Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi late Thursday morning held a press conference and she did not disappoint.
Despite a conference committee of Democrats and Republicans working to avert the next shutdown – less than three weeks away thanks to President Donald Trump‘s demand for $5.7 billion for his wall – the Speaker made explicitly clear the wall will not be funded.
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Lin Wood, left, and Sidney Powell.
Do you remember Lin Wood, the Trump attorney who in December, 2020, accused Chief Justice John Roberts of raping and murdering children? How about this one: the very same Lin Wood accused Roberts of being responsible for the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in his sleep during a trip to a luxury hunting resort in Texas, a trip, incidentally, Roberts did not make with Scalia and his billionaire buddies.
That’s not all. In January of 2021, Wood alleged that child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, who had died in his cell at the Manhattan Correctional Center, was instead alive and could back up his charges about Justice Roberts. After the attack on the Capitol, Wood alleged that Vice President Pence, too, was a child molester and called for his death by firing squad. In May of 2021, Wood and his friends Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn were rewarded for their insane blathering by being invited to be keynote speakers at a gathering of QAnon fanatics in Dallas.
In November 2020, a week after Joe Biden was declared winner of the presidential election, Wood filed suit in Georgia, naming himself as plaintiff, to overturn the election results in that state, seeking to block certification of the Georgia election results. Later that month, a federal district judge appointed by Donald Trump threw out Wood’s lawsuit, finding it had “no basis in fact or law.” Wood had alleged that Trump won the election with 70 percent of the vote, and made the evidence-free charge that a conspiracy of the Chinese Communist Party, aided by “international communists” and certain Republican officials, had stolen the election from Trump. Wood appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
On December 5, 2020 the circuit court upheld the district court decision throwing out Wood’s lawsuit. He then filed another lawsuit in a different federal court district seeking to stop the runoff election for Georgia’s two senate seats. In his filing, Wood stated that the facts in his lawsuit were verified “under plenty of perjury” rather than the normal legal standard of “under penalty of perjury.”
Well, the State Bar in Georgia has finally caught up with Lin Wood. Before a decision could be rendered in a disciplinary hearing, Wood surrendered his law license, calling himself “the second most persecuted person in America.”
Wood joins a list of other Trump attorneys who have been disciplined by bar associations around the country. Rudy Giuliani had his license to practice law suspended in New York, and a disciplinary hearing by the Washington D.C. bar unanimously recommended that Giuliani lose his license there, too. Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, who is one of Trump’s co-defendants in Georgia, was disciplined by the Colorado bar for her actions as Trump’s attorney in cases seeking to overturn the election of 2020. Ellis has distinguished herself from other Trump attorneys, as well as from her co-defendants in Georgia, by announcing this week that she will not vote for Trump in 2024, because of Trump’s “malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
Another one of Trump’s attorneys, John Eastman, who authored the fake elector plan that was supposed to confuse, delay or outright cancel the counting of electoral ballots on Jan. 6, is facing a disciplinary hearing by the California bar seeking to take away his law license. Eastman is a defendant in the Georgia case against Trump and 17 others, and is an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against Trump in Washington, D.C. So is Giuliani. This week, he was sued for $1.4 million in unpaid legal bills by the law firm of Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, who said Giuliani had racked up $1.6 million in legal bills between November of 2019 and July of 2023 and paid only $214,000 of that amount.
In Michigan, a court ruled in 2021 that a lawsuit filed by Sidney “Bring the Kraken” Powell and Lin Wood and several other attorneys was “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process” and had been “brought in bad faith and for improper purpose.” The court sanctioned the attorneys and ordered Powell and Wood and the rest of them to pay $175,250 to the city of Detroit for lawyers’ fees and court costs and referred all the attorneys to their state bars for unethical conduct that could lead to disbarment.
Powell joined Wood in a second lawsuit filed in Georgia in November 2020 against Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking a court to end the certification of the election results. In Powell’s and Wood’s lawsuits in both Georgia and Michigan, the word “district” was misspelled in three different ways on the first pages of the lawsuits. Misspelled words alone should be grounds for disbarment, especially when you consider that spell-check programs are included in the word processors, meaning that the spell-check suggestions, all three of them, would have had to be intentionally ignored in the legal filings, showing evidence of contempt of court.
It is not a good time to be a lawyer for Donald Trump, or even a lawyer for a lawyer for Donald Trump. There is always the issue of whether you will get paid, of course, and on top of that, there is the issue of whether you will continue to be permitted to practice law and earn a living as a lawyer.
Food for thought as certain members of various bars head into a year of trials, disbarment proceedings, and potential lawsuits that attorneys representing the likes of Trump and Giuliani and Powell and Eastman and the rest of them might be asked to file. Lin Wood, at least, will be spared those risks, as he will never set foot in a courtroom again unless he is a defendant.
When a Georgia grand jury handed down indictments on August 15 against Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants for racketeering in a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia, it was announced that a previous investigative grand jury had recommended that 11 additional people be indicted on the same charges, along with other several people who had posed as fake electors for Donald Trump. Among the 11 people not indicted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis were South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, former Georgia Senator David Perdue, Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, long-time Trump lawyer and adviser Epshteyn, and — ta da! — former lawyer Lin Wood.
There was a great deal of speculation at the time of the racketeering indictments against Trump and his co-defendants about why the other people recommended for indictment were spared, especially when it became known that the votes in the investigative grand jury to recommend indictment against Wood and others were twenty to one, with no abstentions. With grand jury votes like those, there must have been great piles of evidence indicating their participation in the conspiracy to overthrow the election results. What could have been the reasons Fani Willis declined to indict them?
Well, in the case of at least one of them, our friend former attorney Lin Wood, who surrendered his law license in July, we have an answer. In a filing today listing attorneys for Trump co-defendants who have conflicts of interest in the racketeering case, Willis said that one of the attorneys had a conflict of interest because he previously had been co-counsel with Wood in a lawsuit against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and that Wood is now “a witness for the state” in the racketeering case, and “would be subject to cross-examination by him were he to remain counsel of record in this case.”
What that legalese means is that Lin Wood copped a plea in the racketeering case against Trump and the rest of them and he will be testifying against Trump or at least one, if not more, of his co-defendants. If one of the biggies left out of the racketeering indictment will be a witness in the case, there could be more.
With that little piece of juicy news, I will ask you to stay tuned, because there is doubtlessly more to come from the state of Georgia.
When a Georgia grand jury handed down indictments on August 15 against Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants for racketeering in a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia, it was announced that a previous investigative grand jury had recommended that 11 additional people be indicted on the same charges, along with other several people who had posed as fake electors for Donald Trump. Among the 11 people not indicted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis were South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, former Georgia Senator David Perdue, Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, long-time Trump lawyer and adviser Epshteyn, and — ta da! — former lawyer Lin Wood.
There was a great deal of speculation at the time of the racketeering indictments against Trump and his co-defendants about why the other people recommended for indictment were spared, especially when it became known that the votes in the investigative grand jury to recommend indictment against Wood and others were twenty to one, with no abstentions. With grand jury votes like those, there must have been great piles of evidence indicating their participation in the conspiracy to overthrow the election results. What could have been the reasons Fani Willis declined to indict them?
Well, in the case of at least one of them, our friend former attorney Lin Wood, who surrendered his law license in July, we have an answer. In a filing today listing attorneys for Trump co-defendants who have conflicts of interest in the racketeering case, Willis said that one of the attorneys had a conflict of interest because he previously had been co-counsel with Wood in a lawsuit against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and that Wood is now “a witness for the state” in the racketeering case, and “would be subject to cross-examination by him were he to remain counsel of record in this case.”
What that legalese means is that Lin Wood copped a plea in the racketeering case against Trump and the rest of them and he will be testifying against Trump or at least one, if not more, of his co-defendants. If one of the biggies left out of the racketeering indictment will be a witness in the case, there could be more.
With that little piece of juicy news, I will ask you to stay tuned, because there is doubtlessly more to come from the state of Georgia.
Time was when getting caught in a malicious lie about a rival would have ended an American politician’s career. We no longer live that way. Just the other day, Donald Trump unleashed a series of falsehoods attacking President Biden that would have shamed a carnival barker.
Speaking to a rally in South Dakota, Trump delivered a series of mocking claims, beginning with the allegation that the administration was using made-up jobs numbers when the truth is that only 2.1 million jobs have been created during the president’s 30 months in office. The actual statistics show somewhere over 13 million—including near-record growth in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) during the recovery from the 2020 Covid slump.
Then Trump got personal. “He makes up these stories, like there’s a picture of a fighter jet…[mocking] You know like ‘I used to be a fighter jet pilot.’ Then there’s a picture of a truck. ‘I used to drive a truck.’ The worst is, did you ever see his golf swing? He said he’s a six-handicap! A six handicap is a good golfer. This guy can’t hit a ball… I think that’s the biggest lie of all, if you want to know the truth.”
Trump shakes his head in feigned disbelief as the crowd laughs and applauds. (Never mind that there’s a best-selling book by veteran sportswriter Rick Reilly called Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump describing how he races down fairways in his golf cart, kicks opponent’s balls into ponds, drops his own onto the green, etc. Filled with interviews of golf pros and caddies, it’s actually quite funny.)
So is Trump’s performance, or would be if you didn’t know—South Dakota isn’t exactly a golfing hotbed—that every single word of it is a malicious lie. Joe Biden has never claimed to be a truck driver or a fighter pilot. Don’t you think you’d have heard?
Biden has mostly made self-deprecating jokes about his golf game, commenting that “the course record remains intact” after his initial outing as president. Back in 2018 he carried a USGA handicap of 6.7, according to Golf News Net, which is pretty good—no surprise as Biden was an accomplished athlete as a young man. But he’s never boasted about it.
Anyway, who cares? As a politician, Trump himself is treated by audiences and reporters alike as a stand-up comic. Which would be fine if he stuck to stage performances. Alas, polls show that millions of gullible Americans believe even the most absurd of his inventions. Deep-thinking pundits are writing columns about Biden’s great unpopularity, which reality-oriented blogger Kevin Drum shows is largely a function of false memories.
I like Drum because he’s an engineer by training who lives in Orange County, California and is congenitally immune to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom. Recently he posted a graph comparing the “favorability” ratings of the last several presidents at the equivalent point in their respective administrations. It turns out that they all hovered in the forties. It comes with the territory. Biden’s in no worse shape politically than Clinton, Obama, or Trump.
Only George W. Bush, thanks to the strong patriotic surge in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was in better shape. However, Dubya’s disastrous second term drove his approval down to 24 percent by 2008.
So, no President Biden isn’t deeply unpopular with the public, and certainly not in comparison with Trump, whose negatives are markedly worse even in Fox News surveys. That said, polls mean very little at this point in the election cycle, and have pretty much failed to predict the results in any of the last several national contests.
Remember the vaunted “Red Wave” in 2022? Never happened. People pretty much don’t answer their phones unless they know who’s calling. The whole business of public opinion polling is an increasingly shaky enterprise.
I suspect it’s pretty much the same with the whole Fox News-generated Hunter Biden saga. Supposedly a majority of Americans believes Joe Biden has violated the law in his dealings with his wayward son. Apart from not paying his taxes on time, however, it isn’t even clear what crimes the younger Biden’s alleged to have committed. It’s not against the law to work for a foreign corporation, nor to drop Daddy’s name in business meetings.
If it were, there wouldn’t be a Trump sibling walking around free, much less cashing humungous checks from Saudi Arabia.
Doting father that he is, I quite doubt that Joe Biden fills out Hunter’s IRS form 1040. Nor that after decades in public life with no sign of financial impropriety, he suddenly got greedy in his 70s. However, Fox News imagineers appear to have persuaded millions of viewers that with all the manure they’ve shoveled, there must be a pony.
Gullible cynicism regarding politicians is always fashionable. But if they go ahead and impeach the president, they’d better produce that pony.
Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President.
