1/ I want to briefly tease out Cruz's statement, which will help set expectations about what might happen January 6:

A thread on the most unusual “victim advocate” case I handled. Not, oddly, a SA case. This is a story for NCOs & JOs especially. 1/

I was a LT (O3) assigned to USS Mount Whitney. Not a surface warfare officer, so while they stood command duty officer watches in port, I stood the lesser officer watch: Officer of the Deck. A nonrate was often assigned to my watch team as Messenger of the Watch: 2/

Let’s call her Laila. She was a seaman (E3) w/no rating (MOS), so she chipped paint & handled lines etc in Deck Department. She was 35yo, had a BA, & spoke two languages flawlessly—English & Farsi. She was SQUARED AWAY. But: she was from Iran. Came to the US as a child 3/

to go to school & live w/her older brother, a doctor. This was 1979. She got stuck in the US during the Revolution, became a US citizen. Joined the USN when her brother was killed in a car wreck. Most of the sailors called her “The Terrorist.” She did not fit in. 4/

She was VERY squared away, & always chipper & upbeat. She was a runner. She saved every penny, trying to get enough $ to get her youngest brother to Jordan & then to help him apply for a US visa & eventually citizenship. She wanted to strike for linguist, but still had 5/

As the ineffable @BenardoDeLaPaz pointed out to me, @LLinWood is dropping major bombs all over the place. He points to this article from famous conservative upstart, Vox

Vox Day is quoting this article from the Anonymous Conservative.

Let's see Mr. Wood is

"A sealed document in a federal court in Maryland, sealed under National Security, documents how Nancy Pelosi, Rod Rosenstein, John Podesta, and John Brennan have tapes of John Roberts talking with Podesta about who would best replace Antonin Scalia, and...

"...they were recorded before Scalia died, and apparently had foreknowledge of his death. Roberts flew on Epstein’s plane because Epstein helped him acquire his children from Wales."

"Barack Obama is worth well over billion dollars, much inherited from his step-father who owned it in Halliburton stock."

I’ve often said that nothing is normal about Julian Assange’s case. Here’s my list of the top 10 least normal aspects, strictly on the logistical side of monitoring the extradition proceedings (this is not to mention the many substantive issues that are also far from normal).

1. The judge’s stubbornly persistent refusal to acknowledge that NGO observers are professionals and have an important role to play (separate to that of the general public) in ensuring open justice, and refusal to grant us access to be able to do our jobs properly.

2. The constantly shifting goal posts in gaining access to the public gallery, and arbitrary restrictions on numbers in all 3 courts where proceedings have been held. On any given day, it’s impossible to predict how many will be let in and when, necessitating very early queuing.

3. Receiving conflicting information from the court about remote access, including being accredited to the Cloud Video Platform and then having that access revoked in September. The same thing seems to have happened to us again for 4th January.

4. After unbelievable difficulty getting in, what we actually observed was a small screen on the other side of a large room. It was often impossible to tell who was who, and I could only follow properly as I had the lawyers’ voices memorised from February (when I could see them).

This will be a thread containing the more sensitive information @LLinWood tweeted tonight.

It would be a perversion of justice of the highest order if we prosecuted hundreds of people for participating in violent insurrection, but let the mastermind & ring leader skate to a life of luxury & golf every day.

No ONE in America has been better at evading justice & no

one in America has been more deserving of punishment than Trump.

Nuremberg was not about holding low level foot soldiers accountable. They paid a price, for sure, but it was the leaders who were publicly shamed

and made to face the world for their crimes.

Imagine if Hitler had survived the allied liberation. Do you think ANYONE IN THE WORLD would have intimated he be let him go & allowed to retire in peace to promote global «healing» & «unity?»

Trump has the blood of 400,000 dead

Americans on his hands. He broke more laws while in office than we can shake a stick at!

Even the people who are suggesting that he be given a pass aren’t doing so because he isn’t deserving of punishment. They are doing so because they have a stake in preserving the world

order in which wealthy, powerful white men get away with WHATEVER THE HELL they do.

The desperate, almost pathological need to preserve the mystique of powerful white men blocks out rational thinking about accountability & justice. The EXACT SAME mindset that justified giving