From Russia With Love ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Bond, Don Bond? With both houses of Congress still on Easter break, nothing much is happening on the legislative front, not that much happens when Speaker Mike Johnson and his do-nothing crowd is in session but that’s another story.  However, things are bubbling away on the legal front. Raise your hand if you had Trump’s bond being disqualified on your BINGO card?  It hasn’t been DQed yet, but it could be because it turns out that the $175 million bond that Trump posted with the court to prevent NY Attorney General Tish James from glomming on to his assets may not be kosher. Knight Specialty Insurance Company, the entity providing the bond, failed to provide a complete set of financials in its initial bond paperwork filing. Upon notification that their filing was incomplete, they provided more information, but unfortunately for Trump that information reveals that Knight isn’t as liquid as they need to be, or at the very least as liquid as New York law requires that they be.  NY law limits how much money state-regulated surety companies can post on a single bond to 10% of their total capital surplus.  Knight’s surplus is only $138 million, meaning that the bond they provided Trump is 137% of their dedicated reserves, far in excess of the 10% limit.  Knight’s position is that since they aren’t registered to operate in New York, the state’s capital adequacy requirements don’t apply to them. It’s far from clear that pointing out that they aren’t registered in New York is a winning strategy.  Moreover, the point of the 10% limitation is to ensure that bond companies have the ability to fund their obligations if and when they are called upon to do so, the whole purpose of a bond in the first place. To determine whether or not the Knight bond is valid, Judge Erdogan, who is overseeing Trump’s fraud case, has called all the lawyers to appear back in court on April 22.  At least for now it looks like Trump who needs the bond because he was found guilty of fraudulently cooking his books may be using, or at the very least trying to use, a bond from a company who is playing sleight of hand with theirs. That’s probably not all that surprising given Trump’s history and does anyone think that any of his voters will care, especially since he’s already going with his usual defense, that he’s being unfairly prosecuted and it’s all a witch hunt. By the way, keep an eye on his Trump Social stock (DJT on the NASDAQ), it continues to head south and it’s just a matter of time before lawsuits and/or an SEC investigation starts hunting for witches there too. Curiously, The Guardian reports that in 2022, a Russian-American banker named Anton Postolnikov used a trust to facilitate a loan to help save Trump Media and Truth Social.  Postolnikov who is under investigation by the FBI is the nephew of Aleksandr Smirnov, an ally of Putin. Das Vedanya.    

Legal Morass: Trump’s legal problems extend beyond the New York fraud case.  Yesterday, Judge Merchan who is overseeing his NY election interference/hush money case denied his last-ditch attempt to push off the trial until after SCOTUS decides his presidential immunity case telling Trump that he’d waited too long to play the immunity card. Absent another wrinklie, and this being Trump there could be one, the election interference/hush money case will proceed on April 15 which is also the date that Trump will not reveal his tax filings because of his forever audit 😊.  In Georgia where Trump and his codefendants are appealing the judge’s decision to allow DA Fani Willis to continue prosecuting her election interference RICO case, presiding Judge McAfee upheld the criminal indictment against Trump, rejecting the argument that Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were protected under the Frist Amendment by concluding that overturning an election does not count as protected political speech.  The judge has not yet set a trial date; Willis is pressing to start arguing her case in August, Trump is pressing for never.  There was also news yesterday on the Mar a Lago purloined document case, the one that should be a slam dunk for prosecutors but isn’t because of Judge Aileen “loose” Cannon’s questionable decisions and stalling tactics.  Yesterday Judge Cannon rejected Trump’s bid to have his charges of mishandling classified documents dismissed on the grounds that his argument that the Presidential Protection Act trumped the Espionage Act and protected him from prosecution didn’t cut it.  That’s the good news, the not so good news is that Cannon appears to be standing by her request that lawyers on both sides provide alternative jury instructions based on what Special Counsel Jack Smith and most other lawyers familiar with the case believe reveals either an ignorance of applicable law and/or pro-Trump bias that will make it possible for her to dismiss the charges against Trump after a jury is seated. Once a jury is seated, it will be too late for Smith to appeal her decision.  There’s still a chance that Smith takes the unprecedented step of requesting her recusal but at least for now, he doesn’t appear to have the technical grounds to do so.  While Trump’s stalling tactics are costly, they continue to keep him from suffering legal consequences. However, John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark, two of the lawyers associated with Trump, appear to have run out of rope. A judge in California issued an order last week which recommended that John Eastman be stripped of his law license. The judge found that Eastman had breached professional ethics rules by pushing a “strategy to challenge the results of the 2020 election that lacked evidentiary or legal support.” Eastman hasn’t been officially disbarred yet, but his license is now “involuntarily inactive” while he appeals, assuming he can raise the money for an appeal.  Jeffrey Clark who for a brief minute was a Trump Acting Attorney General, is one step closer to losing his license to practice law too.  Yesterday a Washington DC Bar committee ruled that he violated at least one rule of ethics and should be professionally sanctioned as in disbarred for trying to use the Department of Justice’s “influence” to help reverse Trump’s 2020 election defeat. 

Political Games:  The No Labels party announced yesterday that they are giving up on their plan to run a third- party candidate for president primarily because despite their efforts they couldn’t find any credible candidates interested in being their candidate. Apparently, neither Tulsi Gabbard nor RFK Jr met their standards. That’s good news, especially for President Biden, but unfortunately nepo/anti-vaxxer RFK Jr is still running and though no one is certain whether his run will take more votes from Biden than from Trump, a lot of his financial support comes from Trump supporting billionaires who clearly think that supporting RFK will cut into Biden’s base more than Trump’s.

Fog:  Biden and Netanyahu are on the outs, not all that surprising since Bibi, deservedly, isn’t all that popular with many but a really bad thing for Israel which can’t afford to lose friends at a time when it is losing the PR war to Hamas. Think about that, the guys who murdered, raped, and took hostages on October 7 are now the good guys? This morning after finding that serious errors and protocol violations took place, Israel fired two officers responsible for the strikes that killed the World Central Kitchen workers.  Has Hamas fired those responsible for October 7?  How will a ceasefire work when Hamas routinely breaks them, Israel has a compromised leader, and the hostages are still hostages. #Sigh        

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Evan too!