Yeah, The Judge Is Losing Control

Dialogue that's beginning to emerge from recent days in Trump's New York trial is giving me the impression that Judge Engoron has already backed himself into reversible territory, and he knows it. Via Forbes from last week:

Engoron’s law clerk has been a source of contention throughout the trial, after Trump made a disparaging post in the trial’s first week sharing a false rumor about the clerk and suggesting she was politically biased against him, prompting the judge to impose a gag order barring parties in the case from speaking about court staff.

The "false rumor" was news that a complaint had been filed with the New York State Bar Association against Judge Engoron's chief clerk, Allison Greenfield, for violating judicial rules preventing officers of the court from making excessive political donations.

[I]n 2022 alone, Greenfield gave $3,335 in political donations to Democrat candidates and causes in New York—more than six times the maximum allowed annually for court officials like herself to give.

Forbes continues,

The back-and-forth over the clerk resumed Friday, with Engoron saying he hoped he was clear when he instructed Trump’s lawyers to stop making improper claims about the clerk and is “worried about this.”

Kise refused to drop the issue, saying, “The entire country, if not the world, is watching this proceeding” and pointing to a Breitbart piece published Thursday, which claimed a Twitter user submitted a complaint to the New York State Bar Association that takes issue with the clerk’s purported “partisan political and Democratic activities.”

The attorney claimed he could file for a mistrial due to the alleged bias.

On Monday, Trump's attorneys continued to telegraph their intent to move for a mistrial on the basis of bias. Via CNN,

Donald Trump’s lawyers said they want to make a motion for a mistrial, getting into an extended debate with Judge Arthur Engoron about how they can raise the conduct of his clerk that’s subject to a gag order.

"We would at least need to reference the subject matter," Trump's attorney Chris Kise said.

Initially, Engoron told Trump’s lawyers they should not file such a motion that referenced his staff, saying he put the gag order in place to protect them.

"I am 1000% convinced that you don't have any right or reason to complain about my confidential communications,” Engoron said.

Other observers have reported that during this exchange, Judge Engoron admonished Kise, "Don't file that motion, Chris", addressing Trump's attorney by his first name in the courtroom, which is highly irregular and suggests the pressures building up on the judge. The CNN account continues,

Trump’s attorneys, who have complained about Engoron’s note-passing with his clerk, claim it’s a sign of the trial’s bias and have urged Engoron to reconsider.

"You can't respectfully reject it before you've seen it," Kise said. Trump attorney Alina Habba told the judge, "Obviously are going to be moving for a mistrial, that is part of the plan."

"We need to have an opportunity to be heard on those things that have not been yet heard,” Habba said.

After conferring with his clerk, Engoron changed course and said that Trump’s attorneys could file a motion, but he asked them to do it in writing.

The trial isn't being televised, so it's hard to determine how frequently Judge Engoron interacts with his clerk, but remarks from observers in the courtroom suggest it's almost constant.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday Laura Loomer alleged that Judge Engoron's wife, Dawn Marie Engoron, had been making anti-Trump tweets from an account called Dawn Marie:

EXCLUSIVE:

This is one of the most damning screenshots I have archived from the Twitter account of Dawn Marie Engoron, the wife of Judge Arthur Engoron, the Leftist judge who is overseeing President Trump’s Civil Fraud trial in NYC.

On October 30, 2023, while the trial was… https://t.co/fBMt1lxMAZ pic.twitter.com/G1TRMiMR6K

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) November 8, 2023

Mrs Engoron has denied that the account is hers:

Newsweek was unable to verify that the account belonged to Dawn, and on Wednesday, she issued a firm denial. Dawn told Newsweek on Wednesday afternoon that the account does not belong to her.

"I do not have a Twitter account. This is not me. I have not posted any anti Trump messages," she said.

Well, after yesterday's post, we at least know that the judge is married to an individual who identifies as female with she/her pronouns, if nothing else. Beyond that,

[I]n a September 27, 2023 article published by Bollywood Safar, over a month before the recent turn of events, Dawn Marie is mentioned as an expert in the field of mental health. Not only that but her current employer’s name was cited as Brain Mind Harmony, where she has been reportedly working as a professional psychotherapist since December 2021.

As per the Bollywood Safar article, her other roles included serving as a psychodynamic psychotherapy supervisor for 3rd and 4th-year residents at the Zucker School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, The Zucker Hillside Hospital, and Northwell Health from July 2021.

I'm sure if Judge Engoron is married to a psychotherapist, his mind and body are indeed in perfect harmony, and he's posted the selfies to prove it.

About Judge Engoron. . .

I don't know which way Judge Engoron swings, and it isn't my business, but it seems like he's setting himself up as a bizarre foil for Trump's Chicago Seven strategy.

BREAKING: The judge presiding over Trump's NYC trial appears to have a peculiar hobby of posting half-naked photos of himself on a high school alumni newsletter he controls as reported on by @MarcoPolo501c3.

The 74-year-old judge Arthur Engoron appeared to even post a… pic.twitter.com/JW2ArmxzzN

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 7, 2023

Alan Dershowitz, before the latest revelation of the judge's bathroom selfies, came to the same conclusion in this YouTube post:

At 3:42, he begins,

. . . back at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s before most of you were born, there was a famous trial in America, it was called the trial of the Chicago Seven. It tas during the 1968 presidential conventions in Chicago that a group of radicals headed by people like Abby Hoffman, left-wing progressive radicals, demonstrated and engaged, sometimes, in some violent conduct, and they were all arrested and charged with conspiracy. I was a consultant on the case, because there were free speech issues, and the trial turned into a farce, because they had picked a judge named Julius Hoffman, who was a very right-wing jurist to preside over the trial, and he hated these radical defendants, and the radical defendants hated him, and Abby Hoffman came up with a tactic, he said basically to his lawyers and everybody else, "Look, we can't win this case in front of Judge Julius Hoffman. Let's see if we can go about getting it reversed on appeal, and the best way to do it is to provoke this judge, he has a short fuse, and provoke him into making error after error."

And that's exactly what [Abby] Hoffman did, he stood up, he made speeches, he wore costumes, he did everything possible to provoke the judge, and the judge fell into the trap, and I was one of the lawyers on the appeal, and we won the appeal, and he held the lawyers in contempt, and we won the appeal on contempt. So we had a total victory, and [Julius] Hoffman really was laughed at by his fellow judges, and he was condemned by jurists and appellate judges. So I call this the Chicago Seven tactic, and I think this is what Donald Trump is using now.

In my view, it doesn't hurt that one of Trump's chief attorneys, Alina Habba, is something of a bombshell, and she stands up to Judge Engoron in court, which he must find especially galling, a highly attractive and assertive woman going against a nebbishy, vain, androgynous, bad-tempered 74 year old. Via Newsweek,

Habba then defended Trump, telling Engoron that the judge is here to "hear what he has to say." Engoron gave an angry response to Habba's interjection, telling the attorney: "I'm not here to hear what he has to say. He's here to answer questions," while demanding she sits down.

In a statement outside the court, Habba said she is not going to "tolerate" being yelled at by a judge and that she was only doing her job as an attorney when defending the former president's responses in court.

Following the revelation of Engoron's bathroom selfies, several commentators have noted that this is not appropriate judicial conduct, and it appears that much like Judge Hoffman, Judge Engoron's reputation will suffer in the wake of this trial. Again, apparently written before the bathroom selfies hit the news, Don Surber posted,

Trump is the issue. Democrats blundered by indicting and suing him so much. Tying him up in court ties the media to keeping him on Page One, where he flourished in 2016. NYT is still holding out hope that Democrats will not suffer a Pyrrhic Victory in court that costs them the presidency.

The official paper of birdcages everywhere reported, “Trump Indictments Haven’t Sunk His Campaign, but a Conviction Might.”

The legacy media can't resist Trump, because Trump brings clicks -- but Trump's ability to deflect the narrative in his favor is uncanny. You can see Dershowitz's grudging respect for Trump growing by the day, and Dershowitz is no amateur at self-promotion himself.

Alan Dershowitz Takes The Red Pill

I've followed Alan Dershowitz for much of my life, and I would have to say I've frequently agreed with him, even at times where he's been, in his own characterization, a traditional 1960s-style liberal. More recently, I find myself agreeing with him even more. Over the weekend, he published an op-ed in the UK Daily Mail, ALAN DERSHOWITZ says vile Leftist anti-Israeli hate will turn millions of American Jews from Blue to Red - and he's one.

The Democratic Party now faces a choice.

The Hamas atrocities of October 7th have forever fractured any political alliance between centrist and liberal Jews and woke, anti-Israel progressives.

It's either them or us.

The coalition is at civil war.

This is a point similar to the one I've been making, that the highly successful New Deal alliance of the 1930s and 1940s, which included labor; Catholics, Jews, and other ethnics; northern philanthropic wealth; and southern segregationists, contained contradictions that began to manifest themselves once Kennedy and Johnson co-opted Republicans on the civil rights issue, which had been Republican since Reconstruction. Bringing urban African-Americans into the coalition was inevitably going to cause internal stress, since rightly or wrongly, residents of urban ghettos resented Jews and other ethnics who ran the businesses that served them like pawnbrokers, bail bondsmen, convenience stores, and retailers.

Other contradictions included the original Christian evangelizatioon of African slaves, which stressed the parallel between the Africans and the Jews enslaved in Egypt, while the NAACP was founded with early Jewish support from figures like Henry Moskowitz, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsh, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. The Spingarn brothers served as officers, and Jacob Schiff, Julius Rosenwald, and Herbert Lehman contributed funds.

A second set of tensions arose with the inclusion of the New Left in the coalition later in the 1960s. While many New Left figures were Jews, there was a second faction, probably just as large, of trust-fund WASPs with consciences troubled about their family wealth that in many ways had dominated the earlier New Deal northern philanthropic alliance with southern segregationists. Many of these figures, like Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Jr, came from post-Civil War high society that was never completely comfortable with admittng Jews.

My own view is that Nancy Pelosi's main task as a latter-day Democrat leader was to maintain the traditional New Deal alliance with the civil rights and New Left additions despite those contradictions, but she was able to do this alomost singlehandedly via her personal charisma. Once she retired as speaker, nobody else could take over that role, least of all Joe Biden. I think this is at the root of Dershowitz's disaffection:

Nine hard-Left Democratic members of Congress voted against a House resolution that condemned Hamas and expressed support of Israel. Another six voted 'present' for the bill that passed overwhelmingly.

Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz suggested these members who couldn't bring themselves to denounce the slaughter of civilians 'don't have a soul.'

Thank you, Congresswoman. But where, I ask, is the presidential address demanding introspection of the 'soul' of the party?

. . . And just last week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pointedly declined to say if the President had any plans to speak to the explosion of antisemitism among university students.

It's correct that the universities have been loci of this anti-Semitic outbreak, but I don't think Prof Dershowitz should be surprised. In his own book Chutzpah, he discusses the post-SAT strategy of the Ivies to maintain de facto Jewish quotas by limiting applicants from Northeastern suburbs and favoring white applicants from the South, Midwest, and intermountain West in the name of "diversity", a principle that was established as early as the 1940s. Ivy anti-Semitism is baked into the system, something Dershowitz has recognized all along -- I sensed it, and I'm sorry to say I was influenced by it myself as an Ivy undergraduate in the 1960s.

But he sums up the dilemma quite well in the piece:

I have supported the Democratic Party since I first voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, for much like my parents and grandparents, and since the days of Frankin Delano Roosevelt, a vast majority of Jewish-American voters could be reliably counted upon to cast their ballots for Democrats and contribute disproportionately to their campaigns.

This is unlikely to continue.

. . . Of course, some Jews will continue to vote blue, but their allegiance will be weakened to the point of disappearing.

. . . The antisemitic and anti-Israeli attitudes uncovered by these game changing events will not be forgotten.

But we should note that this is part of a wider realignment from the New Deal coalition that's been taking place since the 1960s. Trump got the majority of the Catholic vote in 2016; the Southern states went Republican beginning in the 1970s. Prominent Jews formed the neoconservative movement and allied themselves with Reagan in the 1980s. Prof Dershowitz is a smart guy, it's hard to think he's all that surprised now.

Just Sayin'

There's another big takeaway from rhe story I linked in yesterday's post about the schism within the United Methodist Church: Pope Benedict's 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus was initially directed not just to disaffected Anglicans and Episcopalians, but to members of other, Anglican-derived denominations, such as Methodists or African Methodist Episcopal members. However, this has almost entirely been removed from odrdinariate documentation, with only this vestigial reference on the US ordinariate web site:

Former Anglicans and Methodists who have already become Catholic and wish to join the Ordinariate may submit an application form to the Ordinariate.

However, Wikipedia has kept the earlier intent:

A personal ordinariate for former Anglicans, shortened as personal ordinariate or Anglican ordinariate, is an ordinariate, a canonical structure within the Catholic Church established in order to enable "groups of Anglicans" and Methodists to join the Catholic Church while preserving elements of their liturgical and spiritual patrimony.

The original intent of Anglicanorum coetibus was to facilitiate entry of full Anglican and Methodist parishes into the Roman Catholic Church as existing groups with their clergy. This was reflected in the USCCB's Q&A at the time of its promulgation:

Anglicanorum coetibus was a response to repeated and persistent inquiries from Anglican groups worldwide who were seeking to become Catholic. Ordinariates seek to provide a way for these groups to enter in "corporate reunion"; that is, as a group and not simply as individuals. This will allow them to retain their Anglican liturgical heritage and traditions.

The repeated and persistent inquiries to which the constitution refers came almost entirely in the late 1970s and early 1980s from disaffected Episcopalian parishes who objected to the US Episcopal Church's decision to ordain women and revise its Book of Common Prayer at that time. However, the number of these parishes that actually wished to follow through and affiliate with the Roman Catholic Church was never large at that stage, amounting to fewer than half a dozen.

A second wave of inquries began in the late 1990s, which eventually resulted in the promulgation of Anglicanorum coetibus. but again, the actual number of full Episcopalian or Anglican parishes that were able to follow through, disaffiliate from their original denominations and reaffiliate with the Roman Catholic Church with their clergy, was still in the single digits. On top of that, the history of those clergy who entered via that route was often unhappy and marked by scandal.

So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the United Methodist Church, an Anglican-derived denomination specifically targeted for Roman Catholic evangelization as Anglicanorum coetibus was originally envisioned, should show effectively zero interest in Pope Benedict's invitation. Via the link in yesterday's post, 6,000 UMC parishes have elected to disaffiliate, but as far as I'm aware, not one of the 6,000 ever expressed even the most tentative preliminary interest in possibly affilating with the Catholic Church.

I would also guess that there's been no interest, either in Rome or in the US ordinariate, in asking why this might be. One path of inquiry might be with the current US ordinary, Bishop Steven Lopes, whose official photo is at the top of this post. Contrast that with the official photo of Bishop Robert Barron on the Diocese of Rochester-Winona website, at right.

There's something complacent about Bp Lopes that we don't see in Bp Bsrron, who basically comes off as an active, happy guy who isn't leaning on ecclesiastical kit to greet the viewer.

There's likely a great deal to be said about the manifest failure of Anglicanorum coetibus to appeal to conservative Protestants concerned about the liberalizing trends of their own denominations, but who are unmoved by the evangelical appeal of the Catholic Church, at least as presented by the Anglican ordinariates. What's gone wrong?

I think it's worthwhile just to compare the generally flat, inward-looking, and uninspiring mesaage that comes out of Houston from Bp Lopes with something like the Catechism in Year podcast from Fr Mike Schmitz, which has 133,000 subscribers on YouTube and is aimed, based on his occasional remarks, at non-Catholics interested in learning more about Catholicism, in addition to current and lapsed Catholics. These are two entirely different approaches.

The Synod In A Distant Mirror

As a relatively new Catholic convert, I've been reluctant to say anything about the synod recently completed in Rome, except to note what Fr James Martin himself has concludeed about it:

One of these issues was L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, particularly since this community was explicitly mentioned in the Instrumentum Laboris twice. It was also mentioned in half of the reports submitted by episcopal conferences from around the world. Many hoped that the synod would find ways to speak explicitly about reaching out to this community in new ways. Also there were unreasonably high expectations that the synod would, for example, somehow ratify the blessings of same-sex unions.

But that second option was never going to happen on that or any other issue; the synod is consultative, not deliberative. The synod does not have the power to change any church practice; it can only suggest.

Still, the lack of any mention of the term “L.G.B.T.Q.” in the final synthesis, called “A Synodal Church on Mission,” was, for many people, including myself, a disappointment.

I have the sense that at least so far, the Catholic Church has dodged a bullet. The LGBTQ issue, along with earleir ones like women's ordination, has been destroying main line Protestant denominatins for decades. The United Methodist Church is only the most recent:

More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.

. . . Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.

Many of the departing congregations are joining the Global Methodist Church, a denomination created last year by conservatives breaking from the UMC, while others are going independent or joining different denominations.

Pope Francis in occasional offhand remarks that I haven't been able to locate specifically seems to have come close to the basic issue: Protestant denominations have liberalized on this, that, or the other throughout much of the past century, but it hasn't brought any Protestants back to church. For instance,

The General Convention Office released The Episcopal Church’s annual batch of parochial report data this week, providing a snapshot of the church in 2022 as dioceses and congregations were beginning to rebound from COVID-19 disruptions. In addition to the numbers, these parochial reports also included responses to narrative questions aimed at deepening the church’s understanding of the changes, challenges and opportunities present in parish life.

The topline numbers continue to show a church experiencing gradual long-term membership decline, much like other mainline Protestant denominations. The Episcopal Church’s tally of baptized members dropped just below 1.6 million in 2022, down 21% from 2013.

The church recorded an even sharper drop in average Sunday attendance in the past decade, down 43% to 373,000 in 2022, though that one-year total was up by 19% from the pandemic-driven low of 313,000 in 2021.

Earlier trends among Episcopalians reflect a decline that began in the 1960s and 70s, when that denomination began to embrace secular political issues and move toward ordaining women:

The Episcopal Church Annual, also known as The Red Book, includes a table that tracks Episcopal statistics from 1880 to the present. . . . If one simply finds the high point of Episcopal membership in Red Book tables (1966) and compares that figure (3,647,297) with the total members in 2002 (2,320,221), it would seem that the Episcopal Church lost well over a million members during the last 35 years.

And as of 2022, according to the first link, that number had dropped to 1.6 million, less than half the number in 1966. The Episcopalians had two periods of schism in which conservative parishes left for newly constituted Anglican denominatios, the first in the 1970s and early 1980s, the second in the 2000s. According to Wikipedia, the most important of these, the Anglican Church in North America, had 127,624 members in 2019, which can account for only a small part of the more than 2 million Episcopalian membership decline since 1966.

It appears that the likely outcome of all such schisms will be an overall loss of credibility for organized Christianity that can never be made up by organizing new, quasi-orthodox denominations. This suggests that the schism in the United Methodist Church will never produce an overall membership total among the UMC, the new Global Methodist Church, and other groups harboring other dissident UMC parishes, that ever corresponds to the pre-schism total in the UMC alone. Mostly, it will encourage more people just to drop church attendance entirely.

The increase in overall denominations leads to an increase in bishops and other key spokespeople both locally and nationally, especially when one Anglican or one Methodist leader is pro-LGBTQ and another is anti, which diminishes the prestige of both and the overall ability of religious spokesmen to affect the public dialogue.

Beyond that, when denominations break up into smaller ones, it's economically inefficient, since relatively more of individual parish tithes to their supervising bodies will go to more administrative expenses in more corporate-style offices at more denominations. This contributes to an overall death spiral.

The takeaway, from what I csn see, is that when Christian denominations cave to secular pressure, it kills them fairly quickly, especially over the LGBTQ issue. Rome must certainly be aware of these trends, which has almost certainly, if very quietly, affected the outcome of the recent synod.

\

As I've been pointing out, Trump's strategy in at least two of his trials, the Washington January 6 case under Judge Chutkan and the New York civil fraud case under Judge Engoron, has been to irritate and bait the judges into overreacting, imposing gag orders and making reversible errors. As of yesterday,

A three-judge appeals court panel paused the federal gag order that partially limited former president Donald Trump's speech ahead of his federal 2020 election interference trial in Washington, D.C., according to a court ruling filed Friday.

The ruling administratively and temporarily stays Judge Tanya Chutkan's decision to bar Trump from publicly targeting court staff, potential witnesses and members of special counsel Jack Smith's prosecutorial team, a ruling Trump asked the higher court to put on hold. Friday's order is not a decision on the merits of the gag order Chutkan issued last month, but is meant to give the appeals court more time to consider the arguments in the case.

Judges Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee, Cornelia Pillard, another Obama appointee and Bradley Garcia, a Biden appointee, granted the former president's request for an emergency pause on the order less than 24 hours after Trump's attorneys filed a motion for a stay.

So far, Judge Chutkan hasn't lost her cool, but she can't be happy at the defense's continuing series of motions to stay her orders or dismiss the case entirely. Judge Engoron in New York, on the other hand, is doing exactly as the Trump team wishes:

New York County Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron on Friday gagged former President Donald Trump’s legal counsel from discussing his “confidential communications” with staff, including note-passing from clerk Allison Greenfield.

. . . “Serious sanctions” will be brought against the legal team if they violate the order, said Engoron, who is overseeing the civil lawsuit New York Attorney General Letitia James has brought against Trump and his eldest sons.

He specifically named Trump lawyers Christopher Kise, Clifford Robert, and Alina Habba, writing that they “have made, on the record, repeated, inappropriate remarks about my Principal Law Clerk, falsely accusing her of bias against them and of improperly influencing the ongoing bench trial.”

The judge certainly appears to be highly sensitive to any imputations about his close relationsip with his principal clerk. Yesterday's gag order on Trump's counsel, on top of his earlier order and fines against Trump himself, followed a kerfuffle invovling Greenfield the day before:

Proceedings at Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York grew heated on Thursday, with the presiding judge pounding the bench and threatening to expand his gag order to keep the former president’s lawyers from attacking his court staff.

. . . State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron accused attorney Chris Kise of sexism for his repeated jabs at Engoron’s law clerk, Allison Greenfield, who sat to the judge’s immediate right. Trump’s legal team had previously expressed frustrations that Greenfield was passing notes to Engoron, allegedly swaying his opinion during the trial.

“She’s a civil servant. She’s doing what I ask her to do,” the judge snapped, according to the New York Daily News. “I sometimes think there may be a bit of misogyny in you referring to my female principal law clerk.”

Greenfield was previously the target of Trump’s ire in a mocking Oct. 3 social media post that led to Engoron issuing the initial gag order. The former president, who was in court that day, posted a photo of Greenfield with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to Truth Social, calling her “Schumer’s girlfriend” and accusing her of bias.

But the judge's problems with Greenfield go beyond wisecracks from Trump. News also broke Thursday of accusations against Greenfeld of ethical violations:

The top clerk for New York Justice Arthur Engoron, Allison Greenfield, appears to have violated judicial rules preventing officers of the court from making excessive political donations, Breitbart News has learned.

What’s more, it appears Engoron was advised of Greenfield’s violations in a 72-page complaint addressed to his court via email that was also filed with the New York State Bar Association the same day he decided to issue a gag order against former President Donald Trump in his case currently playing out in Engoron’s Manhattan courtroom. Engoron has subsequently fined Trump a total of $15,000 for two alleged violations of that gag order preventing the former president from criticizing his principal law clerk.

. . . New York ethics rules prohibit court officials like Greenfield from giving in excess of $500 in the aggregate in a particular calendar year in political donations.

. . .This year and last year, Greenfield apparently exceeded that $500 threshold. Greenfield began as Justice Engoron’s principal law clerk in 2019—so she has been in this position for several years and in the two most recent years, 2022 and 2023, she violated the ethics rules for judicial staff.

. . . In 2022 alone, Greenfield gave thousands of dollars in donations. The donations, which can be found in New York’s elections database, total several thousand dollars. . . . What, if anything, becomes of these alleged violations of the ethics rules by Greenfield remains to be seen. The judge in the case for now keeps siding with her, and even as recently as Thursday afternoon’s proceedings, according to live updates from New York Times reporters in the courtroom. Greenfield’s presence at Engoron’s side has been a centerpiece of the case as the trial plays out. The judge accused one Trump lawyer of “misogyny,” according to the Times, for raising questions about Greenfield.

Trump's legal team responded to the news on Thursday,

“There’s a news story out [today]…about particular political contributions made by your court staff…it raises questions of impartiality,” Kise said, according to Law360’s Stewart Bishop.

He added the “defense will have to give serious consideration to seeking a mistrial.”

According to Pix11 reporter Henry Rosoff, Engoron — who placed a gag order on Trump regarding Greenfield and has fined him twice for gag order violations — became frustrated.

. . . Engoron said Friday, “It’s not information, it’s an allegation!” according to Rosoff.

“This idea someone has notified me, absolutely untrue, absolutely untrue,” he added.

Trump and his lawyers so far appear to be succeeding in turning at least one of the cases into a farce, with the full cooperation of Judge Engoron, who has begun to overreact and lose his temper repeatedly. The Trump team clearly has gotten under his skin. It looks like the Chicago Seven strategy is working, and it will continue.

Hunter Resurfaces

Why did Hunter Biden take this video? it screams drug-induced paranoia.pic.twitter.com/Fk6ejyqWcd

— Evan Mahoney (@EvanMahoney_) October 31, 2023

Hunter Biden resurfaced twice in the news this week, first in a video that was posted on X Tuesday, linked above, and then in a USA Today op-ed yesterday, where he claims that he is in recovery and sober, but his enemies keep dredging up old videos to make fun of him. But as far as anyone can tell, this is a new video that appears to have been taken as a selfie from his own phone, the release of which would have been entirely under his control. Somehow it got from his phone to X.

On the other hand, I suspect the USA Today piece was written for him, or was at best heavily revised from notes he provided, probably by his Hollywood lawyer friend Kevin Morris, who likely placed it via his or his wife's media network. The video could possibly support his claim that

The weaponization of my addiction by partisan and craven factions represents a real threat to those desperate to get sober but are afraid of what may await them if they do. . . . part of my living amends is to not only survive this, but to also use my experience to be a living example of the promises we are told await us in sobriety.

But if this is what sobriety promises, I'm not sure why everyone's so big on it. Comments on the video in the post note, however, that Hunter's pupils appear dilated, and his overall demeanor appears to be bizarre. (The most amusing comment, though, is from the visitor who claims it's actually Jordan Peterson.) Nobody is quite sure of the video's date, but if we compare Hunter's haircut in this photo from October 3:

with his hair in the video, it could well represent a month's regrowth plus a couple weeks of not shaving, and he has the same wiggy facial expression as in the video, so I suspect it's quite recent. The most that can be said about the October photo outside the Delaware courtroom and the video, though, is that Hunter doesn't look well at all. I suspect it was a task to get him as cleaned up as he was for his October appearance.

But isn't Hunter under Secret Service protection? Somehow he's getting into things that dilate his pupils, give him a strung-out expression, and drive him into bizarre behavior taking video selfies. I've got to ask if his Secret Service detail is enabling this, and if his current condition is why he's no longer living at the White House. The baggie near the Sit Room was probably a sign that things could be covered up only so long.

The conditons of Hunter's pretrial release include abstaining from illegal drugs. According to the link, US Magistrate Judge Christopher Burke claims Hunter had "submitted to tests for illegal drug use multiple times recently and had tested negative". I would think, though, that an independent probation officer seeing the video might order yet another test, but the repercussions for doing this would likely be severe.

Right now, nobody around Hunter is doing him any favors, unless his wife has placed herself and little Beau well out of reach, which I suspect may be the case. The difficulty for Hunter is that he's surrounded by enablers due to Joe's position as Caesar, but Hunter's continuing episodes do less damage to Hunter than they do Joe, and this is for entirely justified reasons -- Hunter is protected becasue of Joe, and any new episodes point this out.

Hunter's whole argument in the USA Today piece is that he's sober. If he isn't actually sober, which I think is the likely case, his whole argument fails -- he's continuing to make himself an exhibitionist joke without any assistance from Republicans. Why on earth did he make that video at all, much less allow it to get out?