Newsflash: viruses come and go. It's a part of life.>

<George Wallace aka Big Pawn : The cockroach pig.

He's certainly not concerned with the COVID case rate anymore. Not one bit. He's long gone.

Libs are so fake.>

<Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) who has been at the center of a years-long securities fraud investigation, has been cleared of any possible wrongdoing in connection with bribery allegations brought against him by former employees, new findings suggest. However, there is just one issue with the report: the investigation that led to his exoneration was conducted by his own office.

"AG Paxton's actions were lawful and consistent with his legal duties and prior actions taken by Attorneys General of Texas," the executive summary reads. "AG Paxton committed no crime."

Published under Paxton's official seal, the 374-page report compiled by Paxton's office, which includes exhibits, suggests the attorney general's former employees' allegations were not supported by substantial evidence, reports Law & Crime.

The latest internal report comes after several of Paxton's former aides—referred to as "Complainants" in the report—accused him of having "improper influence" in a case involving Austin, Texas real estate investor Nate Paul. Ironically, Paul also donated to Paxton's 2018 re-election campaign which also creates a conflict of interest.

"There is no evidence that Nate Paul attempted to bribe AG Paxton," the internal report by Paxton's office states. "The Complainants attempt to use a campaign donation as proof of the bribe, however, Paul has made only one campaign donation to AG Paxton in 2018 – not only well before the allegedly improper actions taken by AG Paxton in 2020, but even before the FBI's 2019 raid that formed the gravamen of Nate Paul's criminal complaints."

It also included a statement from Paxton who criticized his accusers, writing "some of the Complainants operated in an unaccountable manner by not documenting their actions, instructing subordinates not to document their actions, dismissing other employees so that they could have secret meetings, deleting emails, and potentially other acts taken to conceal behaviors, processes, and evidence."

The report has been slammed by the attorneys representing Paxton's former employees. On behalf of the legal team, attorney T.J. Turner released a fiery statement describing the internal report as a "half-baked self-exoneration."

"The takeaway from this internal report is that, although Ken Paxton remains under active federal investigation, the people who still work for Paxton say he did nothing wrong," attorney T.J. Turner wrote on behalf of that legal team. "Notably, whoever in Paxton's office wrote this report was not willing to put their name on it. Of course, the one-sided internal report is full of half-truths, outright lies, and glaring omissions. It is a half-baked self-exoneration by Paxton, who continues to use taxpayer dollars to delay and hide from simple document requests and depositions and pay private lawyers to keep the federal investigation quiet. The truth will come out, but you won't get it from Ken Paxton.">

<'What planet' is Kayleigh on? McEnany's latest mind-boggling claim has critics offering a history lesson

Meaghan Ellis August 25, 2021

Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany triggered quite a few critics when she claimed the United States did not see "crisis after crisis" when former President Donald Trump was in office.

On Tuesday, August 25, Fox News reported on President Joe Biden's approval rating decline amid the Taliban chaotic takeover in Afghanistan and the accelerated surge in COVID cases and hospitalizations across the United States. However, McEnany turned heads when she attempted to rewrite former President Donald Trump's chaotic history.

"We are eight months into a Biden presidency," she said. "Wrap your head around that. We still have three years and four months left. Look, when President Trump was president, you didn't see crisis after crisis. You just didn't see it."

She added, "I shudder to think about what COVID would have been like under Joe Biden."

Despite McEnany's claims, more than 400,000 Americans died from COVID on Trump's watch. Epidemiologists and other members of the scientific community have repeatedly suggested that this figure could have been much lower if the Trump administration had taken more effective action to mitigate the virus at the onset of the pandemic. However, Trump spent most of his time downplaying the severity of the virus with baseless claims insisting it would simply go away.

Things also took a turn for the worse with the presidential election. After losing to Biden, Trump became obsessed with overturning the election by any means. His presidency took even more of a historic nosedive with the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol which led to his second impeachment.

Twitter users quickly chimed in with their reactions to McEnany's words. Many wasted no time offering her brief history lessons about what really happened under the Trump administration just in case the former press secretary forgot about all of the chaos that erupted just last year.

McEnany was quickly reminded of the dumpster fires Trump caused.>

The problem with Georgie is that he brings all the lies with him like a dog with fleas.

<Former President Donald Trump filed a $100 million lawsuit Tuesday against his niece, Mary Trump, and the New York Times, claiming they conspired to obtain his tax returns for the paper’s Pulitzer-winning story on his undisclosed finances.

The lawsuit asserts that Mary Trump and three New York Times reporters — Susanne Craig, David Barstow, and Russell Buettner — were engaged in what the suit calls an “insidious plot” and an “extensive crusade” to obtain Trump’s taxes.

“The defendants engaged in an insidious plot to obtain confidential and highly-sensitive records which they exploited for their own benefit and utilized as a means of falsely legitimizing their publicized works,” the lawsuit claims.

Craig, Barstow and Buettner received a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for explanatory reporting for their series of stories, which provided the public with an unprecedented look at the former president’s finances.

Mary Trump has said she released Trump's tax returns to The New York Times in her best-selling 2020 book about her uncle, "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man," and in media interviews, which the lawsuit notes. In the book, the daughter of Trump's brother, Fred Jr., paints an "authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him.

In a statement, Mary Trump called her uncle desperate.

“I think he is a loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can. It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that he thinks will stick," she said. "As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”

The New York Times said in a statement it plans to challenge the lawsuit.

"The Times's coverage of Donald Trump's taxes helped inform citizens through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest," said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the paper. "This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it.”

The suit was filed in New York State court in Dutchess County, which is where lawyers for the president’s late brother, Robert Trump, filed an unsuccessful claim to stop the publication of Mary Trump’s book.

The 27-page suit alleges the reporter “relentlessly sought out his niece… and convinced her to smuggle the records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over to The Times.”

It added, “Craig, aware that the documents had been derived from the litigation proceedings of the Estate Actions, directed Mary Trump to retrieve the documents from the office of her prior attorney for the Estate Actions, Farrell Fritz, and to ‘smuggle’ them out.”

The suit claims Mary Trump violated a confidentiality agreement that barred her from publicly releasing details of the family’s finances under the terms of the settlement of Fred Trump Sr.'s estate.

The suit claims his niece and the reporters were “motivated by a personal vendetta and their desire to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall” and to “advance their political agenda.”>

Maricopa County Board Chairman Jack Sellers said the overall results in the draft report confirm “the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters.”>

<Well, then, this must be monomania of a certain sort. Chess is a particularly enclosed, self-referential activity. It’s not just that it lacks the fresh air of sport, but that it lacks connections to the real world outside — a tether to reality enjoyed by the monomaniacal students of other things, say, volcanic ash or the mating habits of the tsetse fly. As Stefan Zweig put it in his classic novella The Royal Game, chess is “thought that leads nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance.”

How did you do at the World Series, if I may ask ? Hope you did well !.

Best wishes- to the new weekend as well.

<Former President Donald Trump filed an emergency request to a federal judge late Monday night to prevent the National Archives from sending sensitive records to Jan. 6 committee investigators by Friday. And just after midnight, Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected it, contending the request itself was legally defective and “premature.”

The unusual exchange, which happened in a span of two hours, comes as Chutkan is already considering an earlier request by Trump to prevent Congress from peering into his White House’s records about his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Trump sued to block the National Archives from turning the records over last month, after President Joe Biden declined to assert executive privilege on his behalf. The Archives indicated it would turn the papers over to lawmakers by Friday, unless a court intervened.

Chutkan heard arguments in the suit last week and promised to rule quickly on Trump’s initial emergency request. But she seemed inclined to reject it, questioning the legal basis for a former president to claim executive privilege over records when the sitting president and Congress disagree.

The National Archives has indicated that Trump is seeking to block at least 750 pages out of an initial 1,500 unearthed in response to the Jan. 6 committee’s request for records about the former president’s effort to overturn the election. Many of those papers are culled from the files of senior Trump aides like Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller and Patrick Philbin. They also include call and visitor logs.

Trump’s attorney, Jesse Binnall, issued his second request Monday night, asking Chutkan to approve an “administrative stay” of her own ruling even before she issued it. That way, Binnall argued, Trump would have a chance to appeal her decision before the Archives began delivering hundreds of pages to congressional investigators.

Binnall also warned Chutkan that if she didn’t rule on Trump’s first request by Wednesday, he would go immediately to the appeals court and ask it to step in. He noted that Thursday is Veterans Day and that the National Archives plans to send Trump’s papers to Congress at 6 p.m. Friday.

“This case should be decided after thorough but expeditious consideration pursuant to America’s judicial review process, both before this Court and on appeal, not by a race against the clock,” Binnall wrote.

But the request baffled legal experts, who said judges have no power to preemptively block rulings they haven’t issued yet. They noted Chutkan is already moving on an urgent timeline to consider Trump’s initial request and that it was odd for the former president to threaten to go to the appeals court before seeing Chutkan’s decision.

Chutkan, in her brief decision overnight, said she would consider Binnall’s request for a stay after she issues her ruling, which she reiterated would arrive “expeditiously.” But she noted that federal rules only allow a stay “while an appeal is pending,” not before.>

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/...

The last extensive update on Biden's medical state came in December 2019, when the doctor he eventually recruited to serve as White House physician described him as "a healthy, vigorous, 77-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.">

<Former President Donald Trump on Friday called on Mitch McConnell to resign as Senate minority leader for supporting President Joe Biden's $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, which passed Congress earlier this month....>

<Revealed: how Sidney Powell could be disbarred for lying in court for Trump

The former lawyer filed cases across America for the former president, hoping to overturn the results of the 2020 election

Sidney Powell, the former lawyer for Donald Trump who filed lawsuits across the US for the former president, hoping to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has on several occasions represented to federal courts that people were co-counsel or plaintiffs in her cases without seeking their permission to do so, the Guardian has learned.

Some of these individuals say that they found out that Powell had named them only once the cases were already filed.

During this same period of time, Powell also named several other lawyers – with their permission in those instances – as co-counsel in her election-related cases, despite the fact that they played virtually no role in bringing or litigating those cases.

Both Powell’s naming of other people as plaintiffs or co-counsel without their consent and representing that other attorneys were central to her cases when, in fact, their roles were nominal or nonexistent, constitute serious potential violations of the American Bar Association model rules for professional conduct, top legal ethicists told the Guardian.

Powell’s misrepresentations to the courts in those particular instances often aided fundraising for her non-profit, Defending the Republic. Powell had told prospective donors that the attorneys were integral members of an “elite strike force” who had played outsized roles in her cases – when in fact they were barely involved if at all.

Powell did not respond to multiple requests for comment via phone, email, and over social media.

The State Bar of Texas is already investigating Powell for making other allegedly false and misleading statements to federal courts by propagating increasingly implausible conspiracy theories to federal courts that Joe Biden’s election as president of the United States was illegitimate.

The Texas bar held its first closed-door hearing regarding the allegations about Powell on 4 November. Investigations by state bar associations are ordinarily conducted behind closed doors and thus largely opaque to the public.

A federal grand jury has also been separately investigating Powell, Defending the Republic, as well as a political action committee that goes by the same name, for fundraising fraud, according to records reviewed by the Guardian.

Among those who have alleged that Powell falsely named them as co-counsel is attorney Linn Wood, who brought and litigated with Powell many of her lawsuits attempting to overturn the results of the election with her, including in the hotly contested state of Michigan......”>

<....Among those who have alleged that Powell falsely named them as co-counsel is attorney Linn Wood, who brought and litigated with Powell many of her lawsuits attempting to overturn the results of the election with her, including in the hotly contested state of Michigan.

The Michigan case was a futile attempt by Powell to erase Joe Biden’s victory in that state and name Trump as the winner. On 25 August, federal district court Judge Linda Parker, of Michigan, sanctioned Powell and nine other attorneys who worked with her for having engaged in “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process” in bringing the case in the first place. Powell’s claims of election fraud, Parker asserted, had no basis in law and were solely based on “speculation, conjecture, and unwarranted suspicion”.

Parker further concluded that the conduct of Powell, Wood, and the eight other attorneys whom they worked with, warranted a “referral for investigation and possible suspension or disbarment to the appropriate disciplinary authority for each state … in which each attorney is admitted”.

Wood told the court in the Michigan case that Powell had wrongly named him as one of her co-counsel in the Michigan case. During a hearing in the case to determine whether to sanction Wood, his defense largely rested on his claim that he had not been involved in the case at all. Powell, Wood told the court, had put his name on the lawsuit without even telling him.

A man holds a sign reading "The dead cannot vote" at a rally in Alpharetta, Georgia. Trump supporters attend a rally in Alpharetta, Georgia, where Sidney Powell spoke on efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Photograph: Nathan Posner/REX/Shutterstock Wood said: “I do not specifically recall being asked about the Michigan complaint … In this case obviously my name was included. My experience or my skills apparently were never needed, so I didn’t have any involvement with it.”

Wood’s attorney, Paul Stablein, was also categorical in asserting that his client had nothing to do with the case, telling the Guardian in an interview: “He didn’t draft the complaint. He didn’t sign it. He did not authorize anyone to put his name on it.”

Powell has denied she would have named Wood as a co-counsel without Wood’s permission.

But other people have since come forward to say that Powell has said that they were named as plaintiffs or lawyers in her election-related cases without their permission.

In a Wisconsin voting case, a former Republican candidate for Congress, Derrick Van Orden, said he only learned after the fact that he had been named as a plaintiff in one of Powell’s cases.

“I learned through social media today that my name was included in a lawsuit without my permission,” Van Orden said in a statement he posted on Twitter, “To be clear, I am not involved in the lawsuit seeking to overturn the election in Wisconsin.”

Jason Shepherd, the Republican chairman of Georgia’s Cobb county, was similarly listed as a plaintiff in a Georgia election case without his approval.

In a 26 November 2020 statement, Shepherd said he had been talking to an associate of Powell’s before the case’s filing about the “Cobb GOP being a plaintiff” but said he first “needed more information to at least make sure the executive officers were in agreeing to us being a party in the suit”. The Cobb county Republican party later agreed to remain plaintiffs in the case instead of withdrawing....>