Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) was arraigned just before 4:30 pm ET on August 3 for allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The process in which DDT pled not guilty took almost 30 minutes. He was released after he agreed to appear at a hearing on August 28 and agreed to not break any local, state, or federal laws including tampering with witnesses. His Florida appearance in a separate indictment is August 25.
In an attempt to divert attention from DDT’s third indictment and arraignment on August 3, Republicans are pushing the theory that Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, took bribes from foreign countries. Democrats claimed that convicted witness, Devon Archer, had no damning information about either Biden, but Republicans disagreed. They even went so far as to accuse Special Counsel Jack Smith’s grand jury of indicting DDT at the same time as the hearing to divert attention from Hunter Biden’s “crimes.”
To prove their point, James Comer (R-KY), House Oversight Committee chair, released the transcript of the closed hearing. The transcript proves that Comer and Jim Jordan (R-OH), House Judiciary Committee chair, lied about their witness’s testimony. Instead, Archer challenged Comer’s and Jordan’s claims that the Ukrainian energy company wanted a corrupt prosecutor fired, that Zlochevsky paid bribes, and that Joe Biden had any involvement in the entire situation. Earlier, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) had stated that the witness testified that Joe Biden never talked business with his son or son’s associates, that the president wasn’t party to any of his son’s business deals, and neither of them was bribed. The transcript proves he was accurate.
It’s a case of DAVRO: deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. DAVRO is one of 17 manipulation strategies that an emotional abuser employs to attack their victims, to control a person by eroding self-confidence and developing a dependence on the abuse to keep the victim in the relationship. MAGA supporters are currently using it with the lie “Biden crime family” and exonerating all DDT’s alleged crimes. The Archer transcript.
The basis of Smith’s case is evidence that DDT knew he lost the election but kept trying to overturn the results, and the first page of the indictment claims, “The Defendant knew [the claims] were false.” The fourth charge, a violation of the 1872 Ku Klux Klan act, doesn’t require that DDT know he is lying as the first three conspiracy charges do. In the last charge, DDT conspired against people’s right to have their vote counted.
John Lauro, DDT’s new lawyer, has announced in several TV interviews that DDT is innocent because of freedom of speech in the First Amendment, but DDT’s former AG Bill Barr disagrees, stating that the Constitution protects speech, not actions. A judge recently ruled that continued sincere belief in a stolen election is irrelevant if the defendant knew he was illegally disrupting congressional certification of the vote.
Ruth Marcus points out that the indictment clearly wrote about DDT’s “right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” DDT, however, is being prosecuted for “the actions he took to operationalize that contention and prevent the clear will of the voters from being realized, or what the indictment calls ‘unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.’”
Smith also has evidence that GOP government officials as well as his lawyers told DDT that no basis existed for a “stolen” election. Even lawyer John Eastman who talked DDT into trying to persuade former VP Mike Pence into delaying the certification said that it was illegal. Pence is now claiming that he always knew it was wrong and kept telling DDT that he couldn’t do it.
Barr also asserted that DDT’s defense of following his lawyers’ advice would leave him open to cross examination. A common belief follows Barr’s added statement that cross examination “would not come out very well” for DDT.
In an interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham after the arraignment, Lauro said that DDT acted on advice from Eastman, indicating that “advice of counsel” will be another Lauro defense tactic. Two days before the insurrection, however, Eastman told DDT that his scheme was against the law, that it violated federal statute. Greg Jacob, Pence’s counsel, heard the exchange at a White House meeting. That news has been publicly available for over a year. In addition, Eastman told DDT in December 2020 that DDT’s numbers about illegal voters were inaccurate.
MAGA supporters of DDT are resuming their calls to “hang Mike Pence” on their right-wing social media platform. Calls for violence are at the top of comments on TheDonald.win after Smith’s indictment on August 1. According to the Rolling Stone, TheDonald.win was “a hub of plotting for the unrest at the Capitol, and a place where members of the then-Trump administration monitored their success in firing up the base.” Pence’s refusal to block the congressional certification of Joe Biden on January 6 ignited violent rage. Images of gallows hanging Pence have returned, with one person writing, “I want to pull the lever.” From there the commenters want to inflict violence on all the “traitors.”
Lauro claims that rights to a “speedy trial” belong only to the defense, not to the government. At DDT’s arraignment, however, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya was very clear about the deadlines. Government recommendations for the trial date and length will be provided to Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will hear the case. DDT’s illegal team has seven days in which to respond.
DDT committed his alleged crimes in Smith’s case in Washington, D.C., and a grand jury in the city recommended the charges for the indictment. Yet Lauro—and DDT—wants the case moved out of the city for fear of an unfair jury. Only 5 percent of D.C.’s population voted for DDT in 2020. DDT’s recommendation for the trial location is West Virginia where 69 percent of voters selected DDT.
The indictment also described six co-conspirators who Smith did not yet charge. The first five have been identified, but different media sources are trying to guess the identity of the sixth one, a DDT senior adviser, with varying names.
Meanwhile, news outside DDT’s arraignment continues:
On the day of DDT’s arraignment, two U.S. Navy sailors, Jinchao (aka Patrick) Wei and Wenheng (aka Thomas) Zhao, were arrested for passing sensitive national defense information and military secrets to Chinese intelligence officers in exchange for money. This included blueprints for radar systems, technical manuals for vessels, operational plans for military exercises in the Indo-Pacific, and details of defensive weapons to Chinese intelligence officers.
After Iranians have seized vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, the Pentagon is planning to put armed Marines and sailors on commercial ships if private companies and the countries under which they are flagged and registered wish. The plan will need final approval, and U.S. military officials are talking with Gulf Arab allies. Marines are already undergoing training, and thousands of them have been put into position. The Strait connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the open ocean; at least 20 percent of the world’s crude oil goes through the waterway. The U.S. has already deployed F-16 and F-35 jets, A-10 attack jets, and an additional Navy destroyer.
A three-judge panel for the 9th Circuit Court approved Biden’s emergency request to resume its asylum restrictions on the southern border while the case goes through the courts and stayed a lower court’s ruling to terminate them. Appointed by DDT, one of the three judges on the panel lambasted the decision, complaining that the 9th Circuit had refused DDT’s immigration policies but permitting those of Biden.
Newly released text messages among GOP operatives show a much more expansive plot to overturn the election that Smith described in the indictment. RNC Ronna McDaniel and former Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward played leading roles in the alleged conspiracy from the beginning. Messages connected to DDT’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows describe McDaniel among those promoting DDT’s ballot box fraud in seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. DDT lost all these states. The scheme declared that over 30,000 non-citizens voted in the 2020 election.
Democrats now have a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court after recently elected progressive Janet Protasiewicz was sworn in as a justice on August 1 for a ten-year term. She replaces a retiring conservative judge who served 20 years, including six as chief justice. A new lawsuit challenged the GOP gerrymandered Wisconsin legislative and congressional district maps will likely be filed within weeks. Before the court is also a case challenging the pre-Civil War abortion ban for the state, and rules for voting and elections are expected to come before the state high court in advance of the 2024 election. The liberal majority has already fired the director of state courts for six years as the court moves “in a different direction.”
A federal judge has ruled that the 20-year-old Abu Ghraib contractor torture of prisoners can go to trial. The lawsuit alleges that CACI Premier Technology conspired with U.S. military personnel to commonly subject prisoners to torture and other crimes. Up to 90 percent of them were innocent.
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