☕️ SITTING DUCKS ☙ Wednesday, May 8, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Stormy spins sex stories; classified docs judge cans trial; jabmaker pulls product after clot reveal; Moderna admits millions of injuries; Boy Scouts rename to Woke Scouts; a tale of two tanks; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! That means it’s time to roundup all the news you need to know. In today’s fascinating edition: Trump ‘legal expenses’ trial gets x-rating; Trump classified documents trial suffers a setback for the government; AstraZeneca makes a coincidental, totally not-related move right after reluctantly admitting its clot shots are unsafe; veterinarian jabmaker claims massive numbers of Americans permanently disabled by you-know-what; Boy Scouts finally go ahead and just rename to Woke Scouts; we dodge a nuclear bullet and two tank articles tell us everything we need to know about the state of the Proxy War.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 CNN published an chastened op-ed yesterday evening titled “Honig: The prosecutors may have gone ‘a little too far’ during Stormy Daniels testimony.” That’s what she said.

Most of the media’s column inches on the various Trump cases yesterday were devoted to washed-up, B-roll pornographer Stormy Daniels’ play-by-play descriptions of ancient alleged intimate encounters with the former President. By all accounts, her testimony was X-rated, undignified, unworthy of the Court, and totally over the top, which resulted in Trump’s exasperated team seeking a mistrial at least once. Judge Merchan, who at times even tried himself to shut Stormy up, denied the mistrial motion but admitted that lots of salacious stuff should never have been said. As you know, we always take the high road here at C&C, and I won’t dignify Stormy’s wild stories of presidential spankings any further.

The utter lack of dignity and self-respect in these proceedings make for some kind of metaphor here, but I’ll leave exploring that to you guys in the comments.

🔥🔥 Much more interesting, and much less covered, were developments in Trump’s much more dangerous classified documents case. CNN ran a tearful story yesterday headlined, “Federal judge indefinitely postpones Trump classified documents trial.”

This case, arising from FBI’s dramatic raid on Mar-a-Lago, is one of the three other criminal cases pending against Trump, besides the Stormy Daniels’ mischaracterized expenses case.  The classified documents case has long been considered the most serious case, the case offering liberals their best hopes for undemocratically derailing Trump’s presidential ambitions.

But some remarkable issues have arisen with the evidence. CNN’s article was light on details, but reported the most important development to CNN: Judge Aileen Cannon canceled the current trial date — without setting a new one — since she’s facing eight substantial new motions she has yet to rule on. To give you an idea how substantial, one of the motions is scheduled for a three-day hearing.

But the issue of FBI evidence tampering might have been the most interesting out of a raft of very interesting Trump team issues. Do you remember this widely-circulated picture?

The photo — unimaginably leaked by the DOJ —  was one of the pictures allegedly taken by the FBI during the Mar-a-Lago raid. Many observers, including me, opined it looked like FBI drama queens had deliberately staged the documents, dramatically spreading them out on the floor, intending to manufacture a media picture for later leaking.

Either way, that picture did the job. On August 31, 2022, for example, Washington Post fact checker Philip Bump explained to readers that the “question of whether Trump had classified material with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort has captured the public’s attention. The photo published by the government appears to answer that question quite affirmatively.”

It turns out those of us who smelled an FBI rat were right, as the government has recently been reluctantly forced to admit. At least, we were right that the documents were not originally found on Trump’s office floor. Rather, they were neatly stored in secured bankers’ boxes. The FBI altered the evidence by throwing it all over the floor helter-skelter, putting stupid tape measures under it to look official, and adding a silly evidence tag (“2A”), like they were marking the location where the fatal bullet casing was found.

But it turns out it was so much worse. Thanks to heroic work by Trump’s lawyers, and following several stern orders from Judge Cannon forcing the government to respond to basic discovery requests, we’ve now learned that the documents in the picture aren’t even the documents in the picture.

What I mean is, the FBI has now admitted that the documents seen splayed on the floor are dummies, props. At the time the picture was taken, the original classified documents had already been secured and removed. So the FBI took some other random papers and  — get this — put classified cover sheets on them and then posed those dummy documents on the floor. Picture time.

Not only weren’t the documents found on the floor, and not only weren’t the documents in the picture the actual documents, but the official-looking classified document cover sheets as seen in the photo were totally fake. There were no classified cover sheets on any of the original documents. It was all made up. Here’s how the government warily tried to explain the operation in one of its recent filings:

“[If] the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose.”

And now, they’ve even lost track of at least some of the documents and their fabricated placeholders. The government carefully admitted:

“In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”

“In many instances.” But not all. Worse for the government, over the last year or so, its lawyers have repeatedly insisted that the bankers’ boxes were preserved exactly in their original conditions. But the government’s latest filings and admissions indicate those repeated representations to the court were false.

It’s not a mere technicality. Trump’s lawyers have offered various legitimate reasons why the FBI’s poor handling of the evidence has fatally compromised the case. For one thing, they’d intended to show that everything in the boxes had been packed in sequential date order, proving the documents were undisturbed from when the National Archives staff originally packed them for Trump to take with him.

But now the documents are all mixed up, not even in the same bankers’ boxes in which they began. Nobody knows anymore.

So the government now faces two new, potentially fatal problems: the evidence tampering (or at least, evidence negligence), and lying to the court. And the CNN article mentioned, this is just one of the many complex and potentially novel issues now confronting the government’s case.

🔥 Trump’s team seems to be pursuing a litigation strategy that, for lack of a proper term, I will call “saturation.” In important, big-dollar cases where my defendant clients faced large, well-funded institutional opponents (usually banks, in my cases), I have successfully used the saturation strategy many times.

It works like this: the lawyers for the defense become super granular. They fly-specked every document, every contract, every email, every everything hunting any viable legal theory. (You might think this happens in every case, but it doesn’t. Most cases can’t justify the extraordinary expense, and good lawyers simply don’t have time to work more than one saturation case at a time.)

Thanks to human fallibility, and the fabulous fountains of fate, there are always issue nuggets that can be mined from the documents and the other evidence. Always. And each time a viable new issue is found, the lawyers will develop the issue and use it to attack the prosecution’s case. After a while, the defense has developed multiple separate and stand-alone defense theories, any one of which could be the one that wins the case.

Done properly, the defense will be sitting on a sort of legal theory gold mine. The low chances of winning each individual issue add up to something more that all together is more of a certainty of a win. You almost never lose everything, and if you only have to win something, it adds up to pretty good odds.

Through skillful work, it looks like Trump’s lawyers may have reached the legal saturation point in this case, where the accumulated weight of all the defense’s viable issues will inevitably crush the prosecution. It’s terrific lawyering. Even these tampered evidence issues, which seem obvious once they have been laid out, only became viable defenses due to bulldogging tenacity in discovery disputes and microscopic document analysis by Trump’s legal team.

For this update, I relied extensively on Julie Kelly’s latest Substack. She’s been doing yeoman’s work following this incredibly busy case, where all of the real legal action seems to be happening.

💉💉 It’s only been a handful of weeks since British covid vaccine maker AstraZeneca was forced to admit in legal pleadings what the government regulators and politicians have long steadfastly denied: its spike-protein-based immunity juice causes some people’s blood to clot. And now, completely unrelated, believe me, it’s just a coincidence, Reuters ran this headline yesterday: “AstraZeneca says it will withdraw COVID-19 vaccine globally as demand dips.”

CLIP: Here’s UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak*, telling parliament ‘let me be unequivocal — covid vaccines ARE SAFE’ (0:08). (*real name?)

The dips at Reuters credulously reported the company line, which is that “as multiple, variant COVID-19 vaccines have since been developed there is a surplus of available updated vaccines.” The UK Guardian’s story was much less naive, injecting a hint of skepticism right in its article’s sub-headline: “Company says decision is purely commercial as jab has been superseded by alternatives.”

In fact, the Guardian’s first sentence practically called the jabmaker a liar:

The Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine is being withdrawn worldwide, months after the pharmaceutical giant admitted for the first time in court documents that it can cause a rare and dangerous side effect.

Remember — lawsuits filed by regular British folks finally forced AstraZeneca to cough up the fact of its clotting problem (the murky mechanism of harm remains baffling). In a very practical sense, their lawsuit resulted in the dangerous drug being yanked from the markets, if you don’t believe the drugmaker’s claims of dipping demand, that is.

It seemed like the Guardian did not entirely believe those claims, since it included the doubting plaintiff’s lawyer’s skeptical remarks in its story:

Sarah Moore, a partner at law firm Leigh Day, which is bringing the legal claims, said: “To those who we represent, all of whom have suffered bereavement or serious injury as a result of the AstraZeneca vaccine, this decision to withdraw marketing authorisation, ending the usage of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the EU, will be welcomed.

“It will be seen as a decision linked with AstraZeneca’s recent admission that the vaccine can cause TTS, and the fact that regulators across the world suspended or stopped usage of the vaccine following concerns regarding TTS.

“This is an important regulatory step, but still our clients remain without fair compensation. We will continue to fight for the compensation our clients need and campaign for reform of the vaccine damage payment scheme.”

The war continues, but we just won an important battle. And we will never stop, not till all the drugs have been relegated to historical footnotes and the people behind them are more infamous than Josef Mengele and Benedict Arnold.

💉 Fair warning: prepare to be aggravated. They know. In a recent World Economic Forum clip making the rounds this week, veterinarian and Moderna CEO Stéphan Bancel freely admitted that sixteen million Americans now have disabling long covid, which most of us interpret in proper English as “long vaxx:”

The true face of evil also admitted that four million young, healthy, working-age Americans have been permanently disabled and can no longer work:

"In the US so far, there's been sixteen million people with long Covid, mostly young people in their twenties, their thirties, their forties...Somebody who used to able to jog 5 kilometers they can barely walk now because of lung damage which is permanent, is very profound…four million Americans out of a job right now because of long Covid..."

The notion that four million Americans have been permanently disabled by “long covid” is laughable. We see you, Bancel. Clutching at straws, Bancel suggested more “prevention” is the answer, and then excreted a bunch of meaningless medical freedom platitudes like modern health care is really “sick care” and we should focus more on creating health than on curing illness. Uh huh.

Or — and I realize this is difficult for people with Bancel’s limited intellectual scope to comprehend — maybe we could start focusing on creating health by removing things from the environment that are making people sick. Like jabs.

Anyway, Bancel’s clip has been mercilessly and hilariously mocked online by extremely large numbers of social media viewers. The message is out of the barn, down the hill, and paddling across the Atlantic.

🔥 In the bottom story of the day, the Associated Press ran a tragic article yesterday headlined, “Boy Scouts of America changing name to more inclusive Scouting America after years of woes.”

After 114 years, the Boy Scouts are finally casting off the one thing that has become their biggest problem: boys. Boys seem disinterested in newfangled “safe and inclusive” woke activities. They apparently prefer dangerous, testosterone-fueled fun like running around in the woods, learning survival skills, starting fires, fishing with real hooks, spitting for distance, and generally horsing around.

Because of boys’ defective desires, starting in 2013 — as the earliest part of its “rebranding” effort — the Boy Scouts began recruiting scoutmasters who were a little light in the loafers along with gay scouts. As the pandemic rolled around, perhaps recognizing that “The Gay Scouts” wouldn’t sell well, the Boy Scouts started actively recruiting girls — to be Boy Scouts — even to the point that the exasperated Girl Scouts of America furiously sued them, claiming the Boy Scouts were just confusing everybody. (Their lawsuit got lost in the legal woods.)

Weirdly, during this time, the Boy Scouts have also been dogged by a raft of sex abuse cases.

So, say goodbye to the “Boy Scouts.” Say hello to “Scouting America,” whatever that means. In other words, the controlled demolition of the Boy Scouts is now complete. It has become the Woke Scouts.

Relevant:

🚀🚀  This week we narrowly survived a near-nuclear showdown. On Monday, the Russians urgently started unscheduled nuclear drills after several NATO officials plus one moronic democrat House Minority Leader (Hakeem Jeffries) escalated tensions by stupidly threatening to send Western troops into Ukraine. Fortunately, NATO backed down, and by way of apology, everyone including Biden expressly recognized Putin as Russia’s legitimate leader.

Putin was inaugurated for his sixth term as President yesterday. His inauguration, plus the widespread recognition of his legitimacy, frames a pending crisis as the official end of Zelensky’s term looms on May 21st — yet no new president has been elected in Ukraine.

But the current state of the Proxy War can perhaps be best illustrated through two contrasting articles. The first ran under this Associated Press headline, now two weeks old: “Ukraine pulls US-provided Abrams tanks from the front lines over Russian drone threats.” Whoopsies.

Named for heroic World War II General Creighton Abrams, the M1 Abrams is the United States’ premier battle tank. Each high-tech tank comes with a hefty $10 million price tag, weighs in at a whopping eighty tons, and needs between four and eight hours of regular maintenance downtime after every single hour of runtime. Last year, we gifted the Ukrainians with over thirty fabulously expensive Abrams tanks.

At the time, Ukrainian warbloggers celebrated receiving the massive metal fighting machines as a sign the war’s tide would soon change.

But unexpectedly, as the AP’s headline made clear, the $10 million dollar Abrams tank has been beaten by $200 Russian drones. Not only that, but Russia has  so far managed to capture at least six of the thirty-one American super-tanks. The problem seems to be that the eighty-ton beasts easily get mired in Ukraine’s thick rasputitsa — “mud” in the English — stranding hapless tank crews and making them into sitting kachky (i.e., ducks).

Meanwhile, creative Russian tank crews — allowed authority to jury rig their own experimental solutions to battlefield problems — ingeniously developed a cheap, ugly, but simple workaround to Ukraine’s drones: the turtle shield. In fact, the day before the AP published its swan song for the Abrams, Forbes ran a counterpointing story headlined, “The Russian Turtle Tank Is The Weirdest Armored Vehicle Of The Ukraine War. The Craziest Thing Is, It Might Actually Work.”

The official narrative would have us believe that Ukraine’s real problem is lack of money to buy ammunition. But setting aside the crisis that Ukraine is getting down to the last Ukrainian, these two tank stories provide a stark metaphorical contrast between the two sides in the Proxy War. The scrappy Russian soldiers are demonstrating good old-fashioned American ingenuity and adaptability. But the Ukrainian/NATO War-by-Committee is mired in the slough of despond, bogged down in the sticky rasputitsa by unwieldy, morbidly obese, maintenance-heavy, finicky, non-interoperable, too-clever-by-half donated gear that isn’t practical.

The two articles highlighted the two modern philosophical problems that dog our political class the worst. The first one is the unshakeable belief in the long-discredited theory that more money can cure any conceivable problem: drug addiction, homelessness, and failing educational institutions all spring to mind. The second chronic philosophical failure is the equally mistaken belief that bigger, more ambitious, higher-tech solutions are always better than cheap, practical answers.

These two philosophical mistakes bog down the West — and its proxy warrior, Ukraine — in impractical, unaffordably-expensive thinking thicker than the Ukrainian rasputitsa. That’s the real problem.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Join us again tomorrow morning for a refill of your daily Coffee & Covid, along with all the news you need to know.

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