Jamie Raskin Goes Scorched Earth on SCOTUS Trump Immunity Case

Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin took aim at a peculiar line of questioning brought by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in Donald Trump’s presidential immunity arguments on Thursday, during which one of the high court’s most conservative members seemed to claim that actually punishing Trump for any alleged crimes might only encourage him to break more laws.

“The most astonishing thing for me today was Justice Alito’s question. He actually asked whether holding the president criminally accountable for actual crimes committed, whether murder or coup or you name it, whether holding them accountable would actually encourage them to stage more violent coups to stay in office to avoid prosecution,” Raskin told MSNBC later Thursday.

“Which buys completely into Donald Trump’s narcissistic criminal worldview. I mean, for all of American history, we have said presidents are subject to criminal prosecution if they commit crimes. That’s why Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. That’s why Bill Clinton agreed to give up his law license with the bar for five years so he wouldn’t face criminal prosecution.”

“Now they say, ‘If you’re really mean to Donald Trump and you hold him accountable the same way every other American citizen is held accountable, then he’ll really overthrow the government, he’ll really bring out the big guns, and we can’t afford that,’” Raskin continued. “And that’s a kind of masochistic capitulation-ism of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.”

“Of course we’ve got to hold the president accountable to the law,” he said. “It’s the basic premise of our law, that nobody is above the law, including the president.”

Raskin also went on to argue that a popular mode of thinking about how to hold Trump accountable—which is that you can “impeach and convict and then you can prosecute him”—defies the language of the U.S. Constitution.

“That twists the language and turns it upside down in the Constitution. It says, even if you’re impeached and convicted, ‘nevertheless’ you can still be prosecuted and tried and convicted and punished, presupposing, of course, that the president is subject to criminal law,” Raskin said.

The Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case has already significantly waylaid Trump’s D.C. trial, which hinges on whether the former president can be tried for his alleged involvement in the MAGA-led January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, disrupting Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election results.

Following a hearing on Thursday, the court appeared ready to reject Trump’s claims that he can’t be tried on alleged election interference, but their decision may still significantly delay a trial that was originally slated to be the GOP presidential nominee’s first criminal proceeding. The high court’s ruling is expected to be released sometime between late June and early July.

A former associate of Rudy Giuliani has blown open the Hunter Biden laptop story, revealing that Donald Trump and his associates decided to target President Joe Biden’s son months before they claimed they had unearthed his laptop at a Delaware repair shop.

In an interview released Thursday night by MeidasTouch, Ukrainian American businessman Lev Parnas claimed the cohort had been notified of the presence of a laptop belonging to Hunter in February 2019.

“We knew as early as middle-to-end of February 2019, is when the first time I heard about the Hunter Biden laptop from Yuriy Lutsenko,” Parnas told MeidasTouch, referring to Ukraine’s former minister of internal affairs. “He told me that there is a hard drive out there with compromising information on Hunter Biden, and he promised to get it to us.”

But that was two months before Trumpworld’s accusations of impropriety by Hunter Biden officially began, with the Delaware computer repair shop owner claiming that a man identifying himself as Hunter Biden had dropped off a laptop for repairs in April 2019.

The laptop story has been thoroughly debunked—including by a joint investigation by two Republican Senate committees, as well as an investigation by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.

Parnas, who had been tasked with helping Giuliani connect with Ukrainian officials in his effort to “find dirt on the Bidens” ahead of the 2020 election, has been unearthing the inner workings of his former associates since the scheme blew up. On Tuesday, Parnas revealed that Giuliani had basically insisted on bribes while meeting with Ukrainian officials who did not pose immediate aid to the Hunter Biden corruption narrative.

“Lutsenko told me, ‘I’m the General Prosecutor of Ukraine, I want to meet A.G. Barr,’ so, I tell that to Rudy and he’s like, ‘Look, you want to meet Attorney General [Bill] Barr, the way things work here is you pay a lobbyist and they will get you in there, so you can pay me $200,000 and I will introduce you to Attorney General Bill Barr,’” Parnas recalled to MediasTouch.

“That evening I go meet with Lutsenko… they get drunk. Lutensko is pouring his heart out to me, like he can’t believe what just happened, he looked up to Giuliani as his hero and here Giuliani is basically shaking him down for $200,000 to meet with Attorney General Barr.”

Rudolph Giuliani’s defense against facing criminal charges for his involvement in Arizona’s fake elector plot is not exactly a good one: He’s pointing out other states where he may have committed crimes as well.

“Well, I didn’t spend as much time on Arizona as I did, let’s say, with Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. I know those better,” Donald Trump’s former attorney told Newsmax Thursday night.

“I used Christina Bobb to a large extent, and I’m not putting anything off on Christina. If Christina said it happened, it’s probably more accurate than if I said it happened,” Giuliani added, referring to another former Trump attorney.

Bobb is now the Republican National Committee’s new senior counsel for election integrity. She and Giuliani were among seven Trump aides hit with criminal charges in Arizona for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Even after being charged on Wednesday, Giuliani couldn’t stop shooting his mouth off. New York’s former mayor has had a bad year, stuck in bankruptcy court thanks to the various lawsuits against him as well as unpaid legal fees from Trump.

Arizona has joined Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia in charging fake electors for trying to overturn the 2020 elections. Fake electors in Wisconsin have settled a civil lawsuit over their fraudulent efforts. Meanwhile, in Fulton County, Georgia, Trump himself faces charges for trying to overturn the state election results.

Uvalde parent Brett Cross has some words for Texas police, after their brutal crackdown on Texas university students protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza.

At the University of Texas at Austin Wednesday, more than 100 troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) showed up in full riot gear and military fatigues. They were deployed “at the direction of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, in order to prevent any unlawful assembly,” according to a statement sent to The Texas Tribune.

The response caught the attention of Cross, a parent of one of the children shot and killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022.

“Shit, if only they’d have moved like that when my son was being murdered,” Cross commented on X (formerly Twitter). “But what do I expect….1 AR-15 keeps 376 officers at bay.”

The DPS was one of the many law enforcement agencies who responded to the deadly Robb Elementary School shooting in 2022. Police at the scene were criticized for failing to confront the gunman for more than 90 minutes after the shooting began.

In contrast, police made 57 arrests at largely nonviolent protests at the University of Texas, which began when more than 500 students walked out of class Wednesday to demand the university divest from weapons manufacturers supplying Israel in its attacks on Gaza. The arrests included a cameraman with Fox 7, and video showed him being slammed to the ground. Most charges were later dropped.

Protests against the war and in support of the Palestinians have broken out across the country after a Columbia University protest encampment faced a police crackdown last week, and hundreds of arrests have been made nationwide. The University of Southern California on Thursday canceled its commencement ceremony, citing safety concerns in its own protests. The response from many media commentators and politicians has been to compare protestors to white nationalists who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, nearly seven years ago, and to make grandstanding campus visits. Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza continues to rise and weapons continue to be sent to Israel despite popular objection. 

Donald Trump’s old friend David Pecker is still dishing the dirt on the stand in the real estate mogul’s New York hush money trial, revealing on Thursday that the decision to catch and kill former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story about having a lurid affair with Trump was later re-approved by top members of his presidential administration.

Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer and former CEO of its parent company, American Media Inc., told the court that he had a joint call with Trump’s White House Communications Director Hope Hicks and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about McDougal’s story well after Trump had been elected.

The salacious tabloid executive claimed he had spoken with both taxpayer-funded officials about whether McDougal’s contract should be extended.

“Both of them said that they thought it was a good idea,” Pecker told the court.

And yet, while facing the public, Sanders insisted that allegations that Trump had distributed hush-money payments to women that he slept with were categorically false.

“As the President has said and we’ve stated many times, he did nothing wrong. There are no charges against him and we’ve commented on it extensively,” Sanders said in August 2018, brushing off allegations that Trump had lied to the American public as “ridiculous.”

“Just because Michael Cohen made a plea deal, doesn’t implicate the President on anything,” she said at the time.

Hicks, Cohen, and porn star Stormy Daniels are also expected to testify in the trial against the GOP presidential nominee. Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.