You wouldn’t happen to have any financial interest in overloading our courts with perfunctory proceedings or anything would you?
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I dunno about that in any way, shape, or form. Courts all over the country spend every day deciding peoples’ freedom or lack of it in any number of areas. Look at Britney, and she’s just one of around 1.3 million people in conservatorships, people who committed no crime or anything, yet have courts making decisions for them.
I think that’s a pretty compelling public interest right there-- pretty sure I’d not be a happy camper if someone convinced a judge to take my freedoms away like that.
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The problem with Bannon is he quite intelligent. He knows what he is doing in manipulating people. His lifestyle and belief in his own brilliance will likely be his comeuppance. But in the meantime, he doesn’t care what mayhem he creates. He is about as stateless an actor as you can get. He doesn’t care about the outcome as long as it gets what he wants specifically. The difference between Trump and Bannon in that regard is Trump is driven to be that way. Bannon has chosen to be so. Which makes him much more calculating in how he proceeds. He is a dangerous man despite being open to derision.
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Are witnesses or other participants in a trial process ever given cover because the defendants or those supportive of the defendants have a known, established PATTERN of harassing, threatening or harming witnesses? For instance, the Mafia, criminal gangs and drug cartels are known by courts and law enforcement to take out snitches or those helping courts and law enforcement in their efforts to take them down. Are prosecutors forced to prove individual by individual specific, known probable future harm to a witness when those being prosecuted have a history of witness intimidation or murder? Do judges ever say “Sure, we know the Sinaloa Cartel has disappeared many past witnesses, but I need you to prove THIS one is at specific risk to the same danger.”
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95% of all courtroom proceedings are perfunctory. All I’m calling for is to put the burden on the disclosing party to obtain a court order that the specific discovery materials are to be protected from disclosure. That requirement alone would negate 99% of such disputes, and it would clearly prevent, say for no particular reason, Skadden Arps from designating the entirety of is document production as confidential under a protective order that gave no consideration whatsoever to the actual contents of any of the materials.
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Given the selective bias shown by Mr Bannon and his ilks regarding the application of 1st Amendment protections (ie, they only apply to folks who he agrees with), I can see why some are a bit touchy here. I, for one, routinely ponder a constitutional carve-out for traitorous scum like him.
But I’m not a lawyer and am entitled (by the 1st Amendment) to my day-dreams…
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Go to fucking court and prove it. Or just fucking imagine it because it makes you feel better about things.
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Go to court and fucking prove it.
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Of course it is a bit sweeping, but it seems much of the MAGA crowd is swept up in the notion that law doesn’t apply to them, or more precisely the law is the servant of the powerful and since they are powerful they don’t have to answer to it. That is a Mafia family mentality, sort of what they have in Russia. So far the government has done very little to disabuse people like Bannon that the Putin theory of thug government isn’t absolutely correct. If they can hold things off until 2022 they will have control of congress again (and forever) and they will win.
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Contempt of Congress is literally a misdemeanor. I expect that most of the people defying committee subpoenas justifiably conclude that their personal interests are better served by doing 30-90 days in the pokey than either by being forthright with the committee or taking the alternative path of subjecting themselves to substantially more prison time for perjury.
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Well, yeah, and the whole milieu here doesn’t reward the cool, nuanced take on things as much as the thundering jeremiad, I get that, it’s the dopamine rush and all. “We’re abandoning the rule of law” is a short way of saying “I really really really want the DOJ to lockhimup Trump with cuffs and leg irons and an H. Lecter bitey mask and the full regalia, but it hasn’t happened yet and doesn’t look like it will soon and we can surmise they don’t want even the appearance of political retribution, the DOJ have been abused enough in recent memory, but even so I HATE IT and want what I want and another thing why haven’t they…” and so forth. It goes hand in hand with the statements about how if a particular thing you want to have happen doesn’t happen by a particular date, the republic is KAPUTSKI. It’s funny. Over a year or so we take several steps back from the precipice and everyone lots of people have become much more dramatic about things.
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The Rosamund Pike movie I Care a Lot is eye-opening. I had no idea about the conservator-ship racket before I saw it. The movie seems over-the-top, until you read the investigative article it was based on. Of course in the end there is movie justice that doesn’t reflect real life, but hey, it’s a movie.
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Any time you bring people and money together there’s a strong potential for abuse. Never known it to fail.
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OT but notable:
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Inspired by the acts of kindness and experiences that lifted our spirits this year, decorated rooms in the White House reflect the Gifts from the Heart that unite us all: faith, family, friendship, the arts, learning, nature, gratitude, service, community, peace, and unity. pic.twitter.com/fsaYFthIqH
— Jill Biden (@FLOTUS) November 29, 2021
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I know I can click through and not be confronted with a terrifying blood-red HELLSCAPE OF DOOM. It’s a nice, Christmassy feeling.
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The official White House Christmas tree is decorated with doves of peace - this is the first Christmas in a long while that we haven’t been at war.
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Genuine warmth and good cheer befitting the WH as opposed to the coldness of the past administration.
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There is a difference between confidential discovery and confidential prosecutions. Except in the rarest of circumstances, evidence presented at trial is public. We have public trials, not private trials. What is discoverable is not necessarily what is admissible. They are different things. And the TX lawyer’s point is a good one, in general. But this case is not the usual case.
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Is there a fair moniker to pin to these people? Brownshirts comes to mind, but not so sure its use will only drive the other side harder and allow for “over-reacting” label in reply.
They’d sign up to load the boxcars, in the blink of an eye.
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