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‘Doesn’t Feel Like Garland Was Sprinting’: Former Prosecutor Blasts AG For Taking 557 Days to Appoint Trump Special Counsel

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A former federal prosecutor of thirty years is blasting Merrick Garland in light of the Attorney General appointing a special counsel to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents after just weeks, with those documents being voluntarily identified and turned over, while taking 557 days to appoint a special counsel to investigate Donald Trump’s refusal to hand over hundreds of classified documents.

Glenn Kirschner on Thursday afternoon told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace it “sure doesn’t feel like Merrick Garland is sprinting” in the investigation against the ex-president, Donald Trump. “It feels to me like he was walking at a leisurely pace at a time in our nation’s history when we needed a flat-out sprint.”

Wallace began the segment by saying, “I want to understand the two very different triggers for the special counsel. I mean for Trump, it was eight back and forths with the National Archives, three with the FBI, a … search at Mar-a- Lago, and an ongoing belief that the crimes involved handling of classified documents were being committed at Mar-a-Lago as well as crimes of obstruction of justice.”

“It’s my understanding based on the latest DOJ filings that there’s a belief from the Justice Department that both are still happening today,” Wallace noted.

“But even that didn’t trigger the appointment of a special counsel,” she observed. “It was Trump that that put that in motion when he announced his intention to run for president.”

READ MORE: Appointment of Biden Classified Docs Special Counsel Makes It ‘Much Easier’ and ‘More Likely’ to Indict Trump: Legal Experts

“In this case,” she said, moving on the how Garland has handled the revelations that President Biden may have mishandled a small number of classified documents from his time as Vice President, “it was about, what, three weeks of looking at the facts and then a special counsel is appointed? Can you explain what looks like a very unequal application, the appointment of a special counsel?”

“So it’s tough for me to explain the inexplicable,” began Kirschner, who served as a prosecutor for the U.S. Army, where he handled, among others, espionage cases. He went on to serve as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the powerful U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, and has prosecuted RICO, espionage, and murder cases as well.

“But let me let me give it a shot because I do believe that Merrick Garland is guided by his own sense of ethics and his own determination to preserve the institution, for better or worse,” he said, referring to the Dept. of Justice that had been corrupted by Attorney General Bill Barr and the others Trump had put in charge at DOJ. “And so I think he bends over backwards.”

“I agree we heard about this special counsel, special counsel appointment for the Joe Biden documents, circumstances at lightspeed, and so I think we’re kind of mixing apples and oranges there on the timing front.”

READ MORE: ‘Get Out’: ‘Fraud’ George Santos Must Resign Say County GOP Officials – He Again Defiantly Refuses (Video)

“But I really think the question that is bothering me most right now, is why did it take Jack Smith’s appointment on November 18 to all of a sudden see this increase in the pace and the scope of an investigation that should have been up and running at a full sprint? Ever since, I maintain, right after the insurrection, and it sure doesn’t feel like Merrick Garland was sprinting toward the finish line.”

“Was he running, Glenn?” Wallace asked. “What was the pace with which Merrick Garland was pursuing potential criminality on the part of Donald Trump and his inner circle as it pertained to January 6?”

“It feels to me like he was walking at a leisurely pace at a time in our nation’s history when we needed a flat out sprint,” Kirschner charged, “because I think he was old school in his approach to this investigation, handling it the way we ordinarily handle pyramid conspiracies, but this is not a pyramid conspiracy. I maintain it’s not even a hub and spoke conspiracy. We should call it an octopus conspiracy with all of the tentacles that are splaying out and thrashing about.”

“I think, Merrick Garland in the 24 years, he was a judge. He was a prosecutor before that, and a darn good one. I think he became too judicial, too circumspect. Not aggressive enough in me being sort of this this moment of danger to our democracy.

READ MORE: First Lady Jill Biden Is ‘Compromised’ and ‘Must Be Investigated’ Far Right GOP Congressman Baselessly Claims

“I asked because DOJ is is a National Security Agency,” Wallace explained. “I mean, it houses the nation’s prosecutors. It also houses a National Security Division. And the world’s national security crisis is that we are now exporting insurrections.”

“What happened in Brazil is an extension of the language, the rhetoric and the playbook carried out here where our judicial system, our rule of law appears very sick,” Wallace, a former Bush 43 White House communications director, a top campaign aide to John McCain’s presidential campaign,

“As Glenn just said, our Attorney General is ‘walking at a leisurely pace’ in probing those accountable for the deadly January 6 insurrection here.”

 

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‘Scared to Death’: Trump’s Prison Panic Admission Means He Knows He’s Doomed Says Legal Expert

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Reacting to a report that Donald Trump has been quizzing his attorneys about what type of prison he likely will be sent to, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner stated that is not only an indication that he knows he’s going to be convicted but also an admission of guilt.

Speaking with MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart, the attorney was asked about a recent Rolling Stone report about Trump’s prison panic.

As Rolling Stone reported, Trump asked if he’s “be sent to a ‘club fed’ style prison — a place that’s relatively comfortable, as far these things go — or a ‘bad’ prison? Would he serve out a sentence in a plush home confinement? Would government officials try to strip him of his lifetime Secret Service protections? What would they make him wear, if his enemies actually did ever get him in a cell — an unprecedented set of consequences for a former leader of the free world.”

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

According to the attorney, Trump is revealing himself by asking for so many details.

“What does this tell you about Trump’s mindset?” host Capehart asked.

“It tells me he is scared to death” Kirschner quickly answered. “It tells me he has overwhelming consciousness of guilt because he knows what he did wrong and he knows he is about to be held accountable for his crimes. So it is not surprising that he is obsessing.”

“If he was confident that he would be completely exonerated, would he have to obsess about what his future time in prison might look like?” he suggested. “I think the last refuge for Donald Trump can be seen in a recent post where he urged the Republicans to defund essentially the prosecutions against him. which, to this prosecutor, Jonathan, smells a lot like an attempt to obstruct justice.”

Watch below or at the link.

 

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‘Vulgar and Lewd’: Trump Judge Cites Extremist Group to Allow Drag Show Ban

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A federal judge in Texas known for a ruling that attempted to ban a widely-used abortion drug is citing an extremist anti-LGBTQ group in his ruling allowing a ban on drag shows to stay in place.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a former attorney for an anti-LGBTQ conservative Christian legal organization, and a member of the Federalist Society, in his 26-page ruling dated Thursday cited the “About” page of Gays Against Groomers to claim, “it’s unclear how drag shows unmistakably communicate advocacy for LGBT rights.”

Judge Kacsmaryk, appointed by Donald Trump twice before finally assuming office in 2019, suggests the First Amendment does not provide for freedom of expression for drag shows, calls drag “sexualized conduct,” and says it is “more regulable” because “children are in the audience.”

READ MORE: ‘The Public Deserves to Know’: Abortion Pill Banning Judge Redacted Details About Millions of Dollars in His Stock Portfolio

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern adds, “Kacsmaryk’s conclusion that drag is probably NOT protected by the First Amendment conflicts with decisions from Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Montana which held that drag is constitutionally protected expression. It also bristles with undisguised hostility toward LGBTQ people.”

Calling the judge “a proud Christian nationalist who flatly refuses to apply binding Supreme Court precedent when it conflicts with his extremist far-right beliefs,” Stern at Slate writes that Kacsmaryk ruled drag “may be outlawed to protect ‘the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.’ In short, he concluded that drag fails to convey a message, while explaining all the reasons why he’s offended by the message it conveys.”

Stern does not let Kacsmaryk off the hook there.

“From almost any other judge, the ruling in Spectrum WT v. Wendler would be a shocking rejection of basic free speech principles; from Kacsmaryk, it’s par for the course. This is, after all, the judge who sought to ban medication abortion nationwide, restricted minors’ access to birth control, seize control over border policy to exclude asylum-seekers, and flouted recent precedent protecting LGBTQ+ equality,” Stern says.

READ MORE: Far-Right Judge Under Fire for Failing to Disclose Interviews on Civil Rights – but LGBTQ Community Had Warned Senators

“He is also poised to bankrupt Planned Parenthood by compelling them to pay a $1.8 billion penalty on truly ludicrous grounds. And he is not the only Trump-appointed judge substituting his reactionary beliefs for legal analysis. We have reached a point where these lawless decisions are not only predictable but inevitable, and they show no sign of stopping: Their authors are still just settling into a decadeslong service in the federal judiciary.”

West Texas A&M University President Walter V. Wendler penned the letter that sparked the lawsuit.

Titled, “A Harmless Drag Show? No Such Thing,” Wendler wrote: “I believe every human being is created in the image of God and, therefore, a person of dignity. Being created in God’s image is the basis of Natural Law. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, prisoners of the culture of their time as are we, declared the Creator’s origin as the foundational fiber in the fabric of our nation as they breathed life into it. Does a drag show preserve a single thread of human dignity? I think not.”

Journalist Chris Geidner concludes, “It’s an extremely biased ruling by a judge who has established that he does not care about being overturned — even by the most conservative appeals court in the nation.”

READ MORE: ‘Corruption of the Highest Order’: Experts ‘Sickened’ at ‘Definitely Bought’ Clarence Thomas and His ‘Pay to Play’ Lifestyle

 

 

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Gaetz Praises GOP Congressman Who Echoes His Call for Change ‘Through Force’

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U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL). largely seen as pushing Speaker Kevin McCarthy‘s Republican-majority House of Representatives toward shutting down the federal government, is praising and promoting remarks made by a freshman GOP lawmaker that appear to suggest the use of violence. U.S. Rep. Eli Crane‘s comments, posted Friday (below), call for change “through force,” remarks echoing Congressman Gaetz’s recent comments which were denounced by an expert on authoritarianism as fascistic.

“The only way we’re going to see meaningful change in this town is through force,” wrote Congressman Crane, Republican of Arizona atop a three-minute video in which he frames what is now an almost guaranteed government shutdown as a “spending fight.” In his video he says, “the only way you’re gonna get any change in this town is through force.” Gaetz in August had said, “we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.”

Congressman Crane is a former Navy SEAL. He has promoted the false “Big Lie” conspiracy theory that there was massive fraud in the election President Joe Biden won, and called “on the state legislature to decertify the 2020 election.” He is one of six House Republicans who voted against McCarthy’s speakership all 15 times in January.

READ MORE: White House Mocks GOP With ‘Worst Person You Know’ Meme After Matt Gaetz Blames McCarthy for Shutdown

“Congressman Eli Crane is a fountainhead of political courage,” said Rep. Gaetz Friday afternoon. “He holds the line.”

Crane recently came under fire for calling Black people “colored,” during debate on his legislation that would force the U.S. Armed Forces to not use any diversity requirements in its hiring practices.

READ MORE: ‘Corruption of the Highest Order’: Experts ‘Sickened’ at ‘Definitely Bought’ Clarence Thomas and His ‘Pay to Play’ Lifestyle

Just days before he won his House seat last year, The Washington Post reported Crane had urged an “audience to look up an antisemitic sermon at a recent campaign stop.”

“Crane said that he was motivated to run because of ‘radical ideologies that are destroying this country’ and that he was most concerned about ‘Cultural Marxism,’ which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as an antisemitic baseless claim gaining traction on the American right.”

“He encouraged the audience to watch a speech by a right-wing pastor who blamed cultural change on a group of German Jewish philosophers and condemned Barack Obama for having a ‘homosexual agenda.'”

“If we don’t wake up,” Crane said, according to the Post, “if we don’t study what they’re doing, and if we don’t put people in influential positions that understand what this war is all about, what they’re trying to do and have and have the courage to call it out, we’re going to lose this country.”

In August, while standing next to Donald Trump at a campaign rally, Congressman Gaetz said, “Mr. President, I cannot stand these people that are destroying our country. They are opening our borders. They are weaponizing our federal law enforcement against patriotic Americans who love this nation as we should.”

“But we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C. And so to all my friends here in Iowa, when you see them come for this man, know that they are coming for our movement and they are coming for all of us.”

At the time, Raw Story reported, “historian and author Ruth Ben-Ghiat called Gaetz comments alarming.”

READ MORE: Pete Buttigieg Just Testified Before Congress. It Did Not Go Well for Republicans.

“What he is saying is that they are not going to have change through elections or through legislation or through reform. They are going to have change through violence,” she warned.

“And that’s how fascists talk,” Ben-Ghiat added. “So, even if Trump is out of the picture, these are people who have adopted methods very familiar to me as a historian of fascism, that violence and corruption and lying that’s what the party is today.”

 

Image via Shutterstock

 

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