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Politics Trump, the Colorado Ruling and More Questions for the US Constitution Donald Trump. Donald Trump.Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg By Gregory Korte #Gregorykorte #BloombergBusiness 7 November 2023 at 17:52 GMT Updated on 20 December 2023 at 00:27 GMT “Like no one before him, Donald Trump is at once a former president, a leading candidate to be nominated for the presidency again, and a criminal defendant. He faces 91 felony charges in four separate cases for conduct before, during and after his presidency, including conspiring to defraud the US in his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, mishandling classified documents and falsifying business records to cover up hush money to an adult film actress. This unprecedented situation raises questions that previously would have been implausible law school hypotheticals. One of those questions, about Trump’s eligibility to run again, moved from theoretical to real when the Colorado Supreme Court ruled him ineligible for that state’s primary ballot. 1. Is someone convicted of a crime eligible to serve as president? Generally speaking, yes. The US Constitution says the president must be at least 35 years old, a natural-born citizen and a 14-year resident of the US; a clean criminal record is not a job requirement. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted after the Civil War and little-discussed for decades, does block from public office anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US. Trump was not charged with insurrection or rebellion. Still, many Americans say those terms apply to what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, when a violent pro-Trump mob attacked the US Capitol as Congress was certifying the results of the 2020 election. The attack followed a rally at which Trump repeated his false claims that the election had been fraudulently stolen from him…” #Colorado #SupremeCourt #Trump #Barred #Eligibility #Insurrection #Act #Rebellion #Jan6 #14thAmendment #USCivilwar #Reconstruction

Summary: House Republicans stand by their decision to oust George Santos, despite it costing them a GOP seat. Several GOP lawmakers who voted to expel Santos continue to support their decision, emphasizing that he was unfit to serve. Despite Democrat Tom Suozzi flipping Santos' former seat, the Republicans are standing firm in their stance. Takeaway: The expulsion of George Santos has caused a razor-thin GOP majority in the House, with some Republicans emphasizing the importance of upholding standards in Congress. The decision to remove Santos continues to be a contentious issue within the party. Hashtags: #GOP #Congress #GeorgeSantos #RepublicanMajority #HouseRepublicans

Donald Trump<!-- --> has become the <!-- -->first former US president to be convicted<!-- --> of a crime. Found guilty of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star, Trump, found guilty on all 34 counts is now navigating the legal and political ramifications of this historic verdict. The sentencing and potential appeals are just the beginning of the legal journey ahead, as Trump continues his bid for the presidency against Joe Biden in the upcoming election.The verdict has sparked intense debate and speculation about Trump’s future.<!-- -->Will he serve prison time? Can he still run for president? Here’s a closer look at the key questions surrounding Trump’s conviction and its impact on his political career.What happens now The next step is for Judge Juan Merchan to approve the verdict and enter a final judgment. This is usually a formality. Sentencing typically follows within several weeks, but legal arguments can delay this process. Lawyers on both sides will recommend sentences, which will be debated at the sentencing hearing where Merchan will make a final decision. Will Trump go to prison? That is unlikely. While the maximum sentence for falsifying business records is four years in prison, it is rare for first-time offenders of this crime in New York to receive prison time. “Punishments like fines or probation are more common,” and alternatives like home confinement or curfews could be considered, given the logistical challenges of imprisoning a former president with a lifetime Secret Service detail. Can Trump appeal the conviction? Yes, Trump is expected to appeal. He may argue that the indictment was legally flawed and politically motivated. His defense will likely focus on several legal points, including that state election laws do not apply to federal elections and that the charges themselves were legally improper. Could Trump still become president? Yes, the US Constitution only requires that presidents be at least 35 years old and natural-born US citizens who have lived in the country for 14 years. Even if he were in jail, Trump could theoretically be sworn in as president on January 20, 2025. Can Trump vote for himself? Yes, as long as Trump is not imprisoned in New York, he can vote for himself. Florida defers to other states’ rules on felony disenfranchisement, and in New York, felons regain their voting rights once they are out of prison, even if on parole. Will Trump’s conviction affect his campaign? The conviction does not legally prevent Trump from running for or becoming president. The Republican National Convention, which will take place shortly after his sentencing, has no rules disqualifying a convicted nominee. Trump remains popular among the GOP base, and the party’s leadership is aligned with him. What are the broader implications of this conviction? The conviction marks unprecedented territory in US politics, especially as Trump faces three

A lesser known quote, from ... Pres. Donald J. Trump's speech on Jan 6, 2021 (as published by NPR) .... "So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give. The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country." --------------------------- Trump earlier in the speech (in a more well known passage) said: "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." ------------------------- For many paragraphs of his Jan 6th speech, Trump laid out assertion after assertion of fraud, unconstitutionally conducted election process changes, illegality and impropriety occurring in swing states (tainting the validity of 10's or even 100's of thousands of votes ... more than enough to shift the election results in each mentioned swing state) and he then stated/implied (& whereas earlier I was quoting, I'm now paraphrasing/interpreting): that fraud voids legal contracts ... and should, according to expert lawyers, void an unconstitutionally and unlawfully conducted election too, requiring throwing out the tainted votes (or if necessary, a revote) and recertification of election results by the contested states. So there Trump is folks, exhorting people to speak to their legislators and give the ones that he thinks need it the spine/courage they'd clearly in his view require to lawfully resist fraud during their constitutionally mandated legislative process to be held that day. Obviously, a small percentage of the crowd (but still a large number, over 1,000 of them) -- almost certainly, in some cases, agitated and encouraged by leftist and statist provocateurs -- didn't go to the Capitol, as Trump requested, to talk, protest and encourage as is their legal right to do, but instead went there to destroy property, commit violent acts and/or disrupt the proceedings and create mayhem. That's deeply unfortunate, but it's not a Trump-led insurrection. It's naked partisan opportunism, imo, for his opponents to say it is. Either that, or a world view so warped, that they can't even tell the difference between an actual insurrection, and a large crowd with a small percentage of highly unruly, violent and destructive, troublemakers. Note: some Americans prosecuted and sentenced for their part in Jan 6th were overcharged, and excessively punished in a highly partisan venue. To that extent, they are political prisoners. Others got what they deserved as there were, unfortunately, some bad actors in that crowd. One Capitol police officer got away with what, arguably, was murder (of an unarmed female military vet). It was a sad day.

https://lnkd.in/eiMWt8eY Possibilities presented as Trump's trial enters decisive phase https://lnkd.in/eFVRYfr4 please visit our website  The trial of Donald Trump enters a decisive phase on Tuesday with the start of closing arguments that will precede the jury's deliberations on the possibility of the first criminal conviction of a former US president. This comes months before a presidential election that could allow the wealthy Republican to return to the White House at the expense of the current Democratic president, Joe Biden, who defeated him in the 2020 election. Here are some questions and answers about the next phase of the trial: The case before a Manhattan court concerns the payment of money at the end of the 2016 election campaign to buy the silence of former porn star Stormy Daniels in order to cover up a sexual relationship she had with Trump, which he denies. Attention during the trial focused on the details Daniels provided about the alleged affair with Trump in 2006. The jury will have the difficult task of deciding whether to find Trump guilty of falsifying 34 accounting documents to hide the trace of a sum of money paid to Daniels to cover up this relationship. The money was paid at the end of the campaign for the 2016 election, in which Trump won the presidency at the expense of Hillary Clinton. Read more

Excerpt: We can expect that former president and criminal defendant Donald Trump is going to claim every day — maybe even multiple times a day — that his criminal trial scheduled to begin in Manhattan on Monday was orchestrated by President Joe Biden. Trump used that line of attack at a rally five days before a Manhattan grand jury indicted him on New York state charges on March 30, 2023. Trump said the imminent charges were part of “the Biden regime’s weaponization of our system of justice.” He’s repeated the weaponization lie multiple times since then. For example, two weeks ago after a hearing in that New York state case, Trump, referring to all the trials he’s facing, accused Biden of the “weaponization of our government to try to knock out” his “political opponent.” Tuesday, he said Biden has “weaponized the Justice Department.” A president has no authority to bring a state charge against anyone, but Trump said Tuesday that “every one of these trials is run by the DOJ and the White House. Every single one.” What’s been the response from the Biden campaign and other Democratic leaders to Trump’s repeated lie? Mostly silence. Apparently, that is by design. When Democratic National Committee Chair Jamie Harrison appeared on my Sirius XM show Friday, I asked him if the DNC or Democratic leaders would be countering Trump lies about Biden masterminding this and other prosecutions. Harrison said Trump “wants Joe Biden to get involved” in his court cases and that “we can’t take the bait.” But if Democrats don’t respond, then all that some of the public will hear about the origin of these prosecutions is Trump’s claim that they’re Biden’s doing. If Democrats don’t respond with the truth, then it will be that much easier for the public to be misled. Trump’s obvious goal in lying about Biden’s involvement is to convince voters to ignore any guilty verdicts any jury might return. Trump has to have seen the polls that say a conviction will hurt him badly in November. For example, a February Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll found that 53% of voters in key swing states say they won’t vote for Trump if he’s been convicted of a crime. According to a Politico report from last month, “By a more than 2-1 margin, respondents said that a conviction would make them less likely to support Trump (32 percent) as opposed to more likely (13 percent). Notably, more than a third of independents said it would reduce their likelihood to support Trump.” Of course, we know a criminal conviction is unlikely to deter the MAGA faithful, but a Reuters poll released this week says that about a quarter of Republicans say they won’t vote for Trump if a jury convicts him of a felony. If Trump is convicted of one of more felonies, even if only half of those surveyed stay true to what they said in that poll, it could make it next to impossible for Trump to win in November. Consequently, Trump’s No. 1 priority as his criminal trials begin is to delegitimize the cases.

We have an opportunity to fix our judicial system there is nothing like experience to open one’s eyes. People of color, and poor people have know just how corrupt the system has b en for decades. Prosecutors have been stacking charges on us forever in order to get pleas. They threaten innocent relatives with prosecution if you don’t plea guilty for women they threaten to take away thier children. If you go to trial on 10-counts, and the jury acquitted you on 9-counts, the courts use each of the acquitted counts as relevant conduct and enhance your sentence. Why go to trial? There are an estimated 78-million convicted felons in America, many of whom became felons not because they were guilty, but because they were scared to fight or simply were not will to lose a child or family member. So they plead guilty. We have an opportunity to bring real reform to this corrupt system, by putting Trump in the White House this November, let’s not blow it. Remember Trump was the only President in 30-years to bring reform by signing the First Step Act. Let’s give him an opportunity to sign into law, a Second Chance Act.

Imbecile GOP literally gives away seat in special election in Long Island. Of course George Santos was a lowlife, but he hasn't done anything close to what others in goverment have done, has not been convicted of anything and he's 100% correct here, in his interview below. I don't see the Dim-ocrats sticking any knives in Gold Bar Bob Menendez's back...they understand the game. They may despise Menendez ( probably not, most likely envy his ruthlessness) but they know they need his vote in a close Senate. . The stupid GOP had a reliable right wing vote with Santos, good on nearly all issues, in a razor thin majority, and they sacrificed and canabalized him for the sake of virtue signaling. The Stupid Party prefers to lose, with what their myopia interprets as "dignity" ... As usual, the GOP motto is "surrender first, then pretend fight..." The idiot GOP had Santos brought to heel, and had him under control with his scandal. They could have driven him hard like a rented car until the November elections, and they could have primaried him with another more "respectable" and typically squishy Re-Pubic. But no...they ran an exotic candidate, whose accented English didn't help her electability, fair or not......and formerly A REGISTERED DEMOCRAT... perhaps in a typical misguided appeal to "diversity and inclusion", a candidate who never stood a chance, ...they were outspent, and lost a much needed seat. Great work, GOP. With a republican party like this ship of fools, who needs democrats ? https://lnkd.in/eG_Kjbti

“The wrong case for the wrong offense just reached the right verdict,” David Frum writes. Read it here: https://bit.ly/458p91D Yesterday, a jury convicted Donald Trump on 34 counts related to falsifying business records in order to cover up a hush-money payment he made to Stormy Daniels in 2006. Prosecutors argued that Trump had made the payoff in order to improperly hide information from voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election. “Donald Trump will not be held accountable before the 2024 presidential election for his violent attempt to overturn the previous election. He will not be held accountable before the election for absconding with classified government documents and showing them off at his pay-for-access vacation club. He will not be held accountable before the election for his elaborate conspiracy to manipulate state governments to install fake electors. But he is now a convicted felon all the same,” Frum writes. “What has been served here is not the justice that America required after Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election first by fraud, then by violence,” Frum continues. “It’s justice instead of an especially ironic sort, driving home to the voting public that before Trump was a constitutional criminal, he got his start as a squalid hush-money-paying, document-tampering, tabloid sleazeball.” “If Trump does somehow return to the presidency, his highest priority will be smashing up the American legal system to punish it for holding him to some kind of account—and to prevent it from holding him to higher account for the yet-more-terrible charges pending before state and federal courts. The United States can have a second Trump presidency, or it can retain the rule of law, but not both,” Frum continues at the link in our bio. “No matter how much spluttering and spin-doctoring and outright deception you may hear from the desperate co-partisans of the first Felon American to stand as the presumptive presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party—there is no denying that now.” #TrumpCrimeFamily