This is not your usual campaign pitch. Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is running for the House of Representatives but most wants you to know that her long-standing account of being abducted by aliens really doesn’t define her. It appears that the discussion of aliens in the campaign will remain in this solar system.
Continue reading “Florida Candidate: My Alien Abduction Does Not Define Me”
I have previously written about Michael Cohen’s allegation that President Donald Trump knew and approved the meeting with the Russians in Trump Tower in 2016. It was a bombshell story from an anonymous source and has reverberated in the news for weeks. Some of us questioned the account after no one came forward to corroborate Cohen despite his saying that Trump was briefed in a room with multiple people. Now, Davis (who some have claimed was the source for CNN) is admitting it is untrue.
Continue reading “Davis Denies Prior Allegations That Trump Knew In Advance About Russian Meeting”
When the jury sent four questions to the judge after a day of deliberations, the defense team of Paul Manafort was buoyant. It was viewed as a sign of skepticism over the case. At the time, I took a different view and suggested that such questions can often reflect a single hold out juror and a desire to enlist the court to clarify standards. After all, Manafort did not appear to be following an acquittal strategy rather than a hung jury strategy. It was always more likely that he would face convictions across the board than a hung jury on all counts. It is also interesting that the jury basically discounted anything Rick Gates gave them at trial. It seems that there was unanimity from the outset that Gates is a dirt bag with no credibility.
It now appears that it was a single hold out on the jury that prolonged the case and resulted in ten hung counts. In the meantime, a juror who must have been viewed as a defense asset on the jury spoke out in surprising terms regarding the guilt of Paul Manafort. Continue reading ““A Special Place In Hell”: A Single Juror Prevented Manafort’s Conviction On All Counts”
Below is my column in USA Today on the increasingly dire situation for Paul Manafort who is looking at roughly a decade of potential jail time after the convictions in Alexandria — and substantially more jail time if convicted in the upcoming trial in Washington, D.C. In the meantime, yesterday, White House said that no decision has been made yet on a possible pardon for Manafort.
Manafort once said, while he listens to everyone, Trump’s voice was louder than others. That voice must be uncomfortably quiet in the aftermath of the verdict.
Here is the column: Continue reading “One Voice Louder Than Others: Manafort’s Diminishing Options”
There was a truly bizarre scene in Houston this week when a police officer was on the ground struggling with a man who he said was trying to grab his gun. A security officer circled the scene filming with her cellphone until the officer screamed “Stop f***ing filming and help me!” Instead, she continued to videotape the scene as the officer screamed that the man was trying to kill him. The security guard was later fired.Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on the implications of the conviction of Paul Manafort in Alexandria Virginia. Notably, if President Donald Trump is inclined to pardon Manafort, he may want to do it before the approaching start of the D.C. trial. The counts in the new trial are a true parade of horribles for Manafort and his image will hardly improve by the end. He will face details over his work for a blood-soaked authoritarian figure who fled into exile to Moscow. It will be much more difficult to portray Manafort as a victim and a “good man” after that evidence is aired in open court.
I previously warned that Manafort’s obvious hung jury strategy was likely to fail. He is now left with only his pardon strategy, though his lawyer ominously warned that he is considering “all of his options.”
In what sounds like accidents seen right out of a torts final, Artist Anish Kapoor created a “Descent Into Limbo” to look like a black circle painted on the ground. The problem is that the artistic effect would have been lost with barriers, but the lack of barriers led to a man falling into the eight-foot hole at the Serralves Museum in Porto. It is a classic conflict between art and law with one demanding purity and the other demanding protection. Continue reading “Descent Into Liability? Man Injured After Falling Into Black Hole Art Exhibit in Portugal”
The appearance of Michael Cohen in court as a self-confessed felon was as riveting as predictable as scene in this unfolding drama. Indeed, if this is ever made into a movie, it would seem all too formulaic. Cohen is the ultimate red-shirt defendant. In the film industry, “red shirts” are characters in a movie plot that inevitably die (like those red shirted security officers in Star Trek that always seem to face demise by the end of an episode). You can often spot a red shirt in that character who is so over-the-top in reading letters from home or over compensating in the face of a pending battles. They are dead men walking. If you play back the last year, there is one guy who stands out in the red shirt, the guy who has to implode and flip. It is Michael Cohen. Continue reading “Michael Cohen, The Ultimate Red Shirt Defendant Takes A Plea”
It is not clear what is worse: having your wife fall off your sailboat or not noticing for four hours that she is gone. That is the situation of a couple in Newport, Rhode Island where a woman fell of her husband’s 39-foot sailboat while sailing from Newport to East Greenwich.
Earlier this year, I was critical of the handling of the prosecution of various protesters in North Carolina who torn down a statue in public and then celebrated their criminal acts in broad daylight. Because the statue of a civil war memorial, the act of property destruction was condoned by many and Durham District Attorney Roger Echols caved to the pressure in dropping all charges against everyone. It was effective immunity for a popular criminal act — a dangerous concept in any legal system. Not surprisingly, others are now claiming the right to unilaterally destroy property. The latest were protesters on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s campus who took it upon themselves to destroy the controversial Silent Sam Confederate statue.
We have been following the unfolding disaster in Venezuela where the socialist dream of Hugo Chavez and his dim-witted successor Nicolas Maduro has reduced a major nation to virtual starvation. The central planning of Maduro’s nation has destroyed the oil-based economy and triggered inflation that is projected to reach 1 million percent within the year. Maduro however continues to follow the absurd economic model of Chavez and his chief ally, Cuba (another economic basket case). Now in a move that will worsen an already horrific situation, Maduro has ordered five zeros to be simply erased on the inflated currency while increasing the minimum wage by over 3000 percent. Continue reading “Faced With One Million Percent Inflation, Venezuela’s Socialist Government Strikes Five Zeros Off Its Currency”
A jury in in Texas has a curious notion of justice after recommending a sentence of just 10 years probation and no jail time for Shafeeq Sheikh, a former physician at Baylor College of Medicine. Sheikh raped a heavily sedated patient but will walk after a guilty verdict. It is one of the most disturbing sentences that I have seen in a decade.
Continue reading “Doctor Rapes Heavily Sedated Patient . . . Receives No Jail Time In Texas”
In a interview painfully reminiscent of the “alternative facts” statement of Kelly Anne Conway, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani triggered another firestorm by declaring on NBC’s Meet the Press that “truth isn’t truth.” I actually can see what Conway was trying to say with her “alternative facts” comment, but the Giuliani comment left me mystified why a lawyer would frame such an argument. He was understandably trying to convey that prosecutors can frame the facts in ways to trap a witness. However, it came out in a terribly mangled way. In the meantime, President Trump was on Twitter asserting that White House Counsel Don McGahn is “no RAT” like John Dean in the Nixon Administration. Both statements took the worst possible framing of their respective arguments and predictably led to another wave of criticism. Continue reading “Giuliani: “Truth Isn’t Truth””
Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on the continuing jury deliberations in the trial of Paul Manafort in Alexandria, Virginia. Defense counsel generally take heart in the passage of time as an indication that the jury is having difficulty in reaching a verdict. However, it can be deceiving. I took over a case in this same courthouse after a jury deliberated over a week and still convicted on all counts.
Here is the column: Continue reading “Manafort’s Curious Defense: It Is Easy To Hang on A Hung Jury Strategy”
In Jacksonville, Florida, Tammy Crews, 46, has reportedly confessed to a particularly disturbing crime after she stole the donation jar with $600 set out in a restaurant for the family of 7-year-old Heydi Rivas-Villanueva who was recently shot to death. Crews stole the jar from Tapatio Restaurant but was later apprehended by the police. Continue reading “Florida Woman Arrested After Stealing Donations Jar For Family Of Murdered 7-Year-Old Girl”