Rudy Giuliani just floated a bit further up shit creek without any paddles. After hearing testimony and reviewing evidence, the disciplinary committee for the Washington, DC bar found that Rudy had violated at least one professional ethics rule in his quest to help the former guy overturn the election. This stems from Rudy’s rushing to file lawsuits to disenfranchise thousands of Pennsylvania voters without solid evidence that election fraud really took place.

Of course, Rudy did nothing to help his case with an extended rant defending his conduct even as his own lawyer tried to get him to shut the hell up. Then his attorney John Leventhal whined that Rudy wasn’t being treated like other lawyers. Oh yes, he is Mr. Leventhal. Other lawyers have been punished for much less than what Rudy has done and now he’s finally being called to account for his behavior.

As such, the disciplinary counsel for the DC bar recommended that Rudy be disbarred for his antics. Bar counsel Phil Fox stated that Rudy’s behavior had seriously harmed the country, and that the only proper response to Rudy’s misconduct is disbarment. I agree with Mr. Fox. Trying to undo a legitimate election as Rudy and his pals have done is a very serious kind of misconduct. Rudy struck at the very heart of our democracy through his words and deeds, and has proven himself thoroughly unworthy of being a member of the profession (leaving aside that he likely never was worthy).

Rudy and Mr. Fox will now submit written arguments on how the DC bar should ultimately rule, which should happen early next year. And I hope whenever the final ruling is issued, it’s one that tells Rudy he’s no longer welcome to practice in Washington.

The post Rudy Giuliani is having a bad day appeared first on Palmer Report.

Donald Trump is once again poised to make history. No former president has ever been the subject of a criminal referral from Congress, and that could change early next week.

The House Jan. 6 Committee is set to hold its final meeting on Monday, one in which it could vote on whether to refer Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution for his involvement in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and encouraging the violent attempt to stop the Jan. 6 certification of Joe Biden’s election win. The referral, and the documentation supporting it, would then likely be handed to Special Counsel Jack Smith, who Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed last month to take over criminal investigations involving Trump. It will be up to Smith to ultimately decide whether to bring charges.

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The expected vote to recommend prosecution of Trump would be a climax to the committee’s 18-month investigation, which involved over 1,000 interviews, the gathering of over a million documents, and 10 public hearings. The committee is also finalizing a public report that could be released as soon as next week. The committee voted in October to subpoena Trump to testify, but Trump refused to appear.

The committee is also considering criminal referrals for people who allegedly helped Trump try to overturn the election results by creating fake slates of electors such as former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorney John Eastman, and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal attorney.

The referrals would be largely symbolic, but experts say that symbolism—and the evidence behind it—can still carry a lot of weight.

“Symbols are hugely important,” says Debra Perlin, the policy director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who argues a criminal referral of Trump would “frame a discussion” around the deadly attack on the Capitol and the events that preceded it.

“It can help prevent and counteract misinformation and disinformation in the society that we thrive in,” Perlin says, “because you can point to something authoritative, coming from Congress, that says that this happened, that there needs to be accountability, and that says that criminal prosecution is the path that needs to be taken moving forward.”

If the Committee votes to send criminal referrals, it means “they figured that writing a report wasn’t enough,” says Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University and a former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

Donald Trump’s “the only president to have ever tried to overturn an election,” Naftali continues. “So, yea, this is a unique referral. It’s also a unique moment in our history.”

Other presidents have faced legal jeopardy from their actions while in office. But in most of those cases, the threat of prosecution did not follow them after they left office. In 1974, President Gerald Ford famously issued a pardon to his predecessor, Richard Nixon, clearing Nixon of any crimes that he might have committed against the United States as President.

The pardon came after both chambers of Congress had investigated Nixon’s involvement in widespread abuses of power stemming from a break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex by men working for his re-election campaign.

No congressional committee ever issued a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for Nixon. Rather, the reverse occurred, as Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor tasked with investigating Nixon, sent Congress a “roadmap” laying out evidence of criminal violations Nixon was believed to have committed including bribery, perjury and obstruction of justice. Because Nixon was a sitting president, Jaworski initially believed it made more sense for Congress to move forward with impeachment proceedings, than trying to prosecute Nixon in a court of law. Facing impeachment in the House, cratering support from his fellow Republicans, and looming criminal charges from a grand jury, Nixon resigned from office before facing prosecution.

A criminal referral from Congress against Trump would send a strong message to the former President and his allies ahead of the next presidential election, says Naftali.

“The criminal referral of the cast of characters who tried to overturn our Constitution in 2020, those referrals are a warning, I think, to people around Donald Trump today: ‘Don’t do this again. Don’t try this again. There will be consequences,’” Naftali says.

When asked for a response to the potential criminal referrals, the Trump campaign replied by belittling the committee’s work. “The January 6th un-Select Committee held show trials by Never-Trump partisans who are a stain on this country’s history,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, in a statement. “This kangaroo court has been nothing more than a Hollywood executive’s vanity documentary project that insults Americans’ intelligence and makes a mockery of our democracy.”

The Democratic-led House already impeached Trump twice: once for trying to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch a politically motivated investigation into Joe Biden, and a second time for his role in encouraging the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol Building. After both impeachments, the Senate voted to acquit Trump.

“The Mount Rushmore of Election Denial Criminality”

Norm Eisen, a senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution, was counsel to the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, and considers that impeachment report to have been similar to a criminal referral because it included a 30-page analysis of why Trump and those around him had broken the law during his July 2019 call to Zelensky.

Eisen believes the Jan. 6th committee would be on solid ground with a criminal referral of Trump, as they have helped uncover plenty of evidence of the former President’s alleged role in two main criminal acts: conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to use force to prevent an official proceeding.

The committee has shown that Trump played an active role in trying to drum up 11,780 votes that did not exist in support of him in Georgia. He also was working with others to create slates of fake electors to send to Congress.

And the committee brought to light a phone call in which Trump and Eastman pushed Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to support the effort to create fake electoral slates. Also, U.S. District Judge David Carter ruled in March that Trump “corruptly attempted to obstruct” the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win on Jan. 6 and, in an order issued in October, said that emails from Eastman show that Trump was part of “a conspiracy to defraud the United States” with unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

Eisen says that there’s enough there for the committee to refer Trump for charges on a conspiracy to defraud the United States, under 18 U.S.C. 371 in the federal criminal code.

In addition, Eisen believes that Trump’s actions just ahead of the Capitol attack, in which he encouraged a crowd he knew was armed to go to the Capitol building to stop the certification of election results, may have violated 18. U.S.C. 1512, by being part of a conspiracy to use force to prevent an official proceeding.

Those who helped Trump allegedly violate the law could also face criminal referrals, Eisen says. “The Mount Rushmore of election denial criminality” is Trump, the “inside coup lawyer” Jeffrey Clark, the “outside coup lawyer John Eastman” and Meadows, “whose fingerprints are all over this,” says Eisen.

Perlin, a legal expert on the rule of law and separation of powers, says that the committee, in addition to voting on criminal referrals, should also make public all of the information it has collected, as it isn’t only of interest to prosecutors. “It will also help civil society and experts who are going to be picking up the baton, along with prosecutors, to ensure that our democracy is protected going forward and that there is accountability ensured for everybody who tried to undermine our democracy,” she says.

Together, the committee’s referrals and report are expected to offer a detailed description of how Trump and those around him tried to violate the Constitution and stay in office after losing the election. That alone has value as “a demonstration that our institutions still work,” Naftali says. “We live in such a divisive, noisy era and this would be a focused, clean explanation for each one of these referred individuals, reasons why Congress felt they threatened our Constitution, and I think that’s healthy.”

Elon Musk.

Carina Johansen/Getty Images

• Musk’s family office is looking for new investors for Twitter, according to Semafor.
• New shares of Twitter will be sold at $54.20, the same price Musk paid back in October.
• Musk also sold Tesla shares worth $3.6 billion, according to filings from the SEC.

Twitter appears to be struggling. 

Users are leaving in the platform in droves. Key advertisers are disappearing. And the bills are piling up. 

Now, the company is setting its sights on new investors. According to a report from Semafor, Jared Birchall, the manager for Elon Musk’s family office “reached out to potential investors this week.”

Birchall is apparently offering shares of Twitter to investors for the price of $54.20 a piece, Semafor reported. That’s the same price that Musk paid with his $44 billion takeover of the company in October. 

Since then, he’s made a slew of changes like revamping Twitter Blue, the platform’s subscription tier. He’s laid off significant numbers of workers and is considering not paying severance, according to the New York Times.  He’s tried to impose strict guidelines on working from the office.

In early December, Musk even erected bedrooms in the company’s San Francisco headquarters, seemingly backing his plan to introduce a more “hardcore” culture at Twitter that employees should be working long into the night.

 

 

Doug O’Laughlin of Fabricated Knowledge and Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis go through our most important semis stories of 2022. We get into:

• Samsung and Intel’s stumbles
• Arm taking on Qualcomm
• Risc-V’s rise
• The politicization of semiconductors

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There is something deliciously predictable about the best-quality horror films. And that is this: When watching them, one can be assured that if it’s a good film, it will do as the audience wants it to — it will scare the living crap out of you.

“The call is coming from inside the House.” That line above, first used in the horror film “Black Christmas,” and later in the absolutely terrifying film “When a stranger calls” achieved historical placement in popular culture.

But it’s also being used right now — all over social media. It is being used to describe Kevin McCarthy’s fight for House Speaker — and how the calls to reject him are coming from his own people.He is living his real-life horror film.

McCarthy’s situation is worsening by the day. There is a revolt of sorts going on, and nothing McCarthy does can quench the flood of distaste directed at him. Several of the more conservative members of the house are saying they might vote as a unite — and that nothing McCarthy does will ever get their votes.

And the pressure is getting to him. That might be why Kevin made a fool of himself by getting into a quarrel with CNN’s Manu Raju. All Raju did was ask him about his struggles in attracting enough votes. Kevin’s response was to snap at him.

“I can always count on you for the most inappropriate question,” was Kevin’s answer. And it is being said that the hunt for an alternative is growing. Yes, the call is coming from inside the house. The man is loathed — not that he’ll ever acknowledge that. So the question becomes — what will Kevin do if he does NOT get the votes?

He’ll have to adjust to being just another House member. How awful for him. How awful for him that his team — the team that was supposed to love him — might be the ones who will be responsible for ending his ultimate dream. But that’s what horror films are all about. They usually do not end well for the one being pursued.

The post Kevin McCarthy is cracking under the pressure appeared first on Palmer Report.

A man holds fake currency bearing the image of Donald Trump as he participates in a “Freedom Rally” protest in support of opening Florida in South Beach in Miami, on May 10, 2020.

Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

• The FEC is urging Congress to help it take on “scam PACs” that defraud donors.
• Such PACs raise money for political campaigns but end up enriching their founders instead.
• All six FEC commissioners urged lawmakers to grant them more power to protect donors.

In a rare case of bipartisan unity, the Federal Election Commission this week unanimously urged lawmakers to tackle so-called “scam PACs” that claim to support a political candidate but end up enriching the founders and their friends.

Per the FEC, such political action committees “solicit contributions with the promise of supporting candidates,” but then disclose “minimal or no candidate support activities while engaging in significant and continuous fundraising.”

The FEC’s six commissioners — three Democrats, three Republicans — believe lawmakers should grant them the authority to directly address such schemes, as well as consider whether it should even be legal to raise funds for a PAC that go almost exclusively to vendors, according to legislative recommendations they approved on Friday. The recommendations urge Congress to explicitly define the PACs’ fundraising tactics and diversion of money raised as fraudulent.

In April 2021, the FBI warned that the scam-PAC problem is “on the rise.”

“It’s fairly easy to start reaching out to potential donors to say, ‘We are backing this candidate or this political issue — please donate,'” FBI Special Agent Eric Miller said in a statement. “The groups can look and sound legitimate, and that’s one of the tough parts of keeping people from being victimized. The red flags aren’t always obvious.”

In some cases, the fraud is somewhat sophisticated. Donations will not merely be directly pocketed by the creator of the PAC but funneled to vendors that they either control or to which they have other financial connections. In some cases — typically the ones that are currently prosecuted — it can be more brazen.

In 2021, James Kyle Bell was sentenced to 46 months in prison after launching two PACs that were at odds with each other: the “Keep America Great Committee,” which ostensibly supported former President Donald Trump, and the “Best Days Lie Ahead Committee,” which was said to support President Joe Biden. Bell raised at least $346,000 through the PACs, according to prosecutors.

In a similar but even more lucrative scheme, three men in 2016 raised roughly $3.5 million for two PACs that were once more in conflict: the “Liberty Action Group,” which was pro-Trump, and “Progressive Priorities,” which purportedly backed Hillary Clinton. According to the Department of Justice, which indicted the men late last year, the groups only spent $19 on any actual political campaigning. One of the alleged conspirators pleaded guilty in August and agreed to hand over more than $800,000. He faces up to 20 years behind bars.

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com

The January 6th Committee says it’s holding one more public hearing on Monday, December 20th. Now Politico says that the committee will use this public hearing to vote on referring Donald Trump to the DOJ for criminal prosecution on at least three criminal charges, including insurrection. Why does this matter?

In spite of some occasional competing leaks about direction and scope, this committee has always publicly put on a united front. Every publicly visible vote has been unanimous. Every public hearing has seen the committee members with a unified goal.

As far as Monday’s hearing, a subcommittee consisting of a few key members is recommending that Trump be referred on these charges. If the overall committee were planning to dispute or shoot down these recommendations, it would be happening in private. So the fact that the committee is holding this vote during a televised hearing is pretty much a dead giveaway that it will vote to refer Trump to the DOJ.

As I’ve been saying all year, this kind of criminal referral is symbolic. The DOJ and Special Counsel Jack Smith already have a federal grand jury targeting Donald Trump for January 6th related crimes. This referral is not going to increase the odds of the DOJ indicting Trump. Nor would the lack of a referral decrease the odds of the DOJ indicting Trump. This referral is going to be about optics and influencing public opinion.

That said, the January 6th Committee must have concluded that there’s enough evidence to convince a trial jury to convict Trump beyond a reasonable doubt, or else the committee wouldn’t risk making itself look foolish by making such a recommendation to begin with.

The bottom line: if you believe as I do that the DOJ will end up criminally indicting Donald Trump on a number of charges, then the January 6th Committee’s (apparent) vote next week to refer Trump for prosecution is yet another sign that we are indeed heading there.

The post Here come the criminal referrals against Donald Trump appeared first on Palmer Report.

(JTA) — Just a few years into her comedy career, Lisa Geduldig was invited to perform standup at the Peking Garden Club near Northampton, Massachusetts. She went to the gig assuming it was a comedy club.

It wasn’t.

“I just had the most ironic experience,” Geduldig remembers telling a Jewish summer camp friend on the phone in October 1993. “I was just telling Jewish jokes in a Chinese restaurant.”

As a Long Island native who was by then living in San Francisco, she was very familiar with the tradition of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas, a product of the neighborhood dynamics between Jewish and Chinese immigrant populations living in New York’s Lower East Side from the end of the 19th century.

After ruminating on it, she thought: why not start a Jewish comedy night on Christmas Eve?

She had enough time before the holiday to find other Jewish comics who liked the idea, write her own press release and partner with a restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown with banquet room space open on Christmas Eve to organize the event, which she called Kung Pao Kosher Comedy. (Geduldig liked the alliteration, even though it doesn’t involve kosher food.)

It was an instant hit, with around 400 guests, and Geduldig said nearly 200 people were turned away at the door. The kitchen of the Four Seas Restaurant was completely unprepared for the volume, as Geduldig didn’t expect anything close to the turnout. The show received a heap of local press, and the next year it earned a three-quarter page spread in The New York Times.

Fast forward and this year marks the 30th Kung Pao Kosher show, and the first one back in person since the COVID-19 pandemic. This time, the event has moved into a synagogue — the Reform Congregation Sherith Israel in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, one of the country’s oldest Jewish houses of worship. The Chinese banquet room at New Asia Restaurant, where the show had been hosted since 1997, became a supermarket in 2020.

Over the years, an impressive roster of comedians has performed, including names such as Marc Maron, Margaret Cho, Shelley Berman, David Brenner, Judy Gold, Gary Gulman and Ophira Eisenberg. Many of the show’s comedians return — Wendy Liebman, who has been doing standup for 38 years, has performed at Kung Pao four times.

Geduldig said the show that put her project on the map was when well-known Jewish comedian Henny Youngman headlined the show in 1997, at 92. Youngman — famous for his quick succession of clever one-liners and interludes from his favorite prop, a violin — died of pneumonia just two months after giving his final performance at Kung Pao Kosher Comedy. For six months after Youngman’s death, Geduldig and other Kung Pao promoters and staff were convinced that they killed him. The SF Weekly published an article titled “The Gig of Death?” But Youngman’s daughter, Marilyn Kelly, exonerated everyone involved in the show, saying the travel was a strain on her father’s health, but he was “delighted to have done it.”

Ten years after Youngman’s final performance, Shelley Berman, then in his 80s, was scheduled to perform at Kung Pao when he called Geduldig complaining of chest pains.

“I go, ‘No! I can’t kill another one!’” she recalled.

It turned out to be just acid reflux, and the emergency room doctor told Berman he could go onstage. (The doctor was extended an invitation to the show, but did not attend.)

In keeping with the Jewish tradition of social responsibility and tzedakah, meaning “charity” or “justice,” Geduldig has given a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales each year to two different charities. Past beneficiaries include a variety of Jewish and secular organizations; this year, the charitable proceeds will go to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank and The Center for Reproductive Rights.

The charitable aspect is part of what keeps Shelley Kessler, a long-time California labor leader, coming back to the show. She has yet to miss a single one.

“Given what’s going on in the world, this is a very nice way to manage the depression,” Kessler said.

At Kessler’s table, her core group of five always bring tchotchkes and booze — though the synagogue has asked this year’s guests to refrain from red wine, to avoid any accidents on the carpet.

“People bring all kinds of things,” Kessler said. “We once had a humongous menorah. Our table has fun, I’ll tell you.”

This year’s lineup of comics includes Mark Schiff (Jerry Seinfeld’s longtime opening act), Cathy Ladman and Orion Levine. Lisa Geduldig will emcee in her customary tuxedo, accented this year with a Cuban guayabera shirt.

Joining Kung Pao on the virtual stage for the third time is Geduldig’s mother, Arline Geduldig, 91, who will Zoom in from Boynton Beach, Florida.

“One of the silver linings of the pandemic was not only living with my mother, but getting to know each other, finding out how funny she was,” Lisa Geduldig said.

In March 2020, the younger Geduldig flew to Florida to visit her mother — and stayed there for 17 months. That was when she launched Lockdown Comedy, a monthly online comedy show where Arline got her start, thanks to some mentoring from her daughter. Arline’s routines are often centered around her fascination with handsome young firemen and the way she calls her husband, Irving, downstairs for dinner.

“I love people saying they like me,” Arline told the Los Angeles Times in 2021. “I have a swelled head already.”

In previous years, Geduldig said she tried to turn “a Chinese restaurant into a synagogue.” She brought inflatable dreidels, giant matzah ball pillows and “Happy Hanukkah” banners, when Hanukkah and Christmas overlapped. Things are trickier now, since she wants to avoid any cultural appropriation while still paying tribute to the show’s origins. For instance, she learned that red paper lanterns are symbolic of good luck in Chinese culture, so she wants to incorporate some into the room.

“This year, I’m turning a synagogue into a Chinese restaurant,” she said.

Although the food will still be provided by a local Chinese restaurant, the usual fortune cookies filled with Yiddish proverbs will not be included. The food isn’t kosher, but because the event is being held in a synagogue there are still restrictions: No pork and no shrimp, despite Geduldig’s 30-year streak of serving treif (or non-kosher) food at Kung Pao Kosher Comedy.

“I was like, ‘How about if I call it kosher prawns?’” Geduldig joked. “They didn’t go for it.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post How a standup show at a Chinese restaurant turned into a 30-year Jewish comedy tradition appeared first on The Forward.

(NewsNation) — Fentanyl is being mixed into street drugs, and more victims are taking it unknowingly.

Nationally, fentanyl deaths increased more than 56% from 2019 to 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Now, a nationwide shortage in prescription drugs such as Adderall has some health experts concerned people will turn to street drugs, which could have fentanyl in them.

“Unfortunately, there are things available on the street that will work in the moment for them and make them feel better and get through the season,” said Marissa Kirch, a mental health and addiction expert at Northwestern Medicine in Illinois.

A simple text or call can make all the difference sometimes.

“That’s truly what people are looking for during the holiday season is that connection with people who care about them,” Kirch said.

With traffickers making bigger and faster money by pushing products with fentanyl, any drug off the street is like a round of roulette.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported that 67% of overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. Only 2 milligrams of fentanyl is considered a potentially lethal dose.

“Whatever it is you’re about to smoke is very likely laced with fentanyl,” Charles Marino, CEO of Sentinel Security Solutions, said. “Whatever drug you’re about to shoot or take into your body any other way, you have to assume it’s laced with fentanyl.”

By now, there are countless pills all over the U.S. disguised as prescription drugs such as Percocet, Adderall, Oxycontin and Xanax. Fentanyl has even been detected in candy and gummies.

“They’re going to continue to get very creative because it’s a business,” Marino said.

For one grieving father, this problem is personal.

“There’s not a drug dealer today that doesn’t know there’s a possibility the person they’re selling to might die,” Matt Capelouto, who lost his daughter to fentanyl, said.

Because traffickers are developing new illegal products that are more colorful and edible, experts fear an increase in deaths among even younger victims.

They’re urging parents to speak with their children about drugs and the current fentanyl emergency.

CHICAGO (NewsNation) — The father of a man accused of killing seven people and wounding dozens more in a shooting at an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago was charged Friday with sevent counts of reckless conduct, according to the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office.   

An attorney for Bob Crimo, the father of 21-year-old Robert “Bobby” Crimo III, told NewsNation on the day after the shooting that his client was “completely in the dark” about the potential for their son to commit the crimes of which he’s accused.

Crimo III, faces 117 felony counts for the attack and has pleaded not guilty.

Authorities were called to the home of the shooting suspect’s parents numerous times between 2010 and 2014, according to police records released days after the attack.

Most of the nine incidents documented by Highland Park police involved allegations of verbal or physical altercations between the suspect’s parents, Bob Crimo and Denise Pesina. The incidents were first reported by the Chicago Tribune.

Crimo III had come to law enforcement’s attention on two prior occasions in 2019 for alleged behavior suggesting he might harm himself or others, authorities said earlier this week.

Police first responded in April to a suicide attempt. That matter was handled by mental health professionals, according to Lake County Major Crime Task Force spokesman Christopher Covelli.

If you or someone you know is thinking of harming themself, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides free support at 1-800-273-8255. As of July 16, 2022, U.S. residents can also be connected to the Lifeline by dialing 988. For more about risk factors and warning signs, visit the organization’s official website.

Five months later, a family member called police saying he threatened to “kill everyone” in the home. State Police said officers found knives during the call, but they turned them over to the father, who was the owner.

Illinois State Police said they received a “clear and present danger” report after the alleged knife incident in 2019, but after Crimo’s father claimed the knives were his, he declined to move forward with a complaint. State Police said there was no probable cause to make an arrest.

Just months after the alleged knife incident, Crimo’s father sponsored his son’s gun license in December 2019, State Police said. Crimo III was 19 years old at the time. He later passed four different background checks between June 2020 and September 2021, according to State Police.

NewsNation reporter Katie Smith contributed to this report.