Rats on Sinking Ships Face Money Woes... and ... There's Something about Mikey J

Nov 01, 2023

Due to the likelihood that Trump family members and their varied businesses and organizations will be prevented from conducting business in New York, conservative lawyer George Conway (husband of Kellyanne) stated in an interview that Trump is facing a cash crunch that will force him to liquidate multiple holdings, including Mar A Lago.

From my perspective, his sole chance to retain his Florida estate while he faces losses of hundreds of millions of dollars, may rest on the deal Jared Kushner made with Saudi government investors. Jared only gained access to the foreign investors as an aide to his father in law, so I believe he and Ivanka will provide him capital to continue to operate in other states and countries.

He’s raged about the judge who ended the suspension of his limited gag order due to the veiled threats he made about other criminal defendants who’ve agreed to testify if called upon in the trials of others, like Trump and his inner circle.

He’s also failed to keep his word on promises made to key staff like Rudy Giuliani. Trump offered to cover his legal expenses and has failed to deliver. Several others - both co-defendants and allies - are struggling to pay legal bills with some even being sued by their lawyers.

Burn-the government-down podcaster Steve Bannon will get a ruling on the appeal of his conviction for spurning Congressional subpoenas later this month and he could be facing 4 months in jail plus fines. Most prosecutors anticipate his conviction will stand. And he’s still facing charges next May for his part in a fundraising effort to build another section of the southern border wall, with prosecutors claiming he defrauded investors.

My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell is reeling due to his baseless claims about the accuracy of voting machines owned by two companies. They’ve filed $2 billion in defamation lawsuits plus he owes millions in legal fees to a Minneapolis law firm. That firm formally asked a court to allow it to withdraw its representation of Lindell citing the millions in unpaid debts he owes them.

Another lawyer for Bannon and Giuliani has also filed lawsuits against them for the big money they owe him. And Rudy is still fighting Smartmatic’s $2.8 billion defamation lawsuit plus a number of criminal charges in Georgia. Legal experts consider him most at risk for the criminal charges due to all the newly cooperating witnesses, as he’s been tied to each of them.

Some lawyers and legal analysts consider it inevitable that Trump will try to make scapegoats of one or more of his co-defendants as his demands for loyalty are a one-way street. They also consider it to be inevitable that he’ll break at least one of his gag orders and get a 30 day jail sentence. It might even be a deliberate strategy on his part since he can play the martyr to keep his followers committed to their support of him.

The ACLU sought permission to file a supporting brief about the gag order, as they believed it to be overly broad. Judge Chutkan ruled against their participation. Trump’s trial in that federal election subversion case is scheduled to begin March 4th, the day before Super Tuesday voting.

We’re advised to be more aware about how fascism works and how Trump embraces it, by Mark R. Reiff, writing for Salon.

”Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has regularly bordered on the incitement of violence. Lately, however, it has become even more violent. Yet both the press and the public have largely just shrugged their shoulders.

As a political philosopher who studies extremism, I believe people should be more worried about this.

Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is guilty of “treason,” Trump said in September 2023, just for reassuring the Chinese that the U.S. had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration. And for this, Trump says, Milley deserves death.

And back in April, Trump said that his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would result in “death and destruction.” Then, in early October, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James, the New York attorney general who filed suit against him for business fraud.”

Reiff describes its historical set of beliefs and how Trump is mirroring it, which should concern us all.

CBS News:

The House Ethics Committee said Tuesday it will announce its "next course of action" in its investigation into embattled Rep. George Santos by Nov. 17.

The update from committee leaders comes ahead of a possible floor vote on a resolution to expel the New York Republican from Congress as federal charges against him accumulate.

House Ethics chairman Michael Guest of Mississippi and the panel's top Democrat, Rep. Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, said investigators have contacted about 40 witnesses, reviewed more than 170,000 pages of documents and authorized 37 subpoenas. They said the investigation has taken "countless hours" and involved "a significant amount" of resources.

Santos has pleaded not guilty to 23 federal charges that accuse him of stealing his campaign donors' identities and racking up thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges on their credit cards, falsifying campaign finance reports, money laundering and other charges. He has also defied repeated calls from Republicans and Democrats for his resignation.”

They could also note to expel him today. But their Nov 17th deadline is significant as that’s also the deadline to pass a budget bill or face a government shutdown. Do GOP House members want his vote to ensure a shutdown?

Numerous articles about the new House Speaker have emerged to paint a clearer picture of the little known pol.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon has been digging into his evangelical past, covering the uncommon beliefs that many evangelicals hold about marriage, sex and an insistence on having a submissive wife. Michael Johnson’s words indicates his beliefs in all of them.

Immediately after winning the speakership vote, the Johnson’s pulled their podcasts
and her counseling service site offline, attempting to conceal their controversial views. But journalists had already archived them to keep their extremist views available for researchers to review. Her article is a highly recommended read.

So is the article by award winning author Anne Nelson. In the wake of Trump’s 2016 election, she went searching for answers, which she detailed in her book, ‘Shadow Network: Money, Media, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right’. It revealed to many a largely secret organization begun in the 1980s called the Council for National Policy (CNP).

She published an article in the Washington Spectator yesterday that revealed how Johnson was closely aligned with its goals and members. While many have focused on the efforts of Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society as key to the remaking of federal courts that are vastly more conservative, Nelson maintains the CNP developed the strategies the Federalists employed, in collusion with prominent evangelical leaders, wedding Christian nationalism religion to the GOP.

The CNP has kept its membership rolls secret, with only a few leaks.

Her new article is How Christian Nationalists, Big Oil and the Big Lie Seized the Speaker’s Gavel. Among its revelations: the CNP ‘spearheaded efforts to overturn the 2020 election’. (Have you heard of the CNP before? Did the mainstream media report who was leading the effort?) Thirteen months before the 2020 election at their annual meeting, the featured speaker was Michael Johnson.

Since its founding in 1981 by a group of right-wing fundamentalists and oil barons, the CNP has worked, largely behind the scenes, to reshape America into a country that protects gun rights, counters federal regulation, favors plutocrats, and rolls back the social progress wrought by the New Deal and the Great Society.
The CNP has labored for decades to purge the Republican Party of moderates and replace them with right-wing extremists (see Shadow Network for a detailed history of its ascendancy). But it wasn’t until 2016 that the CNP accrued the influence to play kingmaker. That was the year when CNP strategists rallied a thousand “Mega-Christian Leaders” to New York City on behalf of Donald Trump’s struggling campaign. They had already defined the terms of the deal: the previous March, CNP Board of Governors member Leonard Leo had met with Trump to present him with a list of ultra-conservative candidates for the federal judiciary.
An Oklahoma pastor who attended the New York City gathering reported that Trump told them, “All his judges would be vetted by [Leo’s] Federalist Society.” Trump also emerged from the meeting with a new Evangelical Advisory Board, including CNP members James Dobson, Ralph Reed, Richard Land, and Harry Jackson, with Tony Perkins as an additional advisor.
An additional benefit was revealed a few months later, when the CNP newsletter reported, “CNP President Tony Perkins was instrumental in developing the [Republican Party] platform”—supporting conversion therapy to “cure” homosexuality and the right to denial of service to LGBTQ populations, and seeking to roll back gay marriage and a host of environmental protections. Not coincidentally, Trump shelved his previous ideas for vice president in favor of evangelical Mike Pence, who emerged as a dues-paying member of the CNP in 2021.

At the 2019 meeting, the Congressman who introduced Johnson tagged him as a great future House Speaker, once they got past the 2020 election: “As we go through the success of this next election, we can then take the leadership that needs to be done. If we were to choose a person to represent our values, who would be skilled, likeable, loveable, loves his country and loves the Lord, it would be our speaker tonight.”

Parts of Johnson’s speech: Johnson continued his tributes. “Probably all of my biggest heroes are in this room tonight. I mean, I grew up in the movement…I literally was the bag boy for Matt Staver when I began. And Tony Perkins, I was his bag boy, I’m not kidding. I was a young lawyer, and I just wanted to learn. And Kelly Shackelford is one of my mentors… I was telling Morton Blackwell, I’m in Congress primarily because I called him for help, and he got me here. I owe you all so much, and I can’t speak tonight without saying how much that has meant to me, and so many countless others.”

And: Johnson had already been vetted by major CNP allies. The previous night in Washington, he said wryly, “Somehow I found myself invited to a small dinner that Charles Koch was having on the Hill. He has the Stand Together group, now movement, that he’s working with. He had twenty-five of the top conservative philanthropists in the country, and just people doing some amazing work. And they asked me to address to them what I thought was the biggest challenge facing America is.” Needless to say, Koch and his philanthropic guests also shared their perspectives with the congressman. The Center for Media and Democracy’s Connor Gibson estimates that the approximately 25 “charitable” groups in Koch’s fleet collectively hold some $4 billion in assets. And according to OpenSecrets.org, oil and gas companies have contributed more to Johnson’s campaigns than any other industry, for a career total of $338,125; Koch Industries account for $35,000 of the total.

From Wikipedia (I’ve bolded some names here that might surprise): The CNP was founded in 1981. Among its founding members were: Tim LaHaye, then the head of the Moral Majority, Nelson Bunker Hunt, T. Cullen Davis, William Cies, Howard Phillips, and Paul Weyrich.

Members of the CNP have included General John Singlaub, shipping magnate J. Peter Grace, Edwin Feulner of The Heritage Foundation, Rev. Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Jerry Falwell, U.S. Senator Trent Lott, Southern Baptist Convention activists and retired Texas Court of Appeals Judge Paul Pressler, lawyer and paleoconservative activist Michael Peroutka, Reverend Paige Patterson, Senator Don Nickles, former United States Attorneys General Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, gun-rights activist Larry Pratt, Colonel Oliver North, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, philanthropist Elsa Prince (mother of Blackwater founder and former CEO Erik Prince and Trump Administration Secretary of Education Betsy Devos), Leonard Leo, and Virginia Thomas (wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas). Former California State Assemblyman Steve Baldwin was CNP's executive director from 2000 to 2008. Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell sits on the board of governors for the organization.

That oughta be enough to convince you to read the rest of Nelson’s article with its eye-opening details.

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