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OT - OSU trying to steal Iowa's 'bubble thunder'.

Won 3rd of 4 tonight by beating Nebraska, and all 3 wins against projected NCAA teams. (Purdue, @MSU and Nebby). Now 17-12 on the season, with zero Quad 3 or 4 losses.

Their last two reg. season games are Michigan and @Rutgers, which doesn't help them 'resume' wise, but heck of a lot easier to win matchups than @NW and Illinois.


Seems firing Holtmann was the best thing that could have happened to/for OSU.
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Grassley takes credit for prodding FBI to investigate Biden whistleblower charged with lying

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley took credit Wednesday for prodding the FBI to investigate whistleblower claims made by Alexander Smirnov — claims that have since resulted in the former federal informant being arrested on charges that he fabricated a bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden.

“Just think of what I did for the people this country for making sure that somebody was misleading the FBI is no longer going to mislead them,” Grassley told Iowa reporters during a weekly press call. “And think what I did for the people of this country to make sure that the FBI is doing its job.”

Last year, Grassley publicly released an internal FBI document known as an FD-1023 that contained unconfirmed allegations from a confidential source claiming that the CEO of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, paid a $10 million bribe to the Bidens.

The claims had been at the center of the U.S. House Oversight Committee’s investigation into Biden and his family’s business dealings. And once Grassley made the document public, Republicans seized on it, in calling for Biden’s impeachment.

But the informant, Smirnov, was indicted in February and charged with two counts of making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record for information he gave to the FBI. His lawyers say he could be sentenced to 15 to 21 months in prison if convicted.

A federal judge on Feb. 26 ordered Smirnov to be jailed while awaiting trail because of concerns he could flee the country.

Grassley said Wednesday his role in the saga has been misunderstood, arguing his only goal was to ensure the FBI was following up on a lead that he believed they had been ignoring.

“Then they interview this Smirnov, and they find out he's been lying to them,” Grassley said. “Well, they've been paying him for 10 years. … So, the bottom line of it is, if I hadn't made this public, this guy would still be working for the taxpayers and still probably being paid for it and still be lying to them.”

Grassley did not comment Wednesday on whether the charges against Smirnov have undermined the House GOP’s impeachment efforts.

SIAP-Biden Did Not Take a Cognitive Test With Physical Yesterday

I did not see this posted anywhere but may have missed it. As many of you know I lean left but this is concerning. According to the White House propaganda, "he takes a cognitive tests everyday by being the President" (paraphrasing.) World tensions are a their highest level in decades and we do not have a candidate for President that is fit to fill the job. How did America get into this mess!

Opinion Supreme Court aids and abets Trump’s bid for delay

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Donald Trump’s audacious claim of presidential immunity from prosecution — with oral argument a leisurely seven weeks off — all but guarantees one of two terrible outcomes. Either the former president’s trial on charges of attempting to subvert the 2020 election, a trial that was supposed to start next week, will now not take place until after the 2024 election, or it will be held in the final months before Election Day. The justices are not entirely responsible for this mess, but they have just made a bad situation far worse than it needed to be.


My beef isn’t with the court’s decision to hear the case — it’s with the outrageously lethargic timing. It would have been far better for the court to have taken up the issue back in December, when special counsel Jack Smith urged the justices to leapfrog the federal appeals court. Now, two and a half months have gone by. It took the justices two weeks after Trump sought their intervention to announce that they would hear the case. Worse, they set oral argument for the week of April 22, a delay that means a decision could easily take until May or even linger until the term finishes at the end of June.
Worst of all, especially given this timetable, the justices could have allowed trial preparations to go forward while the case was briefed, argued and decided. That would have prevented Trump from accomplishing what has been his aim all along: to use the immunity claim as a ploy to delay his trial until after the election.



Instead, the court engaged in a weird procedural dodge. It didn’t do what Trump’s lawyers had asked and grant a stay of the appeals court ruling against him. Instead, it issued an unusual order to the appeals court that ends up having the same effect — without having to satisfy the stringent standards that are supposed to apply when a stay is sought.


In any event, the bottom line is that pretrial proceedings remain frozen. And because U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan has estimated the parties need 88 days to get ready for trial, that means it will take months after the justices finally rule for a trial to begin. That means a trial isn’t likely to begin until September — at the earliest. And you can bet that Trump, if that happens, will be insisting that the trial be postponed so he can be free to campaign, not confined to sitting in the federal courthouse.

Ruth Marcus on the Supreme Court

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=mc_magnet-opmarcuscourt_inline_collection_20

How to explain what’s going on here? This has all the hallmarks of a compromise that isn’t much of a compromise at all — no surprise given the conservative supermajority. Aside from any partisan motives, it’s not hard to imagine that some of the conservative justices, bristling at the notion that the electoral calendar should play a role, would want the case decided in the regular order. You don’t have to be a Trump backer to take that position. That would have meant, since the court’s calendar was already set for this year, kicking it over until the next term begins in October.



Same with the sluggish pace. This court knows full well how to speed things up when it wants to. Consider the timeline in Colorado’s Trump disqualification case: He asked the court to take the case on Jan. 3; it agreed two days later and set argument for Feb. 5. (In that situation, granted, an undeniable deadline was looming. So where’s the ruling? Colorado’s primary is Tuesday.) But here, too, I suspect that the conservative justices might have thought they were already expediting matters. Bottom line: You can’t drive a good bargain without more bargaining power than the liberal justices have.
Finally, some justices might be refusing to accept any responsibility for the collision of the electoral and legal calendars; after all, they could argue, if Attorney General Merrick Garland had moved faster to bring charges against Trump involving conduct that is now three years in the past, we wouldn’t be in this fix. Perhaps, but we are where we are. The proximate cause of the current predicament is the court itself.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=mc_magnet-optrumpindict_inline_collection_20

And there might be more delay — we’ll find out, eventually — built into the way the court has framed the question it wants to decide: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”



The appeals court panel that unanimously rejected Trump’s immunity claim did so on a broader basis. Unlike a different appellate panel that considered the issue of Trump’s immunity in the context of a lawsuit for damages from those injured on Jan. 6, 2021, it didn’t parse whether Trump’s acts were in his official capacity or instead in his role as a presidential candidate. If the justices decide that is the better approach, it could take the lower courts additional time to sort through which allegedly criminal conduct involved official acts.
From the start, this long-shot bid for presidential immunity has always been Trump’s play for time. With the Supreme Court’s complicity, it has worked like a charm.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/29/supreme-court-trump-immunity/

Conference allocations for Nationals released







It is great to be an Iowa Wrestling fan.

Go Hawks!
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Trump Media co-founders sue company, alleging a scheme to dilute shares

The co-founders of former president Donald Trump’s media company filed a lawsuit Wednesday, claiming that Trump and other leaders had schemed to deprive them of a stake in the company that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.

The case could complicate a long-delayed bid by Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of the social network Truth Social, to merge with a special purpose acquisition company called Digital World Acquisition and become a publicly traded company.

That merger deal, which could value Trump’s stake in the company at more than $3 billion, would offer the former president a financial lifeline at a time when he is facing more than $454 million in penalties from a civil fraud judgment this month in New York.

Representatives for Trump, Trump Media and Digital World did not immediately respond to requests for comment.


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Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, who met Trump as contestants on his reality show “The Apprentice,” pitched Trump on the idea of a Trump-branded tech start-up and social media platform in early 2021 after he lost the White House and was banned from Twitter, now called X.

Trump agreed to the deal and was given 90 percent of the company, according to a motion for expedited proceedings filed Wednesday in the Delaware Court of Chancery by the co-founders’ partnership, United Atlantic Ventures. The partnership took 8.6 percent, while an attorney on the deal, Bradford Cohen, was given the remaining 1.4 percent, the motion states.

UAV launched the Trump Media business, hired employees and raised funding while receiving no “fee or payment for its work,” the motion said. And though Litinsky and Moss left Trump Media that year amid a dispute with its current leadership, UAV retained its shares, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing this month from Digital World.


The filing said that Trump was set to receive 78 million shares in the post-merger company — a stake worth $3.5 billion at today’s share price — and that UAV would receive more than 7 million shares, a stake worth about $339 million. “Throughout TMTG’s corporate history,” the motion states, “UAV’s 8.6 percent ownership interest has been recognized and honored.”
But UAV’s attorneys allege in the motion that Trump has recently attempted to “drastically dilute” the partnership’s stake as part of what they called an “11th hour, pre-merger corporate maneuvering” tactic designed to increase the amount of authorized stock, from 120 million shares to 1 billion shares.

UAV’s attorneys wrote that the “dilution scheme” had “no legitimate business purpose” and suggested that Trump and the Trump Media board planned to issue the new shares to “Trump and/or his associates and children,” watering down UAV’s stake to less than 1 percent.


UAV was “promised 8.6 percent of this company and sadly its business partners are baselessly trying to renege,” said the partnership’s lead attorney, Christopher J. Clark of Clark Smith Villazor, in an interview with The Washington Post describing the lawsuit. “They feel like: We made Truth Social for you. You get 90 percent. But some people just aren’t happy with 90 percent.”
Clark has represented high-profile defendants including Hunter Biden, Elon Musk and billionaire businessman Mark Cuban. After representing President Biden’s son for several years in negotiations related to a Justice Department investigation, Clark stepped down in August due to the possibility that he could be called to testify as a witness on Hunter Biden’s behalf.


In the filing, Digital World said the proposed issuing of 1 billion shares in “New Digital World” stock was part of a set of post-merger business changes. The SEC declared this month that the merger’s registration statement was effective, clearing the way for Digital World’s shareholders to vote to finalize the merger in a meeting next month.



Digital World acknowledged the UAV dispute in the SEC filing, saying it had received letters starting last month from a UAV lawyer asserting that the partnership still had the right to appoint directors to Trump Media’s board and to “approve or disapprove of the creation of additional TMTG shares.”
UAV, the filing said, argued that its original services agreement with Trump from 2021 remains in effect. Digital World said in the filing that the agreement was “declared void” by a Trump attorney “nearly two and a half years prior.”
Digital World said in the filing that Trump Media had said it “strongly disagrees with UAV’s assertion to any rights with respect to TMTG under the Services Agreement and that it believes TMTG has valid defenses to the potential claims by UAV.”

The filing said a UAV representative sent a text message this month to a Trump Media noteholder suggesting that UAV might seek to “enjoin,” or block, the merger. The filing also noted that a UAV attorney had sent Trump Media a letter threatening “legal action regarding UAV’s alleged rights in TMTG, including, if necessary, an action to enjoin” the merger.


Digital World said in the filing that the legal dispute could prevent or delay the merger deal, “significantly impact” the company’s future performance or “negatively impact investor confidence and market perception.”
Delaware, where Trump Media was incorporated, is a common state for American business registrations, and its chancery court is a mainstay for corporate litigation.
A sealed legal complaint was filed in the case late Wednesday. Under Delaware chancery law, it won’t be made public for another five days as both sides discuss potential redactions. A copy of the motion for expedited processing, which outlines the dispute, was publicly visible in court records.

Hawks in new NWCA NCAA Women’s Coaches Rankings







It is great to be an Iowa Wrestling fan.

Go Hawks!
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Iowa players that are free agents this year

I was just curious which Hawkeyes were free agents this year. Be interesting to see what happens with each one.


Geno Stone - Balt.
Micah Hyde - Buffalo
AJ Epenesa - Buffalo
Josey Jewell - Denver
Ben Nieman - Denver
Matt Nelson - Detroit
Kristian Welch - Green Bay
Desmond King - Houston
Riley Reiff - New England
Casey Kreiter - Giants
Noah Fant - Seattle
Jaleen Johnson - Titans

Iowa women

That game last night was beautiful. If they play like that in the ncaa's they will be in the final four. At times (a lot of the time last night) they are a thing of beauty to watch. The hitting of the 3's and the passing, mainly by cc is amazing.

No other team in America plays like iowa when they are really rolling and it's not even close. We are so lucky to be getting to witness this.

The greatest show on the court led by the greatest player of all time. Fun times for sure.
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