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‘Bizarre’: Trump Quotes Yogi Berra in Critical SCOTUS Motion

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Attorneys for Donald Trump filed a motion late Monday afternoon asking the U.S. Supreme Court to put on hold a lower court’s ruling rejecting his claims of “presidential immunity.” But legal experts were quick to trash the filing that is critical to his defense, calling it “bizarre” and questioning why it quotes baseball icon Yogi Berra in the very first sentence.

NBC News calls Trump’s decision to go to the U.S. Supreme Court “a last-ditch effort to prevent his prosecution in the federal election interference case from moving closer to trial.” In so doing, “Trump asked the justices to put on hold an appeals court ruling that rejected his broad claim of presidential immunity in relation to events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”

Professor of law Andrew Weissmann, the well-known MSNBC legal analyst and former DOJ official who also worked on the Mueller Report, appeared stunned just moments after reading the Trump motion on Monday.

Asked, “what strikes you?” Weissmann paused momentarily, then replied, “Two things.”

READ MORE: ‘Prick’: Fetterman Smacks Down Rand Paul

“The first is the incredibly inappropriate first sentence, citing Yogi Berra. You know, if you were going to be snarky, they might as well have cited Yogi Bear. I mean, this is, that is, that is just a bizarre way to start.”

“Remember,” Weissmann continued, “Donald Trump and his lawyers have said that their position is that the President of the United States can kill people. And as long as he hasn’t been impeached, successfully, that he was impeached and convicted for it, he cannot be prosecuted. So that for something this serious, that is a bizarre, really bizarre first sentence.”

“The second thing is that stressing this argument about, shifting I think a bit their theory, which is that all of the actions that are charged by Jack Smith are within the outer bounds of what a president can do. The problem with that is that a very, very well respected 11th Circuit Judge, the chief judge, Judge Prior has rejected that in connection with a decision that Judge Prior wrote in connection with Mark Meadows, so I don’t think leading with that kind of argument, after leading where the first sentence is Yogi Berra then going to an argument that you know that Judge Pryor has rejected? Both of those are not terribly, in my view, strong ways to start,” he concluded, granting that “this is just my initial impression.”

MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin also blasted the arguments in the motion.

“So I looked at what his argument is about the ‘irreparable injury’ and I have to tell you that legally it’s not particularly strong,” Rubin began. “First, he says it’s axiomatic that if he’s immune, he doesn’t have to stand trial. But for many people, the act of standing trial is a hideous expense and extraordinarily disruptive to their lives. We’re talking about a guy who is using a leadership pack as his legal defense slush fund to the tune of dozens of millions of dollars and probably has not spent a personal dime in defending this case at all.”

READ MORE: Trump Lawyers Envisioned Jan. 6 Lasting Days or Weeks: Report

“In fact, when I look at this FEC filings, I see the names of dozens of law firms that I recognize, many of which have been involved in this exact case. Then he says it could radically disrupt his campaign for president if he’s forced to stand trial again. I wish some of our political colleagues were here on air with us right now because I bet you that folks like Garrett Haake and Vaughn Hilliard and Jake Traylor and others could tell you, President Trump isn’t actually on the campaign trail that much. He’s on the campaign trail during weekends, but he finds lots of ways to get his messages out. And the most effective way for him right now seems to be True Social, which doesn’t require him to be in any one particular place, and certainly doesn’t require him to be in any one particular state.”

Watch the MSNBC segment below or at this link.

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Trump White House Turns on ‘Moron’ MAGA Loyalist ‘Begging for an Additional Brain Cell’

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The Trump White House is attacking one of its loyal media figures after she berated Vice President JD Vance over President Donald Trump’s Iran deal.

“The problem is, that it’s an absolutely disastrous deal that has brought us to our knees, weeks before our 250th birthday,” NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said in a clip she posted to social media, which Mediaite reported.

“This is an utter humiliation of the United States, and everybody knows it,” she continued. “Everybody knows it, but especially Iran knows it. They are celebrating this. They are still calling us the enemy.”

“And while Iran celebrates this and sneers at us for totally capitulating when we had complete military superiority over them,” she said, “JD Vance is out there criticizing Israel, making up fantasies about how it is Israel’s fault, and Israel wants Iran to be a failed state. And if only Israel would lay down its arms and allow Hezbollah to keep attacking it, there would be peace in the Middle East.”

Ungar-Sargon called Vance’s remarks “disgusting,” “utterly deplorable,” and a “complete Tucker Carlsonification of the Vice President of the United States.”

She warned, “if this was a dry run for Vance 2028,” for president, “we sure learned a lot.”

On social media, Ungar-Sargon added: “VP JD Vance just brought the US to its knees with a humiliating deal weeks before our 250th birthday and he has the audacity to blame … Israel! … for the terrible situation we’re in.”

The White House’s Rapid Response team blasted Ungar-Sargon.

“The only humiliation here is Batya desperately begging for an additional brain cell because her failing TV … show is even more irrelevant than the likes of Kaitlan Collins and Fake Tapper,” the White House declared. “Only a moron of her caliber could still doubt President Trump’s leadership.”

In 2024, Ungar-Sargon wrote, “American Jews should vote for Trump because he is the candidate who stands most clearly for the things that have defined us for centuries.”

 

 

 

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Veteran Journalist War-Games Trump’s ‘Rolling Coup’ — and How It Fails

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Veteran journalist Jonathan Alter has published a fictitious yet “all-too-plausible” scenario whereby President Donald Trump attempts to overturn the results of the 2026 election — especially in the Senate — which could narrowly move to Democratic control in November. He suggests that it will take two sets of citizens: the general public and former U.S. presidents, among others, to defeat what he sees as the current president’s “slow-motion rolling coup attempt,” which he says is “already underway.”

Writing at Washington Monthly, Alter acknowledges that Democratic control of the House after the November election is likely, while control of the Senate is possible but not the “big blue wave” or “tsunami” he sees in the House.

Calling him a “chaos agent,” Alter explains that Trump’s “fear of impeachment and a Senate trial are making him desperate and more dangerous.”

“It’s easy to miss that a slow-motion rolling coup attempt is already underway, staged by Stephen Miller and, of course, Trump himself,” Alter writes. “When Trump told The New York Times early this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in 2020, that was a clear signal that he will likely try to do so after the midterms.”

Ultimately, Alter predicts in his war-gamed scenario that democracy will prevail but not before a months-long constitutional crisis.

“The resolution of the crisis came after more than two months of efforts by President Trump to overturn the results of the midterm elections with unfounded accusations of vote fraud,” Alter writes, as if it were January 2027. “His efforts sparked mass protests, which gave him a pretext to invoke emergency powers and interfere in elections that, under the U.S. Constitution, are handled by the states.”

Alter points to several critical events when Trump telegraphed his intentions.

January 6, 2026: “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told Republicans on the fifth anniversary of what some have called his coup attempt.

That same month: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good,” Trump told The New York Times.

Also that month, he told Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

Alter also points to two critical documents that presumably could give Trump broad emergency powers.

One, the National Presidential Security Memorandum (NPSM-7) that, Alter writes, “grants the president broad wartime powers to designate Americans as possible terrorists if the federal government considers them or their sponsors ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.'”

The second, Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), “which were developed during the Eisenhower Administration as a single instructional book in case of a nuclear attack on Washington.”

Alter continues his war-gamed scenario: “With Mr. Trump now running a police state, former presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices finally came off the sidelines. On December 22, a hastily-organized Committee on Election Integrity issued an open letter in support of certification of the legitimate winners and filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the president’s use of NPSM-7 and PEAD powers—intended for nuclear war—was unconstitutional in domestic politics.”

Read the entire article here.

 

Image via Reuters 

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‘Be Very Afraid’: Carville Warns Trump ‘Everybody Is Out for You’

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Political strategist James Carville has a warning for President Donald Trump: be afraid, because everyone is leaking.

Carville responded to a viewer’s remarks about a recent Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan article. The viewer, citing Carville himself, said, “people in the Trump White House are leaking, like, crazy.”

“Don’t trust anybody,” Carville warned. “They got tapes, everybody. They’re — everybody in the administration is s—— all over you, and they’re just getting warmed up.”

“The other effect, come after November, is these people realize that their careers are for all intents and purposes gone,” Carville explained. “No one’s gonna want to hire anybody out of the Trump administration, and the way that you get right with history is start leaking.”

“And you position yourself as the person that tried to tell them,” he warned administration officials. “That’s the only future you have. Leak like a sieve, leak like a broken faucet, leak everywhere.”

“You’re already leaking,” he continued. “Everybody’s leaking on you, everybody’s leaking on everybody else. Trust no one.”

“That’s what, that’s my message to anybody that works in this administration, and if, I’ll give you one piece of advice, Donald Trump, everybody is out for you, even your own people,” Carville said.

“Be scared. Be very afraid.”

It’s unclear which article the viewer was referencing, but Haberman and Swan have a new book about to be released, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”

Axios earlier this week reported, “Top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, ‘Regime Change.'”

“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” an administration source told Axios. “And we have no idea which ones.”

Axios also noted that it has heard that “President Trump is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts.”

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that Haberman and Swan’s book “reveals a host of details and surprising exchanges as President Trump pushed to drastically expand his power.”

Among them, that the “top echelon of White House officials was fixated on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,” that “Trump wanted revenge against those he felt had wronged him — even when he couldn’t remember their names,” and that “Trump enjoyed comparisons of his power to that of Mao and Genghis Khan.”

Also, the Times noted, one morning White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt found Trump with “a tube of super glue in his hand,” as he “was trying to adorn the marble fireplace mantel with new golden decorations.”

Image via Reuters

 

 

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