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Judge Orders Trump and Attorney to Pay Nearly $1 Million Over ‘Bogus’ Clinton Lawsuit

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Gage Skidmore Flickr

A federal judge in Florida has ordered Donald J. Trump and one of his lawyers to pay nearly a million dollars in sanctions for filing a frivolous lawsuit against nearly three dozen of Trump’s perceived political rivals, including Hillary Clinton.

The sanctions, first reported by The New York Times, serve as a significant rebuke of the former president and add to his growing list of legal woes.

“This case should never have been brought,” U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks wrote in a 46-page ruling. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.”

In the Thursday ruling, the judge addressed Trump’s history of using the courts as a cudgel, going back decades in his business career.

“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” Judge Middlebrooks wrote. “He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions.”

Judge Middlebrooks said Mr. Trump’s suit had been “brought in bad faith for an improper purpose” and had “needlessly harmed” the 31 individuals and organizations, including the Democratic National Committee, he had sued “in order to dishonestly advance a political narrative.” The judge added that Mr. Trump’s use of the courts had helped to undermine the public’s confidence in them.

“A continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law, portrays judges as partisans and diverts resources from those who have suffered actual legal harm,” he wrote.

The judge said Trump and the lawyer who filed the case for him, Alina Habba, and her firm, Habba Madaio & Associates, are to pay $937,989.39.

Amanda Head: More Quid Pro Quo By Hunter And Joe

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Things are heating up in President Biden’s Department of Justice. The bombshell discovery of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president at numerous locations months after the FBI raided former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home has ruffled some feathers, to say the least…

Watch Amanda break down the ongoing scandal below:

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

FBI Finally Raids Communist China’s Illegal Police Outpost in NYC

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ANALYSIS – The fight against China’s growing global network of illegal police outposts has finally heated up here in the United States with the FBI raiding the large Chinese station in New York City (NYC).

This is the mission the FBI should be focused on, rather than raiding pro-life activists or colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans.

I’ve written about these extraterritorial Chinese police stations several times, highlighting the ones in NYC, as well as those in Canada and Europe.

Beijing says these outposts aren’t doing any police work, only helping Chinese citizens abroad, but Chinese state media reports that they in fact “collect intelligence” and solve crimes far outside their jurisdiction.

But they do far more than that. 

They are accused of conducting illegal surveillance on legal U.S. residents and citizens of Chinese extraction and intimidating, threatening, and coercing them.

In some cases, they have reportedly even kidnapped people outside of China.

According to the New York Times (NYT), the FBI raided the suspected Chinese police outpost, hidden in New York City’s Chinatown last fall, seizing materials from one of the secretive operations for the first time.

The Chinatown outpost was on the third floor of a six-story office building on a busy street. It was raided by FBI counterintelligence agents working on a criminal investigation with the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Of course, as the NYT reports, the Chinese Embassy in Washington downplayed the outposts, claiming they are staffed by volunteers who help Chinese nationals perform routine tasks like renewing their Chinese driver’s licenses.

Despite the official Chinese denials, the NYT reports, “Western officials see the outposts as part of Beijing’s larger drive to keep tabs on Chinese nationals abroad, including dissidents. The most notorious such effort is known as Operation Fox Hunt, in which Chinese officials hunt down fugitives abroad and pressure them to return home.”

In October, prosecutors in Brooklyn — the same office that searched the New York office — charged seven Chinese nationals with harassing a U.S. resident and his son, pressuring the man to return to China to face criminal charges.

As reported by the NYT, “It’s outrageous that China thinks it can come to our shores, conduct illegal operations and bend people here in the United States to their will,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2020.

At least 102 such outposts have been documented in 53 countries in recent months by the human rights group Safeguard Defenders. Wray said in November that he’s “very concerned” about the outposts, which he called “police stations.”

“It’s a long-arm power to show their own citizens inside China that their government is so strong,” said Safeguard Defenders researcher Chen Yen-ting. “We have the power to reach globally, and even if you go out, you’re still under our control.”

These outposts are ostensibly set up by local Chinese municipalities or regions. At least four Chinese localities — Fuzhou, Qingtian, Nantong and Wenzhou — have reportedly set up dozens of foreign police outposts in Japan, Italy, France, Britain, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other nations.

These don’t include the ones in Canada and the U.S.

Let’s hope the FBI keeps up the pressure on illegal Chinese police activity in the U.S., and the State Department gets involved in controlling any Chinese entities and personnel it has allowed to enter and operate on U.S. soil.

Communist Chinese influence and subversion in the U.S. is the greatest domestic threat we face, not Americans exercising their constitutionally protected right to free speech.

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

Trump Pressures Zuckerberg to Address Account Freezeout

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Photo via Pixabay images

Former President Trump appears ready to rejoin social media.

According to NBC News, Trump’s campaign is formally petitioning Facebook parent company META to unblock his accounts.

Facebook and Twitter banned Trump a day after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol as lawmakers certified Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

Facebook ultimately decided to institute a limited ban on Trump that would come up for review after two years, starting Jan. 7 of this year.

“We believe that the ban on President Trump’s account on Facebook has dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse,” Trump’s campaign wrote in its letter to Meta on Tuesday, according to a copy reviewed by NBC News.

Trump’s campaign didn’t threaten a lawsuit, as some sources close to Trump thought he would. It instead talked about the importance of free speech and petitioned Meta for a “meeting to discuss President Trump’s prompt reinstatement to the platform.”

A Meta spokesperson declined to comment about Trump beyond saying the company “will announce a decision in the coming weeks in line with the process we laid out.”

According to a Trump adviser, who has spoken with him about Facebook and shared the gist of the private conversation with NBC News on condition of anonymity, explained that his campaign is cautiously optimistic Facebook will ultimately honor the two-year ban. However, the source noted the campaign is prepared to engage with House Republicans to advocate on Trump’s behalf and pressure Meta. The adviser said Congress is likely to examine Section 230 of the federal law affecting social media companies.

“If Facebook wants to have this fight, fine, but the House is leverage, and keeping Trump off Facebook just looks political,” the adviser said, noting that House Democrats like Adam Schiff of California told Facebook last month to keep Trump off the platform.

Trump Attacks Evangelicals for ‘Abandoning’ 2024 Run

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    Donald Trump via Gage Skidmore Flickr

    Donald Trump appears to have fewer friends during his third pursuit of the Oval Office…

    During an interview for “The Water Cooler,” Trump lashed out against evangelical leaders for staying silent over his 2024 campaign. Trump is specifically upset he has yet to receive endorsements from more of these leaders, including pastor and prominent televangelist Robert Jeffress.

    “That’s a sign of disloyalty. There’s a great disloyalty in the world of politics and that’s a sign of disloyalty,” the former president told The Water Cooler host David Brody.

    Jeffress previously said he’d “happily” support Trump if he becomes the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.

    “Nobody has ever done more for right to life than Donald Trump,” Trump said, according to Mediaite.

    He also chastised evangelical voters for not fighting hard enough for Republicans during the midterm elections. Trump supported unproven fraudulence claims in some of those races.

    “I thought they could’ve fought much harder during the election, the ’22 election,” he said.

    Trump has previously blamed last year’s disappointing midterms results on pro-life Republicans.

    READ NEXT: Trump Shifts All Blame to Abortion for Midterm Losses >>

    Musk Questions Radical Leftist Soros and Asks if Davos ‘Globalist Elite’ is Trying to Rule the World

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    ANALYSIS – Elon Musk is challenging fellow billionaire George Soros and the entire globalist elite now meeting in Davos Switzerland. Musk, still majority owner and CEO of Twitter, made his challenge via his recently acquired social media platform. 

    In a tweet by Ian Miles asking, “If we got George Soros in a Twitter Space what question would you ask him?” – Musk responded with his own simple question for Soros: “Do you actually know where your money is going?”

    This prompted a flurry of anti-Soros comments. 

    One user said he would ask: Do you realize that you are part of the hegemonic imperialism you claim to be fighting against..?”

    Another said Soros would respond by saying: “To fund the demise of capitalism so no one will ever be as rich as me again”

    Musk has never directly attacked Soros, but his provocative question comes less than two months after Soros disclosed that he had tripled his investment stake in Tesla over the summer.

    Since then, Tesla’s shares lost almost two-thirds of their value in 2022. 

    We will have to wait until February’s 13F quarterly financial disclosures to know whether Soros remains a shareholder of Tesla.

    But getting back to Musk’s question, Soros, who is reportedly worth about $8.5 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, should definitely know where his money is going.

    Most recently the far-left financier who is one of the Democrat Party’s biggest donors spent $128.4 million on the midterms, says the Americans for Tax Fairness.

    And the Democrat Party has been effectively co-opted by the extreme, so-called ‘progressive’ left.

    However, that is trifling compared to the vast sums of money and resources he uses to fund a radical leftist agenda, causes, and NGOs worldwide through his Open Society Foundations, the billionaire also funds many socialist and socially radical causes and NGOs worldwide. 

    In the U.S. his organizations are notorious for funding the election of leftist prosecutors who are releasing hardened criminals into our nation’s cities without bail, and supporting the extreme transgender agenda, as well as various extreme far-left ‘racial justice’ groups throughout the country.

    He does all this under the highly deceptive banner of promoting democracy, human rights, and press freedom.

    Rather than attack Soros too directly, Musk heaped most of his scorn on the World Economic Forum (WEF), apparently trying to shake up the gathering of those liberal political and economic elites. 

    The forum is traditionally held every year in January in the ski resort of Davos, Switzerland, though it was suspended for the covid-19 pandemic.

    This year’s event, which opened on Jan. 16, brought together 52 heads of state and government and nearly 600 CEOs, including JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and BlackRock’s Larry Finkis.

    A few days before the forum opened, Musk said he’d been invited to join the WEF but had turned down the invite – a claim denied by the WEF. 

    They stated he had not been invited.

    “My reason for declining the Davos invitation was not because I thought they were engaged in diabolical scheming, but because it sounded boring,” Musk explained on Dec. 31.

    However, later Musk tweeted: “I guess there’s value to having a mixed government & commercial forum of some kind,” the billionaire said on Jan. 15. “WEF does kinda give me the willies though, but I’m sure everything is fine 👀.”

    His mockery of the WEF only intensified after that.

    He wondered in particular about the message of Klaus Schwab, the founder of the WEF, urging the participants of the 2023 edition to “master the future” in the face of the challenges currently facing the world.

    “‘Master the Future’ doesn’t sound ominous at all,” the billionaire said sarcastically. “How is WEF/Davos even a thing? Are they trying to be the boss of Earth!?”

    Later on Musk dialed it back quite a bit in response to comments from Chris Rufo of the conservative Manhattan Institute arguing that the Davos forum was essentially an overrated clown show and not a serious concern to Americans.

    It is still good to see Musk questioning both Soros and the Davos WEF forum. I can only hope this is the beginning of even more questioning – especially of Soros and his deceptive and extremely far-left Open Society Foundation.

    There is a lot to question.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Obama Ethics Advisor Sounds Off on Biden Document Discoveries

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      Joe Biden via Gage Skidmore Flickr

      Former President Barack Obama’s ethics advisor is holding nothing back in regard to the disturbing discovery of classified documents at multiple locations.

      According to The Daily Wire, during an interview Obama-era ethics chief Walter Shaub slammed President Biden for recklessly storing the classified materials.

      “It’s nothing like Trump’s deliberate refusal to return classified records demanded by the National Archives, but Biden’s own retention of classified records reflects an inexcusable neglect of the most basic security protocols,” Shaub told Fox News. “The fact that the White House didn’t mention that records were found in more than one location when first asked about them was a breach of trust with the public and a self-inflicted wound.”

      “Based on what we know so far, it seems unlikely that he’s at risk of any of legal consequences,” Shaub claimed, “but I’m glad Garland appointed a special counsel to show even-handed treatment of the current and former president.”

      Last Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed former U.S. attorney Robert Hur to handle the investigation into the documents.

      The review began after Biden’s personal attorney found 10 classified documents stashed in an envelope in the president’s private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. 

      The documents were immediately turned over to the National Archives for storage, said Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president. However, another batch of documents has since been discovered at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Del.

      Trump Speaks Out On Potential DeSantis Matchup

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      Donald Trump isn’t concerned about challengers…

      According to The Hill, during an interview with David Brody on “The Water Cooler” Trump struck a confident tone when asked if it would be a “bad move” for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to enter the presidential campaign field.

      “So you know, now I hear he might want to run against me. So we’ll handle that the way I handle things,” Trump said in part after boasting about his endorsement of DeSantis’s first successful gubernatorial campaign.

      DeSantis has yet to formally announce any future campaign plans or indicate a strong interest in squaring off against Trump in 2024.

      However, numerous recent polls have shown DeSantis beating Trump in hypothetical match-ups.

      The USA Today- Suffolk University poll reported that 56 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters prefer DeSantis, while only 33 percent would support Trump. More than 60 percent said they want a nominee who will continue Trump’s policies but is not Trump, while 31 percent want the former president to run, according to The Hill.

      Amanda Head: Celebrity Unwittingly Admits Hollywood Wokeism Is Racist

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      It was only a matter of time until things would come full circle… even in Hollywood.

      Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

      Federal Court Hands DeSantis a Win Over His ‘Stop Woke Act’

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      Ron DeSantis via Gage Skidmore Flickr

      A federal judge in Florida handed Governor Ron DeSantis a substantial win after ruling that the governor’s administration did not violate a court order regarding the state’s “Stop WOKE Act,” which prohibits colleges from teaching Critical Race Theory and other woke concepts. 

      According to Townhall, plaintiffs attempted to argue that Gov. DeSantis failed to comply with a preliminary injunction that prevents the enforcement of some parts of the law, citing a memo sent out by Florida’s chief of the Office of Policy and Budget, Chris Spencer, asking universities to provide a list of all staff, programs and campus activities related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory.

      “Although this court would not hesitate to compel compliance with its preliminary injunction, this court finds there has been no violation of the injunction at this time,” U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker wrote in her decision. 

      Judge Walker previously called the law “positively dystopian” while issuing a temporary injunction. 

      In November, Walker wrote, “our professors are critical to a healthy democracy, and the State of Florida’s decision to choose which viewpoints are worthy of illumination and which must remain in the shadows has implications for us all…if our ‘priests of democracy’ are not allowed to shed light on challenging ideas, then democracy will die in darkness.”

      DeSantis’s press secretary Bryan Griffin defended the law, asserting the administration is fulfilling its duty to protect students against overt indoctrination attempts.

      “The governor, as chief executive of the state, has every right to ask how public dollars are being spent by public state entities, like state colleges and universities. In fact, that is good government,” Griffin said.