Two very different stories combined to pique my interest.
First:
Excerpts:
Over a year after he was first incarcerated for the sexual assault of Andrea Constand, the disgraced actor and comedian — who is serving three to 10 years — has given his first interview. In it, the 82-year-old maintained his innocence from his Pennsylvania correctional institution, Phoenix, which is located outside Philadelphia, and, because of that, he expects to serve the entire sentence. Cosby also called his trial a “set up” and the jurors “imposters.”
“I have eight years and nine months left,” Cosby told National Newspaper Publishers Association's BlackPressUSA.com, clearly not believing he will leave prison on the early side of his sentence. “When I come up for parole, they’re not going to hear me say that I have remorse. I was there. I don’t care what group of people come along and talk about this when they weren’t there. They don’t know.”
Cosby, who is appealing his sentence, said his trial was “all a set up. That whole jury thing. They were imposters.”
Cosby also used the interview as a platform to blame race, not his conviction or the accusations of sexual misconduct by 60 some women, for being behind his iconic show The Cosby Show being pulled from the air. He said it was a conspiracy to remove the positive representation of black characters.
“When The Cosby Show came on with the Huxtables, just think about it. While it was running, other networks and even the media were doing jobs on trying to belittle whatever it represented,” Cosby said.“They did not like what The Cosby Show looked like for us, and many of us traded into it. Now, look at what has happened. They’ve taken everything that I’ve done and swept it into a place where it would not be shown.”
Go figure. Is it just the timing? Trump pardoned war criminals this week. He also pardoned two turkeys. There are two other turkeys he may be thinking about a issuing a current or future pardon for. One was known as Amerca’s dad, the other as America’s mayor.
Trump may not know his king-like power prevents him from pardoning Bill Cosby because wasn’t tried in a federal court and is his serving three-to-10 years maximum in a state prison in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. Perhaps Cosby doesn’t understand that Trump can’t flex pardon muscles and pardon Amercia’s Dad. Cosby is no dummy. That is within the power of the governor who is a Yale graduate who got his law degree Harvard and served as a Navy JAG officer which suggests he may not cotton to Trump’s pardons of war criminals.
As a sidebar, Cosby claimed he was America’s Dad on Father’s Day this summer on twitter:
This is from a 2015 article in The Wrap: 5 Shocking Revelations From Unsealed Bill Cosby Deposition. Here are two of them:
2. Cosby asked his agent at William Morris to send money to an alleged victim
Cosby contacted his William Morris agent, Tom Illus, and “asked him to send money to one of the Rule 415 witnesses. [Cosby] testified that Mr. Illus did not ask him why,” the documents state.
3. Cosby gave an exclusive interview to the National Enquirer to get it to drop an accuser’s story
The documents state that “Defendant admitted that he agreed to give an exclusive interview the National Enquirer in exchange for their agreement to not print the Beth Ferrier story.” Cosby also said that he was shown a preview of the Enquirer story about Ferrier, “before it was supposed to come out
Hmmmm… notice any similarities between America’s dad and America’s president?
How about this, also from The Wrap?
National Enquirer Dodges Questions Over Killed Bill Cosby Sex Abuse Story — Tabloid tiptoes around issue of whether the comedian used his star status to influence its content
Double Hmmmm…
Now we get to the far more significant breaking news about Rudy Giuliani.
Considering the deep doo-doo “America’s mayor” Rudy Giuliani is in, Trump may also figure he will keep him from turning on him by promising a pardon if Rudy doesn't royally piss him off in his effort to do whatever the hell this unhinged man is doing as demonstrated in his rants on Fox and in these nonsensical tweets about being thrown under the bus.
It is impossible to tell what is in Rudy’s mind about who can throw him under the bus.
It sounds like it is he anticipates the next president will be Joe Biden who may literally tried to get rid of him Mafia style, but then this is Rudy. Maybe he’s warning the current president not to fire him too. Consider this breaking news from Bloomberg:
Trump Denies Sending Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine for Biden Probe:
Donald Trump denied directing Rudy Giuliani to go to Ukraine to look for dirt on his political rivals, in an interview with former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.
“No, I didn’t direct him, but he is a warrior, he is a warrior,” Trump told O’Reilly in an interview streamed on the internet on Tuesday.
However, like Bill Cosby, Rudy could end up in a state prison since if he escapes federal prosecution or conviction especially if Attorney General Bill “Trump’s Shill” Barr thwarts the SDNY investigation. As the lawyers on MSNBC have discussed this could lead to major resignations of SDNY staff prosecutors so Barr might not be willing to take the heat for this. He could end up between a rock — Trump — and the very hard place of public vilification and opprobrium. He could even be censured by the House and possibly by the Senate, if not impeached by the House.
Consider this: New York can now bring charges against presidential pardon recipients.
ALBANY — Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation Wednesday morning that will let New York prosecutors bring charges against individuals who have received presidential pardons for related crimes.
The bill was explicitly written to address fears that President Donald Trump might use his pardon power to interfere with criminal investigations.
“We never thought we would have to worry about a state needing to review the president’s pardon power,” Assembly sponsor Joe Lentol (D-Brooklyn) said in a statement. “However, actions today remind us that presidential powers can be used with bad intentions.”
The federal Supreme Court has found that the constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy does not apply to the states. It does not bar state prosecutors from bringing charges against individuals who have already been tried on similar federal crimes. However, New York’s existing law included additional safeguards that prohibited these second trials.
Oh, what a tangled web!
Addendum: This is a list of the pardons and commutations issued so far by Trump
A commenter wondered about how many pardons Trump would issue if and when he lost the election. I was reminded of what Fidel Castro did to us in the Mariel Boatlift when he included inmates released from jails and mental health facilities among the other refuges. “Out of the around 125,000 refugees that entered the United States around 16,000 to 20,000 were estimated to be criminals according to a 1985 Sun Sentinel magazine article. In a 1985 report around 350 to 400 Mariel Cubans were reported to inhabit Dade County jails on a typical day.[32]”