Trump

[Oniya]

And since then, the number has been wedged into just about every other disliked authority figure - on just about every point of the political spectrum.

[TheGlyphstone]

I was reading an article sometime back in the eternal Hellscape of 2020 about some historians taking a second look at Nero, something about how almost contemporary knowledge about him came from the writings of his enemies.

We can only hope Trump is not remembered 2000 years from now as well.

[gaggedLouise]

And since then, the number has been wedged into just about every other disliked authority figure - on just about every point of the political spectrum.

Once last year I got the number 666 on a queuing number ticket at the local raliway station. 

[stormwyrm]

And I'm getting the feeling that the Book of Revelation is actually a fragment of the 1st century Jewish equivalent of QAnon. 

[Haibane]

And we have passed the magical number of 666 10,000 posts. Shall we close this thread and start a post-presidency "Citizen D. Trump" thread?

[gaggedLouise]

And we have passed the magical number of 666 10,000 posts. Shall we close this thread and start a post-presidency "Citizen D. Trump" thread?

I think two new threads would be needed - one for the Trump impeachment and the Capitol storming, one general about Trump's post-White House career.

In the meantime...Dominion is following up their earlier defamation lawsuit against Sidney Powell (over her claims about their "rigged voting machines") with a thundering suit against Giuliani. A whopping 1.3 *billion* dollars in sought damages are on the line for him. 

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/25/politics/dominion-lawsuit-giuliani/index.html

[Beguile's Mistress]

My job requires me to make a lot of phone calls and 666 comes up quite often as the exchange for the numbers I'm calling.  I get a little chill when that happens.

[Haibane]

In the meantime...Dominion is following up their earlier defamation lawsuit against Sidney Powell (over her claims about their "rigged voting machines") with a thundering suit against Giuliani. A whopping 1.3 *billion* dollars in sought damages are on the line for him. 

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/25/politics/dominion-lawsuit-giuliani/index.html

I can't always keep my finger on these activities so if its possible to maintain links to the ongoing legal cases I would much appreciate it. Guiliani has said this is the perfect opportunity to expose Dominion's election corruption which should be interesting to watch. Were Dominion actually guilty of same, I find it highly unlikely they would have stuck their neck out in a lawsuit. I look forward to this being the end of Sidney Powell's and Rudy Colludy's careers and the end to the rigged election story.

[TheGlyphstone]

There will always be a place in our legal system for crooked, corrupt lawyers, sadly. This might drive him into bankruptcy, but he'll still have his law license.

[Regina Minx]

I can't always keep my finger on these activities so if its possible to maintain links to the ongoing legal cases I would much appreciate it. Guiliani has said this is the perfect opportunity to expose Dominion's election corruption which should be interesting to watch. Were Dominion actually guilty of same, I find it highly unlikely they would have stuck their neck out in a lawsuit. I look forward to this being the end of Sidney Powell's and Rudy Colludy's careers and the end to the rigged election story.

You might want to temper your enthusiasm just a little bit. Defamation is a tough row to hoe in the US legal system. As a primer, if you want to win a defamation case, you have to prove:
1) that defendant made a false and defamatory statement about you;
2) to a third party without privilege;
3) with the required degree of fault;
4) causing you to suffer damage.

For these Dominion cases, 1) and 4) are easy to prove. 2) is only slightly trickier, given that they are suing lawyers, but still not hard. It's where we get to 3 that it's really, really hard to prove. If a private individual accuses someone of defamation, all they have to prove is negligence. But if a public figure accuses someone of defamation, negligence isn't enough. They have to prove what's known as "actual malice." It's very likely that Dominion is a public figure, either because they're a public company with a massive business presence service the voting tabulation needs for lots of states, or they have become a limited purpose public figure due to the attention focused on them in the media following the 2020 election. So the likelihood is that Dominion is going to need to prove actual malice.

To prove "actual malice" in a defamation case, you need to show either that the defendant knowingly lied or that the defendant made the statements with "reckless disregard" of the truth. "Reckless disregard" is also one of those nebulous concepts under the law. It's not enough to show that there wasn't an investigation or that there was a lot of evidence that it wasn't true. You have to show that the defendant actually had serious doubts about the truth of the statement and made them anyway. That's something that's hard to prove unless you can climb into the defendant's head. And it's really hard to do that, especially before discovery.

The first order of business will likely be a motion to dismiss by Powell and/or Guilliani. And in most defamation cases, they tend to die on the MTD. When I say tend to, I mean 'almost always.' I am not a lawyer, just a nerd with a penchant for research. I've been flipping through defamation cases from the court where this case was filed. I'm finding lots of cases that were dismissed because actual malice wasn't adequately pled. I went through 15 or 16 before I found one. In this case, Zimmerman v Al Jazeera, 246 F Supp 3d 257, 281-86 (D DC 2017), one claim from the suit survived a motion to dismiss. The claim there survived because Al Jazeera had obvious reasons to doubt their only source's veracity and still didn't investigate. The court noted that just reasons to doubt alone weren't enough, that failure to investigate also was often not enough, but that all of that, in combination with the source's recantation, could show reckless disregard.

So I hope you can see why, even though the claims are insane and it's clear that Rudy at least should have known they were false, a lot of people are still skeptical of Dominion's chances.

[Chaeronea]

My job requires me to make a lot of phone calls and 666 comes up quite often as the exchange for the numbers I'm calling.  I get a little chill when that happens.

I worked for a telecommunications company in Australia in the 1990s and I still remember how many Asian customers would ask for a new phone number for their land line whenever the number they were automatically allocated by our systems started with a 4. I knew that in Japanese the number 4 is 'shi' which also means 'death' in Japanese, but most of the number change requests we got were from people of Chinese and Vietnamese heritage - that caught me by surprise.

[Beorning]

And I'm getting the feeling that the Book of Revelation is actually a fragment of the 1st century Jewish equivalent of QAnon. 

Q is eternal! They have always been there, planting seeds of chaos in the minds of people!

... are we now making conspiracy theories about a conspiracy theory?

[Regina Minx]

Q is eternal! They have always been there, planting seeds of chaos in the minds of people!

... are we now making conspiracy theories about a conspiracy theory?

Hmm. Should I even bring up that a theorized source of the Gospels is known as....

Q

[Haibane]

*idly wonders where the QAnon thread went*

[gaggedLouise]

Trimp has officially set up an "Office of the Former President" based at Mar-a-Lago, with a logo closely mimicking the official presidential seal. Evidently he's planning to keep up the fiction that he's the real, legit president. 

https://twitter.com/KamVTV/status/1353862402689925120

[Haibane]

That matches his mental make-up. To him he is still the President and his new presidential office is his home and the dude in Washington is an imposter peddling fake news. To Trump it makes perfect sense.

[gaggedLouise]

That matches his mental make-up. To him he is still the President and his new presidential office is his home and the dude in Washington is an imposter peddling fake news. To Trump it makes perfect sense.

Yes, and also it allows him to keep on being addressed and introduced as "Mr President", which he evidently loves. :)

I'm thinking that this is very close both to intrusion on a public brand and national symbols (the seal, too) and a direct challenge to the legality of the new guy in office.

[Haibane]

I am sure those thoughts have entered the minds of Joe Biden's legal counsel. The seal in particular is a significant issue, unless Trump has had slightly different artwork produced which would mitigate a lawsuit.

[Regina Minx]

It's a crime to use the Seal of the President for "for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof." I don't see it. Not when coupled with letterhead stating it's the "office of the ex-President" (which isn't a thing). If I was a prosecutor, I wouldn't charge it.

[gaggedLouise]

It's a crime to use the Seal of the President for "for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof." I don't see it. Not when coupled with letterhead stating it's the "office of the ex-President" (which isn't a thing). If I was a prosecutor, I wouldn't charge it.

You mean it's the "ex-" bit that saves Trump's design from legal trouble? Technically perhaps, but to his devoted followers it just implies that "he has been legally succeeded by no one" and therefore morally and legally he still holds the office. They view Biden's claim to the office as null and void.

[Regina Minx]

You mean it's the "ex-" bit that saves Trump's design from legal trouble? Technically perhaps, but to his devoted followers it just implies that "he has been legally succeeded by no one" and therefore morally and legally he still holds the office. They view Biden's claim to the office as null and void.

And that is a problem, but it's not a problem that we can solve by using the power of the state to stop a private individual from doing something not illegal.

[gaggedLouise]

Saw a guy in a photo on twitter (posted in reply to his "ex-presidential seal logo"), holding a placard with the blunt words "HONK HARD TRUMP!". The words are interesting because "Honk" has two different meanings and I'm not sure which one was intended here: it can mean the sound of a car horn - or "X absolutely sucks". "Suck hard, Trump!"? 

[Oniya]

Saw a guy in a photo on twitter (posted in reply to his "ex-presidential seal logo"), holding a placard with the blunt words "HONK HARD TRUMP!". The words are interesting because "Honk" has two different meanings and I'm not sure which one was intended here: it can mean the sound of a car horn - or "X absolutely sucks". "Suck hard, Trump!"? 

I'm wondering if that's an 'Untitled Goose Game' reference.  (In which the player character is a goose running around causing chaos, usually by stealing things.  Origin of the meme: 'Press Y to honk'.)

[Haibane]

I have just watched the first episode of the 4-part BBC documentary "The Trump Show" that covers the 4 years of his presidency. It is largely driven by the spoken words of interviewed White House staff. I can only urge people to find a copy of this programme and watch it. Excellent.

[gaggedLouise]

A new book by journalist and intelligence affairs specialist Craig Unger claims that Trump was recruited as a KGB agent already in 1980 and has been a Soviet/Russian asset for much of his adult life. Unger has interviewed numbers of ex-KGB, ex-CIA and FBI people and gone through thousands of pages of documents from these agencies - and apparently some of his KGB sources openly say that Trump was well known to them and as asset for their organisation, hence for Moscow - long before he became president.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/635379/american-kompromat-by-craig-unger/

I want to know much more about this. :)