Some good news about the Sackler bankruptcy case

The Sackler family are a really odious bunch, making enormous amounts of money by having their company Purdue Pharmaceuticals aggressively push the opioid OxyContin that their company made and providing all manner of inducements to doctors to overprescribe them, resulting in the massive opioid drug addiction problem that exists right now in the US. They then posed as philanthropists, giving money to various institutions and having their names plastered all over various buildings in universities and museums and galleries. I have written about the actions of this disgusting family many, many times.

The law finally caught up with them and they were sued and the company subjected to massive fines. But even then, they exploited the bankruptcy laws to shift the burden to the company after siphoning off money to them personally while not having to admit guilt, and getting total immunity from future lawsuits that will leave their personal fortunes intact. They did this by making sure that their bankruptcy case was heard by a bankruptcy judge who is notorious for letting wealthy people off easily.
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The man who boasts of being a winner keeps losing

After losing his defamation case against E. Jean Carroll after he sexually abused her, serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), in his usual vindictive manner, turned around and countersued her for defamation because in her post-case interviews, she spoke of being raped by SSAT.

Yesterday the judge overseeing the case threw out SSAT’s case even without letting it go to trial. His opinion is interesting as he explains that although the jury in the defamation case brought by Carroll did not find SSAT guilty of rape, that was because of the narrow way that rape is defined in the New York Penal Code, which is different from the way that is popularly understood.

The judge further added:

Dismissing the counterclaim, a judge in New York, Lewis A Kaplan, said that when Carroll repeated her allegation that Trump raped her, her words were “substantially true”. Kaplan also set out in detail why it may be said that Trump raped Carroll.
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“As the court explained in its recent decision denying Mr Trump’s motion for a new trial on damages and other relief [in the New York case] … based on all of the evidence at trial and the jury’s verdict as a whole, the jury’s finding that Mr Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally – in other words, that Mr Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”

The next case brought by Carroll against SSAT goes to trial on January 15th, 2024.

Trial in the federal case is scheduled for 15 January, close to the start of the Republican primary as well as other court cases in which Trump is embroiled.

Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, said she was pleased with Judge Kaplan’s decision, and predicted the January trial “shouldn’t take very long to complete”.

Alina Habba, a lawyer for Trump, said: “We strongly disagree with the flawed decision and will be filing an appeal shortly.”

SSAT has had an unbroken streak of legal losses. When SSAT promised his followers that they would get tired of winning, he probably did not intend it to be ‘wins’ like this.

How the mighty have fallen

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) Trump is that curious creature, an insecure narcissist. As a narcissist, he has an inflated view of himself, but because he is insecure, he needs to have his self-image constantly reinforced by others. That works for him when he is in a bubble of sycophants and adoring cult followers but that bubble gets pricked when he steps out into the real world.

Such was the case when he arrived for his arraignment in a courthouse in Washington DC on Thursday to be subjected to the little indignities that most of us would barely notice, as this article describes.

The shock of blond-grey hair was familiar. So was the blue suit, white shirt and red tie. So was the conspicuously assertive tug of the suit jacket.

But the Donald Trump who walked into courtroom 22 on Thursday was a Trump that the public never sees – meek, shrunken, stripped of bravado and any sense of control. And, quite possibly, scared.
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The next Trump indictment drops

Special Counsel Jack Smith issued his second indictment of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) yesterday alleging four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights. You can read the 45-page document here. It makes for gripping reading.

Here is a clip of Smith’s brief statement lasting less than three minutes when announcing the indictment. He did not take any questions.

The document also alleges six unnamed co-conspirators but from the descriptions of their behavior, it should not be that hard to figure out who they are, and five have already been identified in media reports as Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro as well as the former US justice department official Jeff Clark. It is not clear if they will be indicted separately, but it is likely that they will at some point since they were very active in supporting SSAT’s absurd claims that he won the 2020 election and formed essential components of the conspiracy. Smith said in his statement that investigations into other people are continuing.
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A bizarre reason for allowing groping

A judge in Italy has issued what can only be described as bizarre reasoning in acquitting a school caretaker of groping a 17-year old student. There was no doubt about what the groper had done. The attacker did not deny it.

The case involves a 17-year-old student at a Rome high school.

She described walking up a staircase to class with a friend, when she felt her trousers fall down, a hand touching her buttocks and grabbing her underwear.
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Targeting legacy admissions

The US Supreme Court has struck down the use of race as a factor in considering applications for all colleges and universities in the US. This was not entirely unexpected given the court”s ideological leanings, but it was disappointing nonetheless.

But when it comes to elite educational institutions, there is one very large group of people who have been getting preferential treatment in admissions but the legitimacy of which has not been subject to legal review and that is the preference given to so-called “legacy admissions” (applicants whose families have attended that school) and children of wealthy donors, all of whom are able to gain admission with lower academic performances. Preferences are also given to students who have athletic or other extra-curricular success. And the overwhelming majority of such people are white, making this, in effect, affirmative action for white people.

But those preferences are now coming under greater scrutiny.
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Justice Alito and the Wall Street Journal

While much of liberal ire with some of the decisions of the US Supreme.Court has focused on justice Clarence Thomas’s opinions, I have long felt that justice Samuel Alito is the most reactionary member of the court, the one most likely to offer tortured reasoning to justify what seems like pre-ordained conclusions based on his extremely conservative ideology.

Both Thomas and Alito have been the targets of investigative reports by ProPublica about the gifts and lavish vacations that they have been given, including travel on private jets, by wealthy individuals who, directly or indirectly, have had cases before the court. They did not disclose these trips and the private jet travel in their financial disclosure forms.

In the case of Alito, though, he went one step further than Thomas. As is customary with good journalistic outfits, prior to publishing their story, ProPublica informed Alito that they were preparing a story and sent him a list of questions to make sure they were being fair and accurate. What was unusual was that Alito used that to publish a ‘prebuttal’ in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal the day before the ProPublica piece even appeared.
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What’s next in SSAT’s legal travails

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) was arraigned yesterday in Miami and pleaded not guilty on all counts. His valet Waltine Nauta was present but did not have a local attorney and so did not enter a plea and will do so June 27. While SSAT sat and scowled during the proceedings, Nauta apparently looked confused. No tentative date was set for SSAT’s trial, maybe because his codefendant Nauta could not enter a plea.

In federal criminal cases, the defendant has a right to a speedy trial within 70 days of entering a plea. But the defendant can waive that right and the trial can be much later. It is expected that SSAT and his lawyers will try and drag this out as long as they can with all manner of procedural motions so that it does not occur before the elections. If SSAT wins the presidency, he can order the justice department to drop the case and even pardon himself. This would be an incredible misuse of presidential power but when has that stopped SSAT? While his devoted supporters keep saying that the justice department has been weaponized against him and that what is happening to him is making the US look like a banana republic, it has always been the case that SSAT is the one who had made a mockery of many of the institutions that constitute a functioning democracy.
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The sad case of Waltine Nauta

I think it is safe to say that before yesterday, very few people apart from his immediate circle had heard the name Waltine Nauta. Then he was named alongside serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) in the 38-count federal criminal indictment that special prosecutor Jack Smith unsealed yesterday and now faces a raft of serious charges for essentially being an accomplice in SSAT’s mishandling of classified documents.

The 40-year old Nauta is described as a personal aide or valet to SSAT, a sort of Jeeves to SSAT’s Bertie Wooster. This brief biography says that he is from Guam and served in the navy and worked as a cook at the White House before he became an aide to SSAT when he was president and then stayed with hm when SSAT returned to private life.
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What the Trump indictment contains

The indictment against serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and his personal aide Waltine Nauta have been unsealed and can be read here. It is far more wide-ranging than I anticipated. The indictment describes how sloppy SSAT was with the documents, including for a time having boxes of them on the stage of one of the ballrooms at Mar-a-Lago, in a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room, and showing documents to others who had no security clearance, and moving some of them to the Bedminster golf club in New Jersey when he went there.

The indictment consists of 37 felony counts but 31 of them are the same charge but related to different individual documents, leaving just seven distinct categories.

31 of those counts are for “Willful Retention of National Defense Information” and each relate to individual documents that are at issue. (p. 28-33)

#32 is for “Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice” and deals with a conspiracy by SSAT and Nauta to obstruct justice by keeping “classified he had taken with him from the White House and to hide and conceal them from a federal grand jury (p. 34)

#33 is for “Withholding a Document or Record” and describes how the two of them misled one of their attorneys by hiding documents from him so that he would make false statements to the grand jury. (p. 36)

#34 is for “Corruptly Concealing a Document or Record” by hiding boxes from the attorney so that he would not find them and give them to a grand jury. (p. 37)

#35 is for “Concealing a Document in a Federal Investigation”. (p. 38)

#36 is a “Scheme to Conceal”. (p. 39)

#37 is for “False Statement and Representations” with SSAT hiding information. from his own attorney causing his attorney to make false statements to the grand jury that all requests for documents had been complied with. (p. 40)

#38 is against Nauta for lying to the FBI about his knowledge about the boxes and what had been done with them.

It is clear from the indictment that this was not a case of SSAT haphazardly packing up boxes of stuff at the last minute when he was forced to leave the White House on January 20, 2021 and possibly accidentally taking classified documents among them. It is clear that he really wanted these documents and was willing to go to great lengths, even lying to the authorities and hiding them from his own lawyers, to hang on to some of them. The indictment did not speculate on the motives for doing so.

What a stupid, stupid, man.