In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As the presumptive Republican nominee in the November election and leading Biden in the polls, Trump has increasingly been taking over the party machinery, but he's also beginning to send serious foreign policy signals over the direction his next administration is likely to take. In the most recent example, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will meet former President Donald Trump on Friday, March 8 in Florida, Orban's press chief told Hungarian state news agency MTI late Sunday. Last month nationalist Orban endorsed Trump's bid to return to the presidency this year. "We hope the current president will go, and President Trump will return and he will have free hands to make peace [in Ukraine]," Orban said Feb. 23. Elsewhere, At the invitation of former President Donald Trump, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will be traveling to the USA next week. However, it seems unlikely that he will meet with President Joe Biden, reports eXXpress. ...

In recent weeks, both Joe Biden's son Hunter and his brother James have given closed-door depositions to the Comer Committee, and the transcripts have been released. On Thursday, the New York Post ran the headline, After years of denials, Hunter Biden FINALLY acknowledged Joe was ‘the big guy’ in $5M China deal . The next day, it had the story Joe Biden got $40K from China funds, brother James admits in bombshell impeachment interview . Nobody noticed. Last fall, this would have been much bigger news. I think there are several reasons. One is that by this point, the whole Biden family boodle has been factored in; the part of the public that follows the news has inferred everything there is to infer, and it's moved on. Second, while there's a there there, it's never turned into anything big. Joe got $40K from China? Heck, Nathan Wade go $600K from Fani, and that was for piddling stuff like wine tasting tours. Third, the Hunter-Joe-James story had nothing to do ...

Conventional wisdom is very slowly coming to accept that Plan A, securing a conviction in a Trump trial before the election, has effectively disappeared: whatever the outcome of Judge McAfee's decision in the Fulton County RICO case against Trump and his co-defendants, the losing side will appeal. The most conservative prognostications are that the judge will disqualify Wade, the special prosecutor, but not Willis, who would keep her position as DA, but she'd need to find someone new to serve as special prosecutor. That could be a problem, since Wade had been baked into the process from the start. A second contract prosecutor on the case, Anna Cross, disappeared from the proceedings for unkown reasons after attacking Terrence Bradley on February 16, when it had been assumed she would continue in a lead role. Instead, Adam Abbate, an assistant DA on the regular payroll, was called up from the secnd team to represent the DA's office in Ms Cross's absence; his performa...

In my post on Tuesday, I offered an overall theory of the Willis-Wade case that tries to account for some of the inconsistencies I see. Willis and Wade were runnng a grift, but if they were the grifters, who was the griftee? By consensus, neither Willis nor Wade is particularly intelligent, and they aren't self-starters. They basically do what they're told, as long as cooperation has rewards, although they seem to settle for fairly pedestrian levels of grift -- a wine tasting tour in Napa, or a trip to Panama City Beach on the redneck riviera, for instance. But who gave them the initial project of prosecuting Trump and something like 18 codefendants, using RICO, in Fulton County, if they didn't dream it up themselves? It's hard for me to think someone like Fani could mastermind this; the consensus so far is that as incompetent prosecutors go, she's about the best Trump could hope for. Somebody else simply has to be behind the whole scheme, and it's hard ...

I've echoed the puzzlement of several commentators here over the past couple of weeks -- why did Anna Cross, the counsel in the DA's office representing Willis and Wade, suddenly, gratuitously, and viciously attack Terrence Bradley on the witness stand by bringing up the sexual harassment allegations against him, when Bradley appeared to be doing nothing to damage their interests? After all, he was trying his hardest to have his testimony excluded on the basis of attorney-client privilege. Let's start with what's obvious. Ashleigh Merchant, the attorney for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, is a blonde bombshell. As it happens, she is also one of the most prominent Georgia defense attorneys -- one of her cases, entirely unrelated, was featured on A&E's Taking the Stand just two weeks ago. Nevertheless, that notwithstanding, I suspect Judge McAfee, and likely many other judges, feels his day goes just a little bit better any time she's in his courtroom. ...

I wasted more than two hours yesteday watching Terrence Bradley's testimony in the Fani Willis-Nathan Wade hearing. I watched the usual commentators, but Michael Lebron, who posts on YouTube as Lionel, had the best series of takes in the link at the top of this post: First of all, I don't want to be a killjoy, and I don't want to ruin anybody's fun, but much too much has been made of his testimony. I'm sorry, I know that's horrible to say, I know people think like this is the most important -- it's not the most important thing in the least. . . . What it was is an abssolute cluster[redacted] in terms of lying on parade, the likes of which nobody has ever seen. And it was a beautiful combination of lying and absolute stupidity. . . . This is a grown man. This is a lawyer who is a combination of imbecilic and an amnesiac. . . . I've never seen this before. . . . This guy is just a buffoon. . . . I'm thinking maybe he's like jumping on the...

As pieces of the puzzle straggle in, I was impressed by the juxtaposition of Nathan Wade's non-report report on the Cobb County jail death scandal from 2020 with what we now know about the timeline of his relationship with Fani Willis. As I linked yesterday, When Wade finished his investigation later that year, he released no formal public report about what led to the deaths at the notoriously dangerous lock-up. Asked about his findings for a local TV news investigation, Wade conceded that he created no “documents, communications, or records memorializing, reflecting evidence, or relating to the work,” according to the news station, 11Alive. “I have obviously my brainchild, what’s going on in my mind about it. That’s what I have,” Wade told a lawyer for 11Alive who was trying to obtain Sheriff’s Department internal records about the probe through public records act requests. That outcome was condemned by local criminal justice reform activists and defense attorneys, some...