<....Leslie Levin, a professor at the University of Connecticut Law School, said in an interview: “Misrepresentations to the court are very serious because lawyers are officers of the court. Bringing a lawsuit in someone’s name when they haven’t consented to being a party is a very serious misrepresentation and one for which a lawyer should expect to face serious discipline.”

Nora Freeman Engstrom, a law professor at Stanford University, says that Powell’s actions appear to violate Rule 3.3 of the ABA’s model rules of professional misconduct, which hold that “a lawyer shall not knowingly … make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal”.

Since election day last year, federal and state courts have dismissed more than 60 lawsuits alleging electoral fraud and irregularities by Powell and other Trump allies.

Shortly after the election, Trump named Powell as a senior member of an “elite strike force” who would prove that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential race only because the election was stolen from him. But Trump refused to pay her for her services. To remedy this, Powell set up a new non-profit called Defending the Republic; its stated purpose is to “protect the integrity of elections in the United States”.

As a not-for-profit organization, the group is allowed to raise unlimited amounts of “dark money”, and donors are legally protected from the ordinary requirements to disclose their identities to the public. Powell warned supporters that for her to succeed, “millions of dollars must be raised”.

Echoing Trump’s rhetoric, Powell told prospective donors that Defending the Republic had a vast team of experienced litigators.

Among the attorneys who Powell said made up this “taskforce” were Emily Newman, who had served Trump as the White House liaison to the Department of Health and Human Services and as a senior official with the Department of Homeland Security. Newman had been a founding board member of Defending the Republic.

But facing sanctions in the Michigan case, some of the attorneys attempted to distance themselves from having played much of a meaningful role in her litigation.

Newman’s attorney told Parker, the judge, that Newman had “not played a role in the drafting of the complaint … My client was a contract lawyer working from home who spent maybe five hours on this matter. She really wasn’t involved … Her role was de minimis.”

To have standing to file her Michigan case, Powell was initially unable to find a local attorney to be co-counsel on her case but eventually attorney Gregory Rohl agreed to help out.

But when Rohl was sanctioned by Parker and referred to the Michigan attorney disciplinary board for further investigation, his defense was that he, too, was barely involved in the case. He claimed that he only received a copy of “the already prepared” 830-page initial complaint at the last minute, reviewed it for “well over an hour”, while then “making no additions, decisions or corrections” to the original.

As with Newman, Parker found that Rohl violated ethics rules by making little, if any, effort to verify the facts of the claims in Powell’s filings.

<In my day – those days known as olden – annotating games was one of the key ways to build your chess character – and strength. [...]

Now, anyone can just flick on their engine of choice, and they’re an expert. A guru even. I often wonder about the point of annotating games at all in the age of engines, except to argue about hardware and cores and such. Today’s superhumans reveal just how much they need to prepare, remember and calculate – which is fascinating – but how does the engine-armed public digest this, when they can so easily think they know even better, and are gradually forgetting how to think for themselves?

Dig that hole ever deeper--your horses' efforts have been on the cusp of perfection, as in not--and your heroine Sidney Powell's head is in the lion's mouth due to the frivolous, fraudulent rubbish she has perpetrated on the legal system.

<"On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all -- in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence. 'No legislative act,' wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78, 'contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.' The court in Hubbard v. Lowe reinforced this truth: 'That an unconstitutional statute is not a law at all is a proposition no longer open to discussion.' 226 F. 135, 137 (SDNY 1915), appeal dismissed, 242 U.S. 654 (1916). Following this rationale, an unconstitutionally appointed elector, like an unconstitutionally enacted statute, is no elector at all.">

<Vice President Kamala Harris just committed an astonishing act of political malpractice.

Kamala Harris says the quiet part out loud

Consider these circumstances:

Joe Biden was never a great politician, and now he's a president as doddering as one might fear from someone turning 80 next year. His standard-fare gaffes have devolved into those that some observers liken to a dementia patient. And whether it's his botched Afghanistan withdrawal, deference to dictators Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, or commitment to rivaling the inflation of the Carter years, his particular skill set has never been less made for a moment.

But curmudgeonly, barely sentient old Joe is still Uncle Joe: the father who grieved publicly twice for a dead child, the white sidekick to our first black president, and the liberal less interested in wokespeak and eating the rich than he is in union jobs and healthcare. He still has a remnant of an emotional connection to Middle America that Harris has never developed.

The generation-defining political genius of Barack Obama was both a blessing and a curse to the Democrats. Obama dominating the arena for a decade allowed his party to grow lazy, coronating Hillary Clinton rather than cultivating younger talent such as Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey or then-South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. By 2020, Donald Trump was the only Republican Biden could beat. But just as much, Biden was the only Democrat with a brand capable of beating Donald Trump.

With all of these rather obvious considerations factoring into the equation, Harris should be wary of undermining her tenuous position as the heir apparent. If she burns bridges with Biden's inner circle now, she may not have much time to rebuild them.

That's why it was so politically ham-handed for the vice president to tell the Wall Street Journal, on the record, that she and the man who put her so close to power have never spoken of whether he will run for reelection.

Biden boxed himself into adding the then-California senator to the ticket, first by committing to tapping a woman as his running mate and then as the concession for his crucial deal for veteran Rep. Jim Clyburn's career-saving endorsement before the South Carolina primary. Biden thus limited his list of probable running mates to black women only. But there was exactly one black woman available, namely Harris, in either the Senate or the nation's governors' mansions. That is why she is now a heartbeat away from the presidency — not any great political merit.

But in giving the game away, Harris has yet again outed herself as far from a team player. For months, she and now-Transportation Secretary Buttigieg — the 2020 dark horse who not only, contrary to Harris, made it to the Iowa caucuses but also won them — have had a war by proxy in the press. The former South Bend mayor has done a better job than Harris at situating himself as Biden's more likely successor, should the president decide against running for a second term at age 82.

Harris's admission is even more shocking considering that Jen Psaki, the press secretary of the Biden (and Harris) administration, has been adamant in her assertion that Biden has every intention of running for reelection. So what gives? Was Psaki lying to preserve the public opinion inertia of an incumbent, or was Harris lying to fuel the rumor mill that it's open season for the Democratic nomination and donors come 2024?

Nobody knows for sure, but either way, Harris continues to prove that she's out for one person — and it's not the man in the Oval Office.>

<The United States is drifting toward a catastrophic defeat.

I am talking about a defeat that will eliminate our freedom and permanently subordinate America to Communist China and its demands for absolute control and obedience.

You may think this vision is alarmist, but look at the Chinese Communist Party's control of Hong Kong, its abuses in Tibet and the Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang.

For that matter, look at the giant, wealthy American companies that already kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party's demands and adjust their language and behaviors to placate Beijing.

After pressure from China, Disney removed an episode of "The Simpsons" from its streaming services in Hong Kong over a reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Nike and Coca-Cola lobbied against legislation to ban imports of goods made with forced labor in China. JPMorgan Chase has expanded its business in China—despite known, serious data security and national security risks. And remember the turmoil when Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey tweeted out his support for democracy in Hong Kong? The NBA and various players went into a tailspin of shameless apology and censorship on China's behalf. It was disgusting.

Some American billionaires have made so much money in collaboration with Communist China that they prioritize padding their pockets over both American values and American national security interests.

But a defeated America would be subordinated to the Chinese Communist dictatorship. Our words, behaviors and institutions would constantly be molded to appease the paranoid dictatorship in Beijing.

Despite the extraordinary consequences of defeat, the American system is gradually drifting into a national security system that will clearly lose a major war with Communist China.

Don't take my word for it.

Major American military leaders are already sounding the alarm.

As The Epoch Times reported this month, U.S. Space Force Gen. David Thompson warned that, "China could overtake the United States in terms of space capabilities by 2030 if America doesn't speed up its development." The publication added: "The fact [is] that in essence, on average, [China is] building and fielding and updating [its] space capabilities at twice the rate we are."

Despite this growing threat in space, when Vice President Kamala Harris chaired the administration's first meeting of the National Space Council this month, there was not a single military issue discussed.

Beyond the rising vulnerabilities in space—and generals have reported that Russia and China engage the United States in space virtually every day—there is also a general crisis of our defense capabilities.

As Business Insider reported, "The U.S. military is changing the way it fights after it 'failed miserably' in a war game against an aggressive adversary who knew its playbook."

Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten warned in a July conference: "Without overstating the issue, it failed miserably."

Hyten explained that the wargame, which simulated a conflict with China over Taiwan, involved an adversary that had studied American conflict and warfighting for two decades. As he put it, the fictional China "just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we were going to do before we did it, and they took advantage of it."

The real Communist China has similarly studied our military strategies "with probably even more focus, with larger numbers," Hyten warned. As he put it, we have to make serious changes because our ability to overmatch rival powers including China has been "shrinking fast."....>

<....Admirals who have led the American Pacific military commitment have also been vocal about the failure of our current systems.

According to The Guardian, now-retired Admiral Philip Davidson, who was the 25th commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, said in March that a serious fight over Taiwan could come in the next six years.

"I worry that [China is] accelerating [its] ambitions to supplant the United States and our leadership role in the rules-based international order...by 2050," Davidson said.

When retired four-star Admiral James Stavridis was interviewed by The Asahi Shimbun in June about his new novel, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, he reinforced the sense of growing Chinese capabilities:

When I began writing the novel, it was set in the middle of the century, roughly 2050. But the more I researched and the more I applied my analysis to the situation, the closer the date was set. Many of my friends, very senior officers in the military, both active-duty and retired, and senior policymakers, have complimented me on the book. Still, they have said, "You wrote a great novel, but you've got one big thing wrong. And that is the date." Many believe that the date of a U.S.-China confrontation will be sooner.

As a final example of American vulnerability, James Kitfield reported in Yahoo! News in March on a highly classified simulated conflict with China that started with a Chinese biological weapon attack, continued with a massive invasion disguised as a routine exercise and culminated with devastating missile strikes against our Indo-Pacific bases and warships, as well as Taiwan itself.

Needless to say, America lost that one, too.

The current National Defense Authorization Act simply does not address the scale of change we need to ensure America could militarily defeat China.

The Pentagon and intelligence community's distracting focus on creating a woke force, rather than a war-winning force, is further weakening America.

We need a full-blown investigation into the requirements for military victory over China—and a commitment to undertake every reform needed in defense, education, capital markets, supply chains, manufacturing and other areas to ensure American safety and freedom.

Anything short of a complete rethinking of our capabilities and the challenge of the Chinese Communist Party's systemic effort to become the world's dominant superpower may well lead to our defeat in a much shorter time than anyone now thinks possible.

His reaction? Predictable--he engages in his favourite sport, that of litigation:

<The familiar maxim “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” that we pass along to our children encourages resilience and perseverance in the face of failure. We have reason to think someone encouraged former President Donald Trump to take the expression to heart, and, unfortunately, he did.

There are few truisms in life, but here’s one: Trump is litigious. Very litigious.

The many lawsuits Trump and his allies filed in 2021, the vast majority of which he lost, provide a case study in perseverance. Trump persevered despite the fact that doing so was often irrational and immoral.

There are few truisms in life, but here’s one: Trump is litigious. Very litigious. Before the 2016 election, a USA Today analysis found that he and his businesses had been involved in 4,095 lawsuits over three decades, and in more than 2,100 of those suits as the plaintiff.

Lawsuits, even ones that are destined to fail, can still lead to success. Filing a lawsuit can scare people; lawsuits are often costly and time-consuming to defend against. Filing a lawsuit can also lead to beneficial delays, like, to take two wild hypotheticals, delaying a state investigation into potentially fraudulent behavior or a congressional investigation into an insurrection.

Let’s begin with the lawsuits related to the 2020 election, some of which commenced before 2021. Quick reminder: Joe Biden won the election. As a direct and entirely predictable result of winning a presidential election, Biden is now the president of the United States. Also, you can search and search for massive voter fraud that led to Biden’s win, but it will be less fruitful than searching for a snow leopard in a blizzard, and you will come up empty. The only significant fraud perpetrated in the 2020 presidential election is the lie that there was fraud.

It should therefore come as no surprise that lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies claiming there was fraud in the 2020 election failed. “Failed” might be too tepid a word to describe the fate of these election-related lawsuits: These suits belly-flopped into a pool containing nothing but air and concrete. By one estimate, Trump and his allies have a win-loss record of 0-40 when it comes to post-election lawsuits.

Let’s continue our tour of Trump’s lawsuits by moving on to something that happened right after the election: the insurrection and the effort to stop the election certification. A House select committee is investigating the events of Jan. 6 to determine who knew what and when. In more predictable news, the man who led our government then and apparently tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power from himself to Biden doesn’t want Congress looking under the hood to find out exactly what happened before and on Jan. 6. Trump sued to prevent the committee from obtaining certain White House documents related to the insurrection. He lost in trial court and again in appeals court. Never one to be deterred by the law or facts, Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court for emergency relief. Stay tuned to see what our nation’s highest court does....>

The rest on the way....

<....Trump's only problem with his suit against James is that the law is against him.

And just when we thought the year might end before another big Trump suit hit, the former president sued New York Attorney General Letitia James. Her office is investigating whether the Trump Organization may be civilly liable for, among other things, inflating property values to obtain loans and deflating property values to get beneficial tax treatment. James’ office is also working with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office on a criminal investigation into similar alleged behavior. (Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing in the investigations.)

Trump’s argument is that James’ investigation is politically motivated and she must restrict it or halt it. If your bingo card had Trump calling James’ inquiry a “political witch hunt,” then place a marker on that square. It is worth noting that Trump’s suit arrived on the courthouse doorstep shortly after James’ office subpoenaed Trump for testimony.

As is often the case with his lawsuits, Trump's only problem with his suit against James is that the law is against him. Prosecutors can have political biases without violating the constitutional rights of the people the prosecutor is investigating. That prosecutor simply must set them aside while doing her job.

This is but a tour of some of the highlights (or lowlights) of the cases Trump, and his allies, filed in 2021. If we endeavored to provide an exhaustive list, it would almost certainly be out of date before it was finished, as Trump would likely have filed another suit by then.

<<Philip Bump @pbump
· 4h
Trump says the pandemic of 1918 which he says occurred in 1917 ended the Second World War, which ended in 1945.>

He makes George W Bush look like a Rhodes Scholar by comparison.

Wow.>

<Biden needs to fix his presidency not for legacy, but for the sake of a desperate nation

You’re reading Our View, one of two perspectives in Today’s Debate.

For the Opposing View read Jen Psaki: President Joe Biden's first year marked by tremendous progress.

Joe Biden entered the White House a year ago carrying Americans' hopes that he would restore the nation's confidence in itself and in its commander in chief after four years of Donald Trump's ineptness and dishonesty. But Biden in his first year as president has proved to be agonizingly ineffective.

Biden's signature piece of legislation, the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan, remains on the shelf after the president failed to secure enough votes for it in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.

The same failure has now beset voting rights legislation, despite Biden's assertion last week that those who oppose the bills were siding with racists and traitors.

From Afghanistan withdrawal to the U.S.-Mexico border A president who can't gain approval of cornerstone legislation that he passionately lobbied for – especially when his own party controls the House and Senate – is in danger of being written off as weak and ineffectual by both Washington insiders and the American public.

Not surprisingly, Biden's average approval rating is a meager 42%.

Biden discusses infrastructure investment in 'bridges to make America work'

After a solid career in the Senate and eight years as vice president, Biden seemed to have the experience and temperament needed to clean up the enormous messes that Trump left in his wake. But from a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan to mismanagement of the chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border, the president and his team have stumbled through a stunning number of missteps.

That includes the administration's handling of the lingering pandemic, with Americans still struggling to secure enough COVID-19 tests and N95 masks. This week, the Biden team finally moved forward with distributing both masks and tests to a desperate public. And let's not even talk about the confusing messages coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Follow successful track of infrastructure bill

These are not mere partisan concerns. A PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll last month found that only 29% of independent voters approve of how Biden is handling his job.

Our purpose here is not to pile on a beleaguered president. It is, rather, to implore Biden and his team to reflect honestly on their failures and to make the changes needed in tactics, communication and personnel.

The nation needs an effective commander in chief as threats from China and Russia increase, as inflation erodes Americans' ability to pay their bills, as the pandemic continues to kill an average of about 1,700 people in the USA each day, and as the effects of climate change terrorize citizens from Florida to California.

Biden can start to record more wins than losses by following the successful track he navigated with the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in November. That bill, which gained bipartisan support in the House and Senate, shows that Democrats and Republicans can work together when the White House and congressional leaders take a more incremental approach to addressing the nation's problems.

With three years remaining in his term, Joe Biden must act urgently to fix his faltering presidency. He must do so not for the sake of his legacy or his party, but for the sake of a nation struggling beneath the weight of challenges that appear even more dire now than a year ago.>

<A Washington State Patrol officer who defied a statewide vaccine mandate and signed off for the last time by telling Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee to “kiss my a–” is dead from COVID-19. Former Trooper Robert LaMay, 51, who served 22 years with the State Patrol and retired last October, died on Friday.

LaMay garnered attention from Americans across the country after he signed off for the last time as an officer and told Washington Gov. Jay Inslee he “can kiss my a–” over forced vaccine mandates.

Following LaMay’s death, Washington State Patrol Chief John R. Batiste released a statement praising him for his service, which “will be long remembered and appreciated.”

“I am deeply saddened over the news that our former friend and colleague Trooper Robert LaMay has passed away,” Batiste said.

“This agency’s prayers and remembrances are with his family and loved ones. Rob served honorably for over two decades, and we were disappointed to see him leave the agency this past October."

His service to this state and agency will be long remembered and appreciated.”>

Refusing to get vaccinated because of <not trusting> the vaccine and ending up dead anyway.

Le Not So Grand Orange in such a hurry to leave his beloved White House because his mind was filled with nothing but the need to overturn the 2020 election:

<President Donald Trump rushed to leave the White House last year as he spent his final weeks in office obsessed with trying to overturn his 2020 election loss, The New York Times reported.

Several books on the final days of the Trump presidency said many of the president's aides and advisors had left the White House entirely or had largely checked out by the end of his term. The staff departures created a vacuum for figures like Trump's then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other conspiracy-theory-wielding figures like the attorney Sidney Powell to try to convince him of quixotic ways that he could stay in power.

"At the time," The Times wrote, the aides who remained "were either preoccupied with helping him overturn the election, trying to stop him or avoiding him."

Trump did manage to take multiple boxes of important records and documents out of the White House and back to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida, club and winter residence. His lawyers have been in negotiations with the National Archives for the boxes to be returned to the agency's custody.

Both The Times and The Washington Post reported Trump carted off over a dozen boxes of White House materials, records, and other items that he should have turned over under the Presidential Records Act. The law requires White House officials to properly preserve official presidential correspondence and documentation, like memos, letters, emails, text messages, and social-media posts.

Some of the items in the boxes, according to The Times and The Post, included letters to Trump from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a note from former President Barack Obama, a map that Trump drew on with a Sharpie to mark a possible hurricane path to Alabama, and at least one piece of clothing.

Experts told The Post that Trump likely violated the 1970s law, passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, by taking the documents to Florida with him.

The National Archives confirmed in a Monday statement that the agency had "arranged transport" for 15 boxes of records and materials to be returned from Mar-a-Lago into the agency's custody. It added that Trump and his staff were "continuing to search for additional Presidential records that belong to the National Archives."

David Ferriero, an archivist, said in the statement that compliance with the act was "critical to our democracy, in which government is accountable to the people" and that "there should be no question as to the need for diligence and vigilance."

A spokesperson for Trump didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

The agency has few to no tools at its disposal to enforce violations of the act and other federal record-keeping laws. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said she would open an investigation into the Trump administration's lack of compliance with federal records laws.

Trump's habit of tearing up official White House documents to destroy or dispose of them, a trend Politico first reported on in 2018, is now affecting the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

The National Archives, which has turned over at least 700 documents from the Trump White House to the committee, previously told The Post that some records "included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump." Some documents that had been torn up, they said, weren't taped back together at all.

In addition to routinely tearing up documents in the Trump White House, officials would round up documents in "burn bags" and send them to the Pentagon to be incinerated, The Post reported.>

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/whit...