purpura esq

actually proxy for trump impeach team

a skin disease

an 120

no lnx

Trump team titans spotlight: Former Florida AG Pam Bondi can grift with the best of them

Written by Christopher Brauchli / Common Dreams January 26, 2020

Birds of a feather will gather together.

— Robert Burton, The Author’s Abstract

A man is known by the company he keeps. The make-up of Team Trump is known, and as this is written, the trial is under way and by the time it sees the light of day, may already be over. Nonetheless, is not too late to admire one of the almost members of the Trump defense team, two of the well-known members and draw attention to one member who has been sadly overlooked. It is not that she has not had as illustrious a career as her colleagues. It is just that it is slightly less newsworthy.

The almost member of the defense team is, of course, Rudy Giuliani. He has gone around the world at great personal sacrifice in order to advance the Trump interests by getting dirt on the Bidens, and getting rid of Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine.

In all those efforts he has been single minded, always bearing the interests of the Trump foremost in his mind. Nonetheless, on a personal level, Rudy wanted nothing more than to have his name and face forever implanted on the impeachment proceedings by being a highly visible part of the defense team. Although he had, in the past, made history by being the only New York mayor to announce at a press conference, that he was divorcing his wife, an announcement that was as much news to her as to the rest of the world, that feat would not have held a candle, when his obituary is written, to having been a part of the team that was defending a man who was not only the most corrupt but also the dumbest president to have ever lived in the White House. Rudy really wanted to ride into posterity on the back of the Trump. It was not to be.

Among others, the defense team includes Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr. Alan is an excellent choice since he was one of the lawyers who enabled the billionaire pedophile and good friend, Jeffrey Epstein, to avoid prison time for his now famous sexual escapades. Epstein had faced multiple counts of soliciting and trafficking underage girls in Florida, but thanks to the able defense of Alan and others, he was sentenced to 13 months of house arrest. Alan was assisted in that highly successful effort by another member of the Trump team, Ken Starr. Following his participation in the Epstein case, Ken went on to still more illustrious achievements. In 2011 he was named president of Baylor University and in 2016 he was kicked out for failing to respond appropriately to reports that football players at Baptist Baylor University had been convicted of sexual assaults.

Being among such successful defenders and enablers of men accused of sexual criminal activities, it is no surprise that she would go unnoticed. It’s not fair. She is just as exemplary as they—I refer to Pam Bondi.

Pam was the former attorney general for the state of Florida. When she was running for reelection to that post in 2013, she accepted a $25,000 check for her campaign from the Donald J. Trump Charitable Foundation. (On December 19, 2019 a suit against the foundation for using its money for, among other things, political purposes to further the Trump’s presidential pursuit, was settled.)

Following receipt of the gift from the foundation, Pam made the carefully considered decision not to sue Trump University on behalf of Florida citizens who claimed the university had swindled them.

Among her many notable Trump-like activities, Pam was active in taking steps to make it more difficult for voting rights to be restored to Florida ex-felons, repeatedly appealed federal court rulings against same-sex marriage bans until the U.S. Supreme Court definitively invalidated such prohibitions, and joined a lawsuit opposing the clean-up of the Chesapeake Bay, a bay that is several hundred miles from Tallahassee.

Another notable act occurred when she was running for reelection as attorney general for the state of Florida. Marshall Lee Gore had been sentenced to death in Florida following his conviction for a vicious murder and rape. His execution was twice postponed but finally scheduled for September 10, 2014. It turned out that was the date that Pam, who was running for re-election, had scheduled her “hometown campaign kickoff” at her South Tampa home. Understandably, she did not want an execution to take away from the excitement of her day. Accordingly, she asked the governor’s office to postpone the execution. Her request was granted. Mr. Scott was put to death October 1, 2014. Ms. Bondi’s fundraiser went off without a hitch. She was reelected to a second term as attorney general of Florida the following month.

Pam is a great addition to the Trump defense team. She will have no trouble fitting in. Trump, if no one else, should be grateful for her participation.

w ex bs

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cipollone-will-lead-trump-impeachment-defense-team-as-senate-trial-set

...Trump’s legal defense roster is nearly finalized, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone will lead a team of lawyers during the high-stakes Senate impeachment trial starting next Tuesday.

Sources familiar with the decision said Cipollone, who joined the Trump administration in October 2018 following the departure of Don McGahn, will be joined by Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, who began representing the president in summer 2017 as the White House navigated special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation. The duo, along with Cipollone’s deputies Patrick Philbin and Michael Purpura, will defend Trump against articles of impeachment passed by the Democratic House of Representatives last month that allege Trump abused his power regarding Ukraine and obstructed Congress’s inquiry into the matter. Much of the Trump team’s legal defense has already been prepared.

Whether Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz also joins the legal team remains to be seen, and there is little indication that any of Trump’s staunch Republican defenders in the House will be asked to join the trial effort in the Senate. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was at the White House on Friday and met Vice President Mike Pence but is not part of the legal defense. Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has made no secret of his desire to join the impeachment legal team.

Cipollone, 53, is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, the United States’ largest law firm, and worked as an assistant for Attorney General William Barr during Barr’s first stint in the role in 1992 and 1993. A staunch Catholic, Cipollone is a father of 10, a founding member of the National Prayer Breakfast, and a board member of the Catholic Information Center.

The senior counsel has been harshly critical of the Democrat-led impeachment of Trump. The White House did not participate in House-led hearings, although they are prepared to mount a full-throated defense in the Senate.

“This baseless and highly partisan inquiry violates all past historical precedent, basic due process rights, and fundamental fairness,” Cipollone said in one letter to House Democrats last December. He told them they’d “wasted enough of America’s time with this charade” and that adopting the articles of impeachment “would be a reckless abuse of power” and “would constitute the most unjust, highly partisan, and unconstitutional attempt at impeachment in our nation’s history” in another letter.

Sekulow, 63, has served as Trump’s private attorney for more than two years and is the founder and chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, a prominent religious liberty nonprofit organization. Sekulow has argued before the Supreme Court a dozen times and has his own radio show and rock band. Sekulow was a Mueller critic and is just as dismissive of the Ukraine allegations.

“The Mueller report went nowhere. These articles of impeachment in the Senate will go nowhere. And that’s going to be the end of this, and we’ll be on to the next fight,” Sekulow said on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s radio show in late December. “I’ll tell you what an abuse of power is: writing up an article of impeachment about obstruction of Congress when you’re exercising your constitutional rights.”

Philbin, a graduate of Harvard Law School who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a Cipollone deputy who will also play a big role in Trump’s defense. Also a former partner at Kirkland & Ellis, he worked at the Department of Justice during George W. Bush’s administration as an associate deputy and then deputy assistant attorney general, where he waded into controversial issues such as the legal justification for holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay and the internal debate over warrantless wiretapping.

Purpura, another deputy White House counsel, is a U.S. Military Academy and Columbia University Law School graduate who formerly worked as a federal prosecutor and as an associate counsel during Bush’s presidency. He helped negotiate the terms of the House testimony for the National Security Council’s former Russia expert Fiona Hill and was present during the questioning of former White House communications director Hope Hicks during her closed-door testimony with the House Judiciary Committee last summer, before the Ukraine controversy.

Dershowitz, the author of The Case Against The Democratic House Impeaching Trump, told the Washington Examiner it would not be appropriate for him to comment on whether he was still in discussions to join Trump’s legal team, but he praised those already on it.

“I can tell you this: Both Cipollone and Sekulow are extraordinary lawyers,” Dershowitz said. “They’re both at the top of their profession, and they bring not only real legal talent and experience but great judgment, and that will be very important in this matter.”

Dershowitz said he “believed very strongly that the two articles of impeachment do not charge constitutionally permissible impeachable offenses.” Dershowitz also said that even if Democrats managed to successfully call former national security adviser John Bolton as a witness, Trump would likely invoke executive privilege and would have the courts on his side, and this could open up the door to the GOP forcing Hunter Biden or Joe Biden to testify.

Giuliani remains a wild card, reporters at Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago that he would testify.

"Or, I’d do what I do best: I’d try the case,” he said, adding, “I don’t know if anybody would have the courage to give me the case.”

Giuliani has already publicly defended Trump, tweeting that “the Supreme Court should step in and rule this impeachment unconstitutional.” He said in a Fox News interview, “It's nonconstitutional, it's null and void, it shouldn't have happened, it was totally illegal.”

Most of the Republicans in Congress who have been mentioned as possible members of the legal team are mum, though Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio told Fox & Friends this morning that “I’m happy to join the president’s legal team if that’s what the president and that’s what Pat Cipollone and the White House counsel’s team wants and that’s what the Senate wants.” Jordan’s press secretary said, “The decision is entirely up to the White House.”

The offices for Reps. John Ratcliffe of Texas, Doug Collins of Georgia, and Mark Meadows of North Carolina all declined the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.

Pam Bondi, 53, a former two-term Florida attorney general who joined the Trump administration last October, will help lead the legal team’s communications operation. Bondi, a Fox News regular, endorsed Trump just before the GOP’s Florida primary in 2016. And Tony Sayegh, 43, will join Bondi on the impeachment communications team after leading public affairs at Trump’s Treasury Department from 2017 to 2019. Sayegh is a longtime Republican strategist and spent years as a Fox News guest and contributor.

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trump-defense-lawyer-michael-purpura-begins-by-going-after-schiff-77533765961

AS characterizes/clarifies the mafia-like unspoken bit of call

white House deputy counsel Michael Purpura and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), one of the impeachment managers, debate the details of President Donald Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and when exactly Ukraine found out that there was going to be a freeze in funding for aid.

Source: CNN

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/stop-lying-white-house-attorneys-bogus-defense-of-trump-summarily-discredited-by-observers-with-readily-available-facts

...deputy White House Counsel Mike Purpura (photo) has been making the majority of today’s arguments – they have decided that not enough people will be watching on TV so Saturday’s defense will last not eight but just two hours.

Purpura is not doing a good job – unless his job is to lie to U.S. Senators and the American people. ...Republican Senators are likely glad to hear yet again the lies spread on Fox News by the White House and its allies, but the American people know better. They know they are lies, and they were only too happy to discredit and debunk them in real time moments after Purpura uttered them on the Senate floor...

ful an 120

no lnxtwt

‘Stop lying’: White House attorney’s bogus defense of Trump summarily discredited by observers with readily available facts

Image via Screengrab /

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement January 26, 2020

After three days of House impeachment managers’ brilliant prosecution of President Donald Trump – and “prebuttal” of the arguments the president’s team was expected to make – White House attorneys Saturday morning began their defense of President Trump.

It’s not going well.

Deputy White House Counsel Mike Purpura (photo) has been making the majority of today’s arguments – they have decided that not enough people will be watching on TV so Saturday’s defense will last not eight but just two hours.

Purpura is not doing a good job – unless his job is to lie to U.S. Senators and the American people.

Republican Senators are likely glad to hear yet again the lies spread on Fox News by the White House and its allies, but the American people know better. They know they are lies, and they were only too happy to discredit and debunk them in real time moments after Purpura uttered them on the Senate floor.

It doesn’t take an expert (or a blue check mark from Twitter) to understand facts in this case. In fact, the House’s delay in transmitting the Articles of Impeachment gave the American people more time to digest what they had learned during the impeachment inquiry.

And the American people are very well versed in what facts are – and what the facts in this case are. The president’s attorneys think they can gaslight the America people. Clearly they are wrong.

Take a look.

Mama Tried Honey

@MamaTriedHoney

Dear Mike Purpura. It was not an actual transcript. That's what Trump called it. You sir, are already lying.

Gregory Laan

@GregoryLaan

FACT CHECK: Trump's Impeachment Lawyer CAUGHT Lying to The US Senate Today. Mike Purpura said: Trump Released The TRANSCRIPT of His July 25th Phone Call with President Zelinsky... FALSE... Trump Has NOT... It's Hidden in a Secret Server in the White House. https://gvan42.blogspot.com/2020/01/fact-check-trumps-impeachment-lawyer.html …

7:46 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

16 people are talking about this

The Moscow Project

@moscow_project

Purpura is once again lying about the public record.

The public record clearly shows that Ukraine did know aid was being withheld as early as late July: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/world/europe/ukraine-impeachment-military-aid.html …

Olena Zerkal, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs of Ukraine, says she and other senior government officials knew in July of a freeze on American military aid.

Ukraine Knew of Aid Freeze in July, Says Ex-Top Official in Kyiv

Ukraine’s government learned of the military aid freeze during the Trump administration’s pressure campaign — and tried to keep that knowledge from going public, an ex-deputy foreign minister said.

nytimes.com

450

7:43 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

270 people are talking about this

?????!

@RichardGJP

Jan 25, 2020

Replying to @RichardGJP

They knew about the hold weeks before the Politico article. #ImpeachmentTrial #PurpuraLie https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/us/politics/ukraine-aid-freeze-impeachment.html …

A military instructor in the United States Army and Ukrainian service members during multinational drills in Lviv, Ukraine, last month.

Ukraine Knew of Aid Freeze by Early August, Undermining Trump Defense

Top officials were told in early August about the delay of $391 million in security assistance, undercutting a chief argument President Trump has used to deny any quid pro quo.

nytimes.com

?????!

@RichardGJP

Just to help out my Senator, Purpura is lying about Ukraine not knowing about the hold on the aid until late August, they knew it weeks before that. @senrobportman

7:51 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See ?????!'s other Tweets

Conrad Sieber

@conrad1058

#AmericansWantWitnesses

Why is Purpura lying with John Roberts sitting behind him?

Ukraine Knew of Aid Freeze in July, Says Ex-Top Official in Kyivhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/world/europe/ukraine-impeachment-military-aid.html …

Olena Zerkal, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs of Ukraine, says she and other senior government officials knew in July of a freeze on American military aid.

Ukraine Knew of Aid Freeze in July, Says Ex-Top Official in Kyiv

nytimes.com

7:46 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Conrad Sieber's other Tweets

Team Trump (Text FIRST to 88022)

@TeamTrump

Jan 25, 2020

Pat Cipollone: House Democrats Did Not Tell You That Burden Sharing Was Addressed On The July Call

Embedded video

?????????????????? ????????????

@TravanderBurse

They did discuss European burden- sharing and the lack of proof it was a part of the cause. @patcipollone was lying. And Mike Purpura, is lying now it was testified UA checked on the same day of the Ukrainian call.

Here's what European embassies had to say ??

View image on Twitter

7:58 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See ?????????????????? ????????????'s other Tweets

Report Advertisement

Love Humanity

@LoveHumanity68

Mike Purpura claims Trump was concerned with corruption in Ukraine. Lie!https://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/ranking/release/fact-sheet-dod-certified-that-ukraine-met-corruption-benchmarks …

Fact Sheet: DOD Certified that Ukraine Met Corruption Benchmarks | United States Senate Committee...

United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

foreign.senate.gov

7:45 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Love Humanity's other Tweets

Gregorio Meraz

@GregorioMeraz1

Lying, twisting truth, not showing real evidence andbhsing selected video clips of the House Hearings Mike Purpura cynically states that “Ukraine was not even aware of the (illegal) retention of the security aid” until was published an article in Politico, in August.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

7:50 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Gregorio Meraz's other Tweets

angelavigil

@angelavigil

They are lying again. Mike Purpura is saying they should get a gold star for declassifying a call transcript and releasing it when it shouldn’t have been classified in the first place. We live in a republic and the people have a right to know what their government is doing

7:30 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See angelavigil's other Tweets

Report Advertisement

Pádraig Ó Séag?a

@poshea

Purpura is lying. He selectively played testimony of witnesses who did not have knowledge of Ukraine’s early queries on the aid hold. He will not play the testimony of DoD’s Laura Cooper, who testified that Ukrainians were asking about the delay ON THE DAY OF THE 7/25 CALL.

7:44 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Pádraig Ó Séag?a's other Tweets

Laurie Evans

@leraborg

Hey Michael Purpura! So funny starting with the parody! Schiff called it didn’t he! Then attacking the republicans own house process that they used during Clinton impeachment. By the way, Sondland linked security assistance and meeting directly to Trump! So you’re lying!!!!

7:44 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Laurie Evans's other Tweets

John Swinford

@AG2Pearl

Jan 25, 2020

Are they still harping on the 'secret basement' hearings? Well, you can't say they don't mind doubling down on their lies. Oh, now they are still referring to 'transcripts' of the call when everyone knows there were 'summaries' but no real verbatim 'transcripts'.

John Swinford

@AG2Pearl

Now Purpura is lying about Germany's contribution of aid to Ukraine.

View image on Twitter

7:30 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See John Swinford's other Tweets

Wiseronenow#AYFKM Kinda Day

@Wiseronenow

Ukraine KNEW of the aid freeze in JULY, says ex-top official in Kyiv. So, Purpura is LYING AGAIN. https://twitter.com/HeidiNBC/status/1221096155469287424 …

Heidi Przybyla

@HeidiNBC

Ukraine Knew of Aid Freeze in July, Says Ex-Top Official in Kyiv https://nyti.ms/2qe9M8S

7:47 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Wiseronenow#AYFKM Kinda Day's other Tweets

Report Advertisement

?? ? CD ? ??

@Cynthia__Duke

It’s not a transcript purpura, it’s merely a call summary. Stop lying.

7:25 AM - Jan 25, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See ?? ? CD ? ??'s other Tweets

Crime Watch

@CrimeWa40534906

Hey Mike Purpura, I point you to Michael Cohen’s testimony about how Donald Trump operates “by speaking in code” like a mob boss: #RemoveTrumpNow #TrumpCrimeFamily https://www.miamiherald.com/article226865474.html …

Trump never told Cohen to lie — but suggested it by talking in code, Cohen says

Michael Cohen says President Donald Trump gave instructions in “code” rather than explicitly ordering him to lie. Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, is testifying before Congress about his work for the...

miamiherald.com