Hard times for Trump allies

John Catsimatidis is a billionaire who is a Republican donor. He also owns a radio station WABC and Rudy Giuliani had a time slot on that show that he used to rant about his usual pet peeves. But WABC at some point warned him to stay away from topics like the 2020 election, possibly because of fears that his reckless spewing of conspiracy fantasies about the 2020 election being stolen because of rigged voting machines and software might get the station sued by Dominion and Smartmatic voting systems, the way he has been sued. He already is on the hook to pay $148 million for defaming two Georgia election workers.

But Giuliani did not heed the warnings and so the station has suspended his show.
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Ban on noncompete clauses gets challenged in court

I wrote yesterday about how the FTC had banned noncompete clauses for all but high-level employees. It is absurd to think that low-level employees in places like fast food and the hospitality industry have valuable proprietary information that they could give to their new employers. These clauses are nothing but a way to prevent such employees from finding better jobs, and thus has the effect of suppressing wages.

It should come as no surprise that the US Chamber of Commerce immediately filed a lawsuit challenging the power of the FTC to ban those clauses.
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Trump did not have a good day in court

After the jury was seated last week, yesterday was the second day of the trial for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) on the charges of fraud arising from his payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election. The only witness yesterday was the former publisher of the tabloid newspaper National Enquirer David Pecker who testified to working with then SSAT fixer Michael Cohen about arrangements to buy the rights to any damaging stories about SSAT’s affairs and then not publish them. He testified that his newspaper would be on the look out for those stories.

But that was not all. Pecker was also asked earlier in the campaign to publish negative stories about SSAT’s opponents in the Republican primaries

David Pecker is saying that during the campaign, Michael Cohen would call him and said “we would like you to run a negative article” on a political opponent, such as Ted Cruz, or Ben Carson, or Marco Rubio.

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Arizona GOP digs an even deeper hole on abortion

The ruling by the Arizona supreme court that an 1864 law that purportedly bans all abortions even in the case of rape and incest has created shock wave in GOP politics. The only exception is to save the life of the woman but, as has been pointed out, this is not as clear cut as it appears to be. It is not always evident at which point the woman’s life is in danger and doctors fearing prosecution may wait until they think death is imminent, which could well result in death or serious complications.

Even serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and the GOP nominee for governor Kari Lake have said that they oppose the law although embarrassingly for Lake, just two years ago she enthusiastically supported the very same law, even referring to it as section 13-3603, its specific legislative number, showing that she knew exactly what she was supporting.
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What will Monday’s Trump trial bring?

On Monday, April 15th, the criminal trial involving 34 felony charges against serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT) for the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels is scheduled to begin. Since it is a criminal trial, SSAT is required to be present during it, unlike in the case of the previous civil trials involving the fraud case brought by New York attorney general Letitia James and the two brought by E. Jean Carroll which he chose to sometimes attend, mainly to vent his spleen to the media outside the courthouse.

SSAT has been trying his mightiest to get this next trial, like all his trials, postponed since his entire legal strategy is to avoid any conviction before the election on November 5th in the hope that he wins and can thus shut down all prosecutions. With his federal cases, he can simply order his attorney general to drop them. With the state trials, it is a little more complicated but he could argue that as a sitting president, he has some kind of immunity and that the trials should not go ahead until he leaves office. He is already arguing that, in the federal case over his handling of confidential documents, he has immunity and the US Supreme Court is going to hear that case and will not rule on it until June or July.
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Anthony Comstock should be made the face of the Republican party

It has become increasingly clear that there is a Republican war on sex and that Anthony Comstock has become their flag bearer.

Who is this Comstock, you ask? He is a 19th century anti-vice campaigner who “was dedicated to upholding Christian morality [and] opposed obscene literature, abortion, contraception, masturbation, gambling, prostitution, and patent medicine”. There is a law named after him that is still on the books that reflects his anti-sex views. The Comstock Law was referred to by the two most extreme members of the US Supreme Court Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas during oral arguments on the legality of women accessing by mail the abortion-terminating drug mifepristone that can be used for abortions.

Rebecca Solnit makes a convincing case that the Republican party has become a full-fledged anti-sex movement that is following in the footsteps of Comstock.
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Trump posts bond, gets a stricter gag order

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has managed to post the reduced $175 million bond set for him by a panel of the appellate court.

According to a court filing, the $175 million bond he and the other defendants posted Monday was provided by Los Angeles-based Knight Insurance Group. The filing didn’t specify which assets Trump used as collateral for the bond.

Knight’s president, Amit Shah, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking information about the collateral.

Here is some information about the company that paid the bond. It is also not clear what fee the company charged SSAT.

Meanwhile Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing the hush money criminal trial that is due to start in New York City on April 15th, has stiffened the gag order barring SSAT from attacking people after he attacked the judge’s daughter.
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Woman charged with murder over abortion sues prosecutors

In Texas a woman who was charged with murder for self-managing an abortion, and spent two nights in jail before the charge was dropped, is now suing the prosecutors for $1 million.

The lawsuit filed by Lizelle Gonzalez in federal court Thursday comes a month after the state bar of Texas fined and disciplined the district attorney in rural Starr county over the case in 2022, when Gonzalez was charged with murder in “the death of an individual by self-induced abortion”.

Under the abortion restrictions in Texas and other states, women who seek abortions are exempt from criminal charges.

The lawsuit argues Gonzalez suffered harm from the arrest and subsequent media coverage. She is seeking $1m in damages.
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According to the lawsuit, Gonzalez was 19 weeks pregnant when she used misoprostol, one of two drugs used in medication abortions. Misoprostol is also used to treat stomach ulcers.

After taking the pills, Gonzalez received an obstetrical examination at a hospital emergency room and was discharged with abdominal pain. She returned with bleeding the next day and an exam found no fetal heartbeat. Doctors performed a caesarian section to deliver a stillborn baby.

The lawsuit argues that the hospital violated the patient’s privacy rights when they reported the abortion to the district attorney’s office, which then carried out its own investigation and produced a murder charge against Gonzalez.

Cecilia Garza, an attorney for Gonzalez, said prosecutors pursued an indictment despite knowing that a woman receiving an abortion is exempted from a murder charge by state law.

Prosecutors would had to have known that even in Texas, women could not be charged for receiving an abortion but they decided on charging her with murder anyway, in what seems like a purely vindictive effort to frighten other women who may seek to terminate their pregnancies using legal medications.

Trump gets good and bad legal news

The good news for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is that a panel of New York state appeals court judges has agreed to a reduction in the bond that he has to pay in his appeal of the civil fraud judgment obtained by state attorney general Letitia James to $175 million, and given him ten days to come up with the money. The original amount of $454 million plus interest was due today and SSAT’s lawyers had said that he could not pay it. This allows the appeal to go ahead once he pays this reduced amount but he will still have to pay the full amount if his appeal fails. The appeals process could take several months.

The bad news for him is that the judge overseeing the criminal case involving his hush money payments to Stormy Daniels has rejected his appeal for further delays and has scheduled the trial to begin on April 15th with jury selection. The original trial date was set to begin earlier this month and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had already agreed to a one month delay due to new documents surfacing.
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Judicial body calls a halt to judge shopping

Big legal news occurred recently that did not receive the widespread coverage that I thought it deserved. One of the quirks of the legal system in the US is that it is possible for a federal judge in one local jurisdiction to make rulings that apply nationwide. Furthermore, in some instances, a case can be filed in a any jurisdiction. This has resulted in what has come to be known as ‘judge shopping’, where people look around to see if they can find a judge who will be sympathetic to their case and file their case in that jurisdiction.

One safeguard against abuse of the system is that there are 94 federal districts in the country with multiple judges in each and when a case is filed in them, it is assigned randomly to a judge in that district, so you are not guaranteed to get the judge you want. But in the case of Texas (of course!), each district is split up into smaller divisions and in some divisions there is only one judge, so that any case filed in that division will be sure to be heard by that judge.

Enter Matthew Kacsmaryk. He is is the only federal trial judge in Amarillo, Texas. Any case filed in Amarillo automatically goes before him. He is a Trump appointee who is an advocate of the Christian right and makes no bones about ruling in the most extreme way in favor of his ideology. He has been the go-to judge for anti-abortion advocates and other rightwing zealots.
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