[Terez]

So Barr "asked" Trump to fire Berman and then Barr sent Berman this letter:

[Aptorian]

Seeing as you're approaching the last stretch of Trump's first term and the next election, you'd expect Trump and co. to tone down the abuse of power and corruption a smidge, maybe make some easy good faith decisions, but nope. It's just full speed ahead.

[Terez]

Aptorian, on 20 June 2020 - 08:19 PM, said:

Seeing as you're approaching the last stretch of Trump's first term and the next election, you'd expect Trump and co. to tone down the abuse of power and corruption a smidge, maybe make some easy good faith decisions, but nope. It's just full speed ahead.

It really isn't. This is Trump containing himself as best he can. He's stuck in a spot where he has to try to keep indictments from dropping in the months leading up to the election, when he's already having such a catastrophic year.

[Cause]

I suspect this was a ‘forced error’ now it never situation. This or something worse. Has to do what he can with the power to keep power now or at least stay out of jail after.

Lindsay graham says he won’t approve the nomination because both NY senators won’t approve it. Long standing precedent to do this. So either they never really cared about getting the new guy nominated and only needed to fire Berman or thought they had that much control on Lindsay.

[Primateus]

I know I wrote that I was only surprised about how long it took for trump to try something like this, but I really am surprised. And I simply just don't know why.

Is it because I naively continue to have some slight hope that surely trump won't be that corrupt? Is it a stupid hope that the republicans will wise up and put a stop to it?

I don't know, but all the shitty stuff he's done the past few weeks, this just seems especially bad.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Cause, on 20 June 2020 - 08:33 PM, said:

I suspect this was a 'forced error' now it never situation. This or something worse. Has to do what he can with the power to keep power now or at least stay out of jail after.

Lindsay graham says he won't approve the nomination because both NY senators won't approve it. Long standing precedent to do this. So either they never really cared about getting the new guy nominated and only needed to fire Berman or thought they had that much control on Lindsay.

'Justice Department guidelines require any election-related charges to be filed at least 90 days before the contest, meaning the start of August — a deadline that could be relevant to SDNY’s probes of Giuliani and the Trump 2016 inaugural committee, as well as its prosecution of the Turkish bank Halkbank. All of that is happening as the work of the courts system has been slowed considerably by the coronavirus, which one former federal prosecutor described as “a blessing for the subjects of the white collar criminal investigations.”'

https://www.thedaily...berman?ref=home

[Cause]

So Barr said he asked trump to fire him and trump now says he didn’t? I suspect trump knows being directly tied to this would be a bad idea. Practically impeachment 2.0 if it comes out he did it to shield himself or his friends

[Terez]

Yeah, Barr is trying to get away with the implication that Trump isn't involved because he is very clearly acting on Trump's behalf. So he's covering Trump's ass. Trump has reportedly been vocal about his dislike for Berman in private, so we all know it's a corrupt action, but Barr thinks that pretending it's all his idea and Trump has nothing to do with it will make all the conflicts of interest go away. Since he's not legally authorized to fire (or nominate) US attorneys, he says in his last letter to Berman that Trump fired him at his request, since the resignation lie didn't work.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'U.S. attorney who was investigating people close to Trump now says he will step down, ending standoff with attorney general'

Boo.

On the bright side:

'Berman said that because Barr had respected “the normal operation of law” by appointing his deputy to lead the office, he would step aside. [...] In his letter Saturday, Barr appeared to change course from his original plan to bring in Craig Carpenito, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, to lead the New York office — a move that legal experts had said was on especially shaky ground. The shift allows for Berman’s deputy to take over.'

https://www.washingt...525a_story.html

[Cause]

I wonder what if any fallout there will be if trumps rally proves to be a massive viral bomb.

Seems at this point your either locked in as a supporter or locked in against.

[Terez]

It would be hard to prove that, in a city where COVID cases are already skyrocketing.

In any case, he didn't even manage to fill the stadium. They claimed to have nearly a million people RSVP to the event, and the stadium holds less than 20k, so Trump and Pence had planned to address the overflow crowd outside. They even set up a special stage for it. When they realized that the stadium itself wasn't even going to fill up - nowhere close - they canceled the outside speeches because no one was out there. And now they're saying that the stadium didn't fill up because protestors were blocking people from entering. That's not even close to true. News crews have been filming outside all day; as far as I have seen, there was only one notable incident with a protestor, and she was just sitting on the ground after she was refused entry (because of her "I Can't Breathe" t-shirt). They dragged her away.

[Cause]

Not an epidemiologist but not necessarily that hard to prove depending on the tools used.

But it’s moot if attendance was so low. If thousands of people from multiple states descended it would have been interesting. I mean there remains a non negligible chance trump or premier could catch it even. Though I suppose they had max distance from the crowd but the nature of the all covid 19 aerosol and inside crowds and aircons remains unknown. I wonder if they did any kind of hepa filter modifications

[Tsundoku]

Just wait unit he tweets about it being the "yugest crowd ever".

https://www.news.com...81f46cdd4eac907

[Abyss]

Terez, on 20 June 2020 - 11:23 PM, said:

.... claimed to have nearly a million people RSVP to the event, ...

I'm not certain how credible this is, but have seen a few claims that tiktok and kpop kids were actively RSVP'ing by the thousands in order to generate an expected attendance that the campaign would never fill.

[Terez]

Yeah I have seen that too and it seems to be what happened. They were doing a great job flooding shitty hashtags when the protests started, so I don’t see any reason to be skeptical.

[Abyss]

They seem to be owning it now.
I have to admit, I kind of love the stories around it.
And the Trumpist responses are very very amusing.

[Terez]

The inflated numbers probably did discourage people from attending. No one wants to deal with all the traffic and other madness associated with an event with a million RSVPs, and no one wants to get stuck outside either. That's why Trump and Pence were going to address the overflow crowds - to encourage all of those people to actually come. They probably thought it was safe to expect around 10% of the people who reserved tickets to actually show up, and that would have been more than 5x the stadium's capacity. Instead, they got 1/3 of the stadium's capacity. It was a huge embarrassment. Understandable during COVID, but Trump's whole thing is "COVID isn't real" and his people are into that so we're allowed to make fun of them for it, and also we can see why they got their hopes up. They're trying to pin it on people being afraid of violent antifas, but even that doesn't make them look great, since MAGAs are supposed to be fearless and all that, and Trump is supposed to be the strong leader who can protect them (which is presumably why he threatened protestors on Twitter the day before the event).

The data nerds are amused that the campaign is going to have to throw out all the data they gathered for this event because it's 90% garbage. Apparently this is no small complication for a political campaign. They're also going to have a hard time vetting the data they collect from future rallies.

[QuickTidal]

Abyss, on 21 June 2020 - 04:11 AM, said:

Terez, on 20 June 2020 - 11:23 PM, said:

.... claimed to have nearly a million people RSVP to the event, ...

I'm not certain how credible this is, but have seen a few claims that tiktok and kpop kids were actively RSVP'ing by the thousands in order to generate an expected attendance that the campaign would never fill.

K Pop stans are the best...they also were the ones who, when the White supremacists on Instagram tried to make White Lives Matter and the White square happen As a hashtag, they overwhelmed it with Kpop images and video snippets Instead. And it worked, those hashtags were entirely KPop, ruining the day of many white assholes.

[Gorefest]

I do find it very amusing and I secretly applaud this action. However, at the same time, what if this were reversed and it had been a Democratic rally and the RSVPs had been generated by alt-right sites? Would it still be amusing? Also, I understand that TikTok is a China-based platform (run from Bejing), which I imagine is going to open up all sorts of additional issues.

[Malankazooie]

Some wigs would be flipped, that is for sure. There would be congressional hearings lined up without a doubt.