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Washington Post Portrays Twitter-Hating Brazilian Judge as Disinformation Hero

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes is enraged that X (which will forever still be known as Twitter) allows the free flow of information because he labels some of it "disinformation" which he cannot tolerate. Therefore de Moraes has demanded that Twitter remove a number of accounts. In the old obedient days of Twitter when the management treated "disinformation" (which is mostly information contrary to liberal views) to be one of the great sins of our world, they would have immediately acceded to the request. However  the new owner, Elon Musk, refused to take down the accounts which should make him a free speech hero. But in Friday's paper,  but to the Washington Post found the real hero in this matter is the authoritarian Brazilian Supreme Court Justice. The Washington Post's no longer surprising support of censorship appeared on Thursday in "Having remade Twitter, Elon Musk takes his speech fight global" by the team of Elizabeth Dwoskin, Terrence McCoy and Marina Dias. On one side, there’s Alexandre de Moraes, one of the world’s most aggressive prosecutors of disinformation. In recent years, as right-wing Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters questioned the integrity of Brazil’s elections, Moraes was granted expanded powers to fight false claims online. As head of the country’s top elections court, he has issued arrest warrants against dozens of figures and demanded that social media companies take down scores of accounts. Then there’s Musk, the combative tech billionaire who, since taking over Twitter, has loosened the platform’s restrictions on hateful content and allowed misinformation to flood the platform in the name of free speech. Their opposing worldviews exploded into public view this month, when Musk announced he would no longer countenance judicial orders from Moraes, who he said was breaking Brazilian law, and threatened to shutter the platform, now called X, in one of its most active markets. Moraes, in response, said he was adding Musk as a target in his ongoing criminal investigation into political groups accused of using false information to attack democracy. So guess who the Post castigates in this dispute? Since declaring his independence from Moraes’s orders, Musk has met with Argentine President Javier Milei at a Tesla factory in Texas, been invited to a live online appearance with Bolsonaro and said he will meet soon with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. All are populists bolstered by online armies that have been accused of spreading disinformation. ...Musk’s politics form “a connective tissue between these far-right figures and movements,” said Emerson Brooking, a disinformation researcher with the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council. “He is globalizing America’s culture wars.” The Post failed to note that the leftwing Atlantic Council is a think tank funded by George Soros which hyped the idea for the Biden Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board. Ironic since by their rules, the failure to mention this could be considered... disinformation. See how that works? In stark contrast with their scary-music notes on Musk, the Post tone towards the censorship enforcing Brazilian justice is quite benign. Musk remains a target of Moraes’s investigation, according to a Supreme Court official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the court. That probe goes beyond X’s content moderation policies into whether Musk is part of an organized threat to the country’s democracy. ...For more than a year leading up to the 2022 election, a polarizing choice between Bolsonaro and leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaristas pushed doubts about electronic voting systems in a strategy that mirrored Donald Trump’s unfounded accusations in 2020. Before the vote, Moraes sought an expanded interpretation of the election court’s authority to investigate, censor and prosecute people suspected of undermining public institutions. The Supreme Court granted him the power to order the immediate removal of problematic content — and fine or suspend companies that did not comply. Finally we have a member of the Soros-funded Atlantic Council whining about what he perceives as America, due largely to Musk, backing off a bit from censorship. The country, said Brooking of the Atlantic Council, could become an important cause for right-wing groups worldwide, including in the United States in an election year in which tech companies have largely retreated from policing misinformation.

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'Special Treatment'? Politico Legal Editor Claims Legal System Is Too Nice to Trump

If anybody has any doubt about the extreme liberal bias of Politico, an article they published on Friday should resolve that matter. Their legal editor, James Romoser, attempted to portray the legal system as being too nice to Donald Trump.  The diatribe was headlined: "How Donald Trump Gets Special Treatment in the Legal System." ...He lies about his cases. He vilifies the judges overseeing them — and then vilifies their wives and daughters, too. ...As Trump prepares to begin his first criminal trial on Monday in New York, the tolerance of his tirades is perhaps the most glaring sign of the judicial system’s Trump exceptionalism. But it’s far from the only example. Over the past year, in ways large and small, in criminal cases and civil ones, Trump has consistently been given more freedom and more privileges than virtually any other defendant in his shoes. Romoser's fraud kicked into high gear when he invoked the name of New York Attorney General Tish James who campaigned for her office on a blatant platform of going after Trump: "New York Attorney General Tish James won a $454 million civil judgment against him for perpetrating years of corporate fraud." Although James told Rachel Maddow she had no vendetta against Trump, her own words prove her to be a flat-out liar. Something that the venomous Romoser avoided since it completely undermines his ridiculous premise about Trump somehow getting special treatment from the legal system: It is hard to believe this is being allowed in the United States… she has been waiting for this moment her entire life. pic.twitter.com/3w3lLgN8WO — Eric Trump (@EricTrump) November 6, 2023 So far gone is Romoser's hatred of Trump that he even expressed outrage at the appeals court which lowered his bond set by Judge Arthur Engoron in the New York (victimless) civil fraud case from nearly a half billion dollars to $175 million. But after Trump complained to a New York appeals court, a panel of judges intervened with an unexpected 11th-hour reprieve, issuing a terse, unexplained order that sharply reduced the bond amount that Trump had to post while he appeals the verdict. The decision ensured that Trump wouldn’t have to start selling off assets and that James couldn’t start seizing them. Although Romoser went on to whine about Trump using his Fulton County, Georgia mugshot as a "fundraising tool" he carefully avoided any mention of the district attorney in that case, Fani Willis, currently under investigation for corruption. Ironically, although the subtitle of one of the sections in the Romoser diatribe was "A fusillade of vitriol," he launched into "a fusillade of of vitriol" against any judge who displayed any sense of fairness in the midst of the politically weaponized lawfare launched against him. A few examples: ...Cannon’s deference to Trump has carried over into the post-indictment phase of the case. She has raised the eyebrows of plenty of legal experts — and stoked the frustrations of prosecutors — by issuing confusing rulings on some pretrial matters while leaving others unresolved for long stretches. Most significantly, her plodding pace has cast a pall of uncertainty over the trial schedule — another delay that benefits Trump. ...But with Cannon, some experts detect a more sinister motive: If Trump is elected, many believe she would be on his short list for a Supreme Court appointment. Despite all the media hype, the Bragg case is so weak that even the fairly liberal Vox mocked it as dubious in "The dubious legal theory at the heart of the Trump indictment, explained." ...Bragg built his case on an exceedingly uncertain legal theory. Even if Trump did the things he’s accused of, it’s not clear Bragg can legally charge Trump for them, at least under the felony version of New York’s false records law. ...The felony statute requires Bragg to prove that Trump falsified records to cover up a crime. Bragg has evidence that Trump acted to cover up a federal crime, but it is not clear that Bragg is allowed to point to a federal crime in order to charge Trump under the New York state law. ...There’s also one more twist here. The statute of limitations for the felony version of the false records crime is five years, while the statute of limitations for the misdemeanor version is only two years. Trump’s final payment to Cohen occurred in December 2017, which was more than five years ago.

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Sounds Absurd: CNN's Elie Honig Underlines Weakness of Alvin Bragg's Case Against Trump

CNN's legal analyst Elie Honig writing in a Cafe Brief newsletter that was reprinted in New York magazine on Friday presented both the pro and anti Trump ways of looking at the Alvin Bragg case that takes place on April 15 in Manhattan. It is obvious which of the two point of view that Honig thinks is most realistic in "Donald Trump’s Trial Is a Rorschach Test." ...The crime is a paperwork offense relating to how Trump and his businesses logged a series of perfectly legal (if unseemly) hush-money payments in their own internal records. The prosecution’s star witness is a convicted perjurer and fraudster who openly spews vitriol at the defendant, often in grotesque terms, essentially for a living. The famously aggressive feds at the Southern District of New York passed on the case years ago, and current Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s predecessor could have indicted before he left office but did not. The charges are either misdemeanors or the lowest-level felonies (depending on how the jury decides the case), and the vast majority of defendants convicted of similar offenses are sentenced to probation and fines, not prison. Having presented the POV favorable to Trump, Honig then presents what appears to be a rather lame way of looking at the trial from someone hostile towards Trump presenting it as a desperate payoff scheme in 2016 to keep his campaign from collapsing: ...To keep his listing campaign from capsizing, Trump and his team paid off porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged extramarital affair and then labeled those payments “legal expenses.” Already the first American president or former president to face indictment, Trump could soon become the first to sustain a felony conviction, and it’s possible he could lose the 2024 election — and eventually wind up behind bars — as a result. It's not hard to discern which of these viewpoints Honig thinks best reflects reality. This is also reflected in what else he wrote: ...Paying hush money is not a crime. In fact, a hush-money agreement, though seedy, is legally no different from any other contract between private parties. So Trump knowing about the Daniels payoff — and he clearly did — is merely a starting point here and insufficient to prove anything criminal. The charged New York State crime here is falsification of business records. The DA alleges Trump had the hush-money payments fraudulently recorded in his internal books as “legal expenses” (rather than, I don’t know, “hush money to porn star”). If proved, that’s merely a misdemeanor, a low-level crime virtually certain to result in a non-prison sentence. For comparison, under the New York code, falsification of business records has the same technical designation as shoplifting less than $1,000 of goods. ...But it’s not entirely clear whether Trump was involved in the actual logging of those payments in the internal records of his business — remember, that’s the crime. In fact, when Cohen secretly recorded his then-client talking about a hush-money payment to another woman in 2016, Trump seems clueless about the accounting mechanism. ...The received wisdom is that the Manhattan case is the least important, and will be the least impactful, of the four pending Trump indictments. The first part of that proposition is beyond reasonable dispute. One has to wonder if Donald Trump is guilty of so many massive crimes as those who oppose to him allege, why do the cases against him such as the Manhattan case appear to be so incredibly weak and prosecuted by either corrupt or highly biased or flawed officials while being surreptitiously aided by the Biden administration? Hopefully, Elie Honig won't be shunned by his CNN colleagues for his observations about the Manhattan case.

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Ailes-Hating Vanity Fair Scribe: EEK, Here Comes 'Terrifyingly Competent' Trump!

Remember when the media mocked Donald Trump for being incompetent? Well, that is now old news. Nowadays a new narrative is developing that Trump is actually very competent and that terrifies many journalists including Gabriel Sherman, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair. Sherman wrote a nasty book about Fox News boss Roger Ailes titled The Loudest Voice in the Room that came out ten years ago. (Trump was mentioned once, very briefly.) He described his terror on Thursday with a piece titled "Inside the Terrifyingly Competent Trump 2024 Campaign." The subtitle of his horror tale even included this terror alert for others, "How worried should you be? Very." If Trump wins back the White House, his increasingly extreme and violent rhetoric is poised to become policy. The New York Times reported Trump plans to order mass roundups of undocumented immigrants and detain them in deportation camps. Trump has promised to direct the Justice Department to prosecute Joe Biden. At a rally in February, Trump said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that doesn’t increase military spending. Veterans of Trump’s first administration are sounding the alarm. “He is the domestic terrorist of the 21st century,” former communications director Anthony Scaramucci has said. Former attorney general Bill Barr testified to the January 6 Committee that Trump was “detached from reality.” GASP! You mean Trump might use lawfare to imprison his political enemies via a politically weaponized DOJ? Who ever heard of such a thing being done in America? Oh, and the sheer shame of actually enforcing immigration laws is absolutely intolerable! And now we come to the real source of poor Sherman's terror: the new Trump loyalists won't leak to the leftist press!  But here’s where a second Trump administration might really distinguish itself. While his 2016 agenda was frequently stymied by infighting and incompetence, available signs point to a second West Wing staffed by loyalists who would actually carry out his policies. The takeover of the Republican National Committee, which Trump recently completed, installing his daughter-in-law Lara as cochair, is a blueprint to keep in mind. “President Trump knows who can deliver and who can’t. The backstabbers who were around in 2016 won’t be in this next White House,” Trump’s senior campaign adviser Jason Miller told me. ...In 2024, Trump’s inner circle is made up of heads-down operatives Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita, Miller, and James Blair, who don’t play their agendas through the media. “You have experienced people who don’t leak,” longtime Trump confidant Stone said. Trump trusts his senior team to do their jobs. In the past, Trump worked the phone constantly, soliciting advice from a wide circle of friends, family, Manhattan business associates, and media personalities. Trump’s style of pitting staffers against one another created an incentive to leak. “The side whose opinion lost would run to the media,” a 2020 campaign veteran explained. “This time, he’s not talking to randos.” Finally we get an apocalyptic warning from Sherman about competent Trump's supposed threat to democracy: So how extreme could a second Trump administration get? One thing is certain, few of the guardrails that protected American democracy during his first term are still standing. ...Whether through enhanced discipline or legal circumstance, it appears ever more likely that a second Trump administration would be better primed to achieve its goals. Beware! Beware the competent Trump unhindered by the "guardrails that protected American democracy." Maybe he will be so competent that using lawfare via a politicized DOJ won't boomerang on him as has happened to Biden.