Claims And Issues

Write the Report, Jack. You don't have to ask.

Editing.  (LexisNexis)

 

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

 

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith filed a motion last week to dismiss the criminal indictment in the election insurrection case.

At first, I was not completely sure what kind of motion or motions Jack Smith filed regarding the classified documents case.  Now it's clear that he has filed a motion to dismiss the appeal and the indictment he had going in that case too.

I would like to address Jack at this point.  Directly.

Jack, you said that you did not file motions to dismiss these criminal indictments because you did not have the evidence to prove the crimes.  You said that instead you filed motions to dismiss them because of Department of Justice policy.   Prove it, Jack, by writing a full and complete Report citing all the evidence. 

Prove it, Jack.  You are going to have to prove that you did not file motions to dismiss because you did not have the evidence, Jack.

It is clear that nothing and no-one can stop you from writing the Report, Jack.  In fact, there is nothing and no-one to stop you from writing your Report in both cases you had going.  The appointed trial judge in the classified documents case, the honorable Aileen Cannon, cannot order you to hand the evidence over to her.  There is no longer any appeal pending now, either, so the Eleventh Circuit cannot order you to turn the evidence over to them.

As far as the election insurrection case goes, Judge Chutkan has already approved your dismissal of the People’s indictment.  I do not believe that Judge Chutkan would ever order you to turn the evidence over to her, and besides she has already ruled. 

We the people of the USA should see all the evidence, good and bad, pro and con, in a Report of the Special Counsel. That means you, Jack; you’re the Special Counsel in both of these cases and you have to do at least one Report for both cases or perhaps write two Reports, one for each case.

Otherwise only the criminal defendants will say what the evidence is, and I am sure that you already know this but we cannot count on them to be transparent about it.  They are not the kind of people who would willingly share the evidence that convicts them.  It seems reasonable to expect that the only evidence these people would share would be any evidence that tends to exonerate them.

We can feel confident that they’ll tell their story, Jack, depending on how you release your Report and especially if you do not write one.  How do I know, and why am I so sure? Precedent, Jack. That’s exactly what they did with Bob Mueller’s Special Counsel Report. Mueller did not really get the chance to tell us what was in his Report, the Attorney General did that for him. The Attorney General did not tell the truth, of course.

If you act now, only you can tell us your story, Jack. Your story is our story too.

You may think that if you write a Report based on the evidence it would not go well for you with Merrick Garland or with the Department of Justice for that matter.  Well, Jack, as things stand you are not going to work for the Department of Justice or for any other department, bureau, or agency of the federal government in the U.S. ever again anyway. Unless you are on President Putin’s payroll, you will not get a job as a prosecutor in this country. You might conceivably get a future job somewhere else in the Western World, but not here.

So that’s the way I see it for you, Jack. To my way of thinking, it’s pretty clear. You have no future in this country regardless of how you conduct yourself in the future. Now is the time for you to act, Jack, because soon you will not be able to.

To say again, now is the time to write your Report, Jack, if the American People are ever going to know any of this evidence. To read the documents. To know the testimony from witnesses under oath. The time is now, or never, Jack.

Jack, I would like to end, once again, with a few lines from a poem called The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. These are the lines, lines that could have been written yesterday or even today:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

I underlined the thought expressed in the last two lines because I think that the thought deserves emphasis today, Jack.  Yeats said it first, in I think 1919, but the thought applies in 2024

— so far.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.  A previous version of this article was published in my Substack newsletter. 

 

“What Kind of America Do You Want?”

    When did so many Americans get to the point where they no longer believe in the Constitution, in the Declaration of Independence, in the ideals that have served us well for over 200 years?

    Maybe we need look no further than eliminating civics from our school curricula. Maybe we now have a population that does not understand the Constitution. A population that does not understand the concept of three co-equal branches of government or the separation of church and state. A population that has not learned from history but is willing to make the same mistakes that lead to ruin for other countries. A population that cannot or will not think for itself but is spoon-fed, told what to believe even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

    This is not the America I know and love. Please wake up, America!

Excerpted from a Commentary by retired Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Peggy Quince.  You can read the entire Commentary written by Chief Justice Quince in many venues because it has been republished in many places, including on Wednesday, October 30, 2024 in The Orlando Sentinel.

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DR. FAUCI AND THE REAL STORY OF THE GREATEST GENERATION.

On this the 80th Anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, the Greatest Generation demands that the real story of Dr. Fauci be told.

          Newspaper columnists and cable talking heads have wondered why Republican Members of Congress and other Republican officials and talking heads attack Dr. Fauci over the handling of the Pandemic.  Dr. Fauci is not responsible, that's why.  The attacks on him are a distraction of course.

          They do not attack the head of the CDC at the time.  He was appointed by Their Furor.

          They do not attack Dr. Deborah Birx, who ostensibly was an adviser of some sort to Their Furor.

          And of course they do not attack the person most responsible:  Their Furor. 

          Here it is, caught on tape.  Take a look in case you too have forgotten.  I have not forgotten.  And I am not distracted.  And I am not resigned.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

"IT'S HARD FOR ME TO IMAGINE HOW THAT WAS ACCIDENTAL ...."

John Lewis had it right when he said that Their Furor was an illegitimate president.  That was John Lewis's reason for not going to the 2017 Inauguration.  He was so right.

          They should not have let Their Furor anywhere near the Oval Office, but they did, and here we are.  Now we are hearing that he was so busy being president that he did not have time to commit crimes, no matter what the evidence shows.

          "He was President of the United States."  "He was running the country."  These are supposed to be reasons that he should not be convicted of his crimes.

          His lawyers argue to a jury that he should not be convicted of a crime, but they do not emphasize his innocence.  Instead, they emphasize that he was the "leader of the free world" at the time and so should not go to prison.

          What the Judge said when he heard the lawyer's improper argument to the jury (so improper that the lawyer did not try to defend it), applies to the entire situation we are in:  "It's hard for me to imagine how that was accidental in any way."

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

"FAKE NEWS," DAVID PECKER, AND THE GREAT PROJECTION.

"Fake news."  We've heard about that for some 9 years now.  Yesterday we all learned – if we did not know already – where it came from.

          It's totally projection.  

          David Pecker testified yesterday that his publication, The National Enquirer, would make up good stories about one candidate and would make up bad stories about the candidate's opponents.  They would publish "fake news" (Mr. Pecker called it "embellish" the news) to help The Guy, and to hurt anyone else that The Guy fingered.  Sometimes they wouldn't even wait for the finger, they would make up the negative stories themselves, like they did about Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Hillary Clinton.

          "Fake news."  David Pecker.  And Projection.  When you live in a world where everything you publish is fake news, calling everything else "fake news" even though you know it isn't, comes naturally.

          "Fake news."   When you write it yourself, you may delude yourself that's what  everyone does for a living, not just David Pecker and you.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.      

JOURNALISTS: DON'T YOU GET TIRED OF BEING USED?

The Hur report said that President Biden lost his memory.  It said that he couldn't even remember what day his son died.  Now we have the transcript.  Mr. Hur actually congratulated the President on having a photographic memory.    As for the date that the President's son died, the President not only remembered, he prefaced saying the date with, "Oh, God ...."  That lends credibility with a jury, which any honest trial lawyer knows.

          It turns out that the report was false and the transcript was true.  The news media says that it is shocked!  Shocked!

          Just a few years ago the same people, or at least the same kind of people, said that the Mueller report exonerated the Occupant of the Oval Office at the time.  Then we got the report.  Mr. Mueller actually wrote that the Occupant had participated in criminal activity but that Mueller would not charge a sitting president, following Department of Justice policy.

          It turns out that the press conference was false and the report was true.  The news media said that it was shocked!  Shocked!

          Journalists, don't you get tired of being used?

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

HEARSAY.

Katie Britt is infamously a U.S. Senator, among other things.  In her own words, she describes herself as a housewife.  She has been the subject of much reporting for her performance in trying to rebut President Joe Biden's State of the Union message last week. 

          I want to look at just one part of her performance, when she told a story of a person who, as she told the story, she herself had spoken with.  Ms. Britt said that the victim told her that she, the victim, had been put into sex trafficking by cartels when she was 12 years old.  Ms. Britt at least implied that the victim was an undocumented immigrant.

          Contacted by CNN, the victim herself corrected the story in an appearance of her own on television:  While it was true that she was involved in sex trafficking, it was not at the border and immigration policies had nothing to do with it;  she was repeatedly raped in the brothel where she worked.  The attacks upon her did not happen in the United States; they happened in Mexico.  They did not happen during President Biden's administration; they happened during George W. Bush's administration.

          I have not seen my question addressed in all the reporting since:  Did Katie Britt contact the victim of her story before she told her story?  Ms. Britt says that the victim herself told her this story.  If she did, I wonder why the victim herself would say, as she does,  that using her story for politics was "unfair" if she had been contacted in advance about using her story for politics.  So the likelihood seems to me to be that, at the least,  Katie Britt did not confirm any of this with the victim but that CNN contacted the victim to confirm any of this.

          There seems to be a moral here, and it is this:  It is always a best practice to engage your brain before you engage your mouth.  Here, that would have meant verifying the story before telling it – such as by contacting the purported victim, unless you intend to lie,  and asking her if all the details they told you to say are accurate.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

"IT'S THE DICTA, STUPID."*

*With apologies again to Mr. James Carville, who famously said during one of the successful Clinton campaigns, "It's the economy, stupid."

Dicta is a word that lawyers use to describe the opinions of judges that go beyond what they need to say to decide the case that confronts them.  To paraphrase Black's Law Dictionary, a standard text for many lawyers, dicta are opinions of judges concerning matters which are not necessarily involved in nor essential to determine the case presently before the court.

          In the course of enticing all justices to agree that a candidate of a certain persuasion should remain on all ballots, 5 judges went beyond that case to declare how and why candidates in future cases should not remain on the ballot (which most legal scholars say is self-evident from the Fourteenth Amendment and which did not need to be rewritten).

          When the U.S. Supreme Court took this case, they limited their review to whether they should affirm or reverse the Supreme Court of Colorado.  The Colorado Supreme Court, you will recall, had held that the Fourteenth Amendment barred this particular candidate in this particular case from the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.

          That is what the U.S. Supreme Court said that they would review.  That narrow question.  Of course, as lawyers know, the question of affirmance or reversal on the facts of the particular case is everything that a reviewing court can ever determine without issuing an advisory opinion.

          Here is what the 9 said they ruled on together.  You may or may not agree with it, but you can certainly read it for yourself.  They don't want you to read it for yourself, you know.  Every good trial lawyer, and any lawyer or person for that matter, knows that when they don't want you to look at something, you should look at it.  Read this for yourself:

          A group of Colorado voters contends that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits former President Donald J. Trump, who seeks the Presidential nomination of the Republican Party in this year's election, from becoming President again. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed with that contention. It ordered the Colorado secretary of state to exclude the former President from the Republican primary ballot in the State and to disregard any write-in votes that Colorado voters might cast for him.

* * *

Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse.

Trump v. Anderson, ___ U.S. ___, ___ S. Ct. ___, 2024 WL 899207, at *1 (U.S. March 4, 2024).

          The U.S. Supreme Court was previously pretty consistent in stating the view that it is or was limited under Article III of the Constitution to the existence of a controversy, and that, unlike State Supreme Courts, the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts lacked the power to issue advisory opinions.

          Based on preexisting precedent, the U.S. Supreme Court is accordingly prohibited by the Constitution from issuing an advisory opinion on what action Congress should take to enforce Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates.  So there were very strong grounds before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in this case that it would be limited to deciding whether the Supreme Court of Colorado was right or wrong in this particular case.  Period.  End of report.

          Instead, the joint opinion of the 5 rewrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the satisfaction of the 5.  But this is not how all 9 think about the issue they decided, and it is certainly not the view of the other 4 who decided the narrow question of whether this particular candidate in this particular case would remain on the ballot.

          So the command of the 5 to Congress on how to implement Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates is dicta.

          That is what it is.  Meaning no offense but stating it clearly:  "It's the dicta, stupid."

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

CHURCHILL, CHAMBERLAIN, AND THE STORM GATHERING IN THE U.S. NOW.

Winston Churchill was famously a voice in the wilderness warning about Hitler.

          The newspapers and radios which were the media of his day heaped praise on Neville Chamberlain and not on him.  The newspapers and radios applauded Neville Chamberlain for continuously attempting to compromise with Hitler.  Until it was too late and World War Two came.

          The current situation in the United States is not the same as the situation that faced Winston Churchill.  It is not too late.  It is still possible to affect the outcome.

          That brings me to the decision released on Monday of this week in the Fourteenth Amendment case.  The best legal minds of the day said that the justices would apply the Fourteenth Amendment as it was written.

          The result was unanimous but the "reasoning" on offer was anything but.  Five turned on 4 after the 4 attempted to compromise for a unanimous result of not enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment as it was written.  The 5 outvoted the 4 and wrote their own amendment, still while not enforcing the Fourteenth as it was written.

          It is clear, or it ought to be clear, that this decision was not the product of the best legal minds of the day.  If it was not the result of legal minds, it was the result of political minds and raw power, not reasoning.  5 did not prevail by the strength of their reasoning, which is the only way that the decisions of judges are legitimate in a free society.  5 simply outvoted 4 after the 4 compromised for unanimity.

          The best legal minds of the day are clearly not on the U.S. Supreme Court.

           At this point,  only foolish people expect a different result from them.  To rephrase Ben Franklin, the future is ours, if we can keep it.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

GEORGE WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY ...

... is no longer celebrated by itself.  It is a part of Presidents' Day of course, and it has been that way for a long time.  But to borrow a phrase from Edna St. Vincent Millay, I am not resigned.

          Nor am I resigned to lumping Abraham Lincoln's Birthday into the self-same Presidents' Day where we unload George Washington's Birthday as well – and for that matter, where we unload every single president including the ones that don't deserve to be celebrated.

          So here's to Old Abe and to the Father of His Country.  Long may their memories and examples live with us – both of them separate and identifiable for their honor, their integrity, and their character.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

'FOR EVIL TO WIN, GOOD MUST KEEP QUIET.'

Some people representing some States sued to stop the federal government from allowing corporations to consider economic, social, and governance (ESG) issues in all States.  Honest.  Take a look at what they themselves wrote if you can't believe it:  Download State of Utah v. Walsh Complaint Doc.No. 1 filed 01.26.23 (N.D. Tex. Case No. 2.23.cv.00016)).

          They filed their lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas in federal Court.  There is only one federal judge there, so they filed there.  Not surprisingly, they got the judge of their choice.  Not even drug dealers in major cities can do that.

          Speaking of drugs, this is the same Amarillo judge who 'ruled' for the entire country that the Food and Drug Administration did not have the power to regulate drugs – back in the day, over 20 years ago.  Nothing is too far away to be overturned with this crew, it seems.  Not in time, and not in the rest of the United States; nothing is too far away for them to reach.

          Not having stopped the federal government yet, the litigious people are asking their Amarillo judge to forbid the federal government permanently from ever allowing corporations to consider environmental, social, and governance issues of concern to their shareholders.   Honest.  OK, take a look at what they wrote for yourself: Download State of Utah v. Su Motion for Summary Judgment Doc. No. 92 filed 05.16.23 (N.D. Tex. Case No. 2 .23.cv.00016).

          In Florida, another branch of this crew is 'investigating' a teacher who showed her class a Disney movie.   Honest.

          Parenthetically, the teacher resigned even before she showed the movie.  The 'investigation' by the Florida department of education began anyway when one member of the local school board, who had a child at the school where the Disney movie was shown, started the investigation.  One.   Honest.

          It has not been reported whether or not the one complainer has stock in a Disney competitor.  It does not appear that she has been asked as yet.

          Meanwhile, in Montana, Governor Headslapper signed a bill passed by the learned Montana legislators that bans Montanans from looking at Tik Tok on their cellphones or on computers at home or in the office.  (The governor once slapped a reporter who asked him a question he did not want to answer, so he slapped him instead.)  Honest.

          And so it goes.

          A wise person once said that all it takes for evil to win is for good people to remain silent.  I do not want to be silent.  Do you?

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2023 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.