Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Tudor Dixon opposes abortion for rape victims because there’s ‘healing through the baby’

Michigan Republican gubernatorial nominee reaffirms abortion stance after criticizing earlier portrayal



Despite complaining that Democratic attack ad had taken her comments on abortion out of context, Republican gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon seemed to confirm the ad’s point in a recent TV interview.

The ad by Put Michigan First, a group allied with the Democratic Governors Association, criticized Dixon’s stance on abortion as extreme, noting her support for a total ban on the procedure except in cases where the life of the mother was at stake.

In making that case, the ad featured a clip from a July interview with Detroit podcaster Charlie LeDuff in which he asked Dixon if a 14-year-old raped by her uncle should be forced to have the baby.

“Perfect example,” replied Dixon.

She later slammed the ad as distorting her position, saying it was taken out of context as part of her argument that eliminating parental consent abortion laws would make it harder to catch abusers.

However, when asked by FOX-2’s Roop Raj in an interview Friday about that comment, offering her a chance to clarify whether a 14-year-old rape victim should be allowed to get an abortion, Dixon again said she would oppose that.

“I’ve talked to those people who were the child of a rape victim and the bond that those two people made,” Dixon said. “And the fact that out of that tragedy, there was healing through that baby. It’s something that we don’t think about because we assume that that story is someone who was taken from the front yard then returned. That’s generally not the story there. And those voices, the babies of rape victims that have come forward, are very powerful when you hear their story and what the truth is behind that. It’s very hard to not stand up for those people.”

The interview went viral on social media and has been reported on by national media.

MAGA nominee for MI Governor Tudor Dixon is asked why she is against a 14 year-old rape victim being allowed to get an abortion. She says the bond that rape victims will have with their babies will help them heal.


Watch interview here: https://twitter.com/i/status/1560766117483876352


“A 14 year old is a CHILD. A CHILD should not be forced to carry A CHILD from RAPE. Why do children’s lives – their future, hopes, dreams, aspirations – not matter!?” state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-Royal Oak) wrote on Twitter.

Dixon also reiterated her position that the only exception for abortion is if the life of the mother were in danger.

“I’ve made it very clear [that] health of the mother and life of the mother are two different things,” Dixon said. “Anytime the mother’s life is in danger. All of these fake stories about if you have an ectopic pregnancy, if you have any type of issue that’s not covered, it absolutely is. In fact, the existing law covers that.”

Dixon was referring to the 1931 Michigan law that states almost all abortions would be considered a felony with a possible penalty of up to four years in prison, with doctors who assist in the procedure and pregnant people who use medication for abortions could be charged.

That law was invalidated by Roe v. Wade, but never removed from the books. When the landmark Roe decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, the law technically came back into effect, although it has been held off by an ongoing injunction pending a ruling on whether it is legal under Michigan’s Constitution. That injunction was kept in effect on Friday by order of an Oakland County Judge following a two day trial.

That request was made by Dixon’s November opponent, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who supports abortion rights.

However, Dixon’s assertion that ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg grows outside of the uterus, cannot survive and is potentially fatal to the mother, would be covered by the 1931 law is up for debate.

Dr. Lisa Harris, an obstetrician-gynecologist and associate director of Obstetrics and Gynecology at University of Michigan, is one of the expert medical witnesses who testified at the injunction hearing and was deemed to be “extremely credible” by the judge.

Harris told MLive in July that the law is so broadly written that it is not clear to doctors what procedures would be considered legal.

“They may not wish to treat an ectopic pregnancy if there is evidence of fetal cardiac activity,” said Dr. Harris. “Doctors’ judgment calls now have criminal penalties associated with them. And if someone thinks that a woman’s life was not quite in jeopardy enough, when someone ended that pregnancy, they could face criminal charges.”

https://michiganadvance.com/2022/08/21/dixon-opposes-abortion-for-rape-victims-because-theres-healing-through-the-baby/

[Rick Plant]

Michael Cohen suggests Trump will blackmail the DOJ by threatening to reveal secrets to foreign powers

Appearing on MSNBC on Sunday morning, former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen said he wouldn't put it past the former president to threaten to reveal secrets to foreign powers if the Department of Justice tries to indict him.

Speaking with fill-in host Michael Steele on "The Sunday Show," Cohen was asked why he thinks Trump hauled classified documents to Mar-a-Lago with him after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

"Based on everything you know about him, why do you think he wanted to keep those top secret documents at Mar-a-Lago," host Steele asked.

"He's gonna use it as a get out of jail free card," Cohen immediately shot back. "It's a way to extort America turn around to say if you put me in jail, if you go after me -- he'll even say his children -- I will have my loyal supporters who you do not know who has copies of information that may have been, and again this is my conjecture, that I would take those documents, I will release them to Iran, to China, to North Korea, to Russia.

"You want to take me down, I'll take the whole country down," he added.

"Remember, and I've said this with you 1000 times, Mike, Donald Trump doesn't care about this country," he continued. "He doesn't care about anyone or anything other than himself."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

'I would stay quiet': Kash Patel warned he's putting himself in greater peril by defending Trump



One of Donald Trump's biggest supporters was given a stern lecture on CNN on Monday, with a veteran prosecutor suggesting he needs to step away and be quiet lest he make his own legal problems worse.

Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official, has recently taken to the airwaves to defend the former president's decision to squirrel away sensitive government documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Appearing on CNN with host Abby Phillip, former federal prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers claimed all of the former president's defenders who are floating excuses for Trump are making things worse for the former president, but Patel is dragging both Trump and himself down.

After sharing a clip of the former Trump appointee attempting to make the case that Trump could blanket declassify top secret documents and saying the real culprits are the federal workers who shipped the boxes to Florida, Rodgers said his explanation was nonsensical.

"Even if that were the case, would that be a defense?" host Phillip asked.

"It's not," the Columbia Law school lecturer said dismissively. "I mean now, Abby, we're saying basically that if you steal a household full of stuff and hire movers to move it to a different house, they're guilty."

"This is all just silliness. frankly," she continued. "If I could offer a free piece of legal advice to Mr. Patel: he is implicated in this as a negotiator for the former president with the National Archives. So to the extent that the government ultimately finds that the National Archives were lied to and that all of this was part of a potential crime, Mr. Patel might be implicated."

'If I were him, I would stay quiet, and again, if you say anything it's just wait and see what comes out, the presumption of innocence, et cetera," she suggested.

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Trump hired cronies to search top-secret docs he believed would erase 'stain' of his impeachment: former NYT reporter

Appearing on CNN's "New Day" on Monday morning, former New York Times national security expert Tim Weiner claimed that former President Donald Trump rounded up the boxes of sensitive government documents to take to Mar-a-Lago in the belief that he would find a "smoking gun" in them proving members of the "deep state" were plotting against him.

Speaking with host John Berman, Weiner expanded upon an op-ed in the Times where he wrote, "The Mar-a-Lago papers may well determine if Mr. Trump has a political future. That depends, in part, on the solution to several mysteries. What is in those files? Where did they come from? Whose fingerprints are on them? And who shows up on the surveillance tapes subpoenaed from the Trump mansion, which will show who went in and out of the rooms where they were hidden?"

"I think in the last chaotic days of the Trump administration, Donald Trump was desperate for documents that he thought would somehow absolve him of the offenses for which he was impeached and criminally investigated," Weiner told the host. "I think that he believes that there is some smoking gun in the classified archives of the government that will somehow cleanse him and allow him to run again, that will provide him with political leverage."

"Whether these documents are, in fact, helpful to the president or not is immaterial! He has no right to have them, they are the property of the American people, not a twice-impeached former president," he added.

"You talk about what he did prior to leaving office and who he put in certain places. Why is that important here?" host Berman pressed.

"That's right," the journalist replied. "In the last year of his administration, President Trump put unqualified loyalists at the top of the intelligence community and the Pentagon, and he wanted them to rifle through the classified files in search of documents, which he believed would somehow cleanse him of the stain of his impeachments and of the counterintelligence investigation, the FBI launched six full years ago against Donald Trump and his inner circle."

"These documents may or may not be what he was looking for," he added. "In other words, he wanted his own set of secret files that he thought would be political ammunition and I believe that's what's in those boxes."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Mueller prosecutor explains why Garland will view the Trump document scandal as a very black and white issue

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace returned from vacation to walk through the ongoing scandal of the government documents Donald Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Speaking to Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department prosecutor for former special counsel Robert Mueller, Wallace asked about classified documents and distinctions on the criminality with the various classifications.

Weissmann explained that there have been frequent comments about the classification level of documents being unimportant because the Espionage Act doesn't require that the government documents be classified.

"And of course, the property exists whether the material is classified or not, but I also think it's largely irrelevant whether the documents were declassified by the president on the way out the door because the national security interests of top-secret compartmentalized information state the same whether the label had been taken off by the president or not," said Weissmann. "In other words, a rose by any other name still smells as sweet. It doesn't really matter whether he thought he could take a label off or not. The national security impact is exactly the same. And, I think, the internal DOJ perspective in deciding whether to charge this, I would strongly suspect that people like Merrick Garland or Lisa Monaco are going to see it that way."

He also brought up the report that Trump's former top White House counselors, Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin, were two of the seven people who were appointed to handle documents from his presidency with the National Archives.

"So, the fact that they were interviewed [by the FBI] makes total sense because this was the ball that they were tasked with carrying," Weissmann continued. "And I would imagine that DOJ reached out to the other seven people, which by the way, Mark Meadows is one. And in your timeline, the other thing I would note, is that in June of 2022, just at the time of the reaching out by DOJ, it appears that all seven were replaced by John Solomon and Kash Patel, and that was done by the former president. So, it was just a very interesting confluence. But there's a reason that those two people were interviewed by DOJ and I think that's again, just two of what I would strongly suspect is their attempt to try and talk to all seven."

When it comes to Cipollone and Philbin, they might not have the same legal exposure that Trump or Meadows did if they were trying to do the right thing, he explained. According to the previous reporting, both men were working to get some of the documents back from the White House residence that Trump took with him and get them to the National Archives to comply with the Presidential Records Act.

"This is not a hard call. Having been the general counsel of the FBI, we had to comply with the Records Act and we had a whole protocol in place and the director of the FBI, Bob Mueller, knew exactly what to do and comply with the rules. This is an easy one. This is not one where there's a lot of gray [area]. It is very black and white. These documents don't belong to the individual person and they belong to the government. It's not about giving them back. You turn them into personal custody, the former president and they're supposed to be given directly to the national archives. Which, by the way, pointedly the vice president said he did and had enough time to do."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Florida prosecutor: Trump's new lawsuit is a 'delay tactic' — and bound to fail

On Monday's edition of CNN's "The Situation Room," Palm Beach County Attorney Dave Aronberg weighed in on the new lawsuit Trump filed in South Florida to try to block the Justice Department from reviewing the materials the FBI seized at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

The key problem for Trump, said Aronberg, is that this is being done after the fact.

"Dave, do you think he's going to be successful at slowing down the investigation, and what do you make of that two-week delay?" asked anchor Alex Marquardt

"This is a day late and a dollar short. Namely, two weeks late," said Aronberg. "The documents have already been reviewed. There's already a filter team in place. It's called a taint team, to make sure no privileged documents are among the ones taken. If there are privileged documents, they're put aside, segregated from the rest of it. It's hard to argue the urgency. You need to justify the urgency of a special master when you've waited two weeks to file your motion."

Ultimately, Aronberg said, this comes down to the fact that Trump has no top tier lawyers left advising him — and all he can do now is stall.

"This looks like a delay tactic, especially because they specifically request a pause in the investigation in this motion," said Aronberg. "I don't think they're going to get it. This is what happens when you have trouble finding experienced criminal defense lawyers to represent you. You end up litigating your case on right-wing media instead of the courtroom while the clock runs out."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Trump's lawyers admit to him violating the Espionage Act in their own court filing: legal analyst

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe walked through the "strange" court filing from Donald Trump calling for a court-appointed reviewer of the documents taken from his golf club after a search warrant. But among the things that were the most unexpected is the admission of guilt.

Legal analyst Marcy Wheeler, of EmptyWheel, posted an excerpt from the documents showing the strange admission of guilt.

The court filing says that Trump was subpoenaed on May 11, 2022, and "On June 2, 2022, President Trump, through counsel, invited the FBI to come to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve responsive documents."

About a month after the subpoena, Trump invited the FBI to come in and look at what he had. So, why did Trump still have the documents after June 2, necessitating a search warrant?

"Responsive documents were provided to the FBI agents," it says on page 5.

Twice, in the document, Trump admits he took government documents, which is illegal under the Espionage Act and the Presidential Records Act.



This sentence is a confession to a violation of the Espionage Act.

Written by lawyers claiming to represent the former President, who they call the President.



"On June 8, 2022, Mr. Bratt wrote to counsel for President Trump. His letter requested, in pertinent part, that the storage room be secured. In response, President Trump directed his staff to place a second lock on the door to the storage room, and one was added," says the filing.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman revealed on Monday evening that the documents contained over 300 classified items that included national security information involving the NSA, CIA and FBI. The docs were not only in a storage room, but they were also being hidden in Donald Trump's personal office closet. It's unclear if the FBI knew about that prior to the search, however.

Laurence Tribe called the court documents "very strange," a non-legal term reserved for extraordinarily bizarre cases.

"It's very strange," he began. "For one thing, it's filed not on behalf of private citizen Trump but filed on behalf of President Donald J. Trump. You know, it's never been clear that he distinguishes between himself as a private citizen and himself as president. That may help explain just psychologically why he feels he's entitled to all these papers. He says they're his. That's one thing that's really strange. Another thing that's quite strange, you mentioned yourself just a minute ago: he waited a couple of weeks. So, it's sort of too late to ask for some new special master."

Palm Beach County Attorney Dave Aronberg told CNN earlier on Monday that the legal filing was "a day late and a dollar short," referring to Trump's inability to file the challenge immediately upon the search warrant. Aronberg said this is largely the problem of having a limp legal team that spent more time trying the case on conservative news than it did try it in court.

Tribe noticed on page seven that Trump attacked the Justice Department for taking three days to get the search warrant and execute it. It's unclear why Trump is bothered by the timeline.

"Then, finally, it's strange, not so much what it says but what it doesn't say," he continued. "It doesn't really give any good reasons for thinking this warrant was illegal. In fact, one of the amazing things that I agree with is a statement on page 13 that President Trump, he still calls himself President Trump, should not be treated differently from any other citizen. Finally, he gets that right. Any other citizen who took top-secret material to not just a private home but a resort, like Mar-a-Lago, which has been penetrated by Chinese spies and perhaps by others, would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. So, he is sort of asking Merrick Garland to prosecute him. Thank you, Mr. Trump, I won't call him President Trump."

Reid then walked through a list of people who were arrested for taking top secret documents in other administrations and were indicted.

"If he's being treated not as president but as a citizen, he's got to be indicted," Tribe explained. "Otherwise, the rule of law just doesn't mean anything."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

'This guy is really bad': Even some Pennsylvania Trump voters feel queasy about backing Doug Mastriano



On Monday, WHYY reported that many suburban voters in Pennsylvania — even some who backed former President Donald Trump — are hesitant to support GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, whom they see as an extremist.

One of the key reasons, according to the report, is Mastriano's position on abortion, which he would theoretically be able to put into action in light of the Supreme Court's decision to eliminate the judicial protections in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

"Mastriano, a state senator, opposes abortion under all circumstances. His Democratic opponent, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, says he wants to maintain Pennsylvania’s current law: Abortion is legal up to about 24 weeks of gestation, with later-term abortions permitted in case of a medical emergency," reported Katie Meyer. "Stacy Naulty is one of those voters for whom a total ban is a problem. She’s 43 and lives near Lansdale, a Montgomery County town about an hour from Philadelphia, with her four kids. She supported Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020."

“I think he’s too far conservative. I think he will cause more of a divide in our state if he gets in as governor,” said Naulty to WHYY. She added, “I do think he will take it to the extreme and completely shut abortion down altogether, and that’s not an answer these days. People rape children. You’re going to have her, you know, have a baby out of that situation? No. It’s not OK.”

Cara Alderfen, a Bucks County woman who voted for Trump in 2016, agreed, saying, "this guy is really bad" and the abortion issue was "the nail in the coffin for me."

Mastriano's candidacy has been dogged with controversy from the start. He was present at the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and lied about the extent of his involvement. He also has ties to local extremist churches, including the pro-QAnon "Rod of Iron Ministries" that believes guns are sacred, and LifeGate, a Christian nationalist group that has ties to militia groups and has provided security at Mastriano's campaign stops.

All of this comes as Pennsylvania Republicans are also struggling in the Senate race, with their nominee, daytime TV celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz, becoming a target of widespread ridicule for a recirculating video of himself from April in a grocery store in which he complained about the high price of crudités.

Read More Here: https://whyy.org/articles/pennsylvania-suburban-voters-abortion-mastriano-election-2022/


Pennsylvania Republican's security team includes an Oath Keeper and members of a 'scary' church: report



Right-wing gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has surrounded himself with an armed security team who count at least one member with direct ties to a militia group, and it's not clear whether they're being paid.

The Pennsylvania Republican's security detail includes several members of the LifeGate evangelical church whose leaders openly call for electing Christians who will govern based on their interpretation of biblical principles, including Elizabethtown Area School Board member James Emery, who blocked reporters from entering a Mastriano campaign event in Erie, reported Lancaster Online.

“I’ve not known state senators and House members to have security, per se, they might have aides following them,” said G. Terry Madonna, a senior fellow in residence for political affairs at Millersville University. “But this doesn't strike me as unusual given where we are as a country. (Six or seven security guards) would seem to me to be unusually large, but again, given the environment we’re in.”

But what is unusual are the associations some of these security team members bring to Mastriano's campaign, including Emery's membership in the politically active LifeGate Church, which some Republicans believe is attempting "a hostile takeover" of the local GOP.

“It’s a little scary," said Logan Hoover, a West Donegal Township resident who lost a race for committeeman. "As a Republican I hope Republicans do well, I don’t wish them ill will, but I hope we are true to who we are as a community and not just this one single group.”

Scott Nagle, another Mastriano security guard and LifeGate member, was recently listed as regional director for the Oath Keepers militia whose co-founder, Stewart Rhodes, has been charged with seditious conspiracy for allegedly helping to plot the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Mastriano was at the U.S. Capitol that day and has denied breaching police barriers, but he has campaigned on Donald Trump's election lies and promised to help ensure his favored candidate won the next presidential election.

Read More Here:

https://lancasteronline.com/news/politics/flow-from-the-pulpit-the-lifegate-church-members-providing-security-to-doug-mastriano-video/article_df406aa2-1fe2-11ed-aeff-03f9ba26a060.html