Oklahoma has a stricter anti-establishment clause (separating church and state) in its state constitution than the US constitution. This happened because OK wrote its constitution in the 1900s in the midwest.

Having said that the Bible plan was absolutely horrendous. They were going to buy Trump-branded Bibles for $50 a piece, which contained just the public-domain King James text, and the US constitution. Complete grift.

The speech and debate clause is separate from the arrest clause. The Treason exception only applies to the first part.

Additionally, Treason has a definition elsewhere in this document, and just giving any kind of speech doesn’t meet the standard.

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

It would be pretty hard to claim that any kind of speechifying amounts to “Aid and Comfort”, especially if you can’t identify the “Enemy” in a time when the nation is at peace.

Now the first amendment does apply here, but I expect a legal defense to go to this speech and debate clause first, then 1st amendment. Because 1st amendment has a bunch of exceptions of the “yelling fire in a crowded theater” type, but speech and debate is going to be more ironclad. Once you convince a court that you were doing Congressional speech or debate, then the only discipline you can face is from your chamber’s rules, period.

B-but, but… The Burn Bags??? The grand jury in Florida??? The conspiracy against rights???

Kash gotta stick around to cover for that stuff, right?

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, keep it that way. This is like the dumbest bullshit I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard a lotta bullshit. )

Double jeopardy is not a factor in this situation, because the first jeopardy “does not attach” until a jury is seated and sworn in for trial, or when a guilty plea is accepted. The trial by jury is the “jeopardous” part of the criminal justice process. If the case is tossed before that point for any reason, then there is no jeopardy bar to refiling.

If a trial starts, but ends in a mistrial, then it is usually possible to go to another trial, even though jeopardy “has attached”. A mistrial ruling effectively “unwinds” the entire trial like it never happened.

or is it like an annulment where it kind of never happened?

This is what Judge Currie said in her opinion. The indictments didn’t happen because they were run entirely by a pretend US attorney.

I am not looking forward to potential litigation on that question.

[The Senators and Representatives] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Beach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

You are correct. The public only receives written transcripts of the relevant sections of tape only. Off-topic conversations, meaning anything that is not relevant to the air accident, are not released. The audio files are not released to the public.

It’s a real geopolitical problem for Russia. Russia got screwed by geography in terms of natural harbors that don’t freeze over in the winter. It’s why they’ve always had a crap navy, going way back into the imperial days.

Right now, the Russian Navy is based in Murmansk (brrrr. limited routes to get out into Atlantic) and the Black Sea. The Black Sea is bad for them because Turkey (a NATO member) makes sure to maintain total control of what passes through the Bosphorous.

Part of what Russia did in Syria during the civil war netted them a lease on a base on the Mediterranean. That could have had some use for power projection, but I think they lost it when a certain opthalmologist was expelled.

Anyhow, it’s hilarious when the trolls posing as MAGA Americans bring this up, because real Americans just take their total abundance of ports that don’t freeze over completely for granted. That’s why I point out secondary, less busy port cities on the Gulf of Mexico, where the water is actually pretty warm (instead of just not freezing over). Just to highlight how good the US has it. Even if we were forced to give up Norfolk and Coronado, there are plenty of other suitable places we could have naval bases.

Ah, yes. As a patriotic American I love our warm water ports like Corpus Christi and Tampa. Don’t you love warm water ports as well?

In semi related news, Greg Bovino, the El Paso sector chief turned tactical commander of Operation Midway Blitz, has personally been found to be a non-credible witness by a federal judge.

This is a finding of fact. It’s presumptively admissable evidence in any future legal case he might testify in. On appeal, it can only be reversed for “clear error.”

That makes this a friendly Kavanaugh stop.

Yep. And remember folks, every secret service, FBI, DEA, or ATF agent out on the streets abducting brown people is one less agent working their regular counterfeiting, terrorism, public corruption, money laundering, drug trafficking, or weapons cases.

It’s really just Alito, not the full court.

Each circuit is assigned to a justice who initially handles emergency motions from that circuit. Alito is assigned to the 5th circuit, which contains Texas. Jackson handled the recent SNAP funding case because she is assigned to the 1st circuit which contains Massachusetts.

So Alito’s stay will be redecided by the full court. He set the response deadline on Monday, so it could be any time after that. It could be real fast or it could be a month.

Speaking on the merits of this application, it seems kind of rich to me to say that the court challenge is too close to the election, but it’s not too close for the legislature to change the map like a month earlier.

I think it bears mentioning that the Coast Guard is the only military service branch organized under Dept. of Homeland Security, rather than Dept. of Defense.

TAL did a different episode along a similar line where two babies were accidentally switched around in the hospital nursery, so they were raised by the wrong families.

Do snow crabs live to be 35?

Finally, these two letters, thorn and eth, dropped out of English a long time ago, but they’re still in Modern Icelandic today.

Each one of those bullet points is potentially a way for Comey to get his whole case thrown out. In addition to that, Comey has 4 other motions to dismiss pending right now, and they’re pretty good arguments. At this point, Comey has so many different ways to win, that it is really hard to imagine that he won’t win on one of them. (In which case he still has an entire trial to defend himself on).

The issue where there’s no case law is a pretty narrow one, I think: The grand jury voted to approve the words of the charges (except that the charge numbers were different), but not the specific piece of paper that the words ended up typed out on. Is that important for the formal charging process or not? Either way this gets decided, it won’t effect very many people, because any competent prosecutor will just re-run the new piece of paper past the jury to make sure. And it may not get decided at all if Comey’s case is dismissed on any of the other reasons.

EDIT: If it’s not true. If it turns out that the grand jury no-billed all three counts, then we’d be looking at a forged indictment. And that would be a serious crime.

I encourage everyone to read the opinion, at least the fact findings. Because it is absolutely unhinged and insane. There are 11 separate findings of fact as to why Comey needs to see the grand jury materials. Here are some summaries:

• Nearly all of the presented evidence relies on search warrants from the Arctic Haze investigation (2019-2020). In the USA, search warrants specify the specific types of evidence to be seized, and the crimes they are searching for. These warrants were for some personal hard drives and email accounts of James Comey’s personal friend and attorney, Dan Richman.
• The warrants themselves said that the government was to go through the full forensic extractions and pick out data that was relevant to the investigation into classified data mishandling. The rest of the search data was to be thrown out. This was not done.
• The warrants said that attorney-client privilege data was to be separated out and thrown out. The first part was done, but not for the Comey-Richman privileged material, and in any case, the full extractions were retained, illegally.
• The warrants were to look for evidence of classified data mishandling, not evidence of lying to Congress. You can’t just take the data from one warrant and use it on another case. You need to get a new warrant for the new case, which wasn’t done. What happened here turns the warrants into “general warrants,” which King George III was infamous for using.
• The FBI agent (Agent 2) for this case was directed to review raw Cellebrite cell phone extractions, which were not supposed to be retained. While reading this stuff, he noticed that some emails between Comey and Richman appeared to be attorney client privilege material.
• Agent 2 passed some information from the Cellebrite to Agent 3 in a memo. Despite being tainted, Agent 3 went ahead and testified to the grand jury anyway.
• Halligan told the grand jury that Comey would be required to testify at trial to clarify things. This is absolutely wrong. Comey has the right to “take the fifth” and not testify at trial, and no adverse inference can be drawn if he chooses not to testify.
• Halligan suggested to the jury that her burden of proof at trial would something less than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” This is also a wrong instruction on the law.
• Halligan told the jury that she would have better evidence to present by trial time, and they could consider that promise when deciding whether to indict. This is wrong. The grand jury must make its decision based only on the evidence presented to it.
• And finally, the big kicker. There is a reasonable basis to think that the 2-count indictment that this prosecution is based on…the actual charging document…was never actually presented to the grand jury for an up-or-down vote. Instead, we think that the grand jury voted on the 3-count bill, rejecting count 1, and finding probable cause on counts 2 and 3. Then Halligan wrote a new indictment, renumbering 2 and 3 as counts 1 and 2, and got the foreperson to sign that, without holding another vote. This is, in the words of Judge Fitzpatrick, “unknown legal territory.” There’s no case law on this exact kind of screw-up.

The auto pen stuff too.