Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

[ti-amie]

‘I’m Haunted by What I Did’ as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department
No matter our intentions, lawyers like me were complicit. We owe the country our honesty about what we saw — and should do in the future.

By Erica Newland
Ms. Newland worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department from 2016-18.

Dec. 20, 2020

was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president. I worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where presidents turn for permission slips that say their executive orders and other contemplated actions are lawful. I joined the department during the Obama administration, as a career attorney whose work was supposed to be independent of politics.

I never harbored delusions about a Trump presidency. Mr. Trump readily volunteered that his agenda was to disassemble our democracy, but I made a choice to stay at the Justice Department — home to some of the country’s finest lawyers — for as long as I could bear it. I believed that I could better serve our country by pushing back from within than by keeping my hands clean. But I have come to reconsider that decision.

My job was to tailor the administration’s executive actions to make them lawful — in narrowing them, I could also make them less destructive. I remained committed to trying to uphold my oath even as the president refused to uphold his.

But there was a trade-off: We attorneys diminished the immediate harmful impacts of President Trump’s executive orders — but we also made them more palatable to the courts.

This burst into public view early in the Trump administration in the litigation over the executive order banning travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, which my office approved. The first Muslim ban was rushed out the door. It was sweeping and sloppy; the courts quickly put a halt to it. The successive discriminatory bans benefited from more time and attention from the department’s lawyers, who narrowed them but also made them more technocratic and therefore harder for the courts to block.


After the Supreme Court’s June 2018 decision upholding the third Muslim ban, I reviewed my own portfolio — which included matters targeting noncitizens, dismantling the Civil Service and camouflaging the president’s corruption — overcome with fear that I was doing more harm than good. By Thanksgiving of that year, I had left my job.

Still, I felt I was abandoning the ship. I continued to believe that a critical mass of responsible attorneys staying in government might provide a last line of defense against the administration’s worst instincts. Even after I left, I advised others that they could do good by staying. News reports about meaningful pushback by Justice Department attorneys seemed to confirm this thinking.

I was wrong.

Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results, I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed.

Unlike the Trump Justice Department, the Trump campaign has relied on second-rate lawyers who lack the skills to maintain the president’s charade. After a recent oral argument from Rudy Giuliani, Judge Matthew Brann (a Republican) wrote that the campaign had offered “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.” Even judges appointed by Mr. Trump have refused to throw their lots in with lawyers who can’t master the basic mechanics of lawyering.

After four years of bulldozing through one institution after another on the backs of skilled lawyers, the Trump agenda hit a brick wall.

The story of the Trump campaign’s attack on our elections could have been the story of the Trump administration’s four-year-long attack on our institutions. If, early on, the Justice Department lawyers charged with selling the administration’s lies had emptied the ranks — withholding our talents and reputations and demanding the same of our professional peers — the work of defending President Trump’s policies would have been left to the types of attorneys now representing his campaign. Lawyers like Mr. Giuliani would have had to defend the Muslim ban in court.

Had that happened, judges would have likely dismantled the Trump facade from the beginning, stopping the momentum of his ugliest and most destructive efforts and bringing much-needed accountability early in his presidency.

Before the 2020 election, I was haunted by what I didn’t do. By all the ways I failed to push back enough. Now, after the 2020 election, I’m haunted by what I did. The trade-off wasn’t worth it.

In giving voice to those trying to destroy the rule of law and dignifying their efforts with our talents and even our basic competence, we enabled that destruction. Were we doing enough good elsewhere to counterbalance the harm we facilitated, the way a public health official might accommodate the president on the margins to push forward on vaccine development? No.

No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.

We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.

And we owe our best efforts to restore our democracy and to share what we learned to help mobilize and enact reforms — to remind future government lawyers that when asked to undermine our democracy, the right course is to refuse and hold your peers to the same standard.

To lead by example, and do everything in our power to ensure this never happens again. If we don’t, it will.

Erica Newland, counsel at Protect Democracy, worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department from 2016-18.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/opin ... awyer.html

[ti-amie]

This person responded to the above mea culpa this way.

Judy Parr
Holland, MI

Times Pick

Erica Newland’s confession sounds familiar. In describing the trial of Michael Cohen in February 2019, NYT opinion writer Peter Wehner wrote how Cohen and Trump’s loyalists sank into Trump’s cesspool:

“Mr. Cohen told Republican lawmakers, ‘I did the same thing that you’re doing now. For 10 years. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years.’

“He then issued this warning to them: ‘The more people that follow Mr. Trump — as I did blindly — are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.’ Mr. Cohen later explained the ethos of Trumpworld: ‘Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump. Every day most of us knew we were coming and we were going to lie for him about something. That became the norm.’

“The ethic that became the norm at the Trump Organization —- defacing the truth and disfiguring reality in the service of Donald J. Trump — is the ethic that has become the norm of the Republican Party and the American right.

“This is what some of us who are conservatives and who have been lifelong Republicans have warned since Mr. Trump began his quest for the presidency — that his corruptions would eventually become theirs.”

What I will never understand is how so many allowed themselves to fall under his spell. The two letter word "NO" doesn't seem to be in their vocabulary. Another NYT reader said that Lt Col Vindman did the right thing. I agree.

[ponchi101]

I have "followed" Tiny since the 80's, when Doonesbury started covering his charade. And I have always wondered what is it that people see in him. He is truly a bag of the worst qualities a human being can be. And yet, he swoons large crowds. He has gotten away with anything and everything always. And I have always wondered: why can't people see what I, a damn foreigner that has not dog in this fight, can so easily detect?
And I draw a blank. Then again, I always asked the same question about Chavez. Why were so many people not able to see the real person?
Guess that is the reason I am an emigrant.

[ti-amie]

Trump’s Longtime Banker at Deutsche Bank Resigns
Rosemary Vrablic, who oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to President Trump’s company, will leave the bank next week.


Rosemary Vrablic, a managing director and senior banker in Deutsche Bank’s wealth management division, recently handed in her resignation.Credit...Paul Laurie/Patrick McMullan

By David Enrich
Dec. 22, 2020, 1:12 p.m. ET

President Trump’s longtime banker at Deutsche Bank, who arranged for the German lender to make hundreds of millions of dollars of loans to his company, is stepping down from the bank.

Rosemary Vrablic, a managing director and senior banker in Deutsche Bank’s wealth management division, recently handed in her resignation, which the bank accepted, according to a bank spokesman, Daniel Hunter.

“I’ve chosen to resign my position with the bank effective Dec. 31 and am looking forward to my retirement,” Ms. Vrablic, 60, said in a statement.

The reasons for the abrupt resignation of Ms. Vrablic, as well as that of a longtime colleague, Dominic Scalzi, were not clear. Deutsche Bank in August opened an internal review into a 2013 real estate transaction between Ms. Vrablic and Mr. Scalzi and a company owned in part by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Mr. Trump and a client of Ms. Vrablic’s.

Ms. Vrablic and Mr. Scalzi joined Deutsche Bank in 2006 from Bank of America. Ms. Vrablic quickly made a name for herself as one of her division’s leading rainmakers. In 2011, she landed a prominent new client: Mr. Trump, who for decades had been mostly off-limits to the mainstream banking world because of his tendency to default on loans. With her bosses’ approval, Ms. Vrablic agreed to a series of loans, totaling well over $300 million, for his newly acquired Doral golf resort in Florida, for his troubled Chicago skyscraper and for the transformation of the Old Post Office building in Washington into a luxury hotel.

When Mr. Trump became president, his relationship with Deutsche Bank came under a microscope by regulators, prosecutors and congressional Democrats. Ms. Vrablic’s starring role in the suddenly controversial relationship — she was a V.I.P. guest at Mr. Trump’s inauguration — pushed the publicity-shy banker into the spotlight.

The relationship between Mr. Trump and the German bank is the subject of congressional, civil and criminal investigations. The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, has been investigating whether Mr. Trump committed financial crimes as he sought to get loans from Deutsche Bank.

Mr. Scalzi didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/busi ... -bank.html

[ponchi101]

subpoena phobia?

[ti-amie]

The Whitestone Republican Club, whose gathering in Queens, N.Y., occurred before New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) halted indoor dining starting Dec. 14, hosted at least 50 guests indoors at an Italian restaurant, Il Bacco. New York prohibited gatherings of more than 10 people at the time.

The group wrote in its social media post Tuesday, “Yes, we held a holiday party. A good time was had by all. We abided by all precautions. But we are not the mask police, nor are we the social distancing police.

“Adults have the absolute right to make their own decisions, and clearly many chose to interact like normal humans and not paranoid zombies in hazmat suits,” the club continued. “This is for some reason controversial to the people who believe it's their job to tell us all what to do.

“We ALL have the inalienable right under the First Amendment to peaceably assemble, and that's what we did,” the post went on to say. “There's no pandemic clause in the Constitution, no matter how badly the media and Cuomo want you to believe otherwise.”

“We urge ALL New Yorkers regardless of political affiliation to go out and enjoy the holidays in whatever way makes them happy and comfortable. Make your own calculated decisions, don't give in to fear or blindly obey the media and politicians, and respect the decisions of others,” the organization added.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watc ... nds-adults

[ponchi101]

It is absolutely despairing. What part of it is contagious don't they get?
Opposite end. I went to train today. The tennis courts have a kid (a kid, 15 or something like that) outside taking down your name and temperature. And as I approach him, he tells me "Mr. P, you are no wearing a mask".
I went out without one. So I realize it is not in my car, I did not bring one.
So he went and fetched me one.

No harm done, I just thanked him.
A kid in Colombia. It is not that hard.

[ti-amie]

What is there to say? Grifters gonna grift.

The Trump administration awarded border wall contracts to build on land it doesn't own in Texas
The government’s strategy of awarding contracts before acquiring titles to land in Texas has led to millions of dollars in costs for delays. Things could get even more complicated if President-elect Joe Biden stops border wall construction.

BY PERLA TREVIZO, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA, AND JEREMY SCHWARTZ, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA DEC. 23, 2020

LA GRULLA, Texas — The federal government said it needed Ociel Mendoza's land on the outskirts of this tiny Texas town — and it couldn't wait any longer.

Each additional day of delay was costing the government $15,000 as contractors waited to begin construction on the border fence slated to go through Mendoza's ranch, the Department of Justice argued in court filings. By Nov. 24, the tab for the delay had reached nearly $1.6 million, the land acquisition manager for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in an affidavit.

More than a year earlier, CBP had awarded a contract then worth $33 million to a New Mexico-based company to build 4 miles of fencing in Starr County. The county is one of the top targets of President Donald Trump’s administration for a border wall and a place agents have called the most volatile stretch in the nation. Construction was slated to begin in November 2019, the agency announced.

There was one problem: The government had awarded the contract before obtaining the land it needed, including Mendoza’s. This September, after more than a year without getting that land, CBP had to suspend the contract to Southwest Valley Constructors, accruing “substantial” charges along the way, according to court documents.

An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune has found that the government's strategy of awarding contracts before acquiring titles to the land in Texas has led to millions of dollars in costs for delays, according to calculations based on statements made by CBP officials in court filings. On at least two dozen occasions, the agency has used the argument, often successfully, to convince even dubious federal judges to immediately seize land from property owners fighting their eminent domain cases.

The situation could become even more complicated if President-elect Joe Biden makes good on his promise to stop border wall construction.

Mendoza, an entrepreneur, said the government’s latest offer, which he said was about $136,000, fell short of the $200,000 he was seeking. The ranch is especially personal. It’s a piece of land he vowed to own after he crossed the border illegally over the property as a teen more than 40 years ago.

“It represents a dream to me,” said Mendoza, who became a permanent resident in the 1980s. “The American dream.”

Since 2017, the federal government has awarded at least a dozen contracts in South Texas worth more than $2 billion prior to obtaining all the land it needed for the projects. The agreements are to build 146 miles of border wall and install nearly three dozen gates.

But very little construction has been completed. Out of the 110 miles the administration planned to build in the Rio Grande Valley, where most of the land is privately owned, 15 miles had been finished as of mid-December.

The Army Corps of Engineers generally requires land to be acquired prior to awarding contracts, but the policy allows exceptions if approved by high-level officials, said Grace Geiger, an agency spokeswoman.

While posing greater risks for the government, she said the practice doesn't have to lead to greater costs as, depending on the situation, the government may still be able to acquire the land before the contractor needs to enter the site.

Contract experts say the practice violates principles of sound procurement.

“It sounds like a formula for waste, or worse, to make the construction contract first and only acquire the land months or years later,” said Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore contracting expert.

Austin Evers, the executive director of American Oversight and a senior counsel for the State Department during President Barack Obama's second term, said the practice should be investigated by federal watchdogs.

“The government is arguing that it has to seize these lands right now because it is being penalized under the contract it already signed,” Evers said. “In plain English, what that means is that American taxpayers are seeing their money thrown away for no purpose because the government signed the contract before it could execute the project.”

Federal judges hearing CBP’s eminent domain cases in South Texas also have expressed frustration with the government’s legal argument for immediate possession in Starr County. In recent weeks, a segment of border fencing has quietly gone up in a remote area near Mendoza’s ranch.

While the government gets the title to the property as soon as it files what’s called a “declaration of taking” and deposits the amount it deems reasonable with the court, it can’t begin construction until a judge approves an order to possess the land. U.S. District Judge Micaela Alvarez, a George W. Bush appointee, blasted government attorneys’ request to take immediate possession of Mendoza’s ranch, arguing that the agency has had the funds to acquire private land in Starr County for nearly two years.

“The United States’ delay until November 2020 to file its motion for possession is not within the Court’s control ... and (does) not create an emergency for this court,” she wrote Dec. 17. “The Court has repeatedly expressed its dissatisfaction with the United States’ requests for expedited relief. The United States is not entitled to expedited relief, and should cease requesting such relief without good cause.”

However, Alvarez said that under the Declaration of Taking Act, she had little option but to grant the government’s request to take possession of Mendoza’s land, noting that Mendoza had not responded in time and that the government had filed the correct documentation and deposited what it estimated it would pay for the land seizure.

Even as government attorneys continue to cite the growing costs of delays to judges, the agency has downplayed the issue outside the courtroom.

“CBP will not know if there are any associated delay costs due to real estate until the end of the contract, as the Contractor may be able to make up any potential delays incurred,” CBP spokesman Matthew Dyman told ProPublica and the Tribune on Friday. Dyman declined to clarify the statement, citing the ongoing litigation.

CBP also insists that awarding contracts without first obtaining land is efficient.

“Once the border wall system design is approved by the Government, and sufficient real estate is acquired by the Government, construction activities can begin,” wrote Roger Maier, a spokesman for CBP.

The government has been here before. A decade ago, CBP learned that building in this part of the border would be especially challenging, between acquiring the land — which in some cases took more than two years — and flooding concerns. Under the Bush and Obama administrations, several border wall fence projects, also awarded before the government obtained the land, died because the agency couldn’t get them built before funding dried up.

The Trump administration’s legal efforts have only intensified, with nearly 40 new eminent domain lawsuits filed in the Southern District of Texas since Election Day.

All of which leaves the incoming Biden administration and hundreds of Texas landowners in a web of title and compensation disputes, multimillion-dollar contracts and a string of unfinished — and disconnected — projects all along the Rio Grande.

Biden has said he will cease wall construction and drop all the lawsuits on day one. His transition team didn’t respond to a request for comment as to how exactly the administration would go about canceling existing contracts nor what it would do with land it now owns as part of the eminent domain push. Biden could save up to $2.6 billion if he halts construction, according to Army Corps of Engineers documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

This will not be the first time Biden confronts this issue. Last time he was in the White House, the Obama-Biden administration allowed the lawsuits and contracts to proceed. By the end of their first term, 54 new miles of border fence had been built in South Texas.

Starr County

One of CBP’s toughest fights over eminent domain centers on Starr County, a poor, mostly rural county where family properties date back to original Spanish land grants issued 250 years ago, well before the Rio Grande served as an international boundary.

For more than a decade, residents and county officials have resisted the agency’s push to build a border wall in Starr County, which the government has said in court filings is the No. 1 county for narcotics seizures across the entire southern border of the United States.

Starr and neighboring Hidalgo and Cameron counties are part of the agency’s Rio Grande Valley sector, which accounts for 40% of immigrant arrests and 43% of the marijuana seizures along the southwest border.

Under the Trump administration, Starr has become one of the agency’s top priorities for the border wall. Hidalgo and Cameron counties already have about 60 miles of border fencing, built upon concrete levee systems.

But Starr County, which lacks a levee system, had no wall before the Trump administration first proposed building there in 2017. Three years later, CBP has awarded contracts for 55 miles, but only about 5 miles have been built, mostly on U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuge land in remote corners of the county.

As it was a decade ago, the government’s effort is once again mired in complicated eminent domain legal battles that have so far prevented construction on the remaining miles.

Of 70 condemnation cases filed by the government since September in South Texas, 53 are in Starr County, where the government has only accelerated legal action since Election Day (25 lawsuits have been filed in this county since Nov. 3).

In one case filed at the end of November, the government is seeking to seize a triangle of land smaller than 2 acres in the county. Despite the tract’s small size, there are more than 30 individuals with possible ownership rights, scattered across Texas and as far away as Washington state, according to court records.

Lawyers say that as land has passed through the generations, many partitions have not been documented properly in official records, resulting in a thicket of potential land ownership that the government has struggled to unravel.

“The title issues in Starr County seem to be far more complicated and difficult than what we've seen in the other border counties,” said Roy Brandys, an Austin-based eminent domain attorney who represents border residents in these cases. “On several of the cases we've been working on in Starr County, one of the reasons they have not progressed even faster is because the government and frankly, we as the landowners’ representatives, are trying to work out the title issues before they move forward.”

According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, title issues in Starr have slowed construction timelines considerably. “Some counties in South Texas, such as Starr County, do not have the infrastructure or funding to maintain recordkeeping systems,” the report says.

But where the federal government sees as a maze of legal hurdles, local officials see a reflection of the region’s heritage.

“For many, the land has been in their families for generations,” said Joel Villarreal, mayor of the Starr County seat of Rio Grande City. “We have a large number of residents that own land and they are proud of that heritage to own land. They speak of it as something to be cherished, the idea of having land.”

Fight over land

On a recent morning, Mendoza, 60, stood in front of his ranch as orange survey markers fluttered in the wind around him.

At regular intervals, he has built steps into his own mesh and metal tube fencing, allowing would-be border crossers to climb over. He said Border Patrol agents have asked him why he built them. “I tell them for one, I was undocumented when I came here,” he explained. “And two, so they don’t break down my fence!”

The ranch holds a special place in the heart of Mendoza, who owns several businesses and properties in Starr County. In 1979, he crossed the border as an undocumented immigrant, passing through the same piece of property on his way to a new life in Houston. Thirty years later he bought the ranch when it came up for sale, and he is loath to lose it.

If the wall comes through the front of his ranch as proposed, Mendoza said he would have to move the fence and an expensive front gate, as well as the corral for the 40 or so cattle he raises on the land. Worse, he said, the wall would render the ranch virtually worthless by placing it almost entirely behind the barrier.

“It won’t have any value afterwards” he said. “Anything could happen on the other side of the wall. I won’t be protected inside there.”

The government first made Mendoza an offer to buy his land in April, according to court documents. Five months later, federal prosecutors sued to take part of his ranch, depositing about $93,000 with the court as a “just compensation.”

The government claimed in Mendoza’s case that the cost of suspending work was about $15,000 per day. In other cases, the government contended that delays have added as much as $100,000 per day, depending on the size of the contract, according to a review by ProPublica and the Tribune. The expenses came from what officials called de- and re-mobilization and from having equipment and crew on standby beyond the date construction was scheduled to begin.


Excerpt from the government’s motion for immediate possession in Mendoza’s case.

In four Rio Grande Valley projects alone, where the government has detailed the costs of delays in court filings, the total is nearly $9 million, as of the date the court granted the order for immediate possession, which is when work can begin.

Despite not having been able to break ground in 18 months, the original $33 million contract to Southwest Valley Constructors is now worth $42 million thanks to contract options the government has exercised. An earlier review of federal spending data by ProPublica and the Tribune found modifications to contracts have increased the price of the border wall by billions, costing about five times more per mile than it did under previous administrations.

Francis Rooney, a Republican U.S. representative from Florida and longtime real estate developer, called the practice “ridiculous.” From a contractor point of view, he said, there’s the risk of inflation and rises in labor or material costs, for instance, as work on those sites is delayed.

“That sounds a little reckless to me, but I’m not surprised given some of what this administration has done,” he said, in reference to Trump declaring a national emergency and using military funding to accelerate border wall building.

ProPublica and the Tribune reached out to the companies with contracts in the Rio Grande Valley awarded under the practice. Most didn’t respond and Kiewit Infrastructure West, an affiliate of Southwest Valley Constructors, referred questions to the Army Corps of Engineers.

Raini Bruni, another spokeswoman with the Corps, said border wall contracts are written in a way that puts much of the risk on the contractor, who can request compensation in cases where there’s a delay or suspension, approved on a case-by-case basis.

But beyond the risk to the government and contractors, the practice can lead to a loss of protections to landowners, experts said.

Due process is at the heart of the government’s power to take private property, said Evers of the nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight. But it is being ignored by rushing things through based on emergencies of the administration’s own creation, he added, “which runs counter to basic American values.”

Beyond the fight over the value of his land, Mendoza doesn’t believe the wall will achieve its goal. “The people won’t stop,” he said. “It wouldn’t have stopped me, I would have jumped over.”

“They use the legal system as a threat”

About 20 miles upriver from Mendoza, the Muñiz family is also fighting the government’s attempt to seize its land in a case that shows the pressure government agents have put on local landowners, especially in the final months of 2020.

On Sept. 1, the government sued Noelia Muñiz and offered to pay $5,500 for about an acre of land. According to court documents, she felt harassed by constant phone calls that she said were taking a toll on her health.

“They call every day, they threaten that if you don’t show your face they will take you to court,” said her brother Noe Muñiz Jr., 63, outside their home. “They use the legal system as a threat. ... It’s very stressful for her.”

Usually the government first tries to settle with landowners but sues when they can’t reach an agreement or it’s unclear who owns the land.



Since the beginning of the Trump administration, the government has filed 193 lawsuits — three-fourths just in the past year — asking Texas landowners to relinquish, temporarily or permanently, more than 5,800 acres, according to information provided by the Texas Civil Rights Project and court documents.

Noe Muñiz Jr. said the family has been going through the process without an attorney because it can’t afford to pay one. “We have no support at all,” he said. “If you want support it takes money and no one has money. ... I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t do this in a place where the majority of people are white. Here you have Mexican people and they are poor, so come on.”

In a normal condemnation case there would be safeguards in place such as environmental reviews, hydrology reports prior to starting the project, said Brandys, who has represented border residents under the current and previous administrations.

But due to what he calls the politicization of border wall construction, the U.S. attorney and those building the wall are under significant pressure from Washington to get as much done as possible. All of which can significantly impact the landowners, he said, adding, “Unfortunately in some of those situations you won't know until the wall is built and the projects are up and we see what the effects are.”

The Department of Homeland Security has a record of abusing the eminent domain process to build border barriers.

In 2017, a ProPublica-Tribune investigation found DHS had cut unfair real estate deals, secretly waived legal safeguards for property owners and ultimately abused the government’s power to take land from private citizens. In some cases, the DOJ bungled hundreds of condemnation cases, taking property without knowing the identity of the owners and condemning land without researching facts as basic as property lines.

Under the George W. Bush administration, the federal government filed more than 360 eminent domain lawsuits along the U.S.-Mexico border as part of an effort to build up to 700 miles of fencing by December 2008. Along the Rio Grande, the agency built 50 miles in disconnected strips and seized a total of 564 acres for which it paid $18.2 million, ProPublica and the Tribune reported.

There are still 20 cases pending in South Texas from that era, involving about 440 owners, according to the DOJ.

While lawyers and residents say some things have improved, such as the government providing more details about the property it is trying to take, the pressure on landowners has not eased.

Daniel Villarreal, a 56-year-old bail bondsman in Rio Grande City, said government negotiators told him earlier this year he either had to accept their offer or they would take it anyway.

But following Biden’s victory, he is starting to feel pangs of regret about selling about an acre of his riverfront property to the government.

He didn’t want to say how much he agreed to but said it’s not life-changing money. “They say they gave me market value, but how long is that going to last? A year or two?” he said. “And then what you’re left with is a monument to a man I don’t even like.”

The wall would also cut Villarreal off from the beauty of the river’s edge, a fear echoed by other property owners.

Growing up, Noe Muñiz said he and his siblings swam daily in the river. As he grew older, the river offered respite after a long day of working in cantaloupe and onion fields. He still fishes there but worries that after a wall is built, the river would become too dangerous to visit inside the no man’s land that would be created south of the barrier.

Even though the Muñiz family will likely lose the battle to keep its land, it is trying to get what it considers just compensation, he said, and holding onto hope that Biden will cancel the wall contract in the area. “You can’t give up on the land. It’s not the government’s land,” he said. “It’s hard to let go.”

Lexi Churchill contributed to this report.

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/12/23 ... ce=twitter

[ti-amie]

This is a breakdown of a story exclusive to @businessinsider re the shell company set up by Tiny and his kids to hide the money they were stealing from their own campaign. It's behind a paywall. https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-tr ... ny-2020-12

Darren Samuelsohn

SCOOP: The Trump campaign shell company that helped hide $617M in presidential campaign spending was almost exclusively a Trump family production, run in part by a top deputy to Eric Trump, @Politicsinsider has learned. by @tomlobianco & @davelevinthal ($)

That Eric Trump deputy, attorney Alex Cannon, worked closely to run American Made Media Consultants with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump, and former campaign manager Brad Parscale.

Together, they built a campaign shell company so powerful and opaque that key Trump campaign aides feared what they might uncover if they learned too much about its operations, according to interviews with more than a dozen Trump advisors and Republicans close to the campaign.

Vast swaths of AMMC's spending still remain a mystery to the public and Trump's own campaign team, although Insider was able to uncover some of American Made Media Consultants' expenditures based on interviews and public documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The power and secrecy of the shell company has spurred calls for federal investigations, including requests filed by three Democratic lawmakers after Insider broke the news last week of Kushner and Lara Trump's involvement.

The shell company was originally created by the Trump kids & Parscale to protect Trump from exorbitant consultant fees & grifting accusations, many of which had been levied at Parscale for his dual role atop campaign & approving payments to himself, Trump advisors told Insider.

But as the campaign evolved during 2019 and into the 2020 sprint, AMMC was also used to make secret payments to Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., who doubled as the Trump campaign's national finance director.

It also facilitated large payments — not disclosed publicly — to top campaign strategist Jason Miller, through an arrangement with the campaign firm he worked for before joining the Trump campaign.

Now w/ Trump's loss clear to almost everyone except Trump, the campaign shell company has become a focal point for advisors lamenting what went wrong. Competing factions in Trumpworld are accusing each other of stealing from the president's campaign coffer via the shell company.

Insider broke the news Friday that Kushner helped create AMMC and picked Lara Trump and Vice President Mike Pence's nephew, John Pence, to serve on its board — facts unknown even to core Trump campaign operatives. Lara Trump is married to Eric Trump.

"The obfuscation raises so many questions," said one Trump advisor.

Whether Trump officials broke the law or will face any consequences remains to be seen. Any possible criminal charges would have to be decided on by prosecutors reporting to Joe Biden's Justice Department. Biden's transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1341 ... 06721.html

[ti-amie]

The Lincoln Project
@ProjectLincoln
Today is William Barr’s last day as Attorney General. In one word, how would you evaluate his time as AG?

His quick exit is making more sense with every passing day.

[ponchi101]

The Lincoln Project
@ProjectLincoln
Today is William Barr’s last day as Attorney General. In one word, how would you evaluate his time as AG?

Criminal.

[patrick]

The Lincoln Project
@ProjectLincoln
Today is William Barr’s last day as Attorney General. In one word, how would you evaluate his time as AG?

His quick exit is making more sense with every passing day.

Unfortunately, not soon enough. He, along with Mr Distractor & McConnell, is the reason Americans are struggling with all aspects of economy, life and justice.

[ti-amie]

Eric Garland
@ericgarland
<THREAD>

Pardons! Face with tears of joyRolling on the floor laughing

There is a list of PARDONED people who can no longer invoke the 5th Amendment. If they get a subpoena, and they go to jail until they testify! Ready?

LT. GEN MIKE FLYNN: Whaddya wanna ask him about? His work as a foreign agent for Turkey? The "Middle East Marshall Plan?" His work with Russia's GRU?

Ask away! Or let him rot in a jail cell!

GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS: Set up Trump's illegal bribe from the Egyptian dictator, El-Sisi, during the 2016 campaign. Ask him all about it! Under oath! If he refuses, JAIL UNTIL HE TALKS.

PAUL MANAFORT: Look, this one's tough, because Manafort is an actual goomba ( From Urban Dictionary: Goomba is the phonetic spelling of the term "cumpà", which is the way people from Southern Italy used to pronounce the word "compare", that is "godfather".)
who was born to go to the clink, and frankly his lack of access to Clairol Luscious Brunette hair dye is working out.

But he can give up everyone from Ferdinand Marcos to Jared Kushner.

ROGER STONE: Prosecutors, you know you can compel testimony out of this Nixon-era basket case for *decades.* Please find out about the Eliot Spitzer-pharma-mortgage stuff. I'm very interested.

CHARLES KUSHNER: Look, his son is going down for 1000 years of violations of his SF-86 form alone...but ask Charlie about Israel and the years *2000-2002.* Ga' head. That'll be fun.

DUNCAN HUNTER, CHRIS COLLINS: Why were these two Republican Congresscritters the *first* two to support that Queens Mobster? Any prosecutor with some curiosity will have a *lot* of fun with that question!

STEVE STOCKMAN: Huh. Why WAS he running agitprop around that Waco thing during the Clinton Administration? Prosecutors, have at. No more 5A here!

(EG Note: Did these Mob idiots realize that the FBI can now get information into court records on counterintelligence cases that would have been very, very difficult otherwise? No? HAHAHAHAHA)

This could go on a long time.

Either way, while these people are still alive, they can be sent a subpoena and have no recourse to the Fifth Amendment. They testify truthfully...or go to prison.

Merry Christmas!

[ti-amie]

Sidney Powell’s secret intelligence contractor witness is a pro-Trump podcaster



By
Jon Swaine
Dec. 24, 2020 at 4:03 p.m. EST

As she asked the U.S. Supreme Court this month to overturn President Trump’s election loss, the attorney Sidney Powell cited testimony from a secret witness presented as a former intelligence contractor with insights on a foreign conspiracy to subvert democracy.

Powell told courts that the witness is an expert who could show that overseas corporations helped shift votes to President-elect Joe Biden. The witness’s identity must be concealed from the public, Powell has said, to protect her “reputation, professional career and personal safety.”

The Washington Post identified the witness by determining that portions of her affidavit match, sometimes verbatim, a blog post that the pro-Trump podcaster Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman published in November 2019. In an interview, Maras-Lindeman confirmed that she wrote the affidavit and said she viewed it as her contribution to a fight against the theft of the election.

“This is everybody’s duty,” she said. “It’s just not fair.”

In a recent civil fraud case, attorneys for the state of North Dakota said that Maras-Lindeman falsely claimed to be a medical doctor and to have both a PhD and an MBA. They said she used multiple aliases and social security numbers and created exaggerated online résumés as part of what they called “a persistent effort . . . to deceive others.”

Powell’s reliance on Maras-Lindeman’s testimony may raise further questions about her judgment and the strength of her arguments at a time when she is becoming an increasingly influential adviser to the president. Trump’s legal team distanced itself from Powell last month after she falsely claimed Republican state officials took bribes to rig the election. But she has visited the White House three times in the past week, once to participate in an Oval Office meeting. Trump has weighed naming Powell a special counsel to investigate the election, according to previous reports.

Maras-Lindeman, 42, served in the Navy for less than a year more than two decades ago and has said she worked later as a government contractor and part-time interpreter. She has identified herself as a “trained cryptolinguist.”

North Dakota’s assertions about her credentials came in a civil case brought by the state’s attorney general in 2018 over a purported charitable event she tried to organize in Minot, N.D., where she and her family resided. Attorneys for the state said she used money she collected — ostensibly to fund homeless shelters and wreaths for veterans’ graves — on purchases for herself at McDonald’s, QVC and elsewhere.

A judge ultimately found that Maras-Lindeman violated consumer protection laws by, among other things, misspending money she raised and soliciting donations while misrepresenting her experience and education. He ordered her to pay more than $25,000.

Maras-Lindeman has appealed to the state Supreme Court. In court filings and in her interview with The Post, she denied mishandling the funds or misleading donors. She blamed identity theft and bureaucratic failings for a proliferation of variations on her name and social security numbers associated with her.

Maras-Lindeman also claimed that she was targeted by the state for political reasons, noting that around that time she was exploring running for mayor of Minot — under the slogan “Make Minot Great Again.” She said that in 2018 she assisted the campaign of David C. Thompson, the Democratic challenger to longtime Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem (R). Thompson is now Maras-Lindeman’s defense attorney.

Thompson said in an interview that the case was a “vindictive exercise” and was excessive given the relatively small amounts of money in question. “They took a missile to kill a fly,” he said.

In an interview, Stenehjem — who signed a brief this month asking the Supreme Court to take up a case that sought to overturn the election — dismissed the claim that his investigation was politically motivated and said that anyone working with Maras-Lindeman should “back away” from her.

In a text message, Powell did not directly address questions about Maras-Lindeman’s fraud case and credentials. “I don’t have the same information you do,” she wrote to The Post.

Powell’s lawsuits — litigation she has referred to as “the kraken,” after a Scandinavian mythological sea monster — rely in key respects on a handful of anonymous expert witnesses. Among them is a purported military intelligence expert identified in court filings as “Spyder.” The Post reported this month that the witness is an I.T. consultant named Joshua Merritt who has never worked in military intelligence. Rather, Merritt spent the bulk of his decade in the Army as a wheeled-vehicle mechanic.

Like Merritt, Maras-Lindeman told The Post she had never spoken directly to Powell or anyone working on her legal team. She said she distributed the affidavit widely to like-minded people and was unaware it had come to Powell’s attention until it appeared as an exhibit in one of her cases.

Maras-Lindeman’s 37-page affidavit outlines a purported conspiracy by the Canadian company Dominion Voting Systems, which sells voting machines used in some states, and Scytl, a Spain-based firm that provides election software. She claims that votes cast on Dominion machines in key states were hacked as they passed through Scytl tallying systems and rigged in favor of Biden.

“The vote is not safe using these machines not only because of the method used for ballot ‘cleansing’ to maintain anonymity but the EXPOSURE to foreign interference and possible domestic bad actors,” she writes in the affidavit.

Like Trump and many of his supporters, Maras-Lindeman points to election night spikes in Biden’s vote totals — explained by officials as merely the result of densely populated areas reporting their counts — as evidence of a “digital fix” involving abrupt dumps of bogus votes.

In a statement last month, Dominion described allegations leveled against it by Powell and other Trump supporters as “baseless, senseless, physically impossible, and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.” Scytl said in a statement that it “does NOT tabulate, tally or count votes in US public elections,” had no relationship with Dominion, and that its U.S. operations are run by a Tampa-based subsidiary.

Last week, Dominion said it had written to Powell to demand that she retract what the company said were defamatory accusations.

Federal judges have rejected all four of the complaints Powell has filed, two of which — in Wisconsin and Arizona — included Maras-Lindeman’s affidavit.

In Wisconsin, a federal judge ruled that Powell’s request that the results of the election be overturned is “outside the limits” of the court’s power. Attorneys for Gov. Tony Evers (D), in seeking the dismissal, said the complaint was “rampant with wild speculation and conspiratorial conclusions, and simply without any basis in law or fact.”

A federal judge in Arizona wrote that allegations “that find favor in the public sphere of gossip and innuendo cannot be a substitute for earnest pleadings and procedure in federal court” and “most certainly cannot be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.”

Powell has appealed the cases to the U.S. Supreme Court, where she is seeking to have them consolidated.

Maras-Lindeman, who goes by Tore (pronounced “Tory”), spent recent weeks in Washington with a group of fellow Trump supporters working to bolster Powell’s legal campaign, according to social media posts and statements on her podcast, “Tore Says.” The group included Millie Weaver, a former correspondent for the far-right website Infowars, who released a documentary over the summer — “Shadowgate” — that helped propel Maras-Lindeman to prominence among conspiracy theorists on the right.

Maras-Lindeman told her listeners on Dec. 7 that she was speaking from “the belly of the beast” and that a group of Trump loyalists was working to take action against those who had stolen the president’s victory.

“There are really good people — patriots — gathered, working hard to ensure that they not only get to the bottom of what happened during this election . . . but they’re also seeking to prosecute,” she said.

Maras-Lindeman spent time at Trump’s hotel in downtown Washington and interviewed Patrick Byrne, the millionaire Overstock.com founder and Trump backer who has said he is funding a team of “cybersleuths” to scrutinize the election. Byrne and Maras-Lindeman told The Post he is not funding her.

In past episodes, Maras-Lindeman has discussed conspiracy theories, including one that baselessly accused high-ranking Democrats of human trafficking centered at a D.C. pizzeria. In an episode last year, she said, “What we realize is that this Pizzagate stuff, this satanic constant abuse of children is an actual real thing.”

Maras-Lindeman, who is of Greek heritage, joined the Navy in December 1996 and spent eight months training in Illinois and Florida as an airman recruit before departing the service in August 1997, according to a Navy record.

In their civil case, North Dakota state attorneys said that Maras-Lindeman created a profile on Together We Served, an online veteran community, that incorrectly depicted an extensive military career.

The profile, which is no longer online, said that Maras-Lindeman reached the rank of lieutenant, served in the combat zones of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the Office of Naval Intelligence, and was awarded multiple medals including a Purple Heart.

In the interview, Maras-Lindeman denied creating the profile and said whoever did had misstated the details of her career. She previously posted to Twitter a purported copy of her Navy separation paperwork, which said that she specialized in communications and intelligence.

Neither the record provided to The Post nor the paperwork Maras-Lindeman posted online stated a reason for her departure, but the papers she posted said that the character of her discharge was “general (under honorable conditions).”

In response to questions about the nature of the discharge, a Navy spokesman referred to the Navy Military Personnel Manual. The manual said it means, “The quality of the member’s service has been honest and faithful; however, significant negative aspects of the member’s conduct or performance of duty outweighed positive aspects of the member’s service record.”

In her affidavit, Maras-Lindeman identifies herself as a former “private contractor with experience gathering and analyzing foreign intelligence” and says that from 1999 to 2014 she had responsibility for delegating tasks to other contractors working for the United States and allied nations. She stood by that account in her interview with The Post.

In a court filing in North Dakota last year, she wrote that she had worked as a contractor since 1996 and had been “a vendor with certain programs associated with USSOCOM,” the U.S. Special Operations Command. A spokesman for the command said in an email that its contracting office could find no record of any contract with her.

She claimed in Weaver’s documentary that, as an intelligence contractor, she carried out a notorious 2008 intrusion into the State Department’s passport records on several presidential candidates. In a separate podcast interview, she said that she retrieved the records on direct orders from John O. Brennan, who then led a private security firm implicated in the incident and was later CIA director. “I went and got them,” she said. “He told me to go get them.”

A spokesman for Brennan said that Brennan had never heard of Maras-Lindeman.

Maras-Lindeman told The Post that, by its nature, her covert work could not be independently verified. “People like me don’t exist,” she said. “You just have to trust.”

According to a LinkedIn profile that has since been deleted, between 1997 and 2014 Maras-Lindeman obtained eight academic degrees in the United States and the United Kingdom, along with additional professional qualifications. The attorneys in the fraud case said in court filings that they could find records of her earning only one degree, a bachelor’s in biology from the University of Kentucky in 2011.

Maras-Lindeman told The Post someone else created the profile — despite claims to the contrary by state attorneys in the fraud case — and she declined to comment on its particulars.

After obtaining the degree, Maras-Lindeman and her family moved to Beaverton, Ore.

She took a voluntary job teaching Greek at Agia Sophia Academy, a private Greek Orthodox school in Beaverton. Her archived biography on the school’s website used the title “Dr.” and said she had a PhD. Attorneys for North Dakota later said in a court filing in the fraud case that Maras-Lindeman “is not a doctor and does not possess a PhD from any institution.”

The school’s principal, Christina Blankenstein, said in an email that the school could not vouch for Maras-Lindeman’s professional record because her position was unpaid. Maras-Lindeman worked at the school for between a year and two years, Blankenstein said.

In the interview, Maras-Lindeman said the school must have misunderstood paperwork she gave them saying that she was a PhD candidate.

After she moved to North Dakota, Maras-Lindeman asserted in series of small claims court cases that she was a pediatric oncologist, attorneys for North Dakota said in a court filing. As recently as November 2017, a website for a purported cancer research organization named “ML Laboratories” referred to her as “Dr. Tore Maras-Lindeman” and said she was its founder.

Maras-Lindeman also used an email address and Twitter handle identifying herself as “Dr. Lindeman.” She told The Post she reserved the accounts so they would be ready for her when she earned a doctoral degree.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... story.html

[ponchi101]

This ties to the conversation we were having about "Will the GOP split?". If they do not speak out against this level of chicanery, what hope can you have that they will develop a spine and stand up to it?
Many are still mum about the election, despite evidence that they are the ones doing treason.