Thursday, July 2, 2020

THE BOOK THAT WILL FINISH OFF TRUMP COMES OUT


Appeals Court Vacates Temporary Order Blocking Publication of Trump Niece's Tell-All

By Andrew Albanese | 
Jul 02, 2020

Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia
In a speedy reversal, the Second Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court has vacated judge Hal B. Greenwald's Temporary Restraining Order blocking Simon & Schuster from publishing Mary L. Trump’s forthcoming tell-all, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
The July 1 decision comes just a day after Greenwald issued his June 30 order, following emergency appeals by both Simon & Schuster and the author, and a speedy private hearing before the appeals court. The decision means S&S can continue to move forward with its planned July 28 publication, although a July 10 hearing on the matter still looms.

In his six-page ruling, Presiding Judge Alan Scheinkman held that because S&S is not a party to the confidentiality agreement at the heart of the case, they cannot be restrained without a full hearing of the facts.

"The only basis offered by the plaintiff to extend the temporary restraining order to S&S are the allegations that S&S 'intends to act' on Ms. Trump’s behalf in causing the publication of the book and that S&S is acting at Ms. Trump’s direction and in concert with her," Scheinkman wrote. "However, these allegations are conclusory and not supported by any specific factual averments. Unlike Ms. Trump, S&S has not agreed to surrender or relinquish any of its First Amendment rights. Since the predicate for the plaintiff’s application for a temporary restraining order is the existence of the confidentiality provision of the settlement agreement (and no alternate basis for an injunction against Ms. Trump is either suggested or apparent), and S&S is not a party to the settlement agreement, this Court perceives no basis for S&S to be specifically enjoined."
But with a hearing set for July 10 before Judge Greenwald, the appellate court upheld a modified version of the Temporary Restraining Order pertaining to the author, Mary L. Trump.
"At this preliminary stage of the proceedings, this Court is of the view that it is appropriate, in view of the confidentiality provision of the settlement agreement and the showing made in the plaintiff’s papers, for a temporary restraining order to issue as against Ms. Trump to temporarily enforce its terms pending a hearing on the preliminary injunction," Scheinkman concluded.
In a statement, S&S officials said there were "gratified" by the Appellate Court’s decision. "As we all know, there are well-established precedents against prior restraint and pre-publication injunctions," S&S officials said, "and we remain confident that the preliminary injunction will be denied."
The decision is the latest twist in a fast-moving lawsuit pursued by Robert S. Trump, the brother of President Donald J. Trump, in New York State Supreme Court in Dutchess County that seeks to block Mary L. Trump from publishing a potentially explosive Trump family memoir on the basis of a sweeping confidentiality clause agreed to in 2001, when the estate of the president’s father, Fred Trump Sr., was settled. On the S&S website, Mary L. Trump's book is described as a “revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him," and claims to offer insight into how Trump "became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.” The publisher's catalog copy describes Mary L. Trump as a trained clinical psychologist as well as the president’s only niece.
Unlike Ms. Trump, S&S has not agreed to surrender or relinquish any of its First Amendment rights.
In its June 30 answer to the Trump family lawsuit, attorneys for Simon & Schuster insisted there is no constitutional or contractual basis for blocking Simon & Schuster's publication, and denied that the publisher is acting either as an "agent" or "in concert" with Mary L. Trump.

“This argument, which posits that Simon & Schuster can be bound by an agreement that pre-existed its relationship with Ms. Trump by almost twenty years and whose existence was unknown to it, is specious at best,” S&S attorneys argue, adding that the publisher and the author are "independent parties that entered into an arm’s length transaction." And unlike a legally defined agent, "Simon & Schuster—not Ms. Trump—maintains the right to control the publication of the Book.”

That argument is bolstered by an affidavit from S&S CEO Jonathan Karp, who told the court that after book was formally accepted on May 7, Mary L. Trump “lost any ability she otherwise may have had to prevent or delay the Book’s publication.” Further, Karp said that "approximately 75,000 copies have been printed and bound and are ready for publication,” which includes shipments to retail booksellers—copies which S&S no longer maintains control of.
“Once Simon & Schuster shipped [the books] in response to a purchase order," Karp explained, "title to the physical copies passed to the retailer or wholesaler.”







Coronavirus, the Russia bounty scandal, and the upcoming election continue to dominate America’s news.
Today, there were 52,788 new reported infections in the country, topping 50,000 for the first time. Right now, the seven-day average of new confirmed cases is the highest it’s ever been, and 45 states have seven-day averages of new infections higher than the previous week. June saw more than 800,000 new cases, bringing the total number of cases in the United States to more than 2.6 million.
But even with statistics like this, tonight on the Fox News Channel, Trump once again said that the economy was recovering strongly, and suggested that the coronavirus would go away on its own. He said: "I think we're gonna be very good with the coronavirus. I think that at some point that's going to sort of just disappear, I hope." (The coronavirus will not just disappear.)
More news dropped today about the Russia bounty scandal, including the information that bounties on American and allied soldiers ranged up to $100,000. National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien blamed Trump’s CIA briefer for not bringing the information to the president’s attention, although sources confirm it was, in fact, written in the President’s Daily Brief in February. While O’Brien did not mention a specific name, he used the pronoun “her.” Trump’s usual briefer is Beth Sanner, a CIA analyst with more than 30 years of experience. Earlier, officials claimed that Trump missed the significance of the coronavirus at first because of her, as well, saying that she had downplayed the dangers of the virus when she briefed him about it on January 23. But Sanner has an excellent reputation as a briefer, and former intelligence officers familiar with Trump’s intelligence briefings say he cannot absorb anything that does not reinforce his worldview.
Trump continued to insist that the scandal isn't real. He told an interviewer on the Fox News Channel that he had not been briefed on it because there was no consensus on the intelligence, and that he believed it was a hoax. On Twitter, he started the day by saying: “The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party. The secret source probably does not even exist, just like the story itself. If the discredited [New York Times] has a source, reveal it. Just another HOAX!” He followed up with: "Do people still not understand that this is all a made up Fake News Media Hoax started to slander me & the Republican Party. I was never briefed because any info that they may have had did not rise to that level…."
Congress, however, wants answers, and so far they have not been forthcoming. Tomorrow, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe will brief the Gang of Eight: the top Democrats and Republicans from both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as the chairs and ranking minority members from both the House and the Senate Intelligence committees. The Gang of Eight is sworn to secrecy, and normally, it is only engaged under extraordinary circumstances when the president wants to limit access to information, as when a covert action is underway. Normally, the president is required to share information about intelligence with the congressional intelligence committees.
And then there is the upcoming election. Today Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is overseeing Trump’s campaign, moved long-serving campaign aide Michael Glassner from the position of chief operating officer to a different role in order to bring in Jeff DeWit, who had held the position in 2016. This move was in response to the Tulsa rally, and seems to assign Glassner the blame for that disaster. Such a shake-up at this point in an election year signals that the campaign team is nervous.
For his part, Trump is throwing his weight behind his base. On Tuesday night, he tweeted that he was considering scrapping a fair housing rule designed to combat racial segregation.
In 2015, President Barack Obama announced new rules to clarify the 1968 Fair Housing Act. That act required government not simply to stop outright discrimination, but also to dismantle existing segregation and foster integration instead, but this latter part of the law’s charge really never got off the ground. The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule was designed to remedy that lack. It sets out a framework for local governments, States, and public housing agencies to look for racially biased housing patterns and to report the results. This will call out, for example, places where zoning laws bar affordable housing, a policy that appears to be race-blind, but which in practice excludes low-income families of color. The AFFH rule also requires towns to set goals which must be tracked over time.
Even while the rule was under discussion, opponents claimed it was an experiment in “social engineering” that would destroy white suburbs. “Let local communities do what’s best in their communities, and I would predict we’d end up with a freer and fairer society in 20 years than we have today,” Rick Manning, the president of Americans for Limited Government told Emily Badger of the Washington Post. “Far freer and fairer than anything that would be dictated from Washington.”
The Trump administration has already delayed enforcement of the AFFH rule, and had proposed to water it down. But last night Trump went after it altogether in a clear appeal to the white suburban voters he has been losing, and whose support he so badly needs in 2020. “At the request of many great Americans who live in the Suburbs, and others, I am studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas. Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make them MUCH WORSE. Not fair to homeowners, I may END!”
The Trump campaign today also reinforced its use of Nazi imagery. It offered for sale an “America First” t-shirt with a design reminiscent of the Nazi Iron Eagle widely understood to be a symbol of hate. Like the use of the triangle symbol that harked back to the Nazi tag for political prisoners, this image is close enough that it cannot be missed, but different enough that Trump supporters promptly insisted that people calling out its use are overreacting. On Twitter, conservative Tom Nichols, a professor of international affairs at the U.S. Naval War College said, “I've been pretty hard on people who make the Nazi comparisons around here, but Christ, even *I* saw this one right away. This is not some standard American eagle, this is a Trump graphics guy thinking he's being clever and trolling the world by saying "mayyyybe it's close."
As Holocaust scholar Waitman Beorn notes, the Trump campaign’s appropriation of Nazi images speaks to Trump’s white supremacist base. But as media critic Parker Molloy noted about the previous controversy, issuing these images is also a cheap and easy way to command media attention without having to pay for it.
—-
Disappear:
Nichols:



ohn Bolton’s Tell-All Memoir Sells 780,000 Copies in First Week

US National Security Advisor John Bolton arrives in Downing Street in London on August 13, 2019, ahead of his meeting with Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid. - US National Security Advisor John Bolton said Monday that Washington wanted "to move very quickly" on a trade deal with Britain …
TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images
1:35

John Bolton’s new tell-all book about the Trump administration has sold more than 780,000 copies in its first week, making Bolton the latest former Trump administration official to cash in on a book bashing the president.
Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, is a negative take of the Trump administration during his 18 months as national security adviser. Bolton was reportedly paid a $2 million advance.
The Room Where It Happened fell short of former FBI Director James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty in first week sales but still ranks as one of the best-selling books of the Trump era, according to The Hill‘s Joe Concha.
Bolton’s memoir came unusually quickly after he left the administration in late 2019 in relation to other books by former officials. Trump has said he fired Bolton, while Bolton claims he resigned.
The White House attempted to block Bolton’s book from publishing after he failed to complete a national security review process for former officials, but a judge ruled that it was impossible since advance copies of the book had already been widely distributed.
The judge harshly criticized Bolton, however, saying that he “gambled with the national security of the United States” and exposed the U.S. to harm by not completing a review of his book for classified information.
Bolton could also face legal and financial consequences due to not completing the review.
Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook.

HEATHER MAC DONALD - THE BREAKDOWN OF DEMOCRAT PARTY-CONTROLLED CITIES ACROSS AMERICA





EYE ON THE NEWS

Breakdown

The unwinding of law and order in our cities has happened with stunning speed.
July 1, 2020
Public safety
The Social Order

It took several months for the first iteration of the Ferguson Effect to become obvious. Michael Brown was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in August 2014, triggering local riots and a national narrative about lethally racist police. Officers backed off proactive policing in minority neighborhoods, having been told that such discretionary enforcement was racially oppressive. By early 2015, the resulting spike in shootings and homicides had become patent and would lead to an additional 2,000 black homicide victims in 2015 and 2016, compared with 2014 numbers.
Today’s violent-crime increase—call it Ferguson Effect 2.0 or the Minneapolis Effect—has come on with a speed and magnitude that make Ferguson 1.0 seem tranquil. George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in late May was justly condemned—but the event has now spurred an outpouring of contempt against the pillars of law and order that has no precedent in American history. Every day, another mainstream institution—from McDonald’s to Harvard—denounces the police, claiming without evidence that law enforcement is a threat to black lives.
To be sure, the first manifestation of the Black Lives Matter movement had a mouthpiece in the Oval Office, lacking now. It doesn’t matter. Presidential imprimatur or no, the reborn Black Lives Matter has gained billions of dollars in corporate support, more billions in free round-the-clock media promotion, and a ruthless power to crush dissent from the now-universal narrative about murderous police bigots. During the two weeks of national anarchy that followed the death of George Floyd, cops were shot, slashed, and assaulted; their vehicles and station houses were firebombed and destroyed. American elites stayed silent. Since then, police have continued to be shot at and attacked; the elites remain silent. Monuments to America’s greatest leaders are being defaced with impunity; anarchists took over a significant swathe of a major American city, including a police precinct, without resistance from the authorities. And a push to defund the police gains traction by the day.
The rising carnage in the inner city is the consequence of this official repudiation of the criminal-justice system. The current tolerance and justification for vandalism and violence; the silencing of police supporters; and police unwillingness to intervene, even when their own precincts are assaulted—all send a clear message to criminals that society has lost the will to prevent lawlessness. In Minneapolis, shootings have more than doubled this year compared to last. Nearly half of all those shootings have occurred since George Floyd’s death, according to a Minneapolis Star Tribune analysis. On Father’s Day, a mass shooting on a crowded street uptown struck 11 people. The next day saw a chain of retaliatory shootings—the first next to a park filled with children, the next, 90 minutes later, on a notorious gang-dominated street intersection. In nearby St. Paul, reported firearms discharges have more than doubled. The same gangbangers are getting shot repeatedly. One 17-year-old boy has been shot in four different events over the last month and a half.
In Chicago, 18 people were killed and 47 wounded in drive- and walk-by shootings last weekend. The fatalities included a one-year-old boy riding in a car with his mother (the gunman drove up alongside and emptied his gun into the vehicle) and a 10-year-old girl struck in the head inside her home; a group of youth on the street outside her house had started shooting at another group of youth nearby. The previous weekend in Chicago, 104 people were shot, 15 fatally. The deceased included a three-year-old boy riding in a car with his father on Father’s Day—his gangbanger father was the intended victim—and a 13-year-old girl shot in her head in her home.
New York City’s homicide rate is at a five-year high; the number of shooting victims was up over 42 percent through June 21 compared with the same period in 2019. The number of shootings in the first three weeks of June was over twice that of the same period in 2019, making this June the city’s bloodiest in nearly a quarter century, according to the New York Times. At 4 A.M. last Sunday, a 30-year-old woman was shot in the head in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a house party. On Saturday afternoon, a man and a woman were shot to death outside a Brooklyn home. Early Friday morning, a 19-year-old girl was shot to death in the heart of Manhattan, near Madison Square Park, on East 26th Street.
Milwaukee’s homicides have increased 132 percent. “In 25 years, I’ve never seen it like this,” a Milwaukee police inspector told the Police Executive Research Forum, referring to the violence and the low officer morale. Shootings are spiking in Indianapolis. Other cities will show similar increases once their crime data are published.
By now, these drearily mindless gang shootings echo one another. Another three-year-old boy was shot in Chicago with his gangbanger father on another Father’s Day, this one in 2016; the boy is paralyzed for life. The young children recently shot inside their homes also recall Ferguson 1.0 incidents. In August 2016, a nine-year-old girl was shot to death in Ferguson on her mother’s bed while doing homework. The gunman was a 21-year-old felon on probation from a robbery conviction who deliberately shot at least six bullets into the home, located near a memorial for Michael Brown. But the pedigree of these domestic drive-bys is longer and more ominous. In New York, children used to sleep in bathtubs before Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton began restoring lawfulness to the city in 1994; we are fast returning to that pre-Giuliani era.
So far this year, more people have been killed in Baltimore than at this point in 2019, which ended with the highest homicide rate on record for that city. June’s killings, which eclipse those of June 2019, include a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant and her three-year-old daughter. They were gunned down in their car by the father of the woman’s unborn child, according to the police.
The victims in these shootings are overwhelmingly black. So far this year, 78 percent of all homicide victims in Chicago are black, though blacks are less than a third of the population. But the defund-the-police advocates and the Democratic establishment have said nothing about the growing loss of black lives.
Instead, the Black Lives Matter movement is tweeting about police defunding, last weekend’s gay pride marches, and NASCAR’s Bubba Wallace, the subject of yet another hate-crime hoax. DeRay Mckesson, an early BLM organizer in Ferguson, is retweeting about whether homophobes are secretly gay. Activist Shaun King, who recently called for vandals to destroy stained-glass windows portraying the Baby Jesus and Mary, is retweeting that Mount Rushmore is an act of vandalism. Ja’Mal Green, a Black Lives Matter organizer in Chicago who was arrested in 2016 for assaulting and attempting to disarm an officer, offered a $5,000 reward on Saturday for information on the killing of the one-year-old boy in Chicago, but coupled that offer with another call to defund the police. Since then, Green has been tweeting about abortion rights and the extradition of President Trump to Iran. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is tweeting about abortion rights, gay pride, and Trump’s culpability for the coronavirus epidemic. The Vera Institute for Justice, a liberal criminal-justice think tank, announced on Monday that “now is the time to spend less on policing” in order to “create safer communities for Black people.”
Actually, now would seem not to be the time to spend less on policing, with gunslingers retaking control of urban streets. The timing of the defund movement was always a puzzle, coming as it did after weeks of destructive riots during which law enforcement was wildly overmatched. Such a demonstration of the violence that lies just beneath the surface of civilization would not, one might think, be the best opening pitch for an argument to shrink police manpower and resources further. Yet the defund idea took off, with the media making sure that the looting and arson became a hazy memory (at least for those whose life’s work did not go up in flames) while alleged police racism remained in the headlines. The establishment, in further proof of the elite betrayal of the principle of law, was happy to forgive and forget the riots as an understandable release of black rage. And now, the self-described champions of black lives are pressing ahead with their anti-cop campaign, with a breezy indifference to countervailing evidence.
While 307 people have been murdered this year in Chicago, the Chicago police have killed three suspects, all armed and dangerous. In 2018, the New York Police Department recorded its lowest number of fatal civilian shootings—five—since records were first kept in 1971. (Data from 2019 have not been published.) All five victims were threatening or appeared to be threatening officers with guns or knives.
The Minneapolis Effect will not be confined to intra-racial gang violence. Sadistic and gratuitous attacks on elderly citizens have been accelerating in recent weeks—a 78-year-old woman punched casually on the head in Brooklyn; an 80-year-old man knocked to the ground, dragged, and robbed in the Bronx; and a 92-year-old woman slammed into a fire hydrant in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park. The high-volume delegitimization of American justice and the incessant drumbeat about white supremacy will likely result in an increase in black-on-white violence, which already accounts for 85 percent of all interracial attacks between blacks and whites.
Meanwhile, criminal-justice leaders themselves are surrendering. The New York Police Commissioner has disbanded the department’s most effective tool for getting illegal guns off the street, the plainclothes Anti-Crime Unit. Officers across the country are being told to ignore low-level offenses, and urban D.A.s are refusing to prosecute public-order arrests, on the ground that Broken Windows policing is racist—until, that is, an outbreak of particularly irksome disorder becomes too widespread, as is the case with the current fireworks discharges. The head of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association in New York has advised its members to use their “utmost discretion” in responding to fireworks complaints unless New York mayor Bill de Blasio “unequivocally commits to having our officers enforce fireworks infractions AND the District Attorneys verbally commit to processing fireworks offenses” (emphasis in original). Otherwise, warns the LBA president, officers are merely being set up for a new slew of phony civilian complaints.
Ambushes await officers who respond to gunfire alerts, illegal house parties, and other crimes. This weekend, New York officers were assaulted with bottles and garbage by a group of about 500 people at 3:45 A.M. in Harlem as they tried to find the source of a shooting picked up by ShotSpotter technology. A Baltimore officer was shot in the stomach earlier this month while trying to break up a large party in West Baltimore. Such parties are the seedbed of gun violence; the day before, a gunman had shot into a crowd at another large Baltimore party. One of Baltimore’s defunding groups, “Organizing Black,” was unmoved. “ABOLISH THE POLICE is the goal,” it wrote on Twitter, “FUCK THE POLICE is the Attitude.” Two car thieves in Chicago struck an officer with their stolen car and dragged him a short distance this June. In late May, crowds threw glass bottles at Chicago officers as they tried to arrest gun suspects; in one case, the crowd tried to free the suspect from a patrol car.
These are no longer the warning signs of a possible breakdown of civilized life. That breakdown is upon us. If local and national leaders are unable to summon the will to defend our most basic institutions from false and inflammatory charges of racism, they have forfeited their right to govern. Unless new leaders come forth who understand their duty to maintain the rule of law, the country will not pull back from disaster.