In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday's post on the FBI and ATF investigations of the January 6 pipe bombs was based primarily on testimony before the House Judiciary Committee from last summer. Since then, new allegations about those investigations have emerged. As of yesterday's post, the official story was that notwithstanding the FBI's huge investigative resources, three years of searching for the bomber have come up empty, while it seems as if the person who discovered the bomb the next day was never seriously considered as a suspect, despite this being a basic investigative principle. Via the Daily Wire this past Monday : A former FBI agent said that the Bureau quickly believed that it tied the person who planted pipe bombs at the Democrat National Committee and the Republican National Committee to a particular Metro fare card and license plate, but did not allow him to interview the person of interest and pulled his team off of the lead. . . . Kyle Seraphin, who led FBI surveillanc...

Yessterday I mentioned in passing the curious case, one of several from January 6, of two pipe bombs that were planted outside the Democrat and Republican national headquarters respectively. The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms haven't been fully forthcoming over this case, and among other things, the perp or perps have never been idenified . "People surmise and suspect that, 'oh, there's all this video all over the country, all over D.C.' It's not true," Steven D'Antuono, the former head of the FBI Washington Field Office, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on June 7, 2023. . . . "We did every check, every lab test, every data. We ran this through systems back and forth, up and down, sideways, all over the place," he testified about the search for the suspect. The bombs did not detonate, however, the FBI noted that the suspect placed them in "residential and commercial areas in Capitol Hill just bloc...

A CNN op-ed from Julian Zelizer , a Princeton history professor, from last Friday asks some productive questions about Trump's so-far highly successful 2024 candidacy: Following Trump’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, which has effectively knocked his final opponent — former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley — out of the race, some of his critics continue to search for slivers of good news. They point to the fact that despite “almost” being an incumbent, he didn’t receive a share of the vote on par with what previous incumbents have encountered in primary contests. Incumbents usually bring to the table unequaled name recognition, fund-raising capacity and the benefit of looking presidential as they run for reelection. Trump has most of this, with his supporters holding on to the memory of him in the Oval Office, and with many of his backers believing he literally won the presidency in 2020, yet Haley pulled a decent part of the electorate away from him. The ambiguity of ...

Remember this ? A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments Jan. 9 on Trump's broad claim of presidential immunity in the federal election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith[.] This in turn happened because Trump's lawers filed an appeal to the DC Circuit on the basis that a US president is immune from prosecution for official acts while in office. Smith filed a plea with the US Supreme Court asking it to rule immediately on the issue, but the court declined to hear the case before the appeals court ruled. This was generally felt to be a threat to Smith's schedule to begin Trump's January 6 trial on March 4 , the day before the Super Tuesday primaries: The ruling is a scheduling win for Trump and his lawyers, who have sought repeatedly to delay the criminal cases against him as he campaigns to reclaim the White House in 2024. It averts a swift ruling from the nation’s highest co...

The results of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, having effectively decided the Republican nomination, seem to have changed political calculations within days, if not hours. The potential Senate compromise on the border is dead, not just in the House but in the Senate : "The great Republican compromise is: ‘We’re for two-thirds of Joe Biden’s open borders, we’ll let in 6 million instead of 9 million,'” scoffed [Sen] Cruz. “This [legislation] makes utterly no sense,” said Cruz. “There’s a reason Republican leadership is like Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football. Over and over again they run for the football and over and over again, Lucy Schumer pulls it away and Republican leadership lands on their ass.” According to The Hill : While some congressional Republicans had been hoping for a piece of election-year legislation aimed at fixing immigration and border security problems, Republican front-runner former President Trump is opposed, which means Sen...

Via Breitbart News , The donor class began to cut off all future funding of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s campaign after she lost the critical Republican primary in New Hampshire, multiple advisers to political megadonors told the Washington Post Wednesday. The desertions represent the beginning of the end for Haley’s ability to remain in the race. Haley was the donor class’s choice candidate to block former President Donald Trump, but after his historic victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, Haley’s financial backers apparently see the writing on the wall. The writing n the wall was from Trump himself : "When I ran for Office and won, I noticed that the losing Candidate's 'Donors' would immediately come to me, and want to 'help out.'" "This is standard in Politics, but no longer with me. Anybody that makes a 'Contribution' to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp," Trump declare...

Reid Hoffman, the Democrat donor who also funded E Jean Carroll's defamation suit against Trump, donated $250,000 to a pro-Haley super PAC last year, but no longer plans to support her campaign . Billionaire Reid Hoffman does not plan to give any more money to Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign after her loss in the New Hampshire Republican primary, according to a person familiar with the matter. Hoffman is one of Haley’s first wealthy donors to start heading for the exit after she said Tuesday that she will remain in the GOP’s nomination contests against former President Donald Trump despite failing to beat him in New Hampshire or in the Iowa caucuses. The person who told CNBC that Hoffman didn’t have immediate plans to help Haley again declined to be named in order to speak freely about the matter. This is another factor that suggests to me that Democrats wanted to support a candidate who could take Trump out of the running in the primaries but would be easier to bea...

Ever since I noted Andrew McCarthy's resuscitation of that meme last week at National Review Online, I've kept it in the back of my mind as I watch developments. NRO repeated it this morning in response to Trump's New Hampshire win: The Democrats want Trump as their opponent in the belief that they can salvage Joe Biden’s prospects by making the race all about Trump, and last night showed, once again, that they are making a sensible, if cynical, calculation. That independents turned out in such large numbers to cast votes in the Republican primary simply to protest Trump was an early indication of how he could lose the middle in November. Republican voters could have avoided giving Democrats what they wanted, but instead are putting all their chips on their riskiest electoral bet. The first problem with this view is CNN's reporting of the New Hampshire exit polls : Roughly 7 in 10 of the New Hampshire voters backing Trump said they were registered as Republi...

Last Friday I posted on a bar complaint filed against Kevin Morris : [I]f Mr. Morris has provided personal funds to an individual who has now been confirmed to be a client – or who would reasonably believe himself to be Mr. Morris’s client – Mr. Morris would have violated both the text of the Rules of Professional Conduct and the well-established norms of the legal profession. . . . If Hunter Biden or a similarly situated person would reasonably anticipate that Mr. Morris was obligated to provide legal services, the alleged funding of the lifestyle of a client or potential client justifies the immediate opening of a misconduct investigation under Rule 1.8.5. In that post, I raised the question of whether Morris is actually Hunter Biden's attorney -- he could potentially weasel his way out by saying he is in fact an attorney, but in Hunter's case, he's just acting as a friend, not as an attorney of record. But according to Just the News, Morris invoked attorney-clien...

I suddenly realized Alan Dershowitz has had very little to say about developments in Trump's trials in recent weeks beyond comparing his strategy in New York to the successful Chicago Seven strategy of 1969. But here's how he saw the prospects, at least for his four criminal indictments, as of last August : Alan Dershowitz believes all of former president Donald Trump’s trials will be completed prior to the 2024 election, but notes “There’ll be some convictions,” along the way. . . . “I predict there’ll be some convictions,” speculated the lawyer. “I think the strategy is to get bad convictions, but to get them fast,” he continued, saying that Trump would then be able to appeal the decisions, after the election. Dershowitz argued that this is the reason prosecutors are “rushing” to get their cases against Trump to trial. . . . “They’re going to get on the bandwagon,” Dershowitz said of prosecutors. The “approach is to get him before the election, convict him before...

I've been posting about Kevin Morris for quite a while. in part because his story never quite adds up. As I posted last November, . . . he's an entertainment lawyer whose career seems to have prospered, at least for a time, because his wife, William Morris partner Gaby Morgerman, is one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood. But the projects he's been asssociated with, South Park (1997) and the musical The Book of Mormon (2011), are old news. He left his former law firm Morris Yorn Barnes & Levine in 2020, oddly at the same time that he became heavily involved in Hunter's business and personal affairs. But as I posted here, Morris appears to have lost interest in his law practice years earlier. In 2009, he "decided to become a writer" and seems to have worked full time at writing and publishing a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems (2014), and two novels, All Joe Knight (2016) and Gettysburg (2019). By most accounts, ...

As I noted on Wednesday, although NeverTrumpers like Andrew McCarthy claim that the Democrats' lawfare strategy has succeeded in making Trump the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican nomination, statements by Biden supporters have consistently taken the position that the indictments and trials were timed to coincide with key campaign events that would tend to favor his opponents, especially Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. By that reasoning, at least as might have been foreseen in the middle of last year, the Letitia James civil trial in New York would have dampened Trump's prospects in the Iowa caucuses and early primaries, while starting the January 6 trial in Washington on March 4, the day before Super Tuesday, would also have favored other Republican candidates. Instead, it looks like there won't be much of a Republican primary contest at all. On Wednesday, following the Iowa caucus results, Sen Cruz, who ran against Trump in the 2016 primaries, announced “th...

Retired Hollywood attorney and John Updike wannabe Kevin Morris has been lurking in the background of the news lately. He was interviewed by the Comer committee yesterday in what is generally characterized as a "lackluster" appearance that's said to have done nothing to advance the Republicans' case, although at this point, Hunter's income sources and how they may relate to Joe aren't major campaign issues -- they fade in comparison to the simple questions of Joe's condition, the border, and the economy. Here's typical reaction : Morris was there as part of the impeachment probe into Joe Biden, but it wasn’t entirely clear what the Republicans were expecting him to say. Morris admitted to virtually everything that we’ve heard about his relationship with the First Son but seemed baffled about why he was there. James Comer suggested that there were inappropriate connections between “loans” that Morris had made to Hunter and Joe Biden’s political...

Trump was back in court for the second E Jean Carroll civil trial in New York on Tuesday, and his exchange with Judge Kaplan was true to form: "Mr. Trump has the right to be present here. That right can be forfeited and it can be forfeited if he is disruptive, which what has been reported to me consists of. And if he disregards court orders, Mr. Trump, I hope I don’t have to consider excluding you from the trial," Judge Lewis Kaplan told Trump, who was reportedly making comments throughout the trial, according to CNN. Trump responded to Kaplan by throwing his hands up. "I understand you’re probably eager for me to do that," the judge said. "I would love it," Trump said, according to reporters in the courtroom. "I know you would," Kaplan responded. "You just can’t control yourself in this circumstance apparently." This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Trump's public demeanor, as well as his conduct in the cour...