I’ll just leave this here.
Christ, what an deluded asshole.
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207 million raked in, 9 million spent… and there’s no one to tell him what to do with the rest of it?
It’s really hard for me to belivd that’s in any way legal. Never mind even just the imoluments clause, just basic campaign finance regulation should cover this one. Do political campaigns typically get to pocket unspent funds raised through registered donations?
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“Good work Rudy. Give’em more like that” – the fan servicer in chief
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Shouldn’t the overage be returned to his “flock”, or go to the general fund, or something?
It’s not like Trump is a private citizen (yet), who can just gather money and do whatever with it. He’s contesting the election in the context of a public employee. You’d think that unspent dollars would belong to the government.
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I feel like the real Kraken should sue for damage to the brand.
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It’s a suitable substitute for British dark rum when making painkillers.
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Trump’s lawyers even said something similar in court yesterday. To which the exasperated judge replied “then why are we here?”
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I think technically, Trump isn’t contesting anything.
Like everything else in Trump’s life, a nominally separate organisation is doing it for him.
I don’t believe he personally is a plaintiff in any of these claims. It’s Donald J. Trump for President Inc. or individual Trump elector candidates.
Trump himself just spews on social media and lets other people spend yet further removed people’s money on his behalf and subject themselves to the risks of perjury.
If they succeed it’s all down to him. If they fail, he’s been let down by incompetents/the system, etc.
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But that also means he isn’t entitled to the unspent monies (which, unfortunately, would be the case if it was meant directly for his campaign), so we should keep a close eye on those funds. If any of them end up in his direct campaign fund, his own bank account, or the Trump Org, then that’s just plain fraud. It’s not even a campaign finance violation at that point.
Which reminds me, one of the things that can happen immediately on Jan 20 is that Biden can fill the FEC with a quorum again, and they can start going after campaign finance violations. That impacts not only 45, but many many GOP lawmakers like Gaetz, McCarthy, McConnell, Gohmert, Johnson, and many more I can’t rattle off from memory.
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With a hat tip to… you, above: 
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I really don’t buy the theory that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are just pretending to be incompetent idiots.
That’s gonna depend on what happens in Georgia. FEC appointments require Senate approval.
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Holy shit, you’re right. That’s stupid. They already have 6 year terms and cannot by law be majority of one party. Too many backstops.
Still, I would imagine that they could at least get one anti-Trump Republican nominated and confirmed. It wouldn’t help with Congresscritters, but they could sure start rolling up Trumpkins.
I assume the strategy isnt really to win these cases, just drag the issue out to boost donations from suckers for as long as possible. At some point the losses and embarrassing legal beatdowns should start to have the opposite effect. Or they would if Trumpkins werent suckers to begin with. But then maybe his legal team really are just incompetent boobs too. I hope somebody gets disbarred in all this.
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Probably not, given how (in)famous Trump is for not paying his bills.
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Not necessarily - seems like there are several possibilities here in which they are aware of that, but which don’t indicate good things about these people. One is that on some level they value doomed fights, that they see themselves as fighting an uphill battle. The American tradition of “rooting for the underdog” has been warped because they’ve bought into, and identified with the Confederate “Lost Cause” narrative (and/or defeated fascist regimes) so much that they routinely identify with villains in stories, seeing them, like themselves, as fighting a doomed “good fight.” Another is that they don’t care about the context at all - the appeal of depictions of overwhelming, genocidal, authoritarian “strength” in those narratives (The Death Star, Thanos…) is so strong that it supersedes any context. So really, either way it indicates they’re basically fascists.
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But I can’t help but keep wondering about this. Powell got into law school at age 19, which (I assume) is atypical. Giuliani was a Federal prosecutor. Both of these things would suggest that they aren’t (or, at the very least, weren’t) idiots, but clearly something’s happened to both of them along the way (to Giuliani, in particular).
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Yup. Donald Trump happened to them.
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Can that incompetent fucker be disbarred, already?
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Unfortunately Rudy is just walking on a path laid by previous hucksters, incompetents, and liars who pushed the boundary of what is “unethical.” Typically lawyer regulation is directed to protecting the clients rather than the legal system. And Drumpf ain’t complainin’.
I don’t see mere dismissals of Drumpf’s lawsuits as a victory. It would be nice to see bar referrals for Sidney, Rudy, Lin, etc. although as I said above I don’t see that happening. At the very least I wish judges would take the initiative with their inherent powers and other rules designed to punish abuses of the court system, and cause enough pain to make these charlatans think twice next time. That will be tough, though, with them sitting on a $200 million warchest.
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The only exception to this is boundary disputes between states, where the supremes are the first court, deciding questions of fact as well as questions of law. Of course they are so unprepared to decide questions of fact that when they do have to try those they generally appoint a special master to investigate the facts.
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