FAIRYTALES

 

 

“When I used to read fairytales, I fancied that never happened, now here I am in the middle of one.” Alice.

During the 2020 election, the Trumpians pushed out a number of conspiracy claims. Prominent among them was a claim that Democrats had installed a vote-switching machine in state election commissions. The claim was that a machine invented during the reign of Hugo Chavez  enabled an operator to switch a vote from candidate A to candidate B at the push of a button. The machine was said to be manufactured and sold by a company called Dominion, run by Chavez associates, and was, the conspiracy asserted, a principal means of stealing the election.

 

One of the most prominent advocates of the Dominion vote-switching-machine conspiracy (along with Trump, Giuliani, et al) was a Texas lawyer named Sidney Powell. She not only represented Trump in litigation advancing the Dominion theory, she gave numerous interviews on Fox and elsewhere, asserting that Dominion's vote-switching machines had been used to steal the election.

Dominion responded that everything about that claim was a lie. There is no vote-switching machine and there never was. There is a company named Dominion, and they do and did sell vote-counting machines, but they have nothing to do with Hugo Chavez, their machines were invented and are manufactured in Colorado, and the devices are neither capable of switching votes nor were they used in any way to deprive Trump of a single vote.

 

Dominion sued Powell for libel. 1.3 Billion dollars.  The complaint listed all the occasions on which Powell claimed that Dominion’s machines were used to switch votes.

 

Earlier this week, Powell filed her response. She asked the District Court to dismiss the complaint on a number of grounds: she said the complaint was too long, she said that even though her statements were made in the District of Columbia, she wanted the court to send the case to her home county in Texas, she said this was a political matter and therefore all of her statements were protected by the First Amendment, and she saved her best argument for last. 

 (First, a few words of legal background. Actionable libel may fairly be described as a defamatory statement of fact that is false. Opinion, on the other hand, is not actionable. That is protected by the First Amendment. Generally speaking, courts have adopted a simple test to determine whether a statement is fact or opinion: if the statement can be provable to be true or false, then it is a statement of fact, whereas an opinion is not susceptible to such proof.)

 In their request to dismiss the Dominion libel complaint, Powell’s lawyers argued that her statement that Dominion’s machines were used to cheat Trump and steal the election was merely a statement of opinion, not fact. It is hard to imagine any judge agreeing with that proposition. Certainly, the claim that the machines were used to switch votes can be proved to be true or false. Therefore it is clearly a statement of fact. That brings us to the Alice in Wonderland part of the Powell defense;

Her lawyers argue that even assuming Powell's charges were statements of fact, they are so outlandish, so implausible, "no reasonable person would conclude the statements were truly statements of fact." Therefore they must be opinion!

In other words, my client and her colleagues are such outrageous liars, no reasonable person would believe a word they say. 

(I guess that means January 6 never happened?)

When they get around to disbarring Powell, they oughta take a hard look at her lawyers.

A bientot.

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THE BIG SQUID AND HIS CAPTIVE

 

“All roads with you lead to Putin.”

House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi uttered those damning words on October 16, 2019, in a White House meeting, while standing and pointing across the table to the then-President of the United States. The photograph is iconic, and the statement was 100% valid.

While the rationale for the Trump-Putin connection remains as yet unclear, the validity of the Pelosi statement is now verified.

There never was any doubt that Russia worked hard to get Trump elected in 2016.  Mueller explained in his report that he found that the Russian government extended great energy toward electing Trump, told the Trump campaign it was doing so, and the campaign readily, indeed happily accepted Putin’s effort. But Mueller, the reluctant prosecutor, declined to bring criminal charges against the Trump campaigners because “collusion” was not a crime, and he did not think he could meet the legal test of proving a criminal conspiracy. 

Later in the Trump presidency, the United States intelligence services apparently pierced the Putin curtain and were able to see what Russia was doing in connection with our 2020 presidential election. The report has just been declassified. Surprise, surprise, under the personal direction of Vladimir Putin, Russian intelligence services worked diligently to reelect Trump. Using proxies (read Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani), they attempted to feed the American public anti--Biden misinformation. During the campaign, our intelligence services informed the president this was happening. The result? The Trump administration let loose its own campaign of misinformation: Trump appointees William Barr, the Atty. Gen. of the United States, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State of the United States, and John Ratcliffe the Director of National Intelligence of the United States all adopted the same plan of misdirection: they pointed to China, not Russia, as the malefactors, despite our intelligence agencies’ conclusion that China had decided, for its own reasons, to stay out of this campaign.

Really now, should anybody be surprised that this president, who holds what is perhaps the world’s record for telling lies, had appointed sycophants who didn’t hesitate to tell lies in support of their boss?

Yesterday’s release of this latest intelligence report is, I suggest, just one more stride down the path that leads to Trump’s ultimate political irrelevancy.

We still don’t know the nature of the tentacles that hold Trump so firmly in Putin’s grasp. But four years is a long time, and our Intelligence services, Department of Justice, and State Department are now being managed by honest men and women. And there are grand juries at both the federal and state levels that have the former president in their sights. Whether or not citizen Trump goes to jail, the corrosive effect of the facts to be found by these inquiries will chip away the  brass-colored paint on the idol that adorned the stage at the CPAC convention.

And who knows, maybe we’ll learn more about the Big Squid and his captive? 

A bientot.

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