Could there be an unknown totally different Trump investigation?

 

Not counting the Jan. 6th Committee which can’t issue indictments but is still of major importance as an investigative body, Trump is facing three investigations which could result in legal charges being brought against him:

• Merrick Garland’s DOJ investigation into the mishandling of top-secret government documents
• Fani T. Willis, Fulton County, Ga. DA’s investigation into election tampering
• New York Attorney General  Letitia James’ investigative probe into the Trump Organization

There is yet another investigation that may be underway that the public is not aware of, and that I think Trump ,if he’s not totally delusional, ought to be very, very worried about. You know what this could be from my illustration. Of course that Washington Post edition was preceded by one of the most historic Washington Post front pages ever with this article:

Here’s how I put my thought about this in a tweet before I decided to expand on my speculation and write this diary.

Newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times have some of the best investigative reporters in the world. Some are veterans and some are eager young dogged reporters like these two were 50 years ago:

“Watergate at 50” article

These are the first paragraphs of story above:

One of the five men arrested early Saturday in the attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters is the salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s reelection committee.

The suspect, former CIA employee James W. McCord Jr., 53, also holds a separate contract to provide security services to the Republican National Committee, GOP national chairman Bob Dole said yesterday.

Former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, head of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, said yesterday McCord was employed to help install that committee’s own security system.

My hunch is that if journalists are investigating some yet to be revealed crime committed by Trump, or new damning evidence for which “they have the receipts”* proving crimes already in the news, there won’t be an article like this one alerting the Trump legal team that these hound dogs are on the scent and closing in on him.

I’ll go out on a limb here and add another speculation just for bragging rights if it happens. We all know that Rachel Maddow just stepped down from hosting her show five nights a week to only do a show on Mondays “to work on other projects.” She had a large staff of investigative journalists working on her show. She may still have them working for her.

What if one of the so called “other projects” involves tracking down leads that came to her about Trump that could lead to his ultimate downfall. She said she wanted to focus on podcasts and a film directed by Ben Stiller. No matter what she’s said these project are they could be a diversionary smoke screen.

If this was true I have no doubt that MSNBC would provide her with all the resources she needed. Who knows whether or not Rashida Jones, the current president of MSNBC who succeeded Phil Griffin, is playing the role the legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradleeplayed with Woodward and Bernstein.

If there is an investigation by a newspaper or a television network, I only hope that one of these is fruitful.

Maybe this is all wishful thinking on my part, As the saying goes…

chose your ending.

Take the poll and let us know how likely you think it is that one of these days Trump will be hoist by the petard of the news he calls fake whenever it reports a truth he doesn’t like.

Stay tuned...

* I don’t recall the saying “they have the receipts” or “I” or “we” have them being used so frequently in the news, or even at all, until the Jan. 6 Committee hearings.

The strange (legal) case of psychiatrist Bandy Lee

Note the blog archives are in the right column. The most recent stories are all political. They are:

• Trump like Scrooge McDuck swimming in document loot
• Watch His Waistline: Measuring Trump's stress level
• Trump wants his supporters to die for him.
• Scroll down further and you'll find stories like this one about bathroom art a a nearby restaurant. 

The strange (legal) case of psychiatrist Bandy Lee

This story was also published (here) on Daily Kos where it hopefully will prompt some comments.

Bandy X. Lee, MD, MDiv is well known among those who follow books, articles, and television coverage of how Donald Trump's psychopathology makes him, as the book she edited proclaims him, a dangerous case.

She is currently in the news.

Click above to enlarge image

This all began with her with a legal case which began with the following precipitated by the media hog par excellence and thin skinned Alan Dershowitz :

CANCEL CULTURE New York Magazine  DEC. 30, 2021

She Tweeted That Alan Dershowitz Might Be Acting Crazy. So Yale Fired Her.

 

The strange free-speech case of Bandy Lee.

Now some 10 months later the case has been adjudicated. This is the legal result as reported in The Yale Daily News:

Bandy Lee attempted to contest her being dismissed from this voluntary but important position at Yale University but a federal judge ruled against her.

Bandy Lee complaint dismissed by federal judge; Lee says she will appeal

“I won’t stop,” said the psychiatrist, who had alleged wrongful firing over tweets about Alan Dershowitz and tied her case to broader issues of academic freedom.

This was reported, I suspect with some satisfaction, on Rupert Murdoch's NY Post as follows:

Click above for article. Note that the paper misspelled her first name.

One aspect of her association with Yale which has been reported I wasn't aware of. I thought she was a regular paid member of their faculty working at least as an adjunct professor not on the tenure track. I don't know if she had a formal teaching role but this was reported: The reason the school said she was eventually let go was due to lack of a formal teaching role, the New Haven Register reported. Importantly, Lee responded to this in this tweet:

(a) 80-90% medical faculty are voluntary; and (b) “no teaching role” was decided on after firing, not before.

I was disabused of my assumption about her role at Yale being more active after reading several articles about this. It was reported in The Hartford Courant (subscription required) but referenced by the NY Post:

While Lee wasn’t paid, she claimed the Yale gig was worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars in perks and exposure that allowed her to consult globally, the Courant reported.

It took one day for Wikipedia to update their entry on her:

In 2020, Yale University did not renew Lee's volunteer position for breaking the Goldwater rule in her evaluations of Trump.^[13] Lee sued Yale for violating her academic freedom,^[14] but the suit was dismissed in August 2022

Bandy Lee often referenced her association with Yale and this, in my opinion, gave her a great deal of credibility. Here's a 2020 article about her from The Yale Daily News:

PROFILE: Dr. Bandy Lee and the psychiatric case against Donald Trump

 In fact, Dr, Lee was the driving force behind a conference back in 2017  where mental health professionals presented on subjected related to why Trump represented a danger to democracy. See article:

Click above to article

Other prominent mental health professionals in the media include clinical psychologist John D. Gartner who (according to his Wikipedia page) was a part-time professor, until 2015, for 28 years at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Another is psychiatrist Lance Dodes, a training and supervising analyst emeritus of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

These credentials certainly lent substantial bonafides to their opinions especially compared to other mental health professionals like me who have published opinions whose educational backgrounds are more pedestrian. For example, I was a clinical social worker and the director of a small mental health center who received my MSW degree from Michigan State University.

Bandy Lee's website  which has many informative links doesn't have any abut this ruling (at least not that I can find):

As of this writing the news coverage section of her website hasn't been updated with this latest unfortunate development. However Dr. Lee has tweeted her response:

Click above

I don't know how much of a chance an appeal of this decision will have. I'll leave that to those with a modicum of legal expertise. My own off-the-cuff opinion is that the law favors the right of a university to fire any non-tenured member of the faculty whether an unpaid volunteer or a paid instructor or non-tenured assistant professor without cause. I wish it could be a free speech case and then I think she'd have a good chance of winning on appeal but I am afraid it isn't.

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