The Omnibus P01135809 Criminal Investigation Thread

Love the idiot in the screenshot who says "medium calibre rifles are surprisingly effective against low-flying aircraft."

Pretty sure an MQ-9 Reaper drone would solve that problem.

And McCarthy is launching an investigation to make sure that "no Federal funds are being used as part of this possible arrest of Trump. Which will do fuck-all to stop it, should it actually happen. But the idiot base will lap it up as him "taking a stand," because they don't understand how any of this works.

I'm optimistic, McCarthy could have said a lot worse or threatened a lot worse. Vague directions to committees to investigate funding is about as close to a complete surrender as he could get without outright waving a white flag.

https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1637231947066769414?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

It reminds me of a conversation a friend of mine and I had about a civil war breaking out in the US. He mentioned that a friend of his who'd done a couple of tours in Afghanistan had said that despite what one might think, the Taliban were really able to fuck our forces up and he thought the same could happen here if there was some kind of uprising.

I pointed out that in Afghanistan, we had to contend with supply lines that stretched all the way to the other side of the world and that we had more forces in the US than we did in Afghanistan. So, none of this having to wait for reinforcements to come from outside the country, or for the B-2s doing the bombing run to fly from MO to Afghanistan. Not to mention, the Taliban had been fighting for decades now, and wouldn't lose their shit when a bunch of them got shot at. The Gravy Seals? Most of them are probably LARPers with no military experience so they might not handle it quite as well.

Again, one of those 'more than one thing is true' moments. IMO you are absolutely right about this guy's shit take on the Taliban. Yep, the fact the US did that a world away with no naval shipping of logistics is absolutely incredible. And the Afghanis had been waging this war for really going on centuries. There was no decade of peace going back to the 1800s. Some uprising, battle or war was always happening, and they had deposed half a dozen leaders in the 20th century alone.

But the other side is not all the far right is composed of larpists. There are some serious ex-military in that group - some of them seriously fucked in the head, to be sure, but with skills, training, even discipline. They just sentenced a colonel to two years prison for the Jan 6th uprising, and even the proud boys had detailed plans of the capital and a specific operation in mind when they launched the attack.

I think this would likely go initially like the first civil war - both sides would be pretty contemptuous of the others, and both would be surprised by the violence.

But then, that's another reason why the Taliban comparison is so inapt - we lost twice as many people in one day at Antietam as we lost in 20 years in Afghanistan.

We'd see mostly skirmishes and domestic terrorism to start, but the first time a real battle happened it would be a bloodbath.

If they charge and arrest him next week I will actually shit kittens. Kittens will actually fly out of my butt like monkey7s in the 80's.

In other news I am not buying cat food or kitten proof TP for my bunghole.

Maybe the media can get back to the other important news story about how DeHitler eats pudding with his fucking fingers, because that is some important news to focus on.

They will never allow a LEO to cuff a rich ass white racist leader. Then they would have to find a cop willing to cuff rich ass white dude. They cannot even get a black woman to indict him yet. The laws of physics are not as strong as the laws of racist protection for rich white racist dudes.

even if the laws of white racism collapsed and he got indicted the AG of NY would still have to charge him, he would be given a chance to surrender, and if he did not they would have to go through the process of issuing a warrant for his arrest and then getting florida LEOs to figure out if they can pull over his SS limo and how to arrest a person with SS protection. It will be June before charges are filed, and then at least October before a warrant is issued because he does not surrender.

I do not think he will be charged at all, but people need to get realistic on how the courts work. Unless he surrenders he never has to step into NY jurisdiction for the NY Police to arrest him. He is always in the SS protection and the US has never arrested a person in SS protection. We probably do not even have a procedure for doing it. Just the legal arguments of an arrest warrant for him would be precedent setting and I would imagine would require months of arguments in front of the magistrate.

Let us hope the PB wussbags sit outside of Mar-A-Lago waiting. They will all die of skin cancer from their sunburns before the police do anything.

The fucked in the head part is key, though. Have you ever read Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook by Edward Luttwak? The idiots who did Jan. 6th clearly hadn't, or they wouldn't have been running around the Capitol for hours doing nothing but shitting on the floor and stealing laptops. I don't know if the next time they'll try if they'll be as stupid but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.

Potentially. The key is the government's response. Done right, they could shut things down quickly. Done wrong, and we get a mess. No clue as to if the government will have the right response.

Point of order: Given the poor state of medicine back then, it's not surprising so many people died. After all, germ theory had literally just been worked out a few years before the war in Germany and the medical establishment's reaction to Ignaz Semmelweis' announcement was to declare him insane and have him committed. And thanks to the Comstock Act, it would be decades after Europe realized that Semmelweis was right before the US adopted sanitary measures when it came to surgery. According to a Civil War historian I sorta know, one of the reasons why you read about the stories of guys who are seriously wounded, grabbing their rifle and running to rejoin the fight was because they assumed that they'd already gotten fatal wounds and figured it'd be better to die in a hail of bullets than from an infection they got after having a limb sawn off.

Prior to the pandemic, the number of fatal auto crashes in the US had remained static for decades. It wasn't because there were fewer car wrecks, on the contrary, they'd been going up. The difference was in the fact that not only our medical technology had improved but the speed at which we can get injured people into treatment. Not merely things like cellphones, but also life-flight helicopters and that ambulances are loaded up with all kinds of kit.

Agreed.

Some good points, but IMO one of the reasons battlefield initial triage and medical response helped so much in Afghanistan is that the entire war was low intensity fighting, and the US as always retains a firepower doctrine. We don't like risking troops when we can annihilate a ridge with artillery or airpower. This time the people on that ridge would be US citizens.

In a real ACW scenario, there's a good chance it would not remain low intensity. So just like we saw with covid we'd see medical centers overwhelmed with causalties. And with the intermixing of blue/red areas we'd likely see significant problems in supply lines anywhere near a front.

Add that to the fact the weapons are simply far deadlier I think we'd see a significantly higher body count than in Afghanistan or Iraq. I agree it wouldn't reach the heights of the first civil war, and for the reasons you state.

Let's hope Trump goes to jail and it never gets anywhere near that again.

I certainly don't expect to see it now, even if Trump is jailed. And while DeSantis is more astute in wielding power than Trump is he's not nearly as an effective demagogue. He's less likely to win, less likely to have his followers riot if he loses.

So let's hope better things are on the horizon.

Trae Crowder with a great take on the potential indictment:
https://twitter.com/traecrowder/status/1637167158278111232

And? If we decide to take that ridge, the folks we'd be sending to do that would also be US citizens. Ones who were faithful to the oath that they swore. Both Grant and Sherman were more than happy to unleash hell on Confederates, who were US citizens. Sherman gets a bad rap because Gone With the Wind claimed that he torched Atlanta (truth being that the Confederates torched the city rather than let Sherman have it), while ignoring the fact that he brought a "hard rain" on South Carolina because they were the first state to secede and his forces did far more damage there than they did in Atlanta. You think modern generals are going to be any different? Unlike the 19th Century, if you're a general today, you're probably a West Pointer, and I'm gonna bet that all of them idolize guys like Sherman. And Patton. Yeah, those guys had their flaws, but they also knew how to do a smackdown. If we get to a point where actual US military forces are going to have to whack insurrectionists on our soil, I'm thinking that they're going to be looking at the playbooks by Grant, Sherman, and Patton, to name but a few.

I could be wrong. After all, our troops in Afghanistan had stricter rules of engagement than police in the US do when it comes to dealing with people. But at the same time, when we're talking about a civil war, we're dealing with a situation where people on both sides have crossed a Rubicon where, at least the intelligent ones, know that if they lose, there's no hope of surrender and being allowed to go about their lives after the war is over. If they lose or even get captured, being executed for committing treason is a real possibility. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't have shed a tear if a whole bunch of the insurrectionists on Jan. 6th had wound up eating bullets. I wouldn't be surprised if many in the military felt the same way.

Perhaps. There's differences between COVID and war wounds, however. And much of our response to COVID was botched because of the boob in the White House.

That's true of any war.

That's kind of meaningless though. It's like saying that the Civil War killed more Americans than all other wars combined up until Vietnam. Sure, it's true, but when you stop and think about the fact that it was Americans killing Americans, it kind of loses its impact.

Agreed.

I'd hold off on making judgments about what DeSantis is capable of. He's carefully tailoring his attempt at getting the nomination so as to not alienate Trump supporters while trying to provide just enough distance from Trump to hopefully ensnare people who don't like Trump but lack the balls to come out and say so. He knows he can't hope to win the nomination without a significant number of Trump's base, so he can't directly alienate them, but he also knows he won't win in the general if he manages to suck all of Trump's base to his side. He's got to walk a tightrope where he attracts enough of both the Trumpers and the Never Trumpers to get the nomination and win the general election. Can he do it? I don't know. But he's going to try, and he's also going to try to make sure that if he doesn't get the nomination in 2024 that he hasn't nuked his chances of getting the nomination in 2028.

My point was that in Afghanistan and Iraq during the insurgency the opposition had no ability to use that type of firepower against US soldiers. US soldiers will die in larger numbers if they are facing groups with US level firepower. Individual militias of course won't be there, but in a real civil war we'd expect to see national guard units called into play. Again, that won't happen over Trump's arrest, but if it does happen in the future, and there are a couple of scenarios that could lead to that, we'll see secession movements and the resulting operational level units put into play.

Agree. And again, I agreed with most of your earlier take, I just thought a few aspects of it were worth further discussion.

Depends on what you mean by war - it wasn't true of the Taliban vs the US, for example. Our casualty rates were low the entire time, therefore there wasn't a casualty rate overwhelming our response.

But again, I think we mostly agree, just having slight quibbles in interpretation.

This is the only statement you've made that I definitely disagree. The Union lost more soldiers dead in the Civil War than the US did in any war, including WWII. ~360K vs 291K. The Union's population in the 1860 census was 19.2 million. The US's population in the 1940 census was 132.1 million. It was enormously more impactful than any other war the US fought, even if you just look at the Union and the Rebellion separately.

Well that kind of speaks to my point - he's not as effective a speaker or demagogue, and therefore Trump still retains much stronger support in the base. Desantis has to thread the needle to get the nomination in the first place, and do so without wrecking his chances in the general. It's not impossible but Trump has a much easier path in 2024.

Oh, another interesting point.

If Trump is arrested in NY then he will not only be processed and finger printed but his DNA will be collected.

And E Jean Carrol's lawsuit would likely get access to it.

The more consequences there are, the more consequences there are.

No handcuffs can contain Trump.

Literally.

His hands are too tiny and slip right out.

Agreed. It's also pathetic we're going after him because a willing piece of ass blackmailed him and the payment was botched.

Charge him with inciting insurrection or get off the pot.

The GA investigation is more meaningful.

meh-it took tax evasion to get capone...

And it's not like this one crime being the first to lead to an indictment would prevent prosecutors in all the other jurisdictions where he's committed crimes from indicting him.

Indictments are like Pokemon - gotta catch 'em all!

Hell, if nothing else tie the fucker up in knots and drain his election account. And keep MAGA up - Making Attorneys Get Attorneys. Their sleeze and corruption is both consistent and constant.

Let him try to stretch it all out. I could watch him get prosecuted until his dying day. Yes, I'd rather have him in jail, but he's already going off the deep end from the stress. And honestly, I'm fine if it takes a few years off his life. Couldn't happen to a nicer scumbag.

Dersch is losing his marbles.

https://www.rawstory.com/alan-dershowitz-donald-trump-prison/

Even Sporkfoot is saying that folks need to ignore Trump’s calls for violence.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-warns-against-donald-trumps-protest-demands

Apparently NYPD and the Secret Service have been in discussions as to how to handle any arrest.

https://crooksandliars.com/2023/03/secret-service-and-nypd-talks-possible

at this point i hope they're figuring out that he's earned his perp walk and is a flight risk...

LOCK HIM UP!
LOCK HIM UP!

Looks like three GOP congressmen, including Gym Jordan, want the Manhattan DA to testify before the Judiciary Committee.

I seem to recall that one of the worst offences any politician could make was to interfere with the judicial system or an ongoing criminal investigation. In my country, politicians have been forced to resign over this kind of meddling.

I guess it's no big deal any more.

Jordan refused subpeonas to testify about Jan 6th. The Manhattan DA should just laugh at him. Because they don't enforce subpeonas, the DOJ does.

In other news, Desantis has said he won't block Trump's extradition to New York if it happens. What a surprise.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/...nvolved-trump-indictment-extradition-00087851

CNN reporting that Alanta DA is considering RICO charges for Trump's election interference. "(Charges considered) included potential “solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”

They have 3 recorded phone calls of Trump attempting to find votes, and another to a top election official who was looking into signature matching issues.

"The investigation also included presentations that former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani made before state lawmakers that were riddled with election falsehoods; a phone call between South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Raffensperger; and the sudden departure of Byung “BJay” Pak, the US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia."

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/20/politics/georgia-racketeering-conspiracy-trump-willis/index.html

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Barricades going up around Manhattan Criminal Courthouse....

https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1637809504581550081