'Very unlikely': Ex-Trump lawyer doubts immunity defense can make NY conviction go away – Raw Story
Matthew Chapman is a video game designer who attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and lives in San Marcos, Texas. Before joining Raw Story, he wrote for Shareblue and AlterNet, specializing in election and policy coverage.
A former attorney for Donald Trump poured cold water on his ex-client's plan to get his felony conviction in the Manhattan hush money case tossed citing the Supreme Court's recent presidential immunity ruling.
The judge in the hush money case delayed the former president's sentencing two months while a lower court judge applies the new standard of immunity for "official acts.
Trump's argument that there was anything "official" about his hush payments to an adult film star — a scheme cooked up without presidential powers and before his 2016 election — will almost certainly not fly, former Trump attorney Tim Parlatore explained to CNN's Pamela Brown.
"How likely is it that Trump ultimately get his conviction overturned?" asked Brown.
"I think it's very unlikely," said Parlatore, who previously helped Trump's defense in the federal investigations against him for Jan. 6 and the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Read also: Trump's 'entirely wrong' bid to get his hush money trial tossed is going nowhere: expert
"Given the Supreme Court's decision, and really we're talking about an admissibility issue, that if there are certain things that are alleged to be criminal, but are in fact immune, that that's not something that can be used at trial for things that are not immune. I think that the reasoning that the Trump team is kind of going for here, at least as far as I can tell, seems to be a bit strained, and I don't think that the idea that you can't introduce anything that a president ever does while they're president, I think goes a little bit far."
Ultimately, Parlatore added, "I think that Judge [Juan] Merchan is doing the right thing of at least having a hearing to make sure he has a full record, but the likelihood of success on this is extraordinarily low."
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Tim Parlatore doubts Trump will have his conviction tossedwww.youtube.com
Faced with mounting calls from within his own party to bow out and allow Vice President Kamala Harris to head up the ticket, President Joe Biden so far doesn't appear to be planning for an exit — and there's an important reason for that, wrote University of Pennsylvania psychologist Adam Grant for The New York Times.
Specifically, he wrote, Biden faces a psychological phenomenon known as "escalation of commitment to a losing course of action," or the idea that one tends to prefer doubling down because "it feels better to be a fighter than a quitter."
"One of the tragedies of the human condition is that we use our big brains not to make rational decisions, but rather to rationalize the decisions we’ve already made," wrote Grant — and this goes beyond politicians simply refusing to give up in the face of dimming odds. "We stick around too long in dead-end jobs. We stay in unhappy marriages even after friends have counseled us to leave. We stand by candidates even after they violate our principles."
ALSO READ: How The Onion’s founding editor finds humor in the dismal age of Trump
Past presidents have stuck to failing policies out of this very fear — including the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, he noted. "It happens in business, too: Blockbuster went bust because instead of buying Netflix, leaders escalated their commitment to renting physical videos. Kodak made the same mistake by doubling down on selling film instead of pivoting to digital cameras."
Escalation of commitment is made stronger, Grant explained, when someone feels emotionally attached to the plan, when the end is drawing near, and when there is still some semblance of a path to victory — all of which is true in Biden's case. Which makes it all the more difficult for him to change course — further compounded by the fear many of his own staffers have to speak their mind.
"What Mr. Biden needs is not a support network but a challenge network — people who have the will to put the country’s interests ahead of his and the skill to coldly assess his chances," Grant concluded. "That’s a task for someone who is not affiliated with the campaign in any way, someone whose judgment has proved to be impeccable and most of all, impartial, and someone who is not worried about the possible cost to their own career."
It may be time, he added, for Biden to recognize that "service is not only about stepping up to lead. It’s also about having the courage to step aside."
Donald Trump ally Michael Flynn shot down social media claims he'd been chosen as the former president's vice presidential running mate Wednesday.
A Federal Election Commission filing was shared on Twitter appearing to show Flynn's name added to a Donald Trump fundraising group — with the title "Vice President" accompanying it.
Flynn fired back almost immediately on his X account calling it fake.
"I just saw 2 unauthorized FEC filings referencing my name. They are fake news! I don't know anything about them, and my office has alerted the FEC," he said.
The post comes after Flynn issued an official statement of endorsement for Trump's 2024 campaign.
READ ALSO: 'Fraud': Trump campaign denies federal filing naming Michael Flynn as VP running mate
Last week, Raw Story's Jordan Green reported that a number of fake committees filed documents that inadvertently make false announcements.
"In late 2022, for example, someone created a federal political committee indicating that former Vice President Mike Pence had formed a 2024 presidential campaign committee," recalled Green. "But the committee was a fraud, and Pence's representatives scrambled to correct the record and debunk several premature media reports that Pence, who ultimately would run for president months later, had entered the race."
When a similar Trump-Flynn filing first popped up in June, the Trump campaign debunked it after Raw Story asked about it.
The committee, “Donald J. Trump and Michael Flynn for President 2024 Inc.,” is bogus, the Trump campaign confirmed to Raw Story.
Last week, Flynn himself responded to Raw Story's reporting by indicating he is not in contention to become Trump's vice presidential running mate.
Republicans are not the victors of a tumultuous campaign week that saw President Joe Biden flub his first debate and former President Donald Trump win a landmark Supreme Court ruling — the oligarchy is, a new analysis contends.
Slate writers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern presented an alternative Wednesday to the predominant political narrative that Biden’s campaign is nosediving while a newly disciplined Trump reaps the benefit.
Rather than look at the face of the political parties, they raise the specter of Supreme Court rulings they say demonstrate a cataclysmic governmental shift.
“Make no mistake about it,” the pair write, “When a court that has been battered by near-weekly reports of undisclosed oligarch-funded vacations (and gifts and super yachts and tricked out RVs and secret conferences with high-paying Koch supporters getting access to justices) decides to make it easier to bribe public officials—as it did in Snyder v. U.S.—that’s a very public signal that the conservative supermajority does not care what you think.”
The Slate editorial shifts its gaze away from red versus blue and toward the growing powers they say the nation’s political elite managed to wrestle away from the federal government.
ALSO READ: Fact-checker buries celebration of 'disciplined' Trump by using barrage of furious posts
The Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision was only one of many rulings they argue dismantle checks and balances and channel power toward a strengthening epicenter of government.
“The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees are sympathetic to wealthy individuals and corporations, so they will contort the law to help them,” write Lithwick and Stern.
“The court has placed itself at the apex of the state, agreeing to share power only with a strongman president who seeks to govern in line with the conservative justices’ vision.”
The pair argue the federal checks dismantled in three under-the-radar rulings made in the past week — one obliterating a statute of limitations on government regulation challenges and another a mandate that courts rely on agency know-how — imperil basic necessities of daily American life.
“That is how American government has functioned for well over a century, to the great benefit of the citizenry,” write Lithwick and Stern.
”It’s why there is clean air and drinkable, water and airplanes that stay in the sky and drugs that don’t kill us.”
Unfortunately, while the pair present their readers with a specific vision of an imminent catastrophic future, they don’t have specifics on what an actionable solution might entail.
“Public outrage has somehow made the court more reckless,” the Slate writers conclude. “The time for wishful thinking about the power of shame, institutional legitimacy, and historical legacy is over. The time for action may well be now or never.”
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