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real-human
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 Posted: Sun Sep 10, 2023 9:22 pm Post subject: |
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/ginni-thomas-founded-a-nonprofit-with-funding-from-harlan-crow-weeks-ahead-of-the-citizens-united-ruling-to-advance-conservative-causes/ar-AA1gwzKP?cvid=11db2b29d0764e78f6bf106fc6b20225&ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&ei=15
Ginni Thomas founded a nonprofit with funding from Harlan Crow weeks ahead of the Citizens United ruling to advance conservative causes
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Ginni Thomas laid the groundwork for a nonprofit two months before the 2010 Citizens United ruling, Politico reported.
The nonprofit was started with the help of Leonard Leo and funding from Harlan Crow.
The nonprofit became the start of a "billion-dollar" network that moved money to conservative legal causes.
Leonard Leo, a conservative activist, and Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, banded together to create a nonprofit organization that would take advantage of the new rules on political spending put forth by the Citizens United ruling.
A lawyer for Thomas filed paperwork to begin the process of establishing the nonprofit two months before the 2010 ruling that allowed corporations to funnel money into nonprofits as long as they were independent of political candidates, Politico reported.
Thomas eventually founded the organization, which they called Liberty Central, with a $500,000 donation from Harlan Crow, a close friend of the Thomases whose lavish gifts for them have come under scrutiny. Leo, a bulwark for rightwing causes whose sprawling network has boosted conservative legal causes for over a decade and who is currently under federal investigation, was listed as a director of the organization.
"Ginni really wanted to build an organization and be a movement leader," an unnamed person familiar with the two told Politico. "Leonard [Leo] was going to be the conduit of that."
The organization was described as the beginning of a "billion-dollar force that has helped remake the judiciary and overturn longstanding legal precedents on abortion, affirmative action, and many other issues," Politico reported.
After Thomas' role with Liberty Central became public, it sparked outrage because of her husband's seat on the Supreme Court, Politico reported. Thomas eventually started a for-profit consulting business, Liberty Consulting, to offer consulting services for conservative activist groups. Meanwhile, Leo revived a tax-exempt charitable group, which supplied some funds to Thomas. The group, the Judicial Education Project, became a frequent supplier of amicus briefs to the Supreme Court.
Among the other details Politico uncovered, which included discrepancies in IRS filings from Judicial Education Project, Laura Soloman, a Pennsylvania tax attorney, told Politico that it is unclear if Thomas was executing tasks to justify the payments from the charitable organization.
"The real question then is, 'What is Ginni Thomas qualified to do, what did they pay her to do, and was it fair market value?'" Soloman told Politico.
Representatives for Thomas and Leo did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. |
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real-human
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| Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2023 4:17 pm Post subject: |
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NYT
A friend’s $267,230 loan to Justice Clarence Thomas for an R.V. was mostly, perhaps entirely, forgiven, raising ethical and potential tax issues.
Wednesday, October 25, 2023 4:00 PM ET
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An inquiry by Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee found that Anthony Welters, who lent Justice Thomas the money, eventually forgave the 1999 loan, first reported by The New York Times. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
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| Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2023 4:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Impeach the dishonest MF. |
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real-human
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| Posted: Thu Nov 30, 2023 2:44 pm Post subject: |
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https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/dems-approve-subpoenas-response-supreme-court-controversies-rcna127449?
Dems approve subpoenas in response to Supreme Court controversies
| Quote: | The U.S. Supreme Court has confronted several tough-to-defend ethics controversies over the last several months, most notably difficult questions surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas. The alleged lapses left many members of Congress with all kinds of questions.
On Thursday, senators took a step toward getting some answers. NBC News reported:
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to approve subpoenas for conservative activists Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo over their involvement with Supreme Court ethics lapses. The subpoenas were approved by 11 Democratic senators; no other senators voted.
Republicans on the panel, who’ve spent the year downplaying the Supreme Court’s scandals, would’ve voted against the measures, but they instead stormed out of the room when the Democratic majority circumvented a GOP plan to introduce 177 amendments.
The proposed amendments were not, of course, serious attempts at governing. Rather, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were trying to disrupt and delay the process to help protect conservative allies.
Regardless, the vote to approve the subpoenas marks the latest step in a lengthy process. It was in early April when ProPublica first reported on Thomas and the lavish, undisclosed benefits he’s received from Crow, a prominent Republican megadonor. About a month later, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee reached out to Crow with questions about the alleged ethics lapses.
In the months that followed, Thomas’ benefactor and Democratic senators traded pointed correspondence several times, including an instance in June in which Crow and his attorneys came up with a provocative claim: As my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained, Crow argued that the Judiciary Committee’s members are “not allowed to investigate him or, by extension, Thomas and the Supreme Court.”
Republicans tread carefully following Trump’s anti-ACA offensive
With this level of obstinance in mind, Democrats concluded that they didn’t have much of a choice: If those directly involved with the Supreme Court’s controversies weren’t prepared to cooperate with the investigation, the panel would have to issue subpoenas in response to months of stonewalling.
The latest developments will not necessarily resolve the matter. In theory, those who receive the subpoenas are expected to honor them. In practice, no one would be especially surprised if these latest subpoenas are ignored, which would lead to additional debates over possible contempt proceedings.
In fact, Leo issued a written statement after the vote that read, "Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have been destroying the Supreme Court; now they are destroying the Senate. I will not cooperate with this unlawful campaign of political retribution."
As for why Republicans have so little interest in legitimate ethics controversies surrounding the Supreme Court, GOP members have said very little. That’s probably because a press release that said, “We don’t care about far-right justices credibly accused of wrongdoing” probably wouldn’t go over especially well. |
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real-human
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| Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2023 10:32 pm Post subject: |
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/alito-nailed-by-legal-expert-for-sloppy-work-to-get-his-way/ar-AA1lfgBZ?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=5f934f8196844b11bdd994680af3da03&ei=10
Alito nailed by legal expert for sloppy work to get his way
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In a column for MSNBC, Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito was called out by a legal scholar for his sloppy use of unvetted outside opinions to arrive at legal conclusions he's seeking that, in turn, have a wide-ranging impact on American life.
Using a bombshell report from Politico that Supreme Court justices are increasingly relying on the so-called "friend of the court" briefs known as amicus briefs in place of legal scholarship, University of Texas Law School Professor Steve Vladek warned it is an affront to how the nation's highest court is supposed to work.
With Politico reporting that conservative justices are being flooded with briefs from outside groups affiliated with well-financed conservative gadfly Leonard Leo, Vladek name-checked Alito as one of the justices who has been overusing the sketchy legal assertions found in the briefs in his legal rulings.
After first asserting, "... their arguments are showing up with growing regularity in the justices’ written opinions, notably in Justice Samuel Alito's majority decision overturning Roe v. Wade," Vladek wrote, "... the justices’ increasing reliance upon these briefs as authoritative sources for factual or legal contentions that haven’t been tested in the lower courts and are being advanced by groups or institutions with agendas of their own. Especially as the court has turned more sharply to the right in recent years, that reliance has likewise skewed toward claims advanced by parties with an obvious (and, as Politico suggests, coordinated) ideological bent, at the expense of not only the rules that are supposed to govern the legal process, but also the accuracy of the narratives the court’s opinions provide."
Worse still, he added, the use of those briefs lacks guardrails that would expose who is financing them.
Writing, "the court’s disclosure rules for amicus rules are laughably weak. The brief need not disclose who funded a brief; it need disclose only that it wasn’t funded by one of the parties before the court," he added, "if the court is going to chastise lower courts for relying too heavily on amici, it should also look in the mirror." |
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/justice-alito-supreme-court-quote-anecdote-exposes-amicus-problem-rcna128813
The Supreme Court is too dependent upon its 'friends'
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real-human
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real-human
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| Posted: Tue Dec 26, 2023 6:01 pm Post subject: |
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lock him up.... what a great point did he report these gift as income as required by law?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/clarence-thomas-is-committing-tax-fraud/ar-AA1m3kb2?cvid=42112fa006c74df6e11911cf259a4b00&ocid=winp2fptaskbar&ei=4&sc=shoreline
Clarence Thomas Is Committing Tax Fraud
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For years, conservative billionaires have treated Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas to opulent vacations and trips on their private jets. If these were anything other than disinterested gifts, then they’re taxable — and Thomas owes the IRS a huge bill.
When Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas flouted longstanding ethics laws by refusing to disclose billionaire gifts, he avoided public outrage for years. Based on new revelations about the potential motivations behind those gifts, he also may have avoided laws requiring Americans to pay taxes on such donations, legal experts say.
Recent reporting from ProPublica revealed that Thomas was showered with luxury gifts from wealthy benefactors, including vacations, private flights, school tuition, and even a loan for a high-end RV. Though Thomas has insisted the gifts were just the innocent generosity of friends, many came after he threatened to resign over the justices’ low salaries — and one of Thomas’s vacation companions said the money was given to supplement the justice’s “limited salary.”
According to experts, if these benefits were given to Thomas as a way to buttress his regular pay and keep him on the court, they could be considered a taxable transaction rather than a gift. By refusing to publicly disclose such transactions, Thomas made it impossible for watchdog groups to alert tax-enforcement officials about the potential issue in real time.
“If there are in fact people saying more or less, ‘We’re offering these goodies to the justice so that he will stay in his role’. . . it sounds like it would be taxable income for him,” said Brian Galle, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who focuses on taxation.
Much of the public outcry over Thomas’s long history of undisclosed gifts has centered on whether the activities violate federal ethics laws. Lawmakers have also zeroed in on one particular donation — a $267,000 loan Thomas used to purchase a RV — arguing that if part of that loan was forgiven, Thomas would have to pay taxes on that amount.
Thomas has denied that the gifts were granted in exchange for favorable court rulings. Explaining that some of these donors were “among [his] dearest friends,” he declared in an April 7 statement via the Supreme Court’s public information office that the cushy trips they bankrolled were just vacations: “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them.”
But if these billionaires’ largesse was designed to retain the conservative judge on the country’s highest court, the donations might fall outside of the definition of tax-free gifts, which according to the Supreme Court must stem from “detached and disinterested generosity.” If the benefits showered on Thomas were designed to elicit court actions or job decisions, they could be considered taxable income, whether or not there is definitive proof of quid pro quo on Thomas’s part.
“What Clarence Thomas has done would result in not only any judges in America being removed from the bench, but there is a good chance it would result in criminal prosecution for income tax fraud and for false filings in his mandatory financial ethics disclosure statements,” David Cay Johnston, a visiting lecturer at Syracuse University’s College of Law, told us.
Taxation of unreported income recently emerged as a political flashpoint and focus of federal prosecutors: in January, President Donald Trump’s longtime financial chief was sentenced to five months at the Rikers Island jail complex for failing to report or pay taxes on $1.7 million in off-the-books compensation.
Elliot Berke, Thomas’s attorney, did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication. Thomas has not released his tax returns, so it is unclear whether or not he paid taxes on the gifts he received.
“Personal Hospitality From Close Personal Friends”
Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush, and was immediately embroiled in a scandal when Anita Hill, a former staffer for Thomas, claimed he routinely sexually harassed her.
According to ProPublica, less than a decade later, in January 2000, Thomas complained to Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) that “unless the compensation for Supreme Court justices is increased, ‘one or more justices will leave soon.’”
The following year, Thomas publicly complained that he sacrificed earning potential to sit on the court. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay,” Thomas said during a speech at the Bar Association in Savannah, Georgia, in 2001. “The job is not worth doing for the grief. But it is worth doing for the principle.” (Today, Supreme Court justice salaries range from $285,400 for associate justices to $298,500 for the chief justice.)
Thomas has publicly complained that he sacrificed earning potential to sit on the court.
The idea that Thomas could step down was taken seriously enough that Leonidas Ralph Mecham, director of the Administrative Office of the US Courts at the time, sent a confidential memo about the matter to then–chief justice William Rehnquist on June 13, 2000.
Since then, Thomas has reportedly been treated to dozens of high-end destination vacations and other perks from multiple billionaires, including former Berkshire Hathaway executive David Sokol, Blockbuster billionaire Wayne Huizenga, and oil baron Paul Novelly. The excursions involved private jet flights, helicopter flights, VIP passes to sporting events, luxury resort stays, and a standing invitation to an exclusive golf club.
The most generous benefactor has been real estate mogul and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. Thomas has enjoyed annual luxury trips on Crow’s dime, including stays at the billionaire’s private Adirondacks resort and excursions to Bohemian Grove, a highly exclusive retreat in California. Crow also purchased Thomas’s mother’s home in 2014, and she continued to live there as significant upgrades were made to it.
Thomas refused to disclose many of these perks and argued that ethics rules governing Supreme Court justices were unconstitutional, and we found that he also pushed to kill mandatory disclosure laws for other elected officials.
A 1978 federal ethics law forbids gifts to federal officials from those whose “interests may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance of the individual’s official duties.” Judicial Conference rules, which set ethics codes for the federal judiciary, also broadly forbid gifts from donors with business before the court, but offer exceptions, including for gifts that amount to a cumulative maximum of $100 per calendar year.
In an April statement to the Supreme Court’s public information office, Thomas said that he was instructed early in his tenure that “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”
But in at least three separate instances, we found that Thomas ruled or reversed his position in ways that directly benefited Crow and several of his other donors’ business interests.
“Detached and Disinterested Generosity”
By asserting these trips and benefits were gifts, Thomas also likely avoided paying taxes on what was by all accounts millions of dollars’ worth of donations and gifts.
The US gift tax law, established in 1924, was created to minimize estate and income tax avoidance. According to the law, any transfer of money or property from one person to another is subject to a gift tax. But it’s typically the giver, not the recipient, who’s responsible for the tax, and they only end up paying it once they have exhausted their allotted lifetime gift tax exclusion, which in 2023 is $12.92 million.
Given the personal nature of gifts between family and friends, the gift tax law has proven to be a particularly difficult rule to enforce.
Legal precedent over whether a contribution qualifies as a gift is largely derived from the 1960 Supreme Court case Commissioner v. Duberstein, which dealt with a commodities dealer rewarding a vendor with a new car after a business conversation about potential customers. The decision clarified that a gift must be given with “detached and disinterested generosity” and divorced from business interests to not qualify as income.
In the early 1970s, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued several binding agency-wide guidelines that clarified how this rule applied to donations to elected officials.
“There were a couple of rulings from the IRS that essentially said, ‘When you give money to a public official in order to help them do their job or continue in office, that’s not a gift,’” said Galle at the Georgetown University Law Center.
For example, a 1973 ruling concluded that political donations used to defray the costs of constituent outreach should not be considered tax-free gifts, because “when a payment is made by a customer to a taxpayer who provides services to assure continuation of those services, that payment is not a gift, even though not made in consideration for past or current services.”
Another ruling three years later found that donations that are used to cover the travel expenses of Congress members and their staff are also not gifts, because the travel allows officials “to become more accessible to constituents.”
Galle thinks these rules could directly relate to the gifts Thomas received.
George Priest, a Yale Law School professor who has vacationed with Thomas and Crow, told ProPublica he believed the billionaire was aiming to make the justice’s life more comfortable. “He views Thomas as a Supreme Court justice as having a limited salary,” Priest said. “So he provides benefits for him.”
“If the facts are as they are reported,” said Galle, “that sounds a lot like those 1970s rulings about contributions to public officials.”
By asserting these trips and benefits were gifts, Thomas likely avoided paying taxes on what was by all accounts millions of dollars’ worth of donations and gifts.
Daniel Hemel, a law professor at New York University, said that if he were to argue a case against Thomas, he would cite a federal court case over how a church structured a gift scheme for its pastors.
Hemel pointed to Goodwin v. United States, in which an Iowa church hosted multiple events a year for congregants to give pastors gifts and money. The church suggested that this was not part of the pastors’ income and just merely gifts from the congregants, but the government viewed this as taxable income, Hemel said.
“[The church argued] if it weren’t for these gifts, then it would have been hard for the church to retain these pastors. And then that starts to look like ‘Well, conservative donors are giving money to Thomas so that he doesn’t leave the court,’” he added.
The actions of Thomas’s donors also cast doubt on the idea that the justice’s perks should be considered tax-free gifts, said Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit focused on economic policy. As Rosenthal pointed out, Crow paid for Thomas’s grandnephew to attend private high school, and he did so through his corporation, Crow Holdings, LLC.
“To me, it’s strange for Harlan Crow to route his personal payments through a business, like Crow Holdings LLC,” said Rosenthal in an email. “Were the tuition payments routed in order for Crow Holdings LLC to deduct them?”
If so, and the corporation deducted the payments as a business expense, it would be hard to argue these donations were an example of “detached and disinterested generosity.”
“Paying off Justice Thomas, arguably, provided a substantial financial benefit,” said Rosenthal. “But then the payments would not be a ‘gift.’ And, if Crow Holdings took a business deduction, it also would highlight the absurdity of Justice Thomas’s ethics position [that] the tuition payments were merely a gift from a friend.”
The Case Against Thomas
Even if Thomas technically owes taxes on the millions of dollars he’s received from donors, the IRS is unlikely to recoup most of the lost taxes, given that statutes of limitations for IRS audits typically range from three to six years — far shorter than the time period in which Thomas refused to disclose the gifts.
Concerns about Thomas’s potential tax bill highlight the need to boost financial support for the IRS, which has been systematically underfunded for years.
While the federal prosecutors could pursue a fraud case against Thomas, such a claim would be difficult to prove.
“The IRS or the [Justice Department] would have to prove that Thomas understood that this was taxable income and he was trying to hide it from the IRS,” said Hemel at NYU.
Gabe Roth, executive director of the judicial reform nonprofit Fix the Court, agreed that Thomas is unlikely to face tax fraud charges anytime soon.
“With Thomas, it’s not hard to connect the dots from some of his financial obligations to the conversation with Congressman Stearns to the billionaire buddy program that he was soon enlisted in,” Roth said. “[But] a lot of this also comes down to [the idea that] laws are only as strong as the government’s desire to prosecute, and I can’t imagine a situation where Justice Thomas would be prosecuted.”
Moving forward, concerns about judicial gifts could be addressed by a new Supreme Court ethics code implemented by the justices in November in response to recent scandals. The code prohibits justices from accepting a “gratuity, favor, discount, entertainment, hospitality, loan, [and] forbearance” in most cases, and especially from a “person whose interests may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance of the judicial officer’s or employee’s official duties.”
Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, believes that ethics reforms like this will be the best way to address Thomas’s questionable behavior. “To me, this sort of example is inevitably going to be primarily, if not entirely, fixable through ethical rules, not through tax rules,” said Gardner.
But Gardner adds that concerns about Thomas’s potential tax bill highlight the need to boost financial support for the IRS, which has been systematically underfunded for years.
“The bottom line is that at this moment, this year, last year, five years ago, twenty years ago, this entire time, there’s been very little effort by the IRS to police this gray area in the law,” said Gardner. “If the allegations in the ProPublica article are true, then this is a really dramatic indication that the gift tax isn’t working.”
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real-human
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| Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2023 1:04 pm Post subject: |
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/why-trump-s-critics-are-citing-justice-gorsuch-in-fight-over-ballots-insurrection/ar-AA1mcXgr?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=6e8ad66fe5874938b53c69c97860df6a&ei=17&sc=shoreline
Why Trump's critics are citing Justice Gorsuch in fight over ballots, insurrection
| Quote: | WASHINGTON − As the legal battle over whether Donald Trump is eligible to appear on 2024 ballots moves − inevitably − toward the Supreme Court, one justice in particular is being singled out by the former president’s critics: his first nominee, Neil Gorsuch.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, cited Gorsuch in her decision Thursday that Trump is ineligible to appear on that state’s ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. When the Colorado Supreme Court made a similar decision earlier this month, the justices also quoted Gorsuch.
Trump’s opponents have zeroed in on a short opinion Gorsuch wrote in 2012 when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit – nearly five years before Trump named him to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The case dealt with a presidential candidate who was struck from Colorado’s ballot because he was not, as the Constitution requires, a “natural born citizen.”
More: Native Americans are winning at the Supreme Court – with help from Justice Gorsuch
“As then-Judge Gorsuch recognized,” the majority in the Colorado Supreme Court decision wrote, citing a line from the 2012 opinion. “As now-Justice Gorsuch observed,” Bellows wrote in her decision, before quoting the same line.
Why Trump's critics are citing Gorsuch
Many experts predict the U.S. Supreme Court will resolve the ballot cases on limited grounds, avoiding central questions about whether Trump took part in an insurrection. Even if that’s true, quoting from one of the nine justices on the high court is a well-established tactic for advocates trying to build a five-vote majority.
Writing for a three-judge panel in 2012, Gorsuch dismissed the idea that Colorado was required to place Abdul Karim Hassan’s name on the presidential ballot even if he was ineligible to assume the presidency. A state’s “legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process,” Gorsuch wrote, “permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office.”
What Gorsuch was saying, in other words, is states are empowered to assess a candidate’s eligibility for an office and strike them from the ballot if they don’t meet the criteria for holding office. The question raised in the Hassan case is just one part of the legal fight over Trump’s eligibility playing out in courts across the country today.
Colorado’s top court and Maine’s secretary of state both found Trump ineligible to serve under a Reconstruction-era provision of the 14th Amendment. That provision bars people who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and then took part in an insurrection from serving again.
Both paused the practical impact of their decisions until courts have a chance to review them. In Colorado, for instance, the state court said election officials should proceed as if Trump's name will appear on the ballot until the U.S. Supreme Court resolves the matter.
Who decides what's an insurrection?
The 4-3 majority of Colorado justices also noted a decision from a federal court that upheld California denying a place on the ballot for a 27-year-old presidential candidate because he was several years shy of meeting the Constitution’s 35-years-old age requirement. And they pointed to a decision by a federal court in Illinois that barred a 31-year-old from the presidential ballot.
Trump’s supporters counter that deciding whether a candidate took part in an insurrection is far more complicated – more of a judgment call – than determining whether they are natural-born citizen or meet the Constitution’s age requirement. That is a decision that ultimately should be left to Congress, they said, not election officials or even state courts.
The Colorado Republican Party has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and has asked for expedited review. Trump is expected to do so as well in coming days. If the nation’s top court agrees to hear the case, it could wind up resolving more than a dozen similar pending lawsuits across the country.
Trump nominated three of the current nine justices, Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. But he has a mixed post-presidency record, at best, at the high court. Last year, for example, the Supreme Court declined to hear Trump's appeal of a lower court decision allowing Congress to review White House records related to the Jan. 6 riot.
More recently, the justices sided with Trump just last week and declined to let special counsel Jack Smith leapfrog an appeals court decision on whether Trump may claim immunity from criminal charges tied to his alleged interference in the 2020 election.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why Trump's critics are citing Justice Gorsuch in fight over ballots, insurrection |
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real-human
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| Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 9:14 pm Post subject: |
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https://www.rawstory.com/trump-alina-habba-2666886822/?cx_testId=4&cx_testVariant=cx_undefined&cx_artPos=7&cx_experienceId=EXC93HV4HK4I#cxrecs_s
Alina Habba's boast likely the 'last straw' for 'offended' Supreme Court justices: expert
| Quote: | Donald Trump's attorney, Alina Habba, has likely offended the highest court in the nation with her recent comments, a former federal prosecutor said on Saturday.
Habba, who recently said she would rather be "pretty" than "smart," found herself in hot water after she stated that the Supreme Court was likely to rule for her boss in part because they felt indebted to the former president. Specifically, Habba brought up Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
"I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court. I have faith in them," she said at the time of the interview. "You know, people like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place. He'll step up."
Now, ex-prosecutor Joyce Vance is speaking out against those comments, suggesting the nation's highest court might be "offended." She was asked about the statement while appearing on MSNBC's Yasmin Vossoughian Reports.
ALSO READ: ‘Official’ Trump calendar omits a critical detail
"Joyce? Your reaction?" the host asked after playing a recording of Habba. "Especially when we have been talking about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, the reputation."
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"That was a really appalling statement for any lawyer to make, and particularly a lawyer involved in a contest like this," Vance said. "All federal judges are appointed by a president from one party or another. And we expect all of them to leave that political origin story at the door when they take the bench."
She continued:
"They decide cases based on the law and the facts, and not on the president who got them there. So, I think that this is, in many ways, impugning the character of some of the Supreme Court justices. I hope they're deeply offended by her comments. They should be."
The "real problem," according to Vance, is that "Trump and those around him continue to cast into disrepute all of our important democratic institutions. Trump has attacked the FBI. He's attacked his successor, Joe Biden. He's attacked members of congress. He's attacked the courts."
Vance then alluded to the Supreme Court's own scandals.
"I think we have to be frank here and say that the court has ethical issues of its own making. But this is really the last straw. It should not be tolerated."
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=rv5zemLEyrM&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rawstory.com%2Ftrump-alina-habba-2666886822%2F%3Fcx_testId%3D4%26cx_testVariant%3Dcx_undefined%26cx_artPos%3D7%26cx_experienceId%3DEXC93&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo
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real-human
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| Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2024 4:15 pm Post subject: |
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this is funny and hope he takes the money...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/john-oliver-s-million-dollar-offer-for-judge-clarence-thomas-for-resignation-from-the-supreme-court/ar-BB1iEJoa?cvid=4bc94a90c2ce420ce5236c8e91fbed6c&ocid=winp2fptaskbar&ei=18&sc=shoreline
John Oliver's million-dollar offer for Judge Clarence Thomas for resignation from the Supreme Court
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The host of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver", has proposed paying Clarence Thomas $1 million per year and providing him with a $2 million tour bus, on the condition that the Republican judge steps down from the US Supreme Court.
Oliver's offer
On Sunday's episode of his HBO show Last Week Tonight, Oliver presented the offer, giving the Supreme Court justice a 30-day window to respond before the proposal expires.
John Oliver, declared, "This is not a joke", as he waved a contract at the screen and asked the judge to "get the f*** off the Supreme Court."
Oliver also mentioned that in addition to the annual million, he would include a $2.4 million motor coach as part of the deal for the judge to resign from the United States' supreme judicial body. This offer harks back to earlier reports revealing that Mr. Thomas had borrowed more than a quarter of a million dollars from a rich acquaintance to purchase a luxury motor coach in previous years.
Allegations against the judge
The offer from the John Oliver emerged following a series of media investigations over recent months that revealed Thomas did not report receiving extravagant vacation trips and real estate purchases for his mother from political supporters. Additionally, Thomas did not disclose, as mandated, that a family member's school fees were paid off on his behalf, nor did he report a loan he received to purchase a luxury motor coach. These omissions came despite his public grievances regarding the necessity to increase the salaries of Supreme Court justices.
According to The Independent, Clarence Thomas did respond to the criticism, saying he did not need to report on gifts and travel as it was "personal hospitality from close personal friends". |
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when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard. |
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