The closely watched case focuses on a charge that former President Donald Trump also faces in his election interference case.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of a former police officer who is seeking to throw out an obstruction charge for joining the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
The justices in a 6-3 vote on nonideological lines handed a win to defendant Joseph Fischer, who is among hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants — including former President Donald Trump — who have been charged with obstructing an official proceeding over the effort to prevent Congress' certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.
The court concluded that the law, enacted in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act after the Enron accounting scandal, was only intended to apply to more limited circumstances involving forms of evidence tampering, not the much broader array of situations that prosecutors had claimed it covered.
The provision targets anyone who "obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so," but the court determined that its scope is limited by a preceding sentence in the statute referring to altering or destroying records.
While he is evil enough, he was never a member of the cabinet.
One little stat to ponder: there are 26 cabinet-level positions in the executive branch. If Trump had 44 cabinet members that would be a lot of turnover in four years.
By my count there were 36 cabinet members confirmed by congress in the Trump administration. Of the 25 cabinet posts at the end of the term only 4 left office before the term was up. The rest sat thru Jan. 6th and rode it out, so maybe that stat is a wee bit of an exaggeration.
Still...
If you count those that didn't make it through confirmation you get 42, and Pence counts too, so that's 43. But the NBC story I think this references just says:
NBC News reached out to 44 of the dozens of people who served in Trump's Cabinet over his term in office. Most declined to comment or ignored the requests. A total of four have said publicly they support his run for re-election. Several have been coy about where they stand, stopping short of endorsing Trump with the GOP primary race underway. Then there are those who outright oppose his bid for the GOP nomination or are adamant that they don't want him back in power.
so it's not members of the cabinet, it's people who served in. A bigger pool. And the responses were 'coy' or 'no comment'. But 4 yays out of 44 people who were certainly some level of insiders isn't a good look.
If you ask the guy leaving the restaurant how it is and he looks at the ground and says "well.... Uh.... no comment", I'd look around.
While he is evil enough, he was never a member of the cabinet.
One little stat to ponder: there are 26 cabinet-level positions in the executive branch. If Trump had 44 cabinet members that would be a lot of turnover in four years.
By my count there were 36 cabinet members confirmed by congress in the Trump administration. Of the 25 cabinet posts at the end of the term only 4 left office before the term was up. The rest sat thru Jan. 6th and rode it out, so maybe that stat is a wee bit of an exaggeration.
I'm betting Steve Mnuchin, former Sec. of Treasury. Got a huge amount of investment money from the Saudis. Also Wilbur Ross, forner Sec. of Commerce and escapee from the family burial crypt.
Then there's Ben Carson, former Sec. of HUD who's apparently still in a long-shot prospect for VP.
But we live in age of cowardice and non-existent morals. Few people would speak out right and reject Trump. And then people say one thing and the exact opposite soon after, like Nikki Haley. Or Bill Barr, who's now endorsing Trump. This NBC News article is from July 30, 2023:
NBC News reached out to 44 of the dozens of people who served in Trump's Cabinet over his term in office. Most declined to comment or ignored the requests. A total of four have said publicly they support his run for re-election. Several have been coy about where they stand, stopping short of endorsing Trump with the GOP primary race underway. Then there are those who outright oppose his bid for the GOP nomination or are adamant that they don't want him back in power.
âI have made clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and will not endorse Trump,â former Attorney General Bill Barr told NBC News. Asked how he would vote if the general election pits Trump against President Joe Biden, a Democrat, Barr said: âIâll jump off that bridge when I get to it.â
The Trump campaign declined to comment beyond pointing to three former Cabinet members as people to contact â one of whom has endorsed Trump and two others who, when asked, didn't commit to endorsing him at this time.
tweet of the day 40 out of 44 former cabinet members, including his own former VP, have said they will not vote for trump. This ain't rocket science, folks.
Iâm wandering in Scandinavia for a bit and the posters mocking Trump, and the people asking WTF are âweâ thinkingâ¦itâs embarrassing, especially to admit that our rules allow to loser of the popular vote to be President. We are a laughingstock for even considering him again.
Don't talk to me about Biden's gaffes. Trump looks and sounds more like Will Ferrell's parody of Harry Caray all the time.
Iâm wandering in Scandinavia for a bit and the posters mocking Trump, and the people asking WTF are âweâ thinkingâ¦itâs embarrassing, especially to admit that our rules allow to loser of the popular vote to be President. We are a laughingstock for even considering him again.
Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.
Another pleasant illusion is that the strongman will unite the nation. But an aspiring dictator will always claim that some belong and others don't. He will define one group after another as the enemy. This might feel good, so long as you feel that you are on the right side of the line. But now fear is the essence of life. The politics of us-and-them, once begun, never ends.
We dream that a strongman will let us focus on America. But dictatorship opens our country to the worst the world has to offer. An American strongman will measure himself by the wealth and power of other dictators. He will befriend them and compete with them. From them he will learn new ways to oppress and to exploit his own people.
At least, the fantasy goes, the strongman will get things done. But dictatorial power today is not about achieving anything positive. It is about preventing anyone else from achieving anything. The strongman is really the weak man: his secret is that he makes everyone else weaker.
When it comes to rallying his voter base, the men-of-color-as-sexual-predator trope has to be the most fail-safe tool Trump can invoke, since white men have been using this lie to scare white women and each other into submitting to racism for as long as race relations have existed.
The myth of black and brown men as sexual predators toward white women is a deeply psychological motivator that activates peopleâs basest survival instincts, one that's been around as long as white men have been colonizing places filled with darker-hued humans. And, itâs clearly been highly effective for getting voters to leave logic behind; It's part of how Donald Trump won the White House. (...)
It's that excitement, that unseemly pleasure that men like Trump apparently take in asserting that we should all fear the sexual predation of nonwhite men, that makes it so easy for me to believe that the entire racist structure of colonialism is founded upon white menâs sexual insecurities. There is a perverse pleasure taken in making these warnings, in calling us savages, in generating and regenerating the myth that they are protecting "their" women (and thus their pale future) from the voracious sexual appetites of nonwhite men. They can feel their obsolescence encroaching; they always have.
The vilification of men of color also serves as an indicator about some white menâs own malicious intentions: It takes a rapist to believe that everyone else is intent on rape. In the United States, from the colonial period to well into the 1960s, white men raped women of color with impunity even while setting up their white female counterparts as beholden to them for protection against men of color. Through this mind-bending logic, they managed to create a system that had virtually no legal consequences for a white man who raped a black or brown woman, while black men could only ever be rapists to white women (and thus strung up at the nearest tree after any accusation, regardless of evidence).
"I see no difference when using your terms." Either you didn't watch the video or you're just a f$^kin' numbnut.
The guy who needed his AC fixed this week during a record-breaking heatwave is complaining about addressing global warming as a comparative "whatabout" to support the removal of all government capability. You left out option C: BOTH
Yeah, the 25 year old start up capacitor for the 25 year old compressor failed. Yep, the only reason for that is global warming.
Fortunately, when it failed at around 10 pm, made a call shortly thereafter and got an appointment for noon the next day and was up and running by 4 pm.
At the height of this once in a (short) lifetime global warming heat wave attacking the East. Without needing government assistance.
It's always good to know who to call and get things done.
