to stage protests — which prompted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to step in and urge against violence.

Trump is widely expected to continue his campaign for president in 2024, regardless of the charges against him.

This is not the only criminal investigation of the former president. In Georgia, Fulton County DA Fani Willis is investigating him as part of her probe into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia — including the effort to seat fake Trump electors and the former president’s phone call with Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding he “find” extra votes to win the state for him.

Meanwhile, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is investigating Trump on two different fronts: his role in the incitement of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and his efforts to confiscate and improperly stash highly classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida. Either of those could result in federal charges.

 

 

Covenant Presbyterian Has An Uncomfortable History With Molestation

(Link may be behind a paywall — quoting from the link.)

The interesting twist to this particular civil case is the allegation that wealthy and influential Covenant Presbyterian Church leaders “unlawfully intimidated” Austin Davis and his family. Specifically,  the allegation is that in 2008 Covenant Presbyterian church officials sought to intentionally ruin Mr. Davis’ good name and reputation by falsely accusing him of being ‘mentally unbalanced,’ telling civil authorities, members of the congregation, and others that he was “a security concern” and was “threatening to bring harm to the congregation or its members by use of force, including but not limited to guns.” This slander, according to the allegation, was designed to discredit Austin Davis and to allow church officials to conceal from public view the  “heinous and repetitive”  sexual molestations of a minor by one of the church’s officers (see Complaints 18-24).

Note that 2008 may well have been the very time that Audrey Hale was attending the school. That certainly seems like the kind of coincidence worth investigating further. Does Hale’s “manifesto” say anything about being sexually abused at the school? We don’t know yet because authorities are apparently dragging their feet about releasing it. Now why would that be?

Mike Huckabee’s ghost writer, John Perry, was a founder and officer at Covenant Presbyterian in Nashville (where the school shooting occurred), until 2012. In 2007, Perry sexually abused a girl for three years, from age 11-14, and the church covered it up.

All this stuff is right out there in the public record, so hopefully our Elite Media will start mentioning it, and possibly even investigating it further.

After the shootings, police will conduct another investigation. If Audrey Hale was molested by a church elder, will the church fully cooperate? Or, as is so common in religous sexual abuse, will Covenant Presbyterian slap a Band-Aid on it and let the rot fester? The usual excuse is that hey, everyone prayed and the victim forgave the abuser. Happy ending!

Or maybe not.

CNN is now confirming what we’ve all suspected for a while now: House Republican caucus and committee leaders have been in regular communications with the coup-attempting Donald Trump, keeping him personally up to date on the status of committees and investigations launched to help cover up Trump’s crimes.

“Not only are Trump, his aides and close allies regularly apprised of Republicans’ committee work, they also at times exert influence over it,” reports CNN. And those communications have “emerged as a crucial method for Trump to shape Republicans’ priorities in their newly-won House majority.”

It’s long been evident that House Republicans have seen their defenses of Donald Trump’s often criminal-seeming acts as their top priority—and if there’s any priority number two, it’s certainly not evident. House Republican have made efforts to scuttle Trump’s impeachment for the extortion of the Ukrainian government and block investigations of the Trump’s Jan. 6 rally and the resulting attempted insurrection, refused to testify about their own acts leading up to and during the coup attempt, created a new committee devoted to “investigating” those that who have investigated Trump, and demanded that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg turn over all evidence in his own investigation of Trump’s hush money payments and the possible criminal cover-up of those payments. Republicans have been all-in in their efforts to sabotage any and all investigations of Trump.

CNN’s report puts a new spin on it, however. It’s not just that House Republicans have volunteered themselves as Trump’s personal saboteurs. They’ve been coordinating with Trump himself, even two years after Trump left office following his attempted coup.

CNN names Rep. Elise Stefanik as Trump’s “key point person” in House leadership, reporting that she and Trump “spoke several times last week alone, where she walked him through the GOP’s plans for an aggressive response to Bragg.” House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan and Trump also “speak regularly,” and Trump “has been regularly briefed” on what Oversight Committee Chair James Comer is working on.

The news that House Republicans have been in constant communication with Donald Trump as they mounted their new attack on Bragg would seem to be even more evidence that Jordan, Comer, and House Republican leadership are mounting the “investigation” of Bragg’s case specifically so that they can share confidential information about Bragg’s evidence and witnesses with Donald Trump. That’s been a long-running game among Trump’s House defenders. House Republicans invariably respond to investigations of possible crimes by Trump by exposing and then publicly demonizing witnesses and investigators, often by encouraging hoaxes and false claims against their targets.

So, yes. Jordan and other Republicans have been in constant touch with Trump as they formulated their attacks on Bragg. And yes, it does appear that there’s a direct pipeline in place that will feed whatever confidential information about Bragg’s case to Trump’s lawyers and Trump himself. It’s not obstruction of justice if Jordan does it!

What’s still not clear in any of this is just why Jordan and the rest of Republicanism continues to live inside Trump’s boxer shorts. Trump has been out of office for two years. Trump left office as the first American president to attempt a coup rather than give up power. Hundreds of police officers were attacked inside the U.S. Capitol as his insurrectionist mob battled their way towards the joint session of Congress that was held to formalize Trump’s loss. Trump is currently facing state lawsuits and investigations related to rape, bank fraud, campaign finance crimes, and a pressure campaign against Georgia election officials encouraging them to alter vote totals.

At any point, any at all, House Republicans could have cut Trump loose. It would have been easy. Jordan could have hopped up to a podium and said, “I’m sorry, we Republicans can overlook a whole lot of creepy-ass crimes but this dude is too much. We’re out.” Anyone could have said it. Trump only has power over the entire Republican Party if the entire Republican Party gives it to him. If Fox News, the conservative conference circuit, and the aimless wanderers of the Republican House and Senate caucuses declared Trump to be a Secret Liberal or in league with groomers or take-your-pick, history suggests the Republican base would go along with it without much complaint. A new Dear Leader gets chosen, photos of the last one get airbrushed away, done.

But no—for some reason, Republicans are more unified behind this golf-cheating blowhard then they’ve been around any other figure in the party’s modern history. It’s George W. Bush who’s been sent off to paint pictures of dogs. Donald Trump, on the other hand, gets constant updates on what precisely each elected Republican sycophant is doing to benefit him on any given day.

There’s something about the constantly lying, cheating, whining grievance machine that convinces Republicans that Donald Trump, of all people, is the savior the party has been waiting for all along.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) grilled Washington, D.C. Councilmember Charles Allen over public urination laws in the city.

During a Wednesday House Oversight hearing on D.C., Boebert used her time to focus on proposed changes to the criminal code.

“In November of 2022, you led the charge to reform D.C.’s crime laws,” Boebert charged. “And these charges, these changes, are now law here in D.C., correct?”

“No, those are not the law,” Allen stated.

“Those are not the law?” Boebert replied.

“You overturned them,” Allen said of Congress.

“Mr. Allen, did you or did you not decriminalize public urination in Washington, D.C.?” Boebert asked.

“No, we did not,” Allen said.

“Did you lead the charge to decriminalize public urination in Washington, D.C.?” Boebert asked again.

“No, ma’am,” Allen answered.

“Did you ever vote in favor of decriminalizing public urination in Washington, D.C.?” Boebert pressed.

“The revised criminal code that was passed by the council kept it as a criminal offense,” Allen noted.

“We have records that show that you were in favor of removing that criminal offense and allowing public urination,” Boebert insisted.

“No,” Allen pushed back.

We know Trump and his Republican defenders are trash because they  celebrate the Jan. 6 criminals as heroes.  Trash defending trash

At the rally, Trump showed a video of jailed rioters singing a song, “Justice for All,” and the national anthem.  Trump  then defended the Jan. 6 criminals and raged against “thug” prosecutors.

Can you imagine if a Democrat did this?

Here is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination,  praising a “choir of convicts” who beat the shit out of cops with an American flag and four cops died.  This “convict choir” defecated in the Capitol.

Can you imagine if Democrats did all of that, and then Bernie Sanders says, “I have an idea, let’s make a choir, we can celebrate the fact that they defecated on the cops, we can do that — that will help us?”  Think about that, what would Newsmax say, what would Fox say, what would all of these right wing propaganda outlests say?

This is the hero of the Republican Party. He is trash and they are trash for supporting him.

I predict this will happen shortly after Trump is trashed in the November 2024 election.

 

 

At least three children and three adults are dead after a shooting Monday at the Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, that teaches preschool through 6th grade, police said.  The three children were students at the elementary school; two of the adults were teachers, one adult was the female shooter.

The shooter, who was identified as a 28-year-old Nashville woman, was killed during gunfire with police, authorities said. Her identity and motive is yet to be confirmed.

THIS IS THE 2022 CHRISTMAS CARD FROM CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVE ANDY OGLES (REPUBLICAN, TN-05) WHO REPRESENTS THE DISTRICT WHERE THE SHOOTING OCCURRED.

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PHOTOS FROM THE AFTERMATH OF THE NASHVILLE TN SCHOOL SHOOTING