Tag: trump derangement syndrome

Trump Commuted His Sentence. Now the Justice Department Is Going To Prosecute Him Again.

When Philip Esformes walked out of prison in December 2020, he’d spent four and a half years behind bars, the majority of which were in solitary confinement. He reportedly weighed about 130 pounds. He was, in many ways, a broken man. But Esformes’ luck was changing: He had recently received clemency from former President Donald Trump, giving him the chance to rebuild his life after paying a debt to the country.

That fortune has quickly soured.

In a move that defies historical precedent, the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden is using a legal loophole to reprosecute Esformes’ case—raising grave questions about double jeopardy, the absolute power of the clemency process, and the weaponization of the criminal legal system against politically expedient targets. 

A former executive overseeing a network of skilled nursing and assisted living facilities, Esformes was arrested in 2016. The prosecutors, who were found to have committed substantial misconduct throughout the case, alleged he paid doctors under the table to send patients his way and subsequently charged Medicare and Medicaid for unnecessary treatments. The government held him without bond in the years leading up to his trial, placing him in solitary. He was ultimately found guilty of money laundering and related charges, as well as bribing regulators to give him notice of upcoming inspections so he could attempt to obscure shoddy conditions at those facilities. 

But Esformes was not convicted of the most serious charges leveled against him. The government failed to convince a jury, for example, that he committed conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud. So his 20-year sentence—handed down by U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola of the Southern District of Florida—may appear grossly disproportionate to his convictions. 

Until you realize the judge explicitly punished Esformes for charges on which the jury hung.

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With the Trump Arraignment, Americans Are Seeing the Power of the Local Prosecutor

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has written himself into the history books and future pub trivia questions by becoming the first prosecutor to pursue criminal charges against a former president. Whether his case against Donald Trump is successful or not, Americans nationwide are now seeing the power that local prosecutors wield, sometimes capriciously.

The Manhattan D.A.’s investigation took nearly five years, and both Bragg’s predecessor and the Federal Election Commission declined to file charges on the same evidence. Reason‘s Jacob Sullum wrote in a recent breakdown of the case against Trump that Bragg is “relying on debatable facts, untested legal theories, and allegations that are tawdry but far from earthshaking.” The New York Times somewhat more gently described the meanderings of Bragg’s investigation as a “circuitous and sometimes uncertain road.”

Political opponents of Trump may insist it’s the destination, not the journey, that matters, but Republicans and conservative commentators have lambasted Bragg’s decision to file charges as nakedly political abuse of prosecutorial discretion. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called it the “weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda.”

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Here’s All the Crimes Alvin Bragg Shrugged Off to Go After Trump

While police are catching criminals on New York City’s unsavory streets, Soros-tied Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has caught a chronic case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The politically ambitious Bragg, whose self-styled crowning achievement is indicting a former U.S. president for the first time ever in American history, is using what he alleges to be a federal campaign-finance violation as a means to upgrade an otherwise-misdemeanor charge to a felony via an untested legal theory.

Simultaneously, as Bragg seeks to prosecute President Donald Trump, the GOP’s top 2024 contender, to the fullest extent of the law no matter the cost, the soft-on-crime DA has downgraded felonies to misdemeanors in a majority of his cases, handing get-out-of-jail-free cards to hordes of hardened criminals with little regard for the victims of these violent crimes in his own jurisdiction.

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A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality. It approaches the subject of disinformation from 13 angles—like the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem—with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.

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For Five Straight Years, The Pulitzer Prizes Have Rewarded Misinformation

The way the Pulitzer Prizes work seems simple enough – an Ivy league university hands out annual awards that ostensibly recognize important journalism. In practice, however, my former colleague Phil Terzian, a Pulitzer finalist who has served on the nominating committee, described the inner workings of the Pulitzers this way:

The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the New York Times largely for the benefit of the New York Times and a limited number of favored publications and personalities. Any citizen who thinks that the annual distribution of awards has something to do with quality probably believes that the Oscar for Best Picture goes to the most distinguished film of the year. If you’re a connoisseur of unrestrained self-praise, may I recommend the citations when the Times awards itself the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.

While the Pulitzer Prizes have always been little more than self-dealing masquerading as journalistic beauty pageant, it was a lot easier to believe in this manufactured prestige back when journalism was at least slightly more competent and concerned with the appearance of objectivity. In fact, a spin through the last five years of Pulitzer recipients reveals some interesting choices that add up to a clear pattern.

In 2018, a Pulitzer for national reporting was given to The New York Times and Washington Post for reporting on the Donald Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. A 2019 Pulitzer for “Explanatory Reporting” was given to The New York Times for reporting on Trump’s taxes.

The 2020 Pulitzer for commentary was given to Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times for the 1619 Project. In 2021, a public service Pulitzer was given to The New York Times for its coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic “that exposed racial and economic inequities, government failures in the U.S. and beyond.” In 2022, the Washington Post won a public service Pulitzer for its coverage of January 6.

Every one of these major stories was badly handled by the media writ large, served activist political narratives, frequently involved credulously regurgitating actual misinformation, or some combination thereof. While there is always reason to be suspicious of Pulitzers, historically most of the objections to the awards handed out never rose beyond the level of newsroom gossip.

The Pulitzers always reflected journalism’s skewed priorities. However, this many high-profile failures in such a short time underscores the rapid and catastrophic descent of American journalism into radical political activism and makes winning a Pulitzer look definitively like a mark of ignominy.

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CNN ex-boss Jeff Zucker told staff not to probe ‘lab leak’ theory because it was ‘Trump talking point’

CNN’s then-president Jeff Zucker told his staffers not to investigate the “lab leak theory” behind the origins of COVID-19 because he thought it was a “Trump talking point,” according to a report.

A “well-placed” CNN insider told Fox News Digital on Monday that Zucker gave the order in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

“People are slowly waking up from the fog,” the insider told Fox News Digital.

“It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”

Mainstream news organizations including CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC and others have been pilloried in recent days following a recent government report that concluded that an accidental leak from a Chinese laboratory is the most likely explanation for the COVID outbreak.

In the initial weeks and months of the pandemic, prominent media personalities, public health officials, and elected officials from the Democratic Party dismissed the “lab leak” theory as “debunked” — with some suggesting it was racist to even discuss the topic.

The Post has sought comment from CNN and Zucker.

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How Trump Derangement Gave Birth To The Censorship-Industrial Complex

The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a “Disinformation Board,” but a more insidious “Censorship Complex” already exists and is growing at an alarming speed. 

This Censorship Complex is bigger than banned Twitter accounts or Democrats’ propensity for groupthink. Its funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left’s ability to control the conversation — and thus the country and the world.

Americans grasped a thread of this reality with the release of the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s reporting on the Global Disinformation Index, which revealed the coordinated censorship of speech by government officials, nonprofits, and the media. Yet Americans have no idea of the breadth and depth of the “Censorship Complex” — and how much it threatens the fabric of this country.

In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned against the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” via the new sweeping military-industrial complex. Its “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [was] felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” Replace “military-industrial” with “censorship,” and you arrive at the reality Americans face today.

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How Did Biden Admin Retroactively ‘Discover’ Chinese Balloons in the U.S During the Trump Years?

The Biden administration has been trying to plug a gigantic hole in their story about Chinese spy balloons flying over U.S. territory during the Trump administration with no one in the government aware of it.

Initially, the Biden administration sought to deflect attention from their failure to shoot down the balloon by noting that Chinese spy balloons transited U.S. territory three times during the Trump years. But when several Trump administration officials hotly denied that charge, Biden administration officials changed their story. They claimed that the balloons were only over U.S. territory briefly — skirting Hawaii and flying over part of Florida — unlike this latest spy balloon, which traversed the entire width of the country. They also claimed that the balloons weren’t detected.

But how do we know this if the balloons weren’t detected and national leaders weren’t informed of their presence?

The American military had a “domain awareness gap,” according to Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command.

“Every day as a NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” VanHerck said. “And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out, but I don’t want to go into further detail.”

What’s a “domain awareness gap”? General VanHerck didn’t define the term, but Breaking Defense offered a partial explanation.

When VanHerck speaks of a “domain gap,” he’s referring to the U.S. Northern Command not having “the correct mix of sensor capabilities.”

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The Same Person Who Slipped Up that Obama Was Spying on Trump Is the Same Person Who Oversaw DoD Unit that Sent $23 Million to Hunter’s Metabiota

You just can’t make this stuff up.  The same person who slipped up in an interview and told the world that the corrupt Obama administration was spying on then-candidate and citizen Donald J. Trump, is likely the same person that approved $23 million for Hunter Biden’s Metabiota lab in Ukraine. 

Last week TGP uncovered that the Department of Defense paid $23 million to Metabiota, the firm that Hunter Biden’s invested in and that set up a Biolab in Ukraine.

After Hunter invested in Metabiota the firm obtained millions in funding from the DOD.  The individual who likely approved the funding at that time was none other than Dr. Evelyn Farkas.  In 2012, Farkas was appointed by President Obama to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia.  In her role it was very likely that Farcas was the one to approve such a transaction in the millions to a US company in Ukraine.

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Biden’s new adviser is a climate alarmist who claimed to have suffered an ‘acute mental health crisis’ as a result of Trump’s 2016 victory

The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board was created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. The board counts among its alumni a Medal of Honor recipient, a steel magnate, a secretary of defense, a retired admiral, and a former state governor.

Joining the board Thursday per President Joe Biden’s apparent wishes: Kim Cobb, a climate alarmist who was admittedly left bedridden as a result of the American people’s election of former President Donald Trump in 2016.

Biden announced his intention to appoint Cobb to the PIAB on Jan. 26.

Cobb noted that she has “much to learn” but hopes “to contribute to the critical work of this esteemed Board.”

Cobb’s biography, lifted from her Brown page and included in the White House’s statement, is seeded with potential clues concerning the president’s decision.

Cobb is a climate scientist who has repeatedly appeared on CNN to discuss the specter of anthropogenic climate change. She co-authored an alarmist UN report in 2021 that simultaneously held that various allegedly man-made climate trends under way are now irreversible and it is still imperative that the world transition off fossil fuels.

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