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THE BIG FINISH: The Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial goes to the jury

A contentious trial comes to an end and a jury now deliberates the fate of five Proud Boys facing multiple charges including seditious conspiracy in what has been the Justice Department's longest Jan. 6 trial to date.
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Prosecutorial Discretion in the Age of Shitlords and "Psychological loldongs Terrorism"

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emptywheel
Among the questions presented by the alt-right chat rooms from 2016 presented at the Douglass Mackey trial are, what happened to Weev after he boasted of the shitposter influence up until Trump got the nomination.
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Daylight Come, and He Got to Go Home

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Peterr
The jam session in heaven is going to be epic tonight, because daylight came and Harry Belafonte has gone home.

James Gordon Meek and Merrick Garland's "Suspect Exception"

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emptywheel
The case against James Gordon Meek, in which an investigative reporter gets arrested for a crime entirely unrelated to his reporting, raises important questions about the application of Merrick Garland's media policy.
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Employer Rupert Murdoch Turned Out to Be a More Important Tucker Carlson "Spy" Than the NSA

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emptywheel
While it's not yet clear what specific things Tucker said in the privacy of a Fox News server got him fired, it seems clear that Fox's review of those statements as part of multiple legal discovery efforts had a more immediate impact on him than the NSA review of his communications with a back channel to Putin.

The Shadow Docket

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bmaz
Go forth and buy The Shadow Docket by Steve Vladeck.
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The Hot Seat: Two Proud Boys testifying at seditious conspiracy trial unravel on the witness stand

The final chapter of the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial featured several days of heated, often bitter testimony from two of the defendants: Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola.
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Glenn Greenwald Keeps Bitching about a Law Requiring Notice If You're Funded by Russian Spies

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emptywheel
Glenn Greenwald teamed up with Tucker Carlson to falsely claim some socialists arrested earlier this week were arrested for their dissident activities rather than their hidden ties to Russian spies.
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Ben Smith Still Doesn't Understand He Peddled Likely Russian Disinformation

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emptywheel
In a piece reflecting on whether he it was right to publish the Christoper Steele dossier, Ben Smith seems blissfully ignorant of the likelihood that he was an unwitting mule for Russian disinformation.
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How the Government Proved Their Case against John Podesta's Hacker

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emptywheel
For years, denialists have said that the Mueller indictment charging twelve GRU hackers in the hack-and-leak of the DNC and other victims might not be proven in court. Here's how DOJ proved a hack-and-trade case involving one of those twelve.
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Fox Settles With Dominion: There Was Gambling At Cafe Rick's Casino

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bmaz
Dominion v. Fox has settled and is over. Can the people on the internet internalizing it as about them please shut up?
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Rudy Giuliani Claims He's Shooting Blank Documents

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emptywheel
The stories Rudy Giuliani and Christina Bobb have told about efforts to overturn Georgia's election have started to fall apart. And lawyers for Ruby Freeman just asked Beryl Howell to force him to cough up the real story.
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Christina Bobb's Rent-an-Attorney-Client Cut-Out Computer

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emptywheel
When the January 6 Committee asked Christina Bobb about the memo calling to seize the voting machines -- the metadata of which showed she authored -- she claimed she had nothing to do with it. No wonder she was the lawyer asked to certify that a diligent search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents had occurred.
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Jack Teixeira: Leak Dumps Don't Care about (the Story You Tell about) Motive

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emptywheel
The Discord Leaks are a leak dump. They may have more in common with past leak dumps than a lot of past leak dump journalists would like to admit.

Problems With The Standard Story Of The Revolutionary War And The Constitution

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Ed Walker
The standard story is wrong about the causes of the Revolutionary War. The Founders Constitution doesn't protect individual rights.

The Investigation into Jack Teixeira

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emptywheel
The arrest affidavit unsealed in the Jack Teixeira case shows that the FBI had definitely IDed him before the NYT revealed his identity yesterday, but they interviewed a key player only after Bellingcat had already reported on how the document moved from server to server.
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Finally: The first Proud Boy on trial for seditious conspiracy testifies

Proud Boy Zachary Rehl testified before jurors for two long days, insisting that the extremist group did not have a plan in place for Jan. 6.