It's Sunday

In an excerpt from his new book OPUS: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church, author Gareth Gore examines the ties binding Supreme Court kingmaker Leonard Leo and Opus Dei, a radical organization on the fringes of the Catholic Church that is accused of serious abuses and dedicated to the complete “re-Christianization” of the world.

[...]

Leo clerked for a judge on the court of appeals and became close with another appellate judge who had recently been appointed to the D.C. circuit — a man from Georgia called Clarence Thomas, who had toyed with becoming a Catholic priest. [...] Leo was asked by the Federalist Society to become its first employee — although he delayed his start date so that he could help his good friend Thomas through his contentious confirmation process for the Supreme Court. Despite accusations of sexual harassment hanging over him, Thomas won Senate confirmation by a slim margin. It would be the first in a series of fights in which Leo would have to put aside the teachings of his Christian faith as he focused on the greater goal of pushing through a conservative revolution of the courts and of society at large.

  Rolling Stone

Putting aside teachings of their faith never seems to be a problem.

In 2005, the Federalist Society began openly advocating for John Roberts — a former member — to be nominated to fill a vacant seat at the Supreme Court, the first time it had campaigned publicly for a particular candidate. A few months later, its sway had grown so much that it torpedoed President George W. Bush’s own preferred candidate for another vacant seat on the Supreme Court — Harriet Miers, a judge and close friend of the president who wasn’t a member of the Federalist Society — and pressured him to nominate Samuel Alito, one of its members, in her place.

[...]

In 2011, Leo teamed up with Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni to co-found another nonprofit that successfully opposed an Islamic center being built near the site of the 9 ⁄11 attacks in New York, denigrated as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” A year later, he joined the board of the Catholic Association, another non-profit linked to the Corkerys, that funded campaigns to oppose same-sex marriage. For its part, the Catholic Information Center — despite in theory being apolitical — had also joined a suit against the Obama administration, challenging the requirement that employers provide and pay for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing drugs as part of employee health insurance plans.

[...]

The makeup of the [Catholic Information Center (CIC)] board was decidedly unpolitical — a mix of academics, lawyers, and volunteers who helped run the bookshop. Pat Cipollone, a lawyer who had been an assistant to Attorney General Bill Barr in the early nineties but who had since returned to the private sector, was the only board member who was remotely connected to the Washington political scene. But in 2014, all that changed. Alongside Leo, Bill Barr, the former attorney general, was also appointed.

Leo and his ilk would soon become a bridge connecting the prelature with important people on Capitol Hill — and the world of dark money populated by secretive billionaires with a deeply conservative agenda. Together, they would form a coalition — unified by their political connections, religious fervor, and money — that would reshape American society and destroy many hard-won civil rights.

[...]

The recruitment of Leonard Leo would cement ties between Opus Dei and the U.S. Supreme Court that had been developing for decades. [...] But with Leo and his network of dark money, Opus Dei’s penetration of Washington’s political and judicial worlds would now reach unprecedented levels.

[...]

As Leo’s access to the world of dark money grew, his Opus Dei friends the Corkerys became critical as a front for the tens of millions of dollars streaming through Leo’s hidden network of nonprofits. Neil and Ann had provided crucial cover for him during the campaign to secure the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005, hiding the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to influence public opinion. As more dark money poured in starting in 2010, they began to do the same again through various nonprofits such as the Wellspring Committee and the Judicial Crisis Network. Their importance only grew following Scalia’s death, as Leo pumped his network for ever larger sums. In the weeks after Scalia’s death, the Corkerys began opening the purse strings in what would eventually become a $17 million campaign to stop Obama from replacing Scalia and instead ensure a reliable conservative filled the vacancy. It was just the start. Over the next five years, Leo and the Corkerys would oversee the transfer of almost $600 million of dark money to right-wing causes. Their hidden ecosystem would eventually enable a conservative takeover of the Supreme Court that would disassemble hard-won civil rights and turn back the clock on issues close to their hearts — on abortion, on affirmative action, and on vast swathes of what they saw as a progressive agenda.

They also used the network to line their own pockets.

Continue reading.

Closer and closer

The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to force the top two lawyers from Donald Trump’s White House counsel’s office to testify about their conversations with the former President

[...]

Trump and his allies have used claims of confidentiality – both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege - with mixed results in multiple legal quagmires that surround the former President. Those include the January 6 federal criminal investigation, the Mar-a-Lago documents federal criminal investigation, Georgia’s Fulton County investigation of election meddling, and the House select committee probe of January 6 as well. Some of the privilege arguments Trump has raised have never been settled in federal court, and some of the fights could lead to the Supreme Court.

[...]

The move to compel additional testimony from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin just last week is part of a set of secret court proceedings. Trump has been fighting to keep former advisers from testifying before a criminal grand jury about certain conversations, citing executive and attorney-client privileges to keep information confidential or slow down criminal investigators.

But the Justice Department successfully secured answers from top vice presidential advisers Greg Jacob and Marc Short over the past three weeks in significant court victories that could make it more likely the criminal investigation reaches further into Trump’s inner circle.

[...]

[T]he Justice Department won a trial-level judge’s order at the end of September that said Jacob and Short must testify in response to certain questions over which Trump’s team had tried to claim presidential and attorney-client confidentiality.

[...]

Cipollone’s and Philbin’s roles as White House lawyers raise complicated legal questions about whether Trump can claim confidentiality over the legal advice they gave him, as well as whether a former president can assert executive privilege to hold off criminal investigators.

[...]

All four men have been willing to be as cooperative as the law demands, leaving Trump’s team to handle the fight over certain details in the investigation

[...]

The sealed court case, stemming from the grand jury’s work, had been before the chief judge of the DC District Court, Beryl Howell. Howell refused to put on hold Jacob and Short’s testimony while Trump’s team appealed.

[...]

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals is still considering legal arguments from Trump’s defense lawyers and the Justice Department over his ability to make executive and attorney-client privilege claims.

  CNN

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

How to abscond with classified documents and not be arrested

Four days before the end of the Trump presidency, a White House aide peered into the Oval Office and was startled, if not exactly surprised, to see all of the president’s personal photos still arrayed behind the Resolute Desk as if nothing had changed — guaranteeing the final hours would be a frantic dash mirroring the prior four years.

[...]

Papers he had accumulated in his last several months in office had been dropped into boxes, roughly two dozen of them, and not sent to the National Archives. Aides had even retrieved letters from Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, and given them to Mr. Trump in the final weeks.

[...]

Although the White House Counsel’s Office had told Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, that the roughly two dozen boxes worth of material in the residence needed to be turned over to the archives, at least some of those boxes, including those with the Kim letters and some documents marked highly classified, were shipped to Florida. There they were stored at various points over the past 19 months in different locations inside Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s members-only club, home and office.

[...]

This month, prosecutors obtained a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago for remaining materials, including some related to sensitive national security matters. The investigation is active and expanding, according to recent court filings, as prosecutors look into potentially serious violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.

  NYT

And we don't know which instances of obstruction, beyond attempting to get back the documents Trump should not have in his possession, they're expecting to have evidence for.

Mr. Meadows assured aides that the harried packing up of the White House would follow requirements about the preservation of documents, and he said he would make efforts to ensure that the administration complied with the Presidential Records Act, according to people familiar with those conversations.

But as the clock ticked down, Mr. Trump focused on pushing through last-minute pardons and largely ignored the transition he had tried to forestall.

[...]

From his first hours in office, Mr. Trump had always taken a proprietary view of the presidency, describing government documents and other property — even his staff — as his own personal possessions.

[...]

[In reality, under] the Presidential Records Act, the law that strictly governs the handling of records generated in the Oval Office, every document belonged to taxpayers. Whether the materials were national security briefings, reams of unclassified documents automatically uploaded to a secure server in Pennsylvania or notes that Mr. Trump routinely ripped up or flushed down the toilet — all were government property to be assessed and, in most cases, transferred as part of the nation’s history to the National Archives.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s lawyers and aides were well versed in the records act, even if Mr. Trump routinely flouted it. Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s first White House counsel, instituted a protocol for the proper handling of materials and gave presentations on the law to staff members, former officials said. After the 2020 election, White House officials held conversations about the fact that someone needed to retrieve documents that Mr. Trump had accumulated in the residence over many months.

[...]

By the end of the administration, the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and his deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, were keenly aware that Mr. Trump’s handling of documents was a potential problem.

[...]

Mr. Meadows’s immediate predecessors in that role — President Barack Obama’s last chief of staff, Denis McDonough, and President George W. Bush’s final chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten — had created teams to scrub West Wing offices of anything that belonged to the archives and made the stewardship of government records a priority. It is unclear whether Mr. Meadows took the same measures, former aides said. But in the administration’s final weeks, the White House emailed all of its offices detailed instructions about returning documents and cleaning out their spaces.

[...]

Mr. Meadows also assured White House staff members that he would talk

[...]

[B]y early 2021, after Mr. Trump had left the White House, officials with the archives realized they were missing significant material.

They reached out to, among others, Scott Gast, who had been a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office under Mr. Trump, and Mr. Philbin. The two men, along with Mr. Meadows and four other Trump officials, had been appointed by Mr. Trump on his last full day in office to work with the National Archives.

[...]

The archivists were particularly insistent about getting back the missing correspondence from the North Korean leader and a letter left on the Resolute Desk for Mr. Trump by Mr. Obama, both of significant historical value.

Archives officials also asked Mr. Gast and Mr. Philbin about the roughly two dozen boxes that had been in the residence during the Trump administration’s final days. Mr. Philbin responded that he would work to get them in the hands of the archives and reached out to Mr. Meadows, who said he would help make it happen.

[...]

But archives officials did not get what they wanted until they traveled to Mar-a-Lago and retrieved 15 boxes of material in January 2022. Subsequently, archives officials told Mr. Trump’s team that they had identified social media records that had not been preserved, and that they had learned White House staff members had not preserved official business they had conducted on their personal electronic messaging accounts.

[...]

In the spring, both Mr. Philbin and Mr. Gast were questioned by the F.B.I. about the boxes; Mr. Cipollone was also interviewed at some point. A grand jury was formed.

[...]

In June, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers signed a statement asserting that all relevant documents with classified markings from the boxes that had been requested — by then they were stored in a basement area at Mar-a-Lago — had been returned. The Justice Department would later file a detailed affidavit to a federal judge in Florida, revealing that the department believed possible crimes had been committed, precipitating the search on Aug. 8 at the club.

[...]

None of [the] documents or any other materials pertaining to the Russia investigation were believed to be in the cache of documents recovered by the F.B.I. during the search of Mar-a-Lago.

Somebody's ass - or somebodies' asses - will soon be in a sling.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

John Dean on the January 6 Committee

In this episode of iGen, John Dean and Jim Robenalt reveal that Pat Cipollone had an obligation to tell Congress about the plots to overturn the 2020 election because of his oath to protect the Constitution.  And also, they believe the Committee hearings will continue into August because of all the new information the Committee is now getting from people who have decided their fate is better if they come forward.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Dereliction of duty

I want to see direct evidence of Trump leading or conspiring with illegal acts.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

The panel did not press him to either corroborate or contradict some specific details of explosive testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who captivated the country late last month with her account of an out-of-control president willing to embrace violence and stop at nothing to stay in power, the people said.

During a roughly eight-hour interview conducted behind closed doors in the O’Neill House Office Building, the panel covered some of the same ground it did during an informal interview with Mr. Cipollone in April.

[...]

Mr. Cipollone, who fought against the most extreme plans to overturn the 2020 election but has long held that his direct conversations with Mr. Trump are protected by executive privilege and attorney-client privilege, invoked certain privileges in declining to answer some of the committee’s questions.

[...]

The panel recorded Mr. Cipollone on video with potential plans to use clips of his testimony at upcoming hearings.

[...]

[Ms. Hutchinson] testified that Mr. Cipollone told her on the morning of Jan. 6 that Mr. Trump’s plan to accompany the mob to the Capitol would cause Trump officials to be “charged with every crime imaginable.”

Two people familiar with Mr. Cipollone’s actions that day said he did not recall making that comment to Ms. Hutchinson. Those people said the committee was made aware before the interview that Mr. Cipollone would not confirm that conversation were he to be asked. He was not asked about that specific statement on Friday, according to people familiar with the questions.

  NYT

Sneaky.

Patsy Baloney testimony

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, on Friday said former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone did not contradict the testimony of previous witnesses when he met with the panel Friday.

[...]

“Mr. Cipollone did appear voluntarily and answer a whole variety of questions. He did not contradict the testimony of other witnesses. And I think we did learn a few things, which we will be rolling out in the hearings to come,” Lofgren told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

[...]

“He could say so and so was wrong, which he did not say. There were things that he might not be present for, or, in some cases, couldn’t recall with precision. My sense was that he, as I say, he did appear voluntarily. I think he was candid with the committee. He was careful in his answers, and I believe that he was honest in his answers,” she said.

[...]

“So I think it was a, you know, a grueling day for all involved — Mr. Cipollone and the staff and the members, but it was well worth it.”

  Yahoo

Not the sharpest tool in the shed

It would seem he might not understand what the committee will be asking Cipollone about.  Oh, wait.  He knows.  He's just trying to gaslight his base.  When, in fact, he has probably just made them want to watch the hearings in case somebody might reveal "secrets of foreign policy or other important matters."

Cipollone to testify to January 6 Committee

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, a critical figure in the final days of the Trump White House, will testify before the House select committee behind closed doors on Friday [under subpoena].

[...]

In a letter to Cipollone regarding the subpoena, Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss, wrote that the committee would like to speak with him about a number of issues, including Trump's efforts to subvert the election, a scheme to submit fake electoral ballots, the attempted replacement of Justice Dept. leadership and attempts to directly interfere with Congress' activities on Jan. 6, 2021.

[...]

"Our evidence shows that Mr. Cipollone and his office tried to do what was right. They tried to stop a number of President Trump's plans for January 6th," Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney said in a hearing last month.

[...]

Cipollone was a lead defender of Trump during his first impeachment trial. He earlier served in government during William Barr's first stint leading the Justice Department in the early 1990s. He has served along with Barr and conservative legal icon Leonard Leo as directors of the Catholic Information Center, affiliated with the conservative Opus Dei movement, as NPR reported at the time of the first impeachment trial.

  NPR

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Why can't we get Pat Cipollone in a public hearing?

It would be so entertaining with cc turned on.  Click these graphics for enlargements.

Thanks to Merrill Markoe for capturing these.

January 6 Committee subpoenas Pasquale "Pat" Cipollone

The subpoena marked a dramatic escalation for the panel and showed its resolve in seeking to obtain inside information about how the former president sought to return himself to office from the unique perspective of the White House counsel’s office.

[...]

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, according to her public testimony, was told by Cipollone that “we’re going to be charged with every crime imaginable” if Trump went to the Capitol that day as he pressured Congress to not certify Biden’s win.

[...]

“The committee needs to hear from him on the record, as other former White House counsels have done in other congressional investigations. Concerns Mr Cipollone has about the prerogatives of the office he previously held are clearly outweighed by the need for his testimony.”

Cipollone was a key witness to some of Trump’s most brazen schemes to overturn the 2020 election results.

[...]

Cipollone has information about Trump’s push to send fake slates of electors to Congress, the subpoena letter said, a plot that would have given the then vice-president Mike Pence cover to supposedly refuse to certify Joe Biden’s election win.

He also has information about Trump’s foiled plan to pressure the justice department into falsely declaring the results of the 2020 election “corrupt”, the subpoena letter said.

[...]

Together with his deputy, Pat Philbin, and another White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, who has cooperated extensively with the select committee, Cipollone sought to restrain some of Trump’s most dangerous impulses, fearing Trump could face serious legal exposure.

[...]

Thompson acknowledged in the subpoena letter that Cipollone had spoken to House investigators in a more informal setting on 13 April. But, he said, recent evidence to which he was in a “unique position” to discuss necessitated on-the-record testimony at a 6 July deposition.

  Guardian

So I'm guessing we will only see clips of his testimony, at best.

Legal advice for staffers during the coup attempt

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone was urging White House officials not to speak to Trump or enable his coup attempt in any way, so they could reduce the chance they could be prosecuted for treason under the Sedition Act. “They’re being told to stay away from Trump,” the friend said.

[...]

According to a person close to the White House, Trump refused to take calls on Wednesday from business leaders who wanted him to call off the insurrectionists. A former West Wing staffer said Republicans were texting and calling Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to lobby him to intervene, but Meadows wasn’t answering.

[...]

Trump told people that he wanted David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler to lose the Georgia Senate runoff election as a way of punishing them and Mitch McConnell. “Trump told people he is really angry that the senators and McConnell hadn’t stood up for him to challenge the election. He’s happy they lost.” According to the Republican, Trump has said he’ll be the most dominant force in Republican politics if there’s no party leadership.

  Vanity Fair

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Because he's fundraising on the "fight"

Then obviously Cipollone IS Trump's personal lawyer, and WE're paying him.  And they'll get away with it, too.

Look who grew a political conscience:

From the guy who wrote the GOP playbook.

Everyone was in the loop

More than two months before he asked Ukraine’s president to investigate his political opponents, President Trump directed John R. Bolton, then his national security adviser, to help with his pressure campaign to extract damaging information on Democrats from Ukrainian officials, according to an unpublished manuscript by Mr. Bolton.

Mr. Trump gave the instruction, Mr. Bolton wrote, during an Oval Office conversation in early May that included the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who is now leading the president’s impeachment defense.

Mr. Trump told Mr. Bolton to call Volodymyr Zelensky, who had recently won election as president of Ukraine, to ensure Mr. Zelensky would meet with Mr. Giuliani, who was planning a trip to Ukraine to discuss the investigations that the president sought, in Mr. Bolton’s account. Mr. Bolton never made the call, he wrote.

[...]

In a statement after this article was published, Mr. Trump denied the discussion that Mr. Bolton described.

“I never instructed John Bolton to set up a meeting for Rudy Giuliani, one of the greatest corruption fighters in America and by far the greatest mayor in the history of N.Y.C., to meet with President Zelensky,” Mr. Trump said. “That meeting never happened.”

  NYT

Yeah, Bolton didn't set it up.

[Giuliani] was adamant that Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Mulvaney were never involved in meetings related to Ukraine.

“It is absolutely, categorically untrue,” he said.

I think if we're going to compare truthfulness between Bolton on the one hand and Giuliani and Trump on the other, we can be fairly certain what did happen.

But John Bolton is a whore for not coming forward and testifying when asked at the House hearings, instead withholding the information to enrich himself with a book.

Mr. Trump also repeatedly made national security decisions contrary to American interests, Mr. Bolton wrote, describing a pervasive sense of alarm among top advisers about the president’s choices. Mr. Bolton expressed concern to others in the administration that the president was effectively granting favors to autocratic leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Xi Jinping of China.

And here's another instance of the Stalin syndrome infecting the White House:

After pushing out Ms. Yovanovitch, Mr. Giuliani turned his attention to other American diplomats responsible for Ukraine policy. During the Oval Office conversation, he also mentioned a State Department official with the last name of Kent, whom Mr. Bolton wrote he did not know. Mr. Giuliani said he was hostile to Mr. Trump and sympathetic to George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has long been a target of the far right.

[...]

Mr. Bolton left the Oval Office after 10 minutes and returned to his office, he wrote. Shortly after, two aides came into his office, saying Mr. Trump had sent them out of a separate meeting on trade to ask about Mr. Kent, Mr. Bolton wrote.

They're at the stage of firing, smearing and destroying people's careers. How much longer until they're at the stage of jailing people who speak out against them?  Already they've got 50 Senators afraid to.

I don't think we can count on Justice Roberts for any support of the rule of law.

And I hope Robert Mueller is having trouble sleeping.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Criminal cabal controls the US

Everybody was in the loop.

Even the guy who is supposed to be guarding the reputation of the office of the president.

Both Devin Nunes and Pat Cipollone, were fact witnesses and accomplices in the president's crimes, while both were in roles defending those crimes, and the Republicans don't care.

UPDATE:

This is a richly filled piñata of crimes and impeachable offenses, and not just on the part of the president*. Cipillone was inches from obtaining a clean getaway for his client—and, very likely, a considerable upgrade in his hourly rates. Now, he's is in the grinder as a possible witness to the fact that, as even Lamar! conceded, the president* is as guilty as John Wilkes Booth. This means that, throughout the Senate trial, Cipollone has been misrepresenting himself and the facts of the case right there in John Roberts’s grill for two weeks. Do that in muni court and you can feed your license to the pigeons in the plaza outside.

  Charles P Pierce

Regarding Bolton's claims - Part 2

This is terribly inconvenient for Republican senators who are frantically searching for ways to vote against hearing from Trump’s former national security adviser and any others who can shed fresh light on Trump’s corrupt conduct.

[...]

[N]ow we have Bolton prepared to testify that Trump himself directly confirmed to him [what Ambassador Sondland testified to in the House hearings], wrecking the “hearsay” defense [against Sondland's testimony]. If Bolton were lying, you’d think Trump would want him to testify under oath, since Bolton’s account is set to appear in a book. Unless the game is to prevent his testimony to the Senate before the vote on Trump’s fate.

[...]

Bolton’s lawyer says he provided the manuscript to the White House on Dec. 30, 2019, for classification review — nearly a month ago.

Importantly, the Times reports that the manuscript might have given Trump’s lawyers a preview of what Bolton would testify.

[...]

Ned Price, a National Security Council official from 2014 to 2017, told me that internal declassification processes in such cases suggest it’s likely Trump’s legal team did indeed access Bolton’s manuscript.

Bolton’s lawyer submitted it to the Records Management Directorate in the White House. Price pointed out that the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, is leading Trump’s impeachment defense, which likely means Cipollone did get his hands on it.

  WaPo

The lawyers need to also testify under oath.

It also intensified concerns among some of his advisers that they needed to block Mr. Bolton from testifying, according to two people familiar with their concerns.

More obstruction of Congress.

Trump’s lawyers have claimed at his trial that “not a single witness” has “testified” to “any connection” between the aid and the investigations. This weasel language is telling: If it’s true that no witness has testified to this, it’s precisely because Trump blocked witnesses who could testify to it, such as Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

We now know Bolton actually would testify to this.

[...]

[T]here is no longer any denying that any GOP senator who goes along with this is willfully and knowingly carrying Trump’s coverup to completion.

When it comes to hearing new witnesses and evidence, GOP senators have no arguments left. And no one is obliged to pretend there’s a shred of legitimacy to whatever excuses they do offer.

More obstruction...

They can do something about that.

Or have your chance to defend yourself at trial?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Regarding Bolton's claims

We may find out.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

All the president's liars

Welcome to impeachment in the Trump era, where the president cheers on his attorneys as they blow right past any suggestion that they themselves were direct witnesses — if not culpable — in a scheme that helped make their client America’s third chief executive to be impeached.

It’s a theme that has been replayed throughout Trump’s life: The lawyers he brings in to authorize and defend his behavior end up in their own legal morass. Trump’s longtime legal fixer, Michael Cohen, is doing three years in federal prison for his election-season role in paying off women who alleged affairs with Trump. Former White House counsel Don McGahn ended up as a star witness for special counsel Robert Mueller after he had a front-row seat to Trump’s potential obstruction of justice. Rudy Giuliani has hired a team of criminal defense attorneys as the Justice Department investigates his recent behavior while serving as personal counsel to the president.

For now, Trump’s current attorneys appear to be embracing their role as supporting actors in a drama that will play out on the Senate floor for another week if not longer, sparring frequently with their Democratic investigators and leaving Chief Justice John Roberts to decide just how many more times he’ll need to serve as the chief of the Senate’s decorum police.

  Politico

The only time he's had any objection to anything is when Jerry Nadler accused the Republicans of treachery.*  He hasn't had any problem with Republicans absenting themselves for long stretches of time.  Or Trump's lawyers' various lies.

Even before opening arguments, House Democrats warned White House counsel Pat Cipollone that they have evidence showing he’s a material witness in their impeachment case and that he should consider removing himself from the president’s defense team for ethical reasons or risk “seriously damaging the fairness of the trial.”

That's no threat to the Trump cabal. Fairness is not what they're after.

Democrats prosecuting Trump had accused Cipollone and Sekulow of fudging facts to present a more sympathetic version of the Ukraine scandal that threatens to upend Trump’s presidency and his political future.

There's a missing word: accurately accused.

On Wednesday, House impeachment prosecutors name-dropped Giuliani more than 100 times during their opening presentations on the Senate floor. That was on top of nearly 60 mentions Tuesday [...] . And that’s in addition to 91 Giuliani references in the opening brief that the House filed last weekend.

[...]

As usual, Trump doesn’t appear fazed by the mounting criticism of his lawyers. He called Cipollone “a high-quality human being” during a news conference Wednesday at the conclusion of an international economic summit in Davos, Switzerland.

“I was very impressed with Pat,” the president added of Cipollone, whose arguments on the Senate floor marked the first time he’d said anything in public since taking the White House job in late 2018. “He had great emotion yesterday. Pat is a brilliant guy, but I've never seen that emotion. And that’s real emotion. That’s because he knows this is a hoax. And I was very proud of the job he did.”

Is this also a characteristic of narcissists - or authoritarians: pretense and show of emotion? Remember Kavanaugh? And Graham during Kavanaugh's hearing? Emoting seems to be prized. The spectacle is the thing. A tried and true weapon in the dictator's arsenal.  (And of the narcissists I know.)

As for Giuliani, Trump said he made the decision to keep arguably his most famous lawyer off his official Senate defense “because I don't want there to be a conflict.”

“I’d love to have Rudy on my team,” the president added. “But, you know, he could be a witness at some point, if this whole sham continues.”

And so could Cipollone. And Sekulow.

Lev Parnas, the Giuliani associate indicted on federal campaign finance violations, told NBC’s Rachel Maddow last week that Sekulow was well aware of Giuliani’s lead role in the Ukraine pressure campaign — even though he said Sekulow “didn’t agree with what Rudy was doing.”

Backing up his claims, Parnas supplied House investigators with an October 2019 email showing Sekulow spoke to the president about having John Dowd, a former Trump lawyer, represent Parnas as congressional investigators sought evidence about the Ukraine scheme.

But Trump doesn't know Parnas, right?

Cipollone is seen as someone in the middle of several episodes tied to the impeachment probe.

He’s the boss of John Eisenberg, the top White House national security lawyer whom several witnesses have identified as someone with direct knowledge of the president’s Ukraine actions. Cipollone has also signed off on several letters the White House sent to the House rejecting its requests for materials.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

*UPDATE:  Turns out that was only because our favorite Whiney Winnie tattled:

UPDATE 1/25:

Assuming Mulvaney, et al., have lawyered up

Deep into a long flight to Japan aboard Air Force One with President Trump [on June 27, more than a week after Mr. Trump had first asked about putting a hold on security aid to Ukraine,], Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, dashed off an email to an aide back in Washington.

“I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends,” Mr. Mulvaney wrote. “Did we ever find out about the money for Ukraine and whether we can hold it back?”

[...]

“Expect Congress to become unhinged” if the White House tried to countermand spending passed by the House and Senate, [the aide, Robert B. Blair,] wrote in a previously undisclosed email. And, he wrote, it might further fuel the narrative that Mr. Trump was pro-Russia.

[...]

Trump’s order to hold $391 million worth of sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, night vision goggles, medical aid and other equipment the Ukrainian military needed to fight a grinding war against Russian-backed separatists would help pave a path to the president’s impeachment.

[...]

American diplomats used the withheld aid as leverage in the effort to win a public commitment from the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to carry out the investigations Mr. Trump sought into Mr. Biden and unfounded or overblown theories about Ukraine interfering in the 2016 election.

[...]

What emerges is the story of how Mr. Trump’s demands sent shock waves through the White House and the Pentagon, created deep rifts within the senior ranks of his administration, left key aides like Mr. Mulvaney under intensifying scrutiny — and ended only after Mr. Trump learned of a damning whistle-blower report and came under pressure from influential Republican lawmakers.

[...]

Opposition to the order from his top national security advisers was more intense than previously known. In late August, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John R. Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, for a previously undisclosed Oval Office meeting with the president where they tried but failed to convince him that releasing the aid was in interests of the United States.

  NYT

Their mistake was in thinking that he might give a shit about the interests of the United States.

By late summer, top lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget who had spoken to lawyers at the White House and the Justice Department in the weeks beforehand, were developing an argument — not previously divulged publicly — that Mr. Trump’s role as commander in chief would simply allow him to override Congress on the issue.

[...]

Mulvaney is shown to have been deeply involved as a key conduit for transmitting Mr. Trump’s demands for the freeze across the administration.

[...]

Those carrying out Mr. Trump’s orders on the aid were for the most part operating in different lanes from those seeking the investigations, including Mr. Giuliani and a number of senior diplomats, including Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt D. Volker, the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.

[...]

[S]ome key players are now offering a defense that they did not know the diplomatic push for the investigations was playing out at the same time they were implementing the aid freeze — or if they were aware of both channels, they did not connect the two.

Really? They're going to use the "we're too stupid to be criminals" defense?

Mr. Mulvaney is said by associates to have stepped out of the room whenever Mr. Trump would talk with Mr. Giuliani to preserve Mr. Trump’s attorney-client privilege, leaving him with limited knowledge about their efforts regarding Ukraine. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he learned of the substance of Mr. Trump’s July 25 call weeks after the fact.

Yet testimony before the House suggests a different picture. Fiona Hill, a top deputy to Mr. Bolton at the time, told the impeachment inquiry about a July 10 White House meeting at which Mr. Sondland said Mr. Mulvaney had guaranteed that Mr. Zelensky would be invited to the White House if the Ukrainians agreed to the investigations — an arrangement that Mr. Bolton described as a “drug deal,” according to Ms. Hill.

[...]

At the center of the maelstrom was the Office of Management and Budget, a seldom-scrutinized arm of the White House that during the Trump administration has often had to find creative legal reasoning to justify the president’s unorthodox policy proposals, like his demand to divert Pentagon funding to his proposed wall along the border with Mexico.

In the Ukraine case, however, shock about the president’s decision spread across America’s national security apparatus — from the National Security Council to the State Department and the Pentagon.

[...]

On Sept. 10, the day before Mr. Trump changed his mind, a political appointee at the budget office, Michael P. Duffey, wrote a lengthy email to the Pentagon’s top budget official, with whom he had been at odds throughout the summer about how long the agency could withhold the aid.

He asserted that the Defense Department had the authority to do more to ensure that the aid could be released to Ukraine by the congressionally mandated deadline of the end of that month, suggesting that responsibility for any failure should not rest with the White House.

Forty-three minutes later, the Pentagon official, Elaine McCusker, hit send on a brief but stinging reply.

“You can’t be serious,” she wrote. “I am speechless.”

[...]

Typical of the Trump White House, the inquiry was not born of a rigorous policy process. Aides speculated that someone had shown Mr. Trump a news article about the Ukraine assistance and he demanded to know more.

[Russell T. Vought, the acting head of the Office of Management and Budget,] and his team took to Google, and came upon a piece in the conservative Washington Examiner saying that the Pentagon would pay for weapons and other military equipment for Ukraine, bringing American security aid to the country to $1.5 billion since 2014.

Seriously? Administration officials have to Google to find out what's going on? Jesus.

The budget office officials had little idea of why Mr. Trump was interested in the topic, but many of the president’s more senior aides were well aware of his feelings about Ukraine. Weeks earlier, in an Oval Office meeting on May 23, with Mr. Sondland, Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Blair in attendance, Mr. Trump batted away assurances that Mr. Zelensky was committed to confronting corruption.

“They are all corrupt, they are all terrible people,” Mr. Trump said, according to testimony in the impeachment inquiry.

[...]

With the [aid] money having been appropriated by Congress, it would be hard for the administration to keep it from being spent by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

The task of dealing with the president’s demands fell primarily to a group of political appointees in the West Wing and the budget office, most with personal and professional ties to Mr. Mulvaney. There was no public announcement that Mr. Trump wanted the assistance withheld. Neither Congress nor the Ukrainian government was formally notified.

[...]

The four top political appointees helping Mr. Mulvaney execute the hold — Mr. Vought, Mr. Blair, Mr. Duffey and Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s top lawyer — all had extensive experience in either congressional budget politics or Republican and conservative causes.

Their efforts would cause tension and at times conflict between officials at the budget office and the Pentagon, some of whom watched with growing alarm.

The single largest chunk of the federal government’s annual discretionary budget, some $800 billion a year, goes to the Pentagon, spy agencies and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The career official in charge of managing the flow of all that money for the budget office is an Afghanistan war veteran named Mark Sandy.

After learning about the president’s June 19 request, Mr. Sandy contacted the Pentagon to learn more about the aid package. He also repeatedly pressed Mr. Duffey about why Mr. Trump had imposed the hold in the first place.

[...]

From the start, budget office officials took the position that the money did not have to go out the door until the end of September, giving them time to address the president’s questions.

It was easy enough for the White House to hold up the State Department portion of the funding. Since the State Department had not yet notified Congress of its plans to release the money, all it took was making sure that the notification did not happen.

Freezing the Pentagon’s $250 million portion was more difficult, since the Pentagon had already certified that Ukraine had met requirements set by Congress to show that it was addressing its endemic corruption and notified lawmakers of its intent to spend the money.

So on July 19, Mr. Duffey proposed an unusual solution: Mr. Sandy should attach a footnote to a routine budget document saying the money was being temporarily withheld.

[...]

Mr. Sandy said in testimony that he had never done [that] before in his 12 years at the agency.

And there was a problem with this maneuver: Mr. Sandy was concerned it might violate a law called the Impoundment Control Act that protects Congress’s spending power and prohibits the administration from blocking disbursement of the aid unless it notifies Congress.

“I asked about the duration of the hold and was told there was not clear guidance on that,” Mr. Sandy testified. “So that is what prompted my concern.”

[...]

[O]n July 18, [...] a group of top administration officials meeting on Ukraine policy — including some calling in from Kyiv — learned from a midlevel budget office official that the president had ordered the aid frozen.

[...]

That same day, aides on the House Foreign Affairs Committee received four calls from administration sources warning them about the hold and urging them to look into it.

A week later came Mr. Trump’s fateful July 25 call with Mr. Zelensky. Mr. Bolton, the national security adviser, had recommended the call take place in an effort to end the “incessant lobbying” from officials like Mr. Sondland that the two leaders connect.

Some of Mr. Trump’s aides had thought the call might lead Mr. Trump to lift the freeze. But Mr. Trump did not specifically mention the hold, and instead asked Mr. Zelensky to look into Mr. Biden and his son and into supposed Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election. Among those listening on the call was Mr. Blair.

Mr. Blair has told associates he [...] saw the aid freeze not as a political tool, but as an extension of Mr. Trump’s general aversion to foreign aid and his belief that Ukraine is rife with corruption.

Just 90 minutes after the call ended, and following days of email traffic on the topic, Mr. Duffey, Mr. Sandy’s boss, sent out a new email to the Pentagon, where officials were impatient about getting the money out the door. His message was clear: Do not spend it.

“Given the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction,” Mr. Duffey wrote in his note.

[...]

This caused immediate discomfort at the Pentagon, with a top official there noting that this hold on military assistance was coming on the same day Ukraine announced it had seized a Russian tanker — a potential escalation in the conflict between the two nations.

[...]

By that point, officials in Ukraine were getting word that something was up. At the same time, the effort to win a commitment from the Ukrainians for the investigations sought by Mr. Trump was intensifying.

[...]

And inside the intelligence community, a C.I.A. officer was hearing talk about the two strands of pressure on Ukraine, including the aid freeze. Seeing how they fit together, he was alarmed enough that by Aug. 12 he would take the extraordinary step of laying them out in detail in a confidential whistle-blower complaint.

[...]

In a very unusual step, the White House removed Mr. Sandy’s authority to oversee the aid freeze. The job was handed in late July to Mr. Sandy’s boss, Mr. Duffey, the political appointee.

[...]

Two budget office staff members left the agency after the summer. Mr. Sandy testified that their departures were related to the aid freeze, a statement disputed by budget office officials.

Pentagon officials, in the dark about the reason for the holdup, grew increasingly frustrated. Ms. McCusker, the powerful Pentagon budget official, notified the budget office that either $61 million of the money would have to be spent by Monday, Aug. 12 or it would be lost. The budget office saw her threat as a ploy to force release of the aid.

[...]

Complicating matters, another budget battle was escalating. Mr. Vought was attempting to impose cuts of as much as $4 billion on the nation’s overall foreign aid budget. It was an entirely separate initiative from the Ukraine freeze, and was quickly abandoned, but helped the White House establish that its concern about aid was not limited to Ukraine.

By the second week of August, Mr. Duffey had taken to issuing footnotes every few days to block the Pentagon spending. Office of Management and Budget lawyers approved each one.

[...]

In a previously unreported sequence of events, Mr. Mulvaney worked to schedule a call for [August 12] with Mr. Trump and top aides involved in the freeze, including Mr. Vought, Mr. Bolton and Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel. But they waited to set a final time because Mr. Trump had a golf game planned for Monday morning with John Daly, the flamboyant professional golfer, and they did not know how long it would take.

By all means, don't interrupt the president's golf game with pressing foreign aid business.

The planned-for conference call with the president never happened. Budget office lawyers decided that Ms. McCusker had inaccurately raised alarms about the Aug. 12 date to try to force their hand.

In Bedminster with Mr. Trump, Mr. Mulvaney finally reached the president and the answer was clear: Mr. Trump wanted the freeze kept in place. In Washington, the whistle-blower submitted his report that same day.

[...]

Backed by a memo saying the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the State Department all wanted the aid released, Mr. Bolton made a personal appeal to Mr. Trump on Aug. 16, but was rebuffed.

On Aug. 28, Politico published a story reporting that the assistance to Ukraine had been frozen.

[...]

Bolton’s relationship with the president had been deteriorating for months, and he would leave the White House weeks later, but on this front he had powerful internal allies.

On a sunny, late-August day, Mr. Bolton, Mr. Esper and Mr. Pompeo arrayed themselves around the Resolute desk in the Oval Office to present a united front, the leaders of the president’s national security team seeking to convince him face to face that freeing up the money for Ukraine was the right thing to do. One by one they made their case.

[...]

Trump responded that he did not believe Mr. Zelensky’s promises of reform. He emphasized his view that corruption remained endemic and repeated his position that European nations needed to do more for European defense.

“Ukraine is a corrupt country,” the president said. “We are pissing away our money.”

[...]

On Aug. 31, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, arranged a call with Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson had been told days earlier by Mr. Sondland that the aid would be unblocked only if the Ukrainians gave Mr. Trump the investigations he wanted.

When Mr. Johnson asked Mr. Trump directly if the aid was contingent on getting a commitment to pursue the investigations, Mr. Johnson later said, Mr. Trump replied, amid a string of expletives, that there was no such demand and he would never do such a thing.

Around the same time, White House lawyers informed Mr. Trump about the whistle-blower’s complaint regarding his pressure campaign.

[...]

Behind the scenes in Warsaw, Mr. Sondland, the American envoy who was Mr. Trump’s point person on getting the Ukrainians to agree to the investigations, had a [blunt] message. Until the Ukrainians publicly announced the investigations, he told Mr. Yermak, the Zelensky adviser, they should not expect to get the military aid. (Mr. Yermak has questioned Mr. Sondland’s account.)

[...]

[T]op lawyers at the budget office were developing a proposed legal justification for the hold.

[...]

The president, the lawyers believed, could ignore the requirements of the Impoundment Control Act and continue to hold the aid by asserting constitutional commander in chief powers that give him authority over diplomacy. He could do so, they believed, if he determined that, based on existing circumstances, releasing the money would undermine military or diplomatic efforts.

[...]

Mr. Bolton was opposed to using [that] argument. [...] And pressure from Congress was intensifying. Mr. Johnson and another influential Republican, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, were both pushing for the aid to be released.

[...]

Democrats in the House were gearing up to limit Mr. Trump’s power to hold up the money to Ukraine, and the chairmen of three House committees had also announced on Sept. 9 that they were opening an investigation.

Still, White House officials did not expect anything to change, especially since Mr. Trump had repeatedly rejected the advice of his national security team.

But then, just as suddenly as the hold was imposed, it was lifted.

And that call to Zelensky was "perfect".

JESUS

What world are we in?  Can I wake up?

The president's cabal is a load of clowns peddling a load of shit.

They've complained about everything to do with the process of the impeachment, and each time the Democrats plugged a hole, they moved over and dug another one.  The latest was that the proceedings were unfair because Trump didn't get any representation in the hearings.  So, in the Judiciary Committee, Nadler invited Trump and/or his lawyer to participate, which they turned down in that first one on Wednesday because it wasn't fact witnesses, but only professors talking about impeachment, but reserved the right to participate in the future.  Nadler gave them until today to decide if they're going to participate Monday when they will hear presentations from counsels  of both parties: evidence from investigators.

Guess what?

You guessed it.

The letter.

While the letter letter doesn't specifically state the White House won't participate, that's what it means, according to a senior administration official.

"The letter communicates that we will not participate in this process," the official said.

  CNN

Or, that they'll decide on Monday to participate and say the letter never said they wouldn't.

The White House's decision not to participate removes one potential hurdle to the House voting on articles of impeachment before Christmas. After Monday's hearing where two committees will present their evidence, the Judiciary panel could debate and approve articles as soon as the end of next week.

[...]

The House-passed rules for the impeachment proceedings gave the President's counsel the ability to participate in the Judiciary Committee hearings. The rules state that the President and his counsel were invited to attend committee presentations of the evidence — which are happening on Monday — as well as ask questions, raise objections, request witnesses or make a concluding presentation.

[...]

House Judiciary Republicans formally requested witnesses whom Trump and his allies have been pushing to testify. GOP Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia sent Nadler a letter Friday requesting eight witnesses, including House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, former Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden, the anonymous whistleblower and anyone the whistleblower relied on to prepare the complaint alleging Trump had solicited election interference from Ukraine.

They know they won't get those witnesses, and then they'll be able to cry foul.

The other GOP-requested witnesses were Democratic National Committee contractor Alexandra Chalupa, Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr, former Burisma board member Devon Archer and the intelligence community employee whom Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman did not identity during his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee.

Kind of hard to call a witness that hasn't been identified.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

If I didn't already have an opinion of Cipollone as a Trump toady, I might think that's a forgery.  Or somebody bumped the table when he was making that "C".  And in a Trump-favored thick-point sharpie, to boot.