Trump is having a bad week, and he knows it. He grows more dangerous as his polls sink lower, and smart enough to know that only a ‘big event’ could possibly save him. The stakes are way beyond his just losing elections.
Prosecutors have been preparing for years to bring cases not only against him, but possibly even his family. He has an Attorney General who could go down with him, and this is no overzealous boast.
Ex-30 year criminal prosecutor Glenn Kirshner has been doing daily YouTube commentaries on current and past political events under a theme that if Trump loses in November, come January it will be kick off time to not only see some of his old cases in court like in the Southern district of New York, on his taxes for example, but also for his actions as president, starting with obstruction of justice.
Kirshner is not alone. In theory, he represents ex-Federal prosecutors and Department of Justice people who have watched as the Trump administration has politicized the Justice Department with their man, AG Robert Barr viewed as serving as Donald Trump’s ‘fixer’ first, and the country second.
In response, the new Kirschner declared plan is to rebuild the Justice Department and institute reforms so that no President would ever be able to subvert it as Trump has done. This would require Democratic control of both chambers, and the current political trend is making that more likely every day.
Today Trump announced that the Republican convention in Tallahassee, Florida has been cancelled due to the unfeasibility of holding it in the pandemic hot spot of Florida, a state competing with California for the faster growing virus surge due to opening too early and their respective publics not taking the spread of the virus seriously.
But two other things happened today that got Mr. Trump’s attention. First, a district court ruled on his former lawyer Eliot Cohen’s habeas corpus petition. The judge agreed that the Bureau of Prisons had revoked Cohen’s serving the rest of his sentence at home solely because he was writing a ‘tell all’ book on President Trump, with a publisher standing ready.
“I’ve never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge,” Judge Hellerstein said at a Manhattan federal court hearing, where he questioned the condition that Cohen not publish a book while in home confinement. “How can I take any other inference but that it was retaliatory?” the judge asked at the hearing, which was held in response to Cohen suing to win his re-release from prison.
In another court room, a judge ordered most of the sealed deposition records be opened within a week regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged teenage girl procurer Ghislaine Maxwell, who is sitting in jail on charges of aiding and abetting a pedophile ring operating out of Epstein’s mansion in New York City. The case was settled in 2015 and the records sealed.
PedoGate watchers are expecting the files to contain a number of bombshells about the breadth and depth of the Epstein pedophile entrapment ring that was run to snare endless targets on video with underage teenage girls, a long time entrapment technique from Cold War espionage days that is alive and well today. The names expected to be revealed are a “Who’s Who” of American and British society.
As these these political bombs are falling on Trump in slow motion, he is losing the Covid war with Red States and California registering record high new Covid infections, with death rates now reaching earlier peaks. This news comes after our genius president earlier told us that the virus was a hoax, that it would just all go away, and later that it was a Chinese virus unleashed on America as a biological weapon. That claim never gained traction in any capital other than Washington and somewhat in Britain.
So what does an embattled president do when under siege by looming indictments banging on the door of his castle, with public and private parties seeking justice and retribution? We have seen Trump carefully preparing an election safety net for himself, starting with his charges that mail in ballots were going to be used by Democrats to stuff mailboxes versus ballot boxes.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has been using a ‘rope-a-dope’ campaign tactic, laying back on the ropes and letting his opponent punch himself out via Trump’s endless charges that Biden is mentally impaired. Trump has continued to shoot himself in the foot with his mishandling of the Covid pandemic which has driven his own poll numbers down while Biden just watches and smiles.
Federal troop crackdown
Trump has also been trying to cast himself as ‘Mr. Law and Order,’ initially with his using not only National Guard troops in Washington, but also federal forces under control of Attorney General Barr’s Justice Department. This resulted in the famous revolt of the 4-star generals, when a number of them went public denouncing Trump for using troops against American protestors in the streets.
Trump deployed Justice Department federal forces to Portland, Oregon wearing military uniforms but with no identifying insignia. This deployment was against protesters, and outside the command of the state governor.
The federal forces attacked demonstrators, including a band of mothers trying to protect their children protesting. The incident was well videoed, and included footage of an older Navy veteran who, while talking to a few of the unknown forces, had one of them go crazy and begin clubbing him and breaking his arm. Retired prosecutors have reviewed the videos and seen numerous examples of criminal assaults against mostly peaceful protesters.
Veterans Today has been receiving information that malicious parties have been infiltrating these demonstrations to attack police, inciting them to fire on the crowds who then respond, giving Trump the video scenes of local mayors not being able to controls their cities, when they are being attacked by black ops professionals.
General Honore has his say
The following day Lt. General Russell Honore, famous for having brought order to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, was interview on MSNBC, one of Veterans Today’s network material providers. The general, long known for his colorful language, had this to say after viewing some of the Portland footage.
“What kind of bullshit is this? Number one, they were wearing military uniforms,” the general angrily noted. “That uniform represents the cloth of our nation, for people who don’t draw overtime, who serve around the world at the direction of the national command authority, and it’s not to be used as an instrument of protest suppression.”
General Honoré then noted, “That uniform is designed to blend into terrain, not to make you look like a warrior,” highlighting the tactical uselessness of wearing camouflage in an urban environment.
“They’re wearing these uniforms as a function of intimidation, to look like warriors,” he added. “Real soldiers just don’t walk up to people and start beating on ’em. Real police don’t do that. The police have the authority to detain you, and then somebody else will decide whether you get charged or whether you go to jail for whatever offense you might have violated.”
“They are acting like an uncontrolled mob on the street with uniforms and badges that they don’t show,” he pointed out, a tactic that the Portland mayor decried as “very un-American.”
I have known General Honoré from my days in Atlanta where I videoed him as a guest speaker at my Military Order of World Wars chapter event, and then later at one of our major Memorial Day events when he was the key speaker.
General Honoré now has joined the ‘Revolt of the Generals’, the 4-star ones that publicly denounced Trump, AG Barr, and Secretary of Defense Esper for being Trump tools for his grandstanding photo op in Lafayette Park, next to the White house.
Trump was holding up a bible, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley and Esper, plus Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump all posing for the world press after Attorney General Barr had cleared the peaceful protesters out of the park with teargas, flash grenades, and nightsticks, all done to gain political points from his Christian Zionist religious supporters.
Trump watchers in the military and intel community sense he is using his favorite tool, diverting attention away from publicity that is killing him politically, such as his having done the most horrible leadership job on Covid than any other leader in the world, but still claiming he has done a wonderful job.
He wants to show that he can clear the streets off ‘anarchist’ protesters in strong Democratic cities to show that the country needs a strong president to do what those mayors and governors could not do, protect America’s streets.
But his has a big problem with that pitch. The military, the generals, and most of the veterans are not with him. They see Trump for what he is, a desperate president using any tool that he can to save himself, as he knows the end of his world could come in November.
In Britain, The Guardian’s historian Andrew Gawthorpe nailed Trump to the wall in an article entitled, “Trump is unleashing authoritarianism on US cities- just in time for the election.”
“Only the thirst for violent spectacle can explain the president’s decision in recent days to send federal security forces. As Trump has already revealed, this message is central to his case for re-election. Between now and November, he can be expected to use and abuse his power over America’s paramilitary security forces to bolster this case.
It is clear that many conservative politicians and voters who claim to believe in individual rights and to fear abuses of federal power are now too deeply invested in authoritarianism, too convinced of the depravity of their opponents, to restrain him.”
I will close with my feeling that there is a trap door under Trump’s feet that follows him wherever he goes. He knows what he has done in his past, and what the price will be if the truth ever comes out.
I have made some calls to ask input on Trump’s name coming out in the Ghislaine Maxwell deposition, and the consensus was ‘very likely’. In 2015 no one, including Maxwell, could have feared Trump ever being President and having vast resources at his command to inflict retribution.
She has been widely reported to have stashed away copies of some of the videos made at the Epstein pedo-palace, saved for a rainy day. If true, she is holding some major cards to negotiate with the prosecutors.
If those blackmail videos went to the Israelis, who are long known to have used such leverage, there will be pressure both on the US and Israel to keep that from coming out. This is something that would put Ms. Maxwell in great danger. Just ask Jeffrey Epstein next time you see him. Oh, that’s right, we won’t be seeing him again, will we?
Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.