#Witness intimidation

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

#talkin #tik tok #war crimes #boeing #witness intimidation #boeing whistleblower #youthpastorryan

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Ann Telnaes, Washington Post :: [h/t Robert Scott Horton]

* * * *

Standing up to Trump's political terrorism.

August 18, 2023

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

          Trump knows that a jury of his peers will convict him in a fair trial. He has therefore resorted to extra-judicial efforts to intimidate and prejudice the jury pool. His efforts are not only extra-judicial, they are undemocratic, thuggish, and illegal. Like a crime lord with feral instincts, Trump knows how to threaten without threatening and brutalize without leaving fingerprints at the scene of the crime. Instead, he grants permission to his followers to violate laws and norms, encouraging them to do the dirty work necessary to defend the indefensible.

          Over the last several days, the breadth and viciousness of Trump’s assault on the legal system became manifest as MAGA extremists attacked the judge and jurors in Trump's various criminal proceedings. Before reviewing the latest insults to the rule of law, let’s skip to the end to discuss the solution: We must recognize that Trump is engaged in political terrorism designed to frighten good people who are the backbone of democracy. We cannot let that happen. The solution is not to shrink in fear, but to swell in numbers, strengthen our resolve, and dispel the exaggerated fears created by a skulk of cowards who hide in internet shadows.

          In America, there is an ever-present risk of violence that cannot be entirely dismissed. Law enforcement and prosecutors should, therefore, vigorously pursue and prosecute the small, frightened, impotent cultists who threaten jurors, judges, and prosecutors. But we must recognize that the business model of political terrorism is for a few individuals to instill outsized and unwarranted fear in the masses. Recognizing that truth should allow us to keep in perspective the fact that a few thousand online pseudo-terrorists vanish to nothingness compared to 335 million Americans.  

          America is bigger than Trump and his minions. We should not cower in fear but should pursue justice with confidence and righteousness. We are protecting the Constitution and our system of laws. We cannot fail in that task—and there is nothing that cowards with keyboards can do to deter us.

          Against that background, let’s look at the events on the ground.

          Abigail Jo Shry of Alvin, Texas, threatened Judge Tanya Chutkan in a voicemail message that began with racial slurs and ended with threats of violence. Shry was quickly questioned, arrested, and charged in federal court. The magistrate ordered that she remain in pretrial detention for at least 30 days pending a determination of her danger to the community. That is type of federal response that will deter future threats.

          At Shry’s detention hearing, her father provided background on Abigail Shry’s threats:

Her father, Mark Shry, testified at her detention hearing and said his daughter is a “non-violent alcoholic,” according to the court filing. [Her father] testified, “that she sits on her couch daily watching the news while drinking too many beers. She then becomes agitated by the news and starts calling people and threatening them.” Her father said, “his daughter never leaves her residence and therefore would not act upon her threats.”

          There have also been threats against members of the Fulton County grand jury that indicted Trump and eighteen other defendants on RICO charges. See NYTimes, Officials Investigate Threats Against Trump Grand Jurors in Georgia (accessible to all). The Fulton County sheriff issued an anodyne statement acknowledging the threats and stating that the sheriff was investigating. (The statement said the sheriff was “aware of online threats against grand jurors and was working with other agencies to track down their origin.”)

          A stronger statement from the sheriff and the quick arrest of several perpetrators would go some distance to damping the false bravado of other beer-fueled couch terrorists. A stronger reaction is necessary because the online threats are directed not only against the grand jurors, but future jurors who will preside over Trump’s criminal trials.

          But there is more.

          Trump released a video in which he attacked special prosecutor Jack Smith as a “deranged lowlife” for obtaining Trump's Twitter feed. See Forbes, Trump Attacks Jack Smith For Gaining Access To His Old Twitter Account. This is the type of statement that should cause Judge Tanya Chutkan to remand Trump into custody. At the very least, the statement should be added to the list of offenses that will finally cause Trump to be detained pending trial.

          Detaining Trump before tria is not only inevitable but also necessary. Trump's continued attacks are having a corrosive effect that seeps into the nooks and crannies of the justice system everywhere. Many readers have commented on the raid on a Kansas newspaper because of efforts by the newspaper to report on the failure of local police to enforce DUI laws against a local businessman. Based on a questionable search warrant issued by a local magistrate, police seized computers, cell phones, and files—a gross violation of federal protections granted to members of the news media.

          The public outcry and obvious illegality of the seizure forced the police to return the seized items and the local prosecutor to withdraw the questionable warrant due to 'insufficient evidence’. But the question remains, “How could this happen? How is it that local police and magistrate could ignore constitutional and statutory protections for the press?” Some of the sordid answers are detailed in this investigative piece by The Wichita Eagle, Judge Laura Viar, who approved newspaper raid, has DUI arrests.  

          Apart from the local magistrate’s questionable potential bias due to her own history of DUI troubles, another answer is that the police and magistrate are modeling themselves after a national GOP in which the rule of law is an impediment to power. In short, they thought they could get away with trampling the Constitution. Fortunately, they were wrong—and will likely be charged with crimes and serve time in jail. As should Trump.

          If Americans see that Trump is punished for his attacks on the justice system pending trial, others will realize that they, too, must respect the justice system. We owe the Constitution nothing less.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

#political cartoon #Ann Telnaes #Washington Post #TFG #indicted #criminal law #Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #witness intimidation #political terrorism #Robert B. Hubbell

[gwydionmisha]

#Gag Order #Donald Trump #Judge Tanya Chutkan #Witness Intimidation #News

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 revealed that they told the Department of Justice that former-President Donald Trump contacted one of its witnesses who hasn’t publicly testified yet.

“After our last hearing. President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation. A witness you have not yet seen in these hearings,” Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the Committee, said on Tuesday.

“That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump’s call and instead alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us. And this Committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice,” she added.

A spokesman for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.

The Tuesday hearing marked the latest round of testimony that depicts Trump as a president determined to hang onto power after the conclusion of the 2020 presidential election — no matter the cost to American democracy.

The Committee showcased fresh testimony from several key witnesses, including former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who told the panel’s investigators that they repeatedly told Trump the election wasn’t stolen and it was time for the President to concede.

Trump has continued to make false claims about the 2020 election two years after he lost to President Joe Biden. Trump has yet to rule out another run for president in 2024.

#us politics #news #witness tampering #witness intimidation #donald trump #captiol riot investigation #house select committee #rep. liz cheney #2022 #department of justice #pat cipollone

[chloeworships]

I wanted to focus on this scripture a bit more…

The LORD in the scrip is saying he will PROTECT the righteous and the innocent and this is YOU if you have followed and continue to follow his instructions.

As I mentioned before, stay on your P’s and Q’s because there are those lying in wait hoping you will slip and not just fall, but FAIL ❌ in your mission(s).

I was given the word “reprimanded” a few weeks ago. Keep your people in line rn and discipline them accordingly because it’s YOU that is the target 🎯 aka “MANAGEMENT”. They are just “pawns”. I was shown this 😞

The other day the LORD showed me an agenda and on the tabs was a name and the word “MANAGEMENT”. Not only are you being closely watched but “MANAGEMENT”has an agenda along with your co-worker. Your workplace is keeping “tabs” on you OR another “organization”.

In the end, you will be successful but I promise you for whoever this message is for, they want your head on a platter hence why the LORD is sending this stern reminder ✅ He loves you and wants to protect you but you have to do your part. He wouldn’t be warning you if he didn’t care.

Honestly it feels someone wants to find fault in whatever you are working on. Does that make sense babes?

Please pray about these messages, my loves. It’s very specific.

PS. The other day I heard “witness intimidation” and “pleading the 5th” which saddened me 😞 Whatever this person has to say could help free an innocent man and someone doesn’t want this person to talk. Letting an innocent person rot in prison is unconscionable to me. This scripture applies to that situation too. I pray the LORD finds a way to free the innocent person ASAP.

PPS: read the full script for encouragement. It’s one of my favourite… Psalms 37

#death AFTER dishonour #traitor in your midst #witness intimidation #NATIONAL SECURITY #beach #DRIFT #DKNY #Notre Dame #300

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Intimidating Witness." Ottawa Citizen. January 23, 1913. Page 2. --- The two Nault brothers, of Maniwaki, were tried in Hull on a charge of intimidating Dr. St. Armour, of Montcerf, who was a witness in liquor prosecution against the асcused. Adolph Nault was further charged with assaulting the complainant. Magistrate Desjardins, after hearing the evidence, reserved judgment until Saturday.

#maniwaki #gatineau #hull #witness intimidation #eyewitness tesimony #assault #threats of violence #liquor control #liquor charge #crime and punishment in canada #history of crime and punishment in canada

[timestampedjesus]

#trump indictment #poetic justice #the scales of justice #full tilt #washington dc #Youtube #marilyn monroe #john f. kennedy #jfk #jackie onassis #assassination day #witness intimidation #special investigation

[immaculatasknight]

This is Upper Canada

#Canada #Southern Ontario #Upper Canada #satanism #cults #ritual abuse #child abuse #cover-up #damage control #witness intimidation #discreditation #mainstream media #books

[mgeist]

Bill C-11 Goes Off The Rails Amid Charges of Witness Intimidation and Bullying by Government MPs

Bill C-11 Goes Off The Rails Amid Charges of Witness Intimidation and Bullying by Government MPs

The Senate Bill C-11 hearings have provided a model for the much-needed, engaged, non-partisan inquiry that was largely missing from the House committee’s theatrics in which the government cut off debate on over 150 amendments. But this week those hearings attracted attention for another reason: serious charges of witness intimidation and bullying by government MPs, most notably Canadian Heritage…

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#benzie #bittle #bullying #c-11 #canadian heritage #nater #online streaming act #rodriguez #witness intimidation

[enchanted-lifepath]

Summer Wells Scamathon Suspect Threatens Key Witness With Sodomy

Summer Wells Scamathon Suspect Threatens Key Witness With Sodomy

A key witness in the investigation into the Summer Wells Reward Fund scandal has been threatened with sodomy by a suspect just hours after court documents revealed Fiona O’Connor’s identity online. Miss O’Connor had been named in civil proceedings launched by Church Hill Rescue Squad after she raised concerns regarding the legitimacy of cash generated through an unlawful fundraiser held by…

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#church hill rescue squad #liplocked nomore #Summer Wells Reward Fund #Summer Wells Scamathon #witness intimidation

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

If the ninety-eight-page indictment by Fani T. Willis, district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, of Donald Trump, Rudolph Giuliani, and seventeen other people is ever made into a movie, it should be called The Framing of Ruby Freeman. Willis gives names to, and levels charges at, some of the people who appear anonymously in Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Trump. She brings more characters into her cast of racketeers. But her plot follows the same contours. The methods used to try to overturn the election of Joe Biden as president of the United States in November 2020 are by now familiar: making claims of electoral fraud that were themselves knowingly fraudulent, leaning on election officials to “find” votes for Trump, creating fake electors, pressuring the vice president Mike Pence not to certify the results. What makes the Willis indictment different is that its story is not only a grand narrative of what Smith characterizes as an attempt to defraud the United States. It is also the tale of a frame-up, a grotesque travesty of justice in which the power of government was used to traduce and attempt to destroy an innocent and defenseless citizen.

As such, it tells us not just what Trump did to try to hold onto power, but also what he will do if he ever gets hold of it again. There are big constitutional, political, and policy matters at stake in his campaign to return to the White House. But the kind of authoritarian rule he is trying to establish always comes down in the end to what happens to small, inconvenient people, those who become what Freeman was called in the Trump campaign against her: “a loose end.” They are lied about, criminalized, terrorized, threatened, and smeared—not by private gangs but by a gangsterized government. These are the things that happened to Ruby Freeman. What is at stake in the Georgia indictment is whether those who inflicted these intimate cruelties can get away with it and, therefore, be free to do it again.

*

Shortly after the presidential election of November 2020 Kay Kirkpatrick, a Republican state senator in Georgia, passed a complaint of electoral fraud to the office of the secretary of state, her fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger. It included photographic stills from social media posts purportedly showing Freeman, a sixty-two-year-old woman who was working for $16 an hour as a temporary election worker, fraudulently tampering with the counting of votes in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. On December 10, 2020, Giuliani, as Willis puts it, “knowingly, willfully, and unlawfully” claimed that after counting had ended for the night surveillance video footage caught Freeman, her daughter Shaye Moss, and an unidentified man “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” to be used to “infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines.” (Why the Dominion systems had to be infiltrated surreptitiously when they were already, as the Trump campaign insisted, rigged is a detail Giuliani never explained.)

Kirkpatrick also passed on to Raffensperger’s office Instagram posts in which Freeman appeared to boast that she and her daughter “did something to change history and we will not be silent and allow evil to control this country,” and “Thank God my baby had a plan and today we put that plan in action after those Trump supporting [sic] and Fox News thought they won and left the building.” These posts seemed to prove not just that Freeman and Moss had conspired to corrupt the election count but that they were brazenly proud of their handiwork.

In responding this week to Willis’s indictment, Giuliani tweeted that it is “the next chapter in a book of lies with the purpose of framing President Donald Trump.” That’s an interesting choice of words, consistent with the standard Trump tactic of naming one’s own crimes while projecting them onto others. For one of the most egregious aspects of the conspiracy to overturn the result of the election in Georgia is this attempt to stitch up Freeman and Moss for nonexistent crimes. Although Willis’s narrative of malfeasance ranges even more widely than Smith’s federal indictment, it also allows us to zoom in on the sheer cruelty of what Trump, Giuliani, and their gaggle of lawyers and operatives were willing to do to ordinary people who stood in their way. The damage to the American republic is the panoramic wide shot, but in this close-up, we can see a particular kind of ugliness with a specific American history: Black people being framed, and publicly punished, for other people’s crimes.

Following Kirkpatrick’s complaint, Raffensberger’s office opened a criminal investigation into Freeman and Moss. The potential charges they faced came under three headings: conspiracy to commit election fraud, fraud by poll officers, and the use of counterfeit ballots. Conviction on the second of these offenses alone could have resulted in Freeman and Moss going to prison for up to ten years. “Teams of investigators” from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the secretary of state’s office were employed to look into these alleged crimes. Two law-abiding Black women were potentially facing the loss of their liberty, reputations, and livelihoods.

The “evidence” against Freeman and Moss was entirely bogus. Counting of votes had not, as the Trump campaign alleged, stopped when the video was shot. The county election director had instructed Freeman, Moss, and other workers to retrieve ballots that had been packed away in anticipation of counting being suspended for the night and to take them to the scanners to be recorded. All of this was perfectly in order, and a subsequent hand count of votes showed that there were no discrepancies and that no fake ballots were scanned.

As for Freeman’s supposed Instagram posts, the criminal investigation found that a man whose name is redacted from its findings had created a phony account called @rubyfreeman_georgia. On December 4, a month after the election, this man (as he told the FBI) came across another account (also not Freeman’s) that had posted her fake “confession.” The name of this second account was then changed to @rubyfreeman_georgia. Subsequently, the first man “described his account as being a fake or parody account.” This sequence of events still seems somewhat murky (and Willis does not deal with it in her indictment) but there is no doubt that more than one person was involved in inventing and disseminating the Instagram “confession” that Kirkpatrick used as part of her complaint against Freeman and Moss and that helped to bolster Trump’s wider claims of a rigged election.

The report into the criminal investigation that cleared Freeman and Moss of any wrongdoing whatever was not completed until March 7, 2023, and not published until June 20. This means that the threat of imprisonment continued to hang over the two women for more than two years. In December 2020 and January 2021, they were relentlessly targeted as the devious criminals who had stolen Trump’s victory in Georgia. As Willis records, on December 10 Giuliani showed the edited version of the video to members of the Georgia house of representatives and directly named Freeman and Moss as the alleged fraudsters. On January 2, in a now infamous call to Raffensperger and other Georgia officials, Trump claimed that Freeman was “a professional vote scammer and hustler,” that “she stuffed the ballot boxes,” and that, in Willis’s words, “Freeman, her daughter, and others were responsible for fraudulently awarding at least 18,000 ballots” to Joe Biden.

Between them, Trump and Giuliani thus had Freeman engaged in four different kinds of vote-tampering: stuffing ballot boxes with fake votes; taking fraudulent ballots from “suitcases” she had hidden under tables; scanning the same ballots multiple times; and using USB flash drives to access and interfere with the electronic voting machines. The combination of these techniques would make Freeman not a low-level scammer but a criminal mastermind, able to conceive and implement a multidimensional plan to generate false Biden ballots, transport them in suitcases into the State Farm Arena, tamper with the scanning machines so that they would record the same ballots more than once, and somehow interfere with the software codes of the Dominion counting machines—and to do all this under the gaze of cameras, election officials, party monitors, and the media. While themselves trying to steal the election, Trump and Giuliani were trying to create for the American public an action movie in which they were battling heroically to save democracy from a female version of Lex Luthor or Keyser Söze.

*

Was it accidental that this arch-villain happened to be African American? Hardly. If the Trump campaign genuinely believed that something dodgy was being done at the counting center, the obvious person to target was the man who gave the instructions to continue the count: the elections director, Rick Barron. But Barron, a suave-looking white man, did not fit the casting requirements. (This did not subsequently save Barron from relentless harassment by Trump supporters because he honorably defended Freeman and Moss. He resigned in despair last year.) On the other hand, Giuliani’s choice of a lurid simile, in which Freeman and Moss were allegedly passing USB devices “as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine,” linked them to familiar tropes of Black drug dealers.

But the salience of race is even harder to miss in Willis’s explication of the alleged conspirators’ attempts to “turn” Freeman. The indictment sets out how the Trump team, having framed Freeman and her daughter, then offered to “help” her if she would do what they wanted. The plan was to “to harass Freeman, intimidate her, and solicit her to falsely confess to election crimes that she did not commit.” An explicit part of the plan involved using Black members of Trump’s racket to offer her this deal.

One of the alleged conspirators, Stephen Lee, a white pastor who got involved in the attempts to get Freeman to “confess,” told Harrison Floyd, a leader of Black Voices for Trump, “that Freeman was afraid to talk to [Lee] because he was a white man.” Floyd then recruited a Black woman, Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for Kanye West and R. Kelly and a self-identified member of “the Young Black Leadership Council under President Donald Trump,” to travel from Chicago to Freeman’s home in Georgia. Freeman, who had been understandably frightened by a barrage of online and personal threats, did not answer her door, but called a neighbor who spoke to Kutti. Kutti “falsely stated that she was a crisis manager attempting to ‘help’ Freeman before leaving Freeman’s home.” Later that day, Kutti called Freeman on the phone to tell her that she was “in danger.”  

Before agreeing to meet Kutti, Freeman called the police and, according to a Reuters report by Jason Szep and Linda So, told the dispatcher, “They’re saying that I need help, that it’s just a matter of time that they are going to come out for me and my family.” Freeman then agreed to meet with Kutti in the safety of a police station. The beginning of the encounter was captured on a police body camera, which recorded Kutti telling Freeman that it may be necessary to move her and members of her family from her home, and that “You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up.” Kutti, before putting Freeman on the phone with Floyd, describes him to her as a “Black progressive crisis manager.” Another piece of theater was being staged, one in which Kutti and Floyd acted out for Freeman the roles of concerned Black brothers and sisters.

The quid pro quo for this show of solidarity was that Freeman would sign a fraudulent and self-incriminating statement vindicating the allegations made against her by Trump and Giuliani. “If you don’t tell everything,” Freeman remembered Kutti insisting, “you’re going to jail.” As so often in this whole story, there is a bizarre circularity to the conspiracy: what Willis alleges here is a crime committed by trying to force Freeman to herself commit the crime of making false claims about a crime of electoral fraud she did not commit. But in all of this dizzyingly convoluted plotting, it is abundantly clear that the desired outcome for the Trump team was a spectacle familiar from totalitarian states: a repentant traitor confessing to her crimes against the great leader. The special American twist would be that the self-confessed vile conniver would be a Black woman who tried to bring down a president who had long played with white supremacist tropes. It was no accident that many of the pro-Trump attacks on Freeman and Moss on social media not only used racist epithets but explicitly called for them to be lynched: “YOU SHOULD BE HUNG OR SHOT FOR YOUR CRIMES.”

If there are any conservatives left in the United States, they owe it to themselves to read at least these parts of the indictment and to think carefully about what happened to Freeman and her daughter. Conservatives are supposed to distrust above all the overweening power of the state and its capacity to crush individuals, strip them of their rights and reputations, threaten their families, and break their wills. The plot against Freeman has elements of the Mafia behavior that Giuliani, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, was so good at prosecuting. But this was much worse than a Mafia maneuver—it was a state operation. It was led by the sitting president. Of the nineteen people indicted by Willis, four were at the time holders of federal or state governmental offices: the president, his chief of staff (Mark Meadows), a senior official in the Justice Department (Jeffrey Clark), and the Coffee County elections supervisor (Misty Hampton). What is this if not Big Government at its most oppressive?

Had Freeman not found the inner resources of courage and dignity to resist the almost unbearable pressure heaped on her by the occupant of the White House, she would have signed a false confession to crimes against the integrity of US elections. Can anyone doubt that Trump and Giuliani, amplified by Fox News and the other right-wing propaganda channels, would have insisted that she and Moss should be given exemplary sentences of penal servitude and locked away for many years? The defense of democracy, they would have cried, demanded nothing less for those who dared to corrupt the electoral process. In that, if in nothing else, they would have spoken the truth.

Fintan O'Toole :: NY Review of Books

#Fintan O'Toole #NY Review of Books #RICO #corrupt GOP #indicted #witness intimidation #Fani T. Willis

[gwydionmisha]

#Witness Intimidation #Donald Trump #Chuck Rosenberg #News #DOJ

[iliveworldnews]

Summer Wells Scamathon Suspect Threatens Key Witness With Sodomy

Summer Wells Scamathon Suspect Threatens Key Witness With Sodomy

A key witness in the investigation into the Summer Wells Reward Fund scandal has been threatened with sodomy by a suspect just hours after court documents revealed Fiona O’Connor’s identity online. Miss O’Connor had been named in civil proceedings launched by Church Hill Rescue Squad after she raised concerns regarding the legitimacy of cash generated through an unlawful fundraiser held by…

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#church hill rescue squad #liplocked nomore #Summer Wells Reward Fund #Summer Wells Scamathon #witness intimidation

[akiacia]

groggy is her favorite time of day

#akia art #olba #baxter ward #getting through as much of my ol backlog as the tswift 1989 earworms will allow LMAO #'u are in love' will do it to u!! #sideblogs intimidate the tech illiterate gma in me so u will all have to witness my sap on main (ty for sticking around :rofl:

[hellonerf]

🙂💬 boyking...

#hetalia #aph america #kill ame #when hes 🙂💬 i really want to squeeze him #obsessed w that expression in particular 🙂💬 #would include the panel where hes all intimidating wit the number #but (prioritizes ame when hes cute 😊) #cute over cool rule

[qqueenofhades]

HAPPY (4TH) INDICTMENT DAY!

YOOOOO IT’S OFFICIAL

Also, there are some BIG co-defendants in this one, including Jeff Clark (the guy Trump wanted as Attorney General during the coup attempt period) AND THE HEAD OF THE GEORGIA REPUBLICAN PARTY.....

.... PLUS. PLUS. RUDY GIULIANI!!! AND MARK MEADOWS!!!!! AND JOHN EASTMAN!!! AND RICO CHARGES FOR TRUMP!!!!

HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

(oh damn, oh snap, a thing of beauty and a joy forever, etc)

Also, apparently this is technically his FIFTH indictment, as the superseding Mar-a-Lago charges added the other day count as another one. But wow this is a WHOPPER.)

#jcams88 #ask #politics for ts #the giant orange monster #cmon fani willis seek pretrial detention #you can do it i believe in you #and GA law is on your side re: defendants and witness intimidation