Thurs: Do You Want to Be Paid in Silver or in Lead?

Note to Attorneys:  Represent QOP Crazies at Your Own Risk

A legal group plans to file bar complaints Thursday against four lawyers representing Kari Lake in voter fraud litigation, NBC News has learned.

Lake, a Donald Trump acolyte who has refused to accept that she lost the governor’s race in Arizona last year, campaigned on the voter fraud claims first popularized by the former president. She filed lawsuits before and after the election advancing the claims, despite having no clear evidence of election fraud.

A federal judge has already sanctioned her lawyers for their efforts, but they could face suspensions or even disbarment.

The 65 Project, a group targeting attorneys who advance spurious election fraud claims in court, said they are filing bar complaints in Minnesota and Maryland against attorneys Jesse Kibort, Joseph Pull and Andrew Parker, who are licensed to practice law in Minnesota, and Kurt Olsen, who is licensed in Maryland. They did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The four lawyers represented Lake and Mark Finchem, then a Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, in a lawsuit first filed in April challenging the use of electronic voting machines. Lake and Finchem claimed the devices could not be trusted.

They Keep Feeding the Meat Grinder

The US military had assessed it would take as long as until May for the Russian military to regenerate enough power for a sustained offensive, but Russian leaders wanted action sooner. The US now sees it as likely that Russian forces are moving before they are ready due to political pressure from the Kremlin, the senior US military official told CNN.

If an unprepared, unsuccessful offensive is what everyone is talking about, there has certainly been plenty of that in the last two weeks. Vladimir Putin stuck a pin in Feb. 21 for a “major speech” to his nation some time back. Maybe he thought that speech was going to be about how Russia had captured Bakhmut, and Vuhledar, and how the Russian army was on the march across the front.

“It’s unlikely Russian forces will be particularly better organized and so unlikely they’ll be particularly more successful, though they do seem willing to send more troops into the meat grinder,” a senior British official told CNN.

If You Or I Impersonated a Police Officer, We Could Be Arrested for It

It’s no secret that federal immigration agents have mislead immigrants and others into believing they’re police, even though they’re not. They commonly wear jackets and vests emblazoned with “POLICE,” for one. Internal training documents have also shown that agents are in fact encouraged to say they’re police, but to just not say from which department. But in what may be a first, “a judge says U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has acknowledged that it trains its agents to identify themselves as police, wear police badges and use ‘ruses’ to enter someone’s home or get them to step outdoors without a warrant,” The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The acknowledgement comes as part of a 2020 lawsuit launched by civil and immigrant rights advocates challenging this totally misleading but apparently legal practice. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that while the court has not yet commented on the legality of the trickery, the litigation can proceed as a class action suit.

“These tactics include where ICE conducts an immigration enforcement operation at a home without proper identification by agents or without a warrant or valid consent,” organizations said. ICE agents know perfectly well they’re not allowed to enter a home unless they have a signed judicial warrant, so they will often misrepresent themselves or say they’re looking for a friend or relative in order to lure someone outside. In just one example reported by The Los Angeles Times in 2017, an agent identified himself as police numerous times within a matter of moments to one targeted immigrant. “Good morning, how you doing? I’m a police officer. We’re doing an investigation,” the agent said.

“Evidence shows that these practices are widespread and have been endorsed by high-ranking officials in the agency,” said the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, the UC Irvine School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic, and the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, which sued on behalf of the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). “In all the alleged incidents, ICE officers made some sort of misrepresentation in order to induce consent to enter an individual’s home or to induce them to step outside,” court documents said. Following class certification this month, the suit now affects residents in the Southern California region “who have been or are at risk of being subjected to the policies and practices challenged in the lawsuit,” the organizations said.

While that would be a significant step toward justice should the lawsuit succeed, the practice would still remain a scourge nationally if it’s not eliminated entirely (which the Biden administration certainly could do). Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House have previously introduced legislation that would make it illegal for ICE agents (as well as agents with Customs and Border Protection) to pretend to be police, but it never advanced.

“Advocates warn that ICE agents, by displaying the word ‘police’ on their uniforms, routinely cause confusion between their authority and that of local law enforcement, which can result in immigrants allowing federal agents to enter their homes without a warrant,” New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker said last year. He co-introduced the act with New York Rep. Nydia Velázquez, who said she’d witnessed “firsthand the negative impacts that these bad-faith tactics of ICE bring to our communities and it certainly doesn’t make things any safer.”

Presidents Against Bibi

Israel’s allies and even its president are alarmed by judicial reforms being proposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition leader Yair Lapid.

In a series of unprecedented moves, the presidents of Israel, the US and France have spoken out separately in recent days urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step back from the precipice. The same message is being sent by hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting their government’s plans to overhaul the nation’s judicial system.

President Joe Biden’s decision to go public suggests he felt repeated personal messages from his secretary of state, national security advisor and other top officials were not being taken seriously by the prime minister. The president’s history as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee brings added weight to his concerns about the developments in Israel, and coupled with a longstanding affinity for Israel that comes from the kishkes as well as the mind.

President Isaac Herzog, in an unprecedented primetime speech to the nation, warned that the assault on the basic principles of democracy and an independent judiciary has increasingly divided the country and put it “on the brink of constitutional and social collapse.” Calling on the government to pause its rush to pass its judicial makeover, he warned, “This powder keg is about to explode. This is an emergency.”

Netanyahu and his extremist coalition appear hellbent on rushing ahead, in defiance of public and international calls to slow it down and seek a national consensus. He and his Knesset allies appear prepared to sacrifice democracy in favor of power.

The Sins of the Father Make the Sins of the Son Possible

An Illinois father will appear in court on Thursday to be arraigned on charges that he helped his underage son obtain the gun used to kill seven people at a Fourth of July parade near Chicago, despite signs that the younger man was mentally unfit.

Robert Crimo Jr. is due to appear in a Lake County Circuit Court at 11 a.m. local time for the hearing a day after a grand jury handed up an indictment on seven counts of reckless conduct.

Crimo Jr. is accused of helping his son obtain a state firearms license in 2019 when he sponsored his application for a firearm owner identification (FOID) card, despite knowing his son was unfit to own a gun.

248 Hours of Hell.  No, It's Not Listening to Bill Walton for 10 Days.

A teenage girl was pulled alive from the rubble in Turkey on Thursday more than 10 days after an earthquake that has killed more than 42,000 people in the country and neighbouring Syria, as families of those still missing await news of their fate.

The 17-year-old was rescued in Turkey's southeastern Kahramanmaras province, broadcaster TRT Haber reported, 248 hours since the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck in the dead of night on Feb. 6.



The number of people killed by the deadliest earthquake in Turkey's modern history has risen to 36,187, authorities said. In Syria, where the earthquake has compounded a humanitarian crisis caused by 12 years of war, the reported death is toll 5,800 - a figure that has changed little in days.