Capitol rioter’s lawyer: My client is a ‘dumbass’ who watches too much Fox News

https://deadstate.org/capitol-rioters-lawyer-my-client-is-a-dumbass-who-watches-too-much-fox-news/


The lawyer for accused Capitol stormer Anthony Antonio, 27, is planning to argue that his client wasn’t interested in politics until he started watching Fox News, which played a part in influencing him to travel to D.C. on Jan. 6, Newsweek reports.
Joseph Hurley, Antonio’s lawyer, says that while blaming Fox News and Donald Trump — which is a strategy multiple Capitol riot defendants reportedly plan to use — may not ultimately be successful, it will be utilized to explain to the court that the influence of Trump and right-wing media is the main reason the defendants were at the Capitol in the first place.
“The reason he was there is because he was a dumb*** and believed what he heard on Fox News,” Hurley said.
Earlier this month, Hurley told the judge his client had “Foxitus” and “Foxmania” from watching six months of Fox News and started believing what was being fed to him by the network and Trump.
Antonio allegedly wore a tactical bulletproof vest emblazoned with a “Three Percenters” patch, which is a right-wing militia group, at the Capitol that day. He was arrested in Delaware on April 20.
Hurley is accused of squirting water and throwing a plastic water bottle at an officer who was being dragged down the Capitol steps. Antonio told FBI agents that he “locked eyes” with the officer and could see “death in the man’s eyes,” but chose not to help him “when I should of.”

 

As if there aren't stupid people who read the New York Times . . .

 

what a pathetic reply.

 

What're you talking about? . . . I confirmed the guy is a dumbass, and pointed out that some liberals are just as stupid as he is . . . It was the perfect reply.

 

can you imagine someone using it as a defense in court? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

 

Frankly, it holds as much water as this pathetic lawyers reply. Maybe I can argue my speeding ticket because I saw Fast and Furious….. Jesus, whatever happened to personal responsibility? Oh, I forgot…. The fed did away with person responsibility. We are all victims now.

 

Pro-Trump lawyer says ‘no reasonable person’ would believe her election lies

A key member of the legal team that sought to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump is defending herself against a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit by arguing that “no reasonable person” could have mistaken her wild claims about election fraud last November as statements of fact.



Senate filibuster reform would produce 'nuclear winter', says Mitch McConnell
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In a motion to dismiss a complaint by the large US and Canadian voting machine company Dominion, lawyers for Sidney Powell argued that elaborate conspiracies she laid out on television and radio last November while simultaneously suing to overturn election results in four states constituted legally protected first amendment speech.

“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” argued lawyers for Powell, a former federal prosecutor from Texas who caught Trump’s attention through her involvement in the defense of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Powell falsely stated on television and in legal briefs that Dominion machines ran on technology that could switch votes away from Trump, technology she said had been invented in Venezuela to help steal elections for the late Hugo Chávez.

Those lies were built on empty claims that apparently originated in anonymous comments on a pro-Trump blog, only to be amplified on a global scale by Trump himself in a 12 November tweet in which he wrote in part “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.”

Citing lost business and reputational damage, Dominion filed a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against Powell and her colleague on Trump’s legal team, Rudy Giuliani. A Dominion employee separately sued the Trump campaign after receiving death threats.

Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January in an effort to stop the certification of an election they considered invalid, killing a police officer in violent clashes in which four others died.

But lawyers for Powell argued her false statements about election fraud in the months preceding the Capitol insurrection were unmistakably not presented as true facts.

“It was clear to reasonable persons that Powell’s claims were her opinions and legal theories on a matter of utmost public concern,” her legal motion says. “Those members of the public who were interested in the controversy were free to, and did, review that evidence and reached their own conclusions – or awaited resolution of the matter by the courts before making up their minds.”

The filing brought expressions of disbelief from Trump critics.

“This is her defense. Wow,” tweeted the Republican representative Adam Kinzinger.

“Bad argument!” tweeted Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen. “[Powell] should have gone with an insanity defense due to #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.”

“Shorter Sidney Powell: suckers!” tweeted Charlie Sykes, an editor of the anti-Trump conservative publication the Bulwark.

As Trump fought to reverse his election loss in November, the former president himself reportedly supported Powell’s claims in private – and trumpeted them in public, touting Powell two weeks after the election as a key part of “the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS”.

Powell was publicly exiled from the Trump camp a week after that tweet, after she appeared at a news conference hosted by the Republican National Committee alongside Giuliani, whose hair dye memorably ran down his face, and Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis.

The group was “an elite strike force team that is working on behalf of the president and the campaign”, Ellis announced.

Then Powell faced the cameras and claimed to have identified “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States”.

Aides reportedly told Trump that Powell was not helping, and Giuliani and Ellis issued a subsequent statement announcing, “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity.”

But that did not prevent Powell from filing lawsuits the next week on Trump’s behalf in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.

In her defense against the Dominion defamation lawsuit, Powell argued that whatever “reasonable persons” thought of her wild claims, Dominion had failed to demonstrate that she herself thought them to be false as she spoke them – a key distinction in defamation cases.

“In fact,” Powell’s motion reads, “she believed the allegations then and she believes them now.”

This article was amended on 24 March 2021. We wrote that Dominion was a “US-based voting machine company”, but it was founded in Canada in 2002 and has headquarters in Toronto as well as Denver.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/23/sidney-powell-trump-election-fraud-claims

 

I wonder if Fox News will report on this?

 

it's amazing how out of gas tuffie and aunt bea are

 

Busy frying chicken for the church bazaar…….

 

You or your wife?
Shoot me a recipe man. I've been big on greens lately that would certainly go well with chicken.

 

That was my Aunt Bea reply to FD.....