Octopus Overlords

A federal grand jury investigating the activities leading up the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the push by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the result of the 2020 election has expanded its probe to include seeking information about Trump's leadership PAC, Save America, sources with direct knowledge tell ABC News.

The interest in the fundraising arm came to light as part of grand jury subpoenas seeking documents, records and testimony from potential witnesses, the sources said.

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According to Save America's statement of organization filed to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the committee was established just days after the 2020 election. At the time, the filing said the new committee is affiliated with the Trump campaign and the Trump Make America Great Committee, a small-dollar focused, joint-fundraising committee between the president's campaign and the Republican National Committee, which has been sending out donor solicitation emails for Save America.

Similar to regular political action committees, leadership PACs can only accept up to $5,000 per donor, far less than the upwards of $800,000 donations that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party's high-dollar joint fundraising committee, Trump Victory, had previously raised.

Since its inception, Save America PAC has brought in more than $135 million, including transfers from affiliated committees, according to disclosure records. As of the end of July, the PAC reported having just under $100 million in cash on hand.

malchior wrote: Thu Sep 08, 2022 1:10 pm More revelations about the Trump DOJ cesspool. We find this out because someone...ah yes...waited for his book deal. The revelations are disgusting. He was a public servant when he got improper requests but choose to monetize this information for private gain. Worse he declined to prosecute and watched another office prosecute it. There is a reason this system is so rotten. This guy shouldn't be applauded for staying quiet while harm was done.

Multiple investigations — by Congress, the DOJ, and the press — demonstrated to most Americans the firings of the US attorneys represented an attempt to influence criminal investigations to the benefit of one political party over another. Gonzales, McNulty, and several others in the Justice Department eventually lost their jobs under a barrage of late-night comedy roasts and Sunday morning talk show incredulity.

Daehawk wrote: Sat Sep 10, 2022 12:22 pm

The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump's lawyers proposed two selections each to a federal judge for who should serve as "special master" in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
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Thomas Griffith, a retired federal judge and George W. Bush appointee, served on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals from 2005 to 2020. In one of his final major rulings before retiring, he wrote the majority opinion rejecting House Democrats' attempt to subpoena Trump's former White House Counsel Don McGahn. (The decision was later overturned.)

In the years since his retirement, Griffith co-authored a report alongside other prominent conservative lawyers and officials debunking Trump's lies about massive fraud in the 2020 election. And he publicly endorsed President Joe Biden's nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court.

Barbara Jones, another retired federal judge and a Clinton appointee, is a former federal prosecutor and a retired judge from the Southern District of New York from 1995 to 2012. She brings a lot of special master experience to the table, having recently served in that position for three high-profile criminal investigations with political implications.

She was tapped to serve as a special master to examine materials seized during an FBI raid of Rudy Giuliani's home and office in April 2021. She was also a special master in the Michael Cohen case, to make sure investigators didn't sweep up any documents that were attorney-client privileged.
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Paul Huck Jr., Trump nominee

Huck, who has his own law firm, had been a partner at the Jones Day law firm, which represented the Trump campaign in 2016, and a contributor to the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society.

Huck also previously served as the deputy attorney general for Florida and as general counsel to former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist -- who was a Republican at the time but served as a Democratic member of the US House and is the Democratic nominee for governor in Florida. Chris Kise, Trump's current lawyer, also worked for Crist and overlapped with Huck.
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Raymond Dearie, Trump nominee

Dearie, a Reagan nominee, has served as a federal judge in New York since 1986. He retired in 2011 and is now a senior judge on the circuit.

Dearie also served a seven-year term on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court. He was one of the judges who approved an FBI and DOJ request to surveil Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, as part of the federal inquiry into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

Daehawk wrote: Sat Sep 10, 2022 1:36 pm Lawyers like to get paid too.

Roman wrote: Sun Sep 11, 2022 11:08 pm Twitter is ablaze with questions as to why trump flew into Dulles today….
Indictment? Grand jury testimony? Illness(Walter Reed)?

NEW: The Mar-a-Lago search warrant has been further unsealed — and it reveals the DOJ subpoenaed surveillance MAL footage from Jan 10, 2022 to present. In other words, DOJ has visuals on every foreign asset that visited the Nuclear Spy at his Espionage hotel in 2022. MAGA can’t be thrilled about this. Jared Kushner can’t be thrilled about it either. 8 months of footage to sort through.

Roman wrote: Sun Sep 11, 2022 11:08 pm Twitter is ablaze with questions as to why trump flew into Dulles today….
Indictment? Grand jury testimony? Illness(Walter Reed)?

Smoove_B wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:14 pm This feels like a big deal

NEW: The Mar-a-Lago search warrant has been further unsealed — and it reveals the DOJ subpoenaed surveillance MAL footage from Jan 10, 2022 to present. In other words, DOJ has visuals on every foreign asset that visited the Nuclear Spy at his Espionage hotel in 2022. MAGA can’t be thrilled about this. Jared Kushner can’t be thrilled about it either. 8 months of footage to sort through.

Alefroth wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:29 pm Did they actually get the footage?

Alefroth wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:29 pm Did they actually get the footage?

Holman wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:30 pm

Roman wrote: Sun Sep 11, 2022 11:08 pm Twitter is ablaze with questions as to why trump flew into Dulles today….
Indictment? Grand jury testimony? Illness(Walter Reed)?

The Trump-arrival episode is a good cautionary tale about overreacting. Twitter was full of people claiming to see that he exited his plane with a jacket draped over his shoulders, which *of course* must have meant that he was in handcuffs. (He wasn't.)

When later pictures appeared of Trump on his VA golf course with a sizable entourage (but with no golf clubs visible), Twitter leaped to the conclusion that they could identify Nunes and McCarthy and other Republican-adjacent figures among the group. It later seemed obvious that most of the collection were known golf-related employees, and that they were probably talking over plans for an upcoming tournament.

Now it's obviously still possible that a Trump visit to DC involves some shady shit, but we should all be careful about the enthusiastic conclusions that erupt in exclamation points.

After all, the Marshal of the Supreme Court would want it that way.

Smoove_B wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 10:04 pm Or (hear me out) we're collectively so desperate to read some genuinely good news for once that the bar for interest is a hair's width off the ground.

malchior wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:52 pm

Alefroth wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:29 pm Did they actually get the footage?

Yeah seriously. It's like no one thinks any of this through to any logical conclusion. You can request anything you want but that only matters if it still exists and they actually produce it. Assuming MAL keeps 18 months of video archives for all their cameras seems...unlikely.

Holman wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 8:32 pm
Of what worth is my phone to the FBI twelve or eighteen months later?

Holman wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 8:32 pm

There have been headlines like this for several days. It really looks like DOJ is going hard on higher-level Jan 6 participants.

Question, though:

Let's say I'm Roger Stone and I have dozens of texts to people all over Trumpworld coordinating plans to employ fake electors and fake legal strategies to subvert the election. Since I'm not an idiot, I delete them all as soon as it starts to look like the plan has failed.

Of what worth is my phone to the FBI twelve or eighteen months later?

Pyperkub wrote: Wed Sep 14, 2022 1:43 pm

Holman wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 8:32 pm

There have been headlines like this for several days. It really looks like DOJ is going hard on higher-level Jan 6 participants.

Question, though:

Let's say I'm Roger Stone and I have dozens of texts to people all over Trumpworld coordinating plans to employ fake electors and fake legal strategies to subvert the election. Since I'm not an idiot, I delete them all as soon as it starts to look like the plan has failed.

Of what worth is my phone to the FBI twelve or eighteen months later?

Or one just upgrades to a new phone every apple cycle (see also Secret Service wiping phones)... the main thing is that the co-conspirators (ALL, if a group chat) need to have done the same... one poor/lazy bastard can still have all the records on a phone (or will have kept screenshots of them for blackmail, cooperation deals, etc).

Grifman wrote: Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:49 am Trump goes on Hugh Hewitt’s show and confesses to the crime:



He doesn’t realize that whether the documents were classified or not is irrelevant to the applicable federal statues under which he can, and hopefully will be, charged. No wonder no lawyer wants his case.

El Guapo wrote: Thu Sep 15, 2022 12:23 pmWell, sort of. One of Trump's arguments is that he has some oral standing order that everything that was taken to MAL was automatically declassified through the act of taking it there. There is zero evidence that such an order existed, and as I understand it such an order would be illegal under classification laws / procedures (because that 'procedure' wouldn't match what is required to declassify). BUT if there was such an order, and it was somehow valid, then he wouldn't have taken any classified material to MAL, because by virtue of removing it the material would have become declassified.

El Guapo wrote: Thu Sep 15, 2022 12:23 pm

Grifman wrote: Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:49 am Trump goes on Hugh Hewitt’s show and confesses to the crime:



He doesn’t realize that whether the documents were classified or not is irrelevant to the applicable federal statues under which he can, and hopefully will be, charged. No wonder no lawyer wants his case.

Well, sort of. One of Trump's arguments is that he has some oral standing order that everything that was taken to MAL was automatically declassified through the act of taking it there. There is zero evidence that such an order existed, and as I understand it such an order would be illegal under classification laws / procedures (because that 'procedure' wouldn't match what is required to declassify). BUT if there was such an order, and it was somehow valid, then he wouldn't have taken any classified material to MAL, because by virtue of removing it the material would have become declassified.