Is there a grifting competition in Trump world?

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

FBI finds no organized plot for the January 6 coup attempt

Despite the adoption of the term by many in the media, there has been a growing disconnect with the actual cases in court. Indeed, a new report from Reuters disclosed that the FBI has apparently struggled to support the account of a coordinated “insurrection” on Jan. 6. Reuters’ FBI sources said that, despite months of intense investigation, they could find "scant evidence" of any "organized plot" and instead found that virtually all of the cases are “one-offs.” One agent explained: “Ninety to 95 percent of these are one-off cases. Then you have 5 percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages."

In other words, they found a protest that became a runaway riot as insufficient security preparations quickly collapsed. While there clearly were those set upon trashing the Capitol, most people were shown milling about in the halls; many took selfies and actively described the scene on social media.

  The Hill

So, if it wasn't an organized plot, and they didn't go there with the intent to storm the capitol, doesn't that strengthen the case for charging Trump with incitement to violence?

More than 570 people have been arrested, but only 40 face conspiracy charges. Those charges are often based on prior discussions about trying to enter Congress or bringing material to use in the riot; some clearly came prepared for rioting with ropes, chemical irritants and other materials.

Sounds like a coordinated insurrection to me.

Many of us remain disgusted and angered by the Jan. 6 riot — but it was a riot. It also was a desecration. These people deserve to be punished, particularly those who went with an intent to try to enter the Congress. The question is whether you can have an insurrection without anyone actually insurrecting. That Zen-like question may find its way into the hearings of some pending cases.

Their intent was to stop Joe Biden being inaugurated and keep Trump in the White House. They entered the Congress because that's where the final tally was being officiated, claiming to be ready to kill people to stop it.

Calling these people “rioters" does not minimize what they did — or undermine the legitimacy of their punishment. However, there is wisdom and even the chance for resolution when we “call things by their proper name.”

Yes. They were insurrectionists.

Guess who wrote this article? Jonathan Turley.

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

The fix was in

[T]he FBI sent a letter to Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), who wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray two years ago with questions about how the investigation into [Supreme Court Justice Brett] Kavanaugh was conducted. On June 30, the FBI responded to the senators, revealing new information about the investigation.

[...]

"The letter from the Department of Justice, released by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's office today, confirms what we knew: The FBI’s investigation into Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's serious allegations about Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh's sexual misconduct was a sham and a major institutional failure,” Blasey Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, said in the Thursday statement. “Not only did the FBI refuse to interview Dr. Ford or the corroborators listed in our letter to FBI Director Wray, it failed to act on the over 4,500 tips it received about then-nominee Kavanaugh. Instead, it handed the information over to the White House, allowing those who supported Kavanaugh to falsely claim that the FBI found no wrongdoing.”

[...]

On Thursday, Whitehouse's office said that a group of seven Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to Wray, asking for additional information on the FBI’s 2018 background investigation into Kavanaugh.

“The admissions in your letter corroborate and explain numerous credible accounts by individuals and firms that they had contacted the FBI with information ‘highly relevant to ... allegations’ of sexual misconduct by Justice Kavanaugh, only to be ignored,” the senators wrote in the letter. “If the FBI was not authorized to or did not follow up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is difficult to understand the point of having a tip line at all.”

  Politico

The point was to uncover all possible witnesses and bury their probable testimony while giving Kavanaugh a heads up about what he would need to deny.

Impeach Kavanaugh.

And pack the court.  (At 38:30)

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

Will Susan Collins be "concerned"?

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

When Hell freezes over

Or as the Red Dwarf character Arnold Rimmer put it: And on that day, Lister, Satan will be skating to work.

As a federal investigation into Rudolph W. Giuliani escalates, his advisers have been pressing aides to former President Donald J. Trump to reach into a $250 million war chest to pay Mr. Giuliani for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

  NYT

Of course, if it turns out that the FBI finds proof of incrimination in the things they seized from Giuliani's home and office, they might convince Trump he needs to pony up to protect himself.

A new court filing made public on Tuesday showed the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan asked a federal judge last week to appoint a special master to conduct a review of potentially privileged materials seized from Mr. Giuliani.

The prosecutors, writing to Judge J. Paul Oetken, said the F.B.I. had begun to extract materials from cellphones and computers seized from Mr. Giuliani, but that a review of those materials had not yet begun, the redacted court filing showed.

[...]

Mr. Giuliani led the effort to subvert the results of the 2020 race in a series of battleground states, but he was not paid for the work, according to people close to both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump. His supporters now want the Trump campaign to tap into the $250 million it raised in the weeks after the election to pay Mr. Giuliani and absorb costs he has incurred in the defamation suits.

“I want to know what the GOP did with the quarter of $1 billion that they collected for the election legal fight,” Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, wrote on Twitter on Sunday. Mr. Giuliani appointed Mr. Kerik when he was mayor of New York.

Invested it in themselves, Bernie. You know that.

Using expletives, Mr. Kerik added that “lawyers and law firms that didn’t do” much work were paid handsomely, while those who worked hard “got nothing.”

Mr. Kerik has made similar complaints to some of Mr. Trump’s advisers privately, according to people familiar with the conversations, arguing that Mr. Giuliani has incurred legal expenses in his efforts to help Mr. Trump and that Mr. Giuliani’s name was used to raise money during the election fight.

So, in addition to all the other character flaws he has, Giuliani is a fool.

A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani, Robert J. Costello, has had conversations with a lawyer for Mr. Trump about whether any of the material that was seized by the F.B.I. should be protected from scrutiny because of attorney-client privilege. Mr. Costello has also raised the question of paying Mr. Giuliani, according to two people briefed on those discussions.

Good luck, dupes.

Mr. Trump later told his advisers he did not want Mr. Giuliani to receive any payment, according to people close to the former president with direct knowledge of the discussions. Before Mr. Trump left the White House in January, he agreed to reimburse Mr. Giuliani for more than $200,000 in expenses but not to pay a fee.

Some of Mr. Giuliani’s supporters have blamed Mr. Trump’s aides — and not the former president — for the standoff. However, people close to Mr. Trump said he has stridently refused to pay Mr. Giuliani.

Mr. Giuliani’s advisers were also disappointed that he did not receive a federal pardon from Mr. Trump, despite facing the long-running federal investigation into his Ukrainian dealings, a person close to Mr. Giuliani said.

Sad.

Asked about Mr. Kerik’s tweet during an interview with ABC News, Mr. Giuliani’s son, Andrew, said that his father’s fees should be covered by Trump’s campaign coffers.

“I do think he should be indemnified,” the younger Mr. Giuliani said. “I think all those Americans that donated after Nov. 3, they were donating for the legal defense fund. My father ran the legal team at that point. So I think it’s very easy to make a very strong case for the fact that he and all the lawyers that worked on there should be indemnified.”

He added, “I would find it highly irregular if the president’s lead counsel did not get indemnified.”

Andy, Andy, Andy. That money is in Trump's personal bank account by now. ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Matt Gaetz update

Beavis is in big trouble.

The group took off for their Bahamas weekend getaway on three separate flights. Most of the passengers, which included at least five young women, flew out of Orlando on two separate private planes. Matt Gaetz flew commercial.

[...]

Also among those on the trip: the former minor who is key to the investigation, whose presence on the trip was previously unreported. According to one of the women in the group who spoke on condition of anonymity, everyone on the trip was over the age of 18 — including the woman in question, who had turned 18 years old months before the trip, she said.

[...]

But questions surrounding the ages of some of the women surfaced immediately upon their return — three of them looked so young when they returned on Beshears’ private plane that U.S. Customs briefly stopped and questioned him, according to sources familiar with the trip, including a woman on the flight.

[...]

[The Mann Act] forbids transporting people of any age across state lines for purposes of prostitution..

[...]

Some of the women on the Bahamas trip entered the orbit of Gaetz and Greenberg through the SeekingArrangement website — a dating website that connects women with so-called sugar daddies — according to interviews with friends and associates who know the two men, and Greenberg introduced him to young women he met on the site. Gaetz said he’s never been on the site.

[...]

Gaetz’s predicament as the subject of a serious investigation became clearer this winter when federal agents executed a search warrant and seized his iPhone, according to interviews with three people who were told of the matter by Gaetz, who changed his phone number in late December.

  Politico

Shortly before he asked then-President Trump to issue him a blanket pardon.

A former local official in Florida indicted in the Justice Department investigation that is also focused on Representative Matt Gaetz has been providing investigators with information since last year about an array of topics, including Mr. Gaetz’s activities, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Joel Greenberg, a onetime county tax collector, disclosed to investigators that he and Mr. Gaetz had encounters with women who were given cash or gifts in exchange for sex, the people said.

  NYT

Greenberg is in so much trouble, it's unsurprising that he'd be ratting on Matt. Matt would do the same to him, I'm sure.

Mr. Greenberg faces dozens of other counts including sex trafficking of a minor, stalking a political rival and corruption. He was first indicted in June.

[...]

Mr. Greenberg began speaking with investigators once he realized that the government had overwhelming evidence against him and that his only path to leniency lay in cooperation, the people said. He has met several times with investigators to try to establish his trustworthiness, though the range of criminal charges against him — including fraud — could undermine his credibility as a witness.

[...]

Speculation about Mr. Greenberg’s cooperation began mounting last week, after his lawyer and a federal prosecutor both said in court that he was likely to plead guilty in the coming weeks. “I’m sure Matt Gaetz is not feeling very comfortable today,” Fritz Scheller, Mr. Greenberg’s lawyer, told reporters afterward.

He shouldn't get to feel comfortable for at least a decade.

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

Lawyer-speak

“They’ve set up an Iron Curtain so you can’t get out the New York Post story which I happened to know is 100 percent accurate,” Giuliani declared. “But even if it isn’t accurate, the American people are entitled to know it.”

  Daily Beast

Honestly, this is the way pleadings are often written.  Only usually (in my experience), it's defense attorneys saying it's not true, but if it is true, then, blah, blah, blah. I've seen those pleadings with my own eyes in the years I worked for attorneys in San Francisco.

Giuliani recently acknowledged that he specifically peddled the salacious Hunter Biden laptop story to the New York Post because they wouldn’t “spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” Other news outlets have reportedly passed on reporting on the laptop material for fear that it can’t be verified and may be part of a targeted disinformation effort.

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

UPDATE:

Not sure where this is going, but...

FBI and IRS agents in Cleveland and Miami on Tuesday raided the offices of a company tied to a Ukrainian oligarch suspected of pushing dirt on Vice President Joe Biden. Vicki Anderson, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Cleveland office, confirmed the raids of Optima Management to TPM, declining to comment any further because the matter “is still under seal.”

[...]

Optima Management is partly owned by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, per court documents filed in Delaware last year.

Kolomoisky has faced a federal criminal investigation out of the Northern District of Ohio for at least a year. The oligarch told the New York Times in November 2019 that, were he the President of Ukraine, he would open the investigations into Biden that Trump and Giuliani have sought.

The next month, associates and political allies of Kolomoisky’s met with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani in Kyiv, offering the former NYC mayor a fabricated narrative about Biden.

[...]

The oligarch appears to have stayed involved in the campaign to damage Biden since then.

[...]

Buzzfeed reported in May that a Cleveland federal grand jury was examining allegations of money laundering against Kolomoisky.

  Talking Points Memo

Maybe that's the only place this is going, but who knows? Money laundering, Ukraine, Trump, Giuliani, Kolomoisky - they're all connected.

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