You and she and all the rest of us can enjoy this part, too:
There is no doubt, however, that Trump will be apoplectic that his three Supreme Court nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, did not publicly dissent from denying his bid to keep his West Wing records secret …
Throughout his presidency, Trump appeared to equate judicial and Cabinet nominations with an act of patronage, viewing those selected as owing him a debt that would be repaid by pursuing his interests rather than honoring the rule of law and the Constitution. He frequently railed at judges who knocked back administration policies, viewing them as politically motivated if they disagreed with his view of a case …
The Supreme Court ruling was the second legal blow to Trump in as many days. In a late-night court filing on Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James said her office had uncovered “misleading or fraudulent” financial statements from Trump’s business empire. She is seeking to compel testimony from Trump, Trump Jr. and the ex-President’s daughter Ivanka Trump as part of her civil investigation into the Trump Organization.
Indeed the Supreme Court ruling was nearly unanimous, the only dissent coming, not from any of Trump’s nominees, but from Clarence Thomas, a man so deluded and incompetent that he’s unfit to be judging hogs at a county fair.
As I understood it, the individual votes of members of the court were sub rosa, only the yes/no result was published, and Thomas was the only one who publicly said what his vote was. So it could have been a 5-4 decision, with Thomas and the 3 trump appointees on the same side, those others (if any) just haven’t spoken about it publicly.
Hm. You may be right - SCOTUSBlog https://www.scotusblog.com/ explicitly says the vote count for other decisions, but not this one. On the other hand, why wouldn’t dissenters make their own votes explicit?
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is requesting a special grand jury to aid in her investigation of former President Donald Trump and his efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
In a Thursday letter to Christopher S. Brasher, chief judge of Fulton County’s Superior Court, Willis said the move was needed because a “significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony.”…
A grand jury is nice, but does have potential problems. If, and I think this is likely, there are MAGAts on the jury, it’s likely they’ll vote against issuing subpoenas for Trump or his associates. I don’t know the rules about how grand juries work in Georgia, but for petit juries, this kind of thing will be a problem getting a conviction, since those have to be unanimous.
It looks like judgments deciding cases get documented with which justices decided and which dissented (and which concurred with only part of the consensus, etc.), but judgments about lower court rulings get only “The Court sez” and dissenting/concurring notes from Justices that want to make them, without the details on who voted which way.
Supreme Court watchers may have a sense of how to read the tea leaves and decide that Justices that didn’t dissent probably (or almost certainly) concurred. In this case, if it was close, I suspect more folks would put themselves on the record - but that’s just my uninformed guess.
While a trial jury must reach a unanimous vote to convict, a grand jury only requires a majority vote of 12 or more to approve an indictment. Furthermore, only 16 of the 23 jurors have to be present. If they decide to approve the indictment, the words “true bill” will be endorsed on it. If there is not enough evidence to support the indictment, they will endorse it “no bill,” and the case will not move forward, and the charges will be dismissed. In Georgia, about 90% of grand juries indict. Across the country, the average is 95%. Therefore, it is likely that there is an indictment when it goes before a grand jury.
So there is a good chance that they will find him as indictable as any other ham sandwich.
Does a grand jury have a say about subpoenas? I thought they only voted to indict or not to indict and things like subpoenas were up to the presiding judge.
You have to wonder what’s the point of a Special Grand Jury if they can’t indict. Maybe an ordinary grand jury can indict purely on the basis of the report? Or the prosecutor could do it without an ordinary grand jury?
I also wonder how quashable are Special Grand Jury subpoenas? You know Trump is going to fight any issued to him or a close associate. Can he potentially find a friendly appeals judge to do that?
“If the special grand jury recommends charges, it’s still up to the district attorney to decide whether to pursue an indictment. If the district attorney does want to seek an indictment, the case must be presented to a regular grand jury.”
I’d guess that the idea is that by the time the special grand jury arrives at a decision, they’re no longer viewed as an impartial body, so you need another grand jury to review what they made.
Or, alternately, because the goal is to allow the process to be free of corruption, while tackling those who are corrupt, them corrupt politicians who wrote the law wanted to add in more steps, to make it harder to go forward…
About that dropping the One America News Network is there, like, some kind of vocab word that describes this behavior? The overly optimistic inaccurate statement used to defraud? Make America Great Again, Alternative Facts, Truth Social…it’s like any time there’s a statement from the right, it’s…well…a lie.
I’d like to submit Alternative Facting, but I’m happy to defer to more catchy phrases.
