French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Wednesday warned Donald Trump against threatening the EU's "sovereign borders" after the US president-elect refused to rule out military action to take control of Greenland, an autonomous territory of EU member Denmark.
#4
He's a Democrat flapping his mouf, so you know he was lying
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/08/2025 11:08 Comments ||
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#5
You would think that a protester would have been charged with that if it happened.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/08/2025 12:27 Comments ||
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#6
"But a review of the federal charges against the alleged rioters shows that they did come armed, and with a variety of weapons: stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats and flagpoles wielded as clubs. An additional suspect also allegedly planted pipe bombs by the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican parties the night before the riot and remains at large."
[Yahoo] Two prisoners who are among the 37 federal inmates whose death sentences were commuted last month by President Joe Biden — a move that spares them from the death chamber — have taken an unusual stance: They're refusing to sign paperwork accepting his clemency action.
Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, both inmates at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, filed emergency motions in federal court in the state's southern district on Dec. 30 seeking an injunction to block having their death sentences commuted to life in prison without parole.
The men believe that having their sentences commuted would put them at a legal disadvantage as they seek to appeal their cases based on claims of innocence.
A 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, maintains that a president has the power to grant reprieves and pardons, and "the convict's consent is not required."
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
01/08/2025 00:00 ||
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[11123 views]
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#1
If they’re innocent, more power to them.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/08/2025 12:26 Comments ||
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[Federalist] The Democrats’ entire assault on the court, and especially on Justices Thomas and Alito, has ended in utter defeat.
The Democrat-run Senate Judiciary Committee’s two-year partisan assault on conservative Supreme Court justices, especially Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, on baseless "ethics" allegations ended with a pathetic 93-page Democrat staff report replete with dishonest and false information. It was so bad it was issued the day after Congress left town for the year and right before the Christmas recess.
This entire investigation was never about "ethics" but about trying to undermine the Supreme Court because it is no longer acting like a left-wing super legislature handing down opinions implementing the Democrats’ political agenda.
The Democrats falsely accused Justices Thomas and Alito of violating ethics laws by not disclosing vacations with friends and not recusing from cases because of their spouses’ activities. They are wrong on both counts.
The Democrats have been after Justice Thomas from the moment he was nominated to the Supreme Court, because despite being born a poor black child and serving as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education and then chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he is a thoroughly conservative Supreme Court judge. The terms in which they attacked him over the years would amply justify the term racist had anyone but senior level Democrats said those things.
Justices Thomas and Alito complied with the laws, regulations, advice, and Judicial Conference rulings regarding reporting trips with friends. They were not required to report these trips under the personal hospitality exemption outlined in the law, no matter what the leaders of this witch hunt, Democrat Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse, claim or wish.
When the Judicial Conference, which was established by law to administer the ethics laws for the federal judiciary, changed its rules in March 2023 and excluded from the personal hospitality exemption trips on private planes and boats, Justice Thomas promptly reported such trips.
In fact, in a humiliating rebuke to Whitehouse’s personal obsession with smearing Thomas, the Judicial Conference sent a letter to Whitehouse dated Jan. 2, 2025, rejecting his outrageous demand that the conference refer Thomas to the Department of Justice for investigation. With this action, the conference agreed that Thomas had done nothing wrong and had complied with the rules. It also found that where there were inadvertent omissions, Justice Thomas filed amended forms, as every justice and judge has done through the years. In other words, the Judicial Conference completely rejected Whitehouse’s frivolous attempt to smear our greatest justice.
RIDICULOUS RECUSAL CLAIMS
The staff report also falsely claims Justices Thomas and Alito violated the federal recusal law by not recusing from Jan. 6, 2021-related cases because of their wives’ activities. But the law only requires recusal if one’s spouse is a party to or lawyer in the case, has a financial interest, or there is a reasonable basis where the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned. None of those factors are present here.
Ginni Thomas had concerns about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 elections. She expressed those concerns to a friend who was serving as White House chief of staff, and she also sent a prewritten form email to state legislators about election integrity concerns. Martha-Ann Alito flew iconic American flags at the Alitos’ home and summer home, including the historic Appeal to Heaven flag, which was created during the Revolutionary War period and has been flown by federal, state, and local governments through the years. But because some protesters carried this flag during the Jan. 6 demonstration, leftist critics claimed, without evidence, that Mrs. Alito was signaling support for the J6 defendants.
A spouse’s opinion or activity is not a basis for a justice to recuse, and it’s sexist to argue otherwise. In fact, that’s what the Democrats and legal ethics experts argued when the shoe was on the other foot.
In a seminal case in 2011, left-wing federal appellate Judge Stephen Reinhardt refused to recuse from a case concerning a challenge to California’s state ban on same-sex marriages, even though his wife’s ACLU chapter (where she was the executive director) had joined two amicus briefs in the court below arguing that the ban was unconstitutional, and she had publicly denounced the ban.
Left-wing legal ethics expert Stephen Gillers filed a brief defending Reinhardt, stating that "a spouse’s views and actions, however passionately held and discharged, are not imputed to her spouse, and Judge Reinhardt is not presumed to be the reservoir and carrier of his wife’s beliefs... No authority requires a judge to recuse based alone on the opinions of his or her spouse; only an ’outmoded conception of the relationship between spouses’ would hold otherwise." In stark contrast to Mrs. Thomas and Alito, who did not comment on any specific case in the court system, Judge Reinhardt’s wife’s group had joined two briefs in the case now before him.
Neither Thomas nor Alito had any reason to recuse from any of these cases based on their spouses’ activities. Moreover, it’s astonishing that the Senate Democrats would criticize justices on recusal issues when Congress is not subject to any recusal laws. They are the only branch in our system not subject to such laws, and Durbin and Whitehouse have repeatedly taken official action to help their spouses’ clients.
AN EMBARRASSING REPORT
More generally, this Democrat staff report is an embarrassment. I served for 10 years as a chief counsel for oversight and investigations for a major congressional committee, managed nearly 200 investigative hearings, and issued several staff reports. Much of the information the staff received in response to letters sent to private citizens had already been reported in the press. The staff report here is based on very little investigative work itself and relies on shoddy work by discredited leftist-funded groups. It is a disgrace to the professionalism of congressional staff and the institution itself.
For example, the staff report cites leftist-funded Fix the Court’s (FTC) absurd claim that Justice Thomas accepted $4.75 million in gifts when that figure has been completely discredited. FTC’s list has scores of trips Justice Thomas never even went on, preposterously values a trip to Indonesia as a $500,000 gift, calculating that Thomas chartered a private yacht for his own personal use, and absurdly values visiting friends at their summer home as a $280,950 gift. This source is a complete dumpster fire of false claims.
This exposes Whitehouse and Durbin as pure hypocrites who don’t care about ethics. President Joe Biden and his family have taken more than 15 vacations at billionaires’ mansions, and he never once reported them on his form. These billionaires are not friends, they are donors, and they vacate their homes while the Bidens are there.
In fact, Joe Biden decided to issue his sweeping and unprecedented pardon to his son, Hunter, while staying at a billionaire’s $34 million mansion on Nantucket Island. Joe Biden also vacationed over Christmas at a mansion in St. Croix Virgin Islands for the eighth time since 2014, and he has never reported these trips on his forms. Whitehouse and Durbin are fine with Biden grifting on billionaire donor homes but are outraged that Justice Thomas visits his friends at their homes and does not disclose it.
The Democrats had no problem with Justice Stephen Breyer taking more than 230 trips paid for by third parties — 63 of these trips outside the United States and 17 of them funded by the Democrat Pritzker family. Never mind that Ruth Bader Ginsburg took more than 157 trips paid for by third parties, 28 of them international. RBG also received a $1 million gift from the Berggruen Institute, which she then secretly distributed to her favored charities.
Fix the Court is its own scandal center. Its CEO Gabe Roth reportedly violated federal law by failing to disclose that he was lobbying Congress on certain issues and was recently exposed for being paid a salary equivalent of 96 percent of FTC’s revenues, while running a deficit of nearly $46,000. Some experts believe this may violate federal law. FTC was also busted for failing to list several trips that liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor failed to disclose. FTC is a sloppy, partisan, noncredible source, but the Democrat staff report relies on its work for its findings.
The staff report cites ProPublica’s dishonest reporting on the justices’ trips, despite ProPublica refusing to include for months in its reporting that similar claims about Thomas’ travel had already been raised in 2011 in a complaint filed by 20 Democrat members of Congress and that the Judicial Conference ruled in 2012 that Thomas had not failed to disclose any necessary information. When ProPublica was forced to write about this ruling, which blew up their entire false narrative that Thomas and Alito had violated the law, these left-wing activists sought to impugn the Democrat and Republican judges on the conference with smears from anonymous sources. This is their standard tactic.
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/08/2025 00:00 ||
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Link ||
[11128 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
The report served as a threatening cudgel that turned out to be a Nerf product. A helping of disbarment is well deserved for all the sponsors and staffers with legal licenses.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/08/2025 12:24 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Federalist] The Democrats’ entire assault on the court, and especially on Justices Thomas and Alito, has ended in utter defeat.
