🔴 The Trump Files 2021
Permalink: https://wp.me/pDKwi-cIt
With Tweets, Retweets, links to articles and excerpts, I’ve tried to document this national soap opera/tragedy we’re living through. The resources at the beginning are a mixed bag of timelines and documents and I provide a clickable cast of characters (Russians, mostly).
What does this have to do with The Blacklist? A lot, actually. Russian mob figures, spies and apparatchiks. Semion Mogilevich, the Smart Don, reminds me of Red, though Red is a lot nicer and much better-looking.
Featured are drawings (she calls them “maps”) by @Jzikah, and “Mueller, She Wrote” is the best podcast I’ve ever come across. The three women who do it are comedians, though they’re all super smart and A.J. (the lead) has a PhD and is a Veteran.
Caution: You may enjoy this feature a bit more if you’re of the liberal persuasion. This is the single place on this blog where *there are politics* though I tend to stick with MSM, specialized sources (ex-Intel Community, altGov, and reputable sleuths) and other people I’ve learned to trust.
🇷🇺 Press Here For Recent Articles and Discussion
🇷🇺 Press Here For Index to all Trump/Ukraine/Russia Files
💽Recommended⋙ Mueller She Wrote Podcast ⋙ http://bit.ly/2PgTKWs or Press ⇊ ⇊
Other Podcasts:
The Asset (Center for American Progress) 🌟
The Dworkin Report (Scott Dworkin)
Gaslit Nation (Sarah Kendzior, Andrea Chalupa)
The Lawfare Podcast (Benjamin Wittes, Brookings)
The Josh Marshall Podcast (TPM)
The Mother Jones Podcast (David Corn)
Mueller Time (Eric Leval, Chris Carey)
The Oath (Chuck Rosenberg, MSNBC)
The Report (Lawfare)
On Topic (Renato Mariotti)
Skullduggery (Michael Isikoff, Yahoo)
Trump Inc (q4- 8qProPublica)
Trumpcast (Slate)
🔊 PlayerFM: Best Trump Russia Investigation Podcasts (2019) http://bit.ly/2MKbtV8
Twitter List: INVESTIGATORS: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/lists/investigators
// Investigative reporters, Trump-Russia sleuths, Intelligence Community, Legislators, “alt-gov,” and Targets
Russian Intelligence Services:
Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) – The Foreign Intelligence Service reports directly to the President of Russia.
GRU – Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces.
Federal Security Service (FSB) – The Federal Security Service is responsible for counter-intelligence, state security and anti-terrorist operations
🔄 ECFR , Mark Galeotti [EU] (2016): Introduction: Putin’s hydra: Inside Russia’s intelligence services http://bit.ly/2NZWN1h
// 5/11/2016, Intro
⋙ 📒 ECFR, Mark Galeotti [EU] (2016): Report: Putin’s Hydra: Inside Russia’s Intelligence Services [pdf] http://bit.ly/2NYjG5b 20p
// May 2016, Full report
Key People: Roman Abramovich, Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov, Rinat Akhmetov, Rinat Akhmetshin, Yulya Alferova, Anatoly Antonov, Andrii Artemenko, Arron Banks, Andrey Baronov, Vitaly Bespalov, Leonid “Len” Blavatnik, Anna Bogacheva, David Bogatin, Victor Boyarkin, Wm Browder, Mariia Butina, Carole Cadwalladr, Michael Caputo, Yuri Chaika, Igor Chekunov, Michael Cohen, George Cottrell, Igor Danchenko, Oleg Deripaska, Andrii Derkach, Igor Divyekin, Kirill Dmitriev, Aleksandr Dugin, Arkady Dvorkovich, Paul Erickson, Oleg Erovinkin, Nigel Farage, Dmitri Firtash, John Fotiadis, Gene (Evgeny) Friedman, Igor Fruman, Daniel Gelbinovich, Rob Goldstone, Sergei Gorkov, Henry Greenberg, Andrew Intrater, Bidzina Ivanishvili, Brittany Kaiser, Mikhail Kalugin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Saak Karapetyan, Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab), Denis Katsyv, Irakly (“Ike”) Kaveladze, Michael Khodarkovsky, Konstantin Kilimnik, Sergey Kislyak, Artem Klyushin, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Konstantin Kosachev, Aleksandra Krylova, Elena Khusyaynova, Simon Kukes, Alexander Litvinenko, Howard Lorber, Yuriy Lutsenko, Simona Mangiante, Alexander Mashkevich, Viktor Medvedchek, Josef Mifsud, Sergei Millian, Semion Mogilevich (Don Semyon), Konstantin Molofeev, George Nader, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Alexei Navalny, Eduard Nektalov, Konstantin Nikolaev, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Yevgeniy Nikulin, Alexander Nix, Isabel Oakeshoff, George Papadopoulos, Lev Parnas, Sam Patten, Alexander Perepilichnyy, Dmitry Peskov, Igor Pisarsky, Petro Poroshenko, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Sergei Prikhodko, Vladimir Putin, George Ramishvili, Dmitry Rogozin, Alexander Rovt, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Konstantin Rykov, Mikheil Saakashvili, Felix Sater, Igor Sechin, Anastasia Shevchenko, Viktor Shokin, Oleg Solodukhin, Christopher Steele, Ruslan Stoyanov, Oleg Solodukhin, Peter Strzok, Taiwanchik (aka Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov), Andriy Telizhenko, Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov (aka Taiwanchik), Aleksandr Torshin, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, Yulia Tymoshenko, Anastasia Vashukevich (aka Nastya Rybka), Viktor Vekselberg, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Vyacheslav Volodin, Curt Weldon, Andy Wigmore, Alexander Yakovenko, Viktor Yanukovych, Ivan Yermakov, Viktor Yushchenko, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, Maria Zakharova, Joel Zamel, Volodymyr Zelensky
Bios w links (Wikipedia unless otherwise noted): Roman Abramovich, Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov, Rinat Akhmetov, Rinat Akhmetshin, Yulya Alferova (National Compass), Anatoly Antonov, Andrii Artemenko, Arron Banks, Andrey Baranov (Bloomberg), Vitaly Bespalov (NBC), Leonid “Len” Blavatnik, Anna Bogacheva (NYT), David Bogatin (NYT), Victor Boyarkin (TrumpRussia), William Browder, Mariia Butina, Carole Cadwalladr, Michael Caputo, Yuri Chaika, Igor Chekunov, Michael Cohen, George Cottrell, Igor Danshenko, Oleg Deripaska, Andrii Derkach, Igor Divyekin, Kirill Dmitriev, Aleksandr Dugin, Arkady Dvorkovich, Paul Erickson, Oleg Erovinkin, Nigel Farage, Dmitri Firtash, John Fotiadis (Archinect), Gene (Evgeny) Friedman, Igor Fruman, Daniel Gelbinovich (Daily Beast), Rob Goldstone, Sergei Gorkov, Henry Greenberg (Miami Herald), Andrew Intrater, Bidzina Ivanishvili, Brittany Kaiser (Cambridge Analytica), Mikhail Kalugin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Saak Karapetyan, Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab), Denis Katsyv, Irakly Kaveladze, Michael Khodarkovsky, Elena Khusyaynova, Konstantin Kilimnik, Sergey Kislyak, Artem Klyushin (National Compass), Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Konstantin Kosachev, Aleksandra Krylova (NYT), Simon Kukes, Alexander Litvinenko, Howard Lorber, Yuriy Lutsenko, Konstantin Malofeev, Simona Mangiante (Papadopoulos), Alexander Mashkevich, Viktor Medvedchek, Josef Mifsud, Sergei Millian, Semion Mogilevich (Don Semyon) …
Cover: KyivPost (10/18/2019): Shady Cast of Characters: Engineers of Trump-Ukraine Scandal http://bit.ly/2MZCilW
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Alexei Navalny, Eduard Nektalov (NYMag), Konstantin Nikolaev, Yevgeniy Nikulin, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Alexander Nix, Isabel Oakeshoff, George Papadopoulos, Lev Parnas ,Sam Patten, Alexander Perepilichny, Dmitry Peskov, Igor Pisarsky (RIM), Petro Poroshenko, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Sergei Prikhodko, Vladimir Putin, George Ramishvili (Bloomberg), Dmitry Rogozin, Alexander Rovt, Giorgi Rtskhiladze (CNBC), Nastya Rybka (aka Anastasia Vashukevich) (WaPo), Dmitry Rybolovlev, Konstantin Rykov, Mikheil Saakashvili, Felix Sater, Igor Sechin, Anastasia Shevchenko (Amnesty Intl), Viktor Shokin, Oleg Solodukhin, Christopher Steele, Ruslan Stoyanov, Peter Strzok, Taiwanchik (aka Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov), Andriy Telizhenko (BuzzFeedNews), Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov (aka Taiwanchik), Aleksandr Torshin, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, Yulia Tymoshenko, Anastasia Vashukevich (aka Nastya Rybka) (WaPo), Viktor Vekselberg, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Vyacheslav Volodin, Curt Weldon, Andy Wigmore, Alexander Yakovenko, Viktor Yanukovych, Ivan Yermakov (Moscow Proj), Viktor Yushchenko, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, Maria Zakharova, Joel Zamel, Volodymyr Zelensky
By @WendySiegelman
Key Documents
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 LawfareBlog: Litigation Documents Related to the Mueller Investigation http://bit.ly/2OVch6n
// new November 2018, to be continually updated
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 House.gov: Select Committee to Investigate the JANUARY 6TH Attack on the United States Capitol https://january6th.house.gov
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 JustSecurity: Public Document Clearinghouse: UKRAINE Impeachment Inquiry http://bit.ly/2CEsQ2F ‼️ Links to ALL documents ‼️
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 AmericanOversight: Trump-Ukraine Key Figures and Documents http://bit.ly/2C24bES
AmericanOversight: The Trump Administration’s Contacts with Ukraine http://bit.ly/2BYSY89 from FOIA requests
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 JustSecurity, Andy Wright: Just Security Launches the Russia Investigation Congressional Clearinghouse http://bit.ly/2L21uHz
// 8/22/2019
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 Lawfare: Full Text of the Mueller Report’s Executive Summaries http://bit.ly/2IFLewq
// 4/18/2019
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 Lawfare: Document: The Mueller Report http://bit.ly/2vcgNpN
// 4/18/2019
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: The Whistle-Blower Complaint: Read the Document [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2nq4FAD
// 9/26/2019
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo: Trump impeachment inquiry: Latest news and updates http://wapo.st/2P09WuE [Continually updated]
🔆 This❗️⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo, Kate Rabinowitz and Kevin Schaul: Who’s involved in the Trump impeachment inquiry http://wapo.st/2W673dg
// orig published 10/21/2019
By @jzikah has a new book! Cartoon President http://amzn.to/2QUeZhk @Jzikah
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 Court Filing (1/17/2019): Civil Action No. 1:18-cv-03501 [pdf] http://cnn.it/2CBddZy (111p) Democratic National Committee v.: Russian Federation, DJ Trump For President, Inc (and others)
// 1/17/2019
⋙ 💙💙🔄 TheAtlantic, Yoni Appelbaum: Impeach Donald Trump http://bit.ly/2FykFIP
//March 2019 cover story
⋙ 💙💙🔄 Politico Mag, Darren Samuelsohn: The Only Impeachment Guide You’ll Ever Need http://politi.co/2QHcJGi
// 1/11/2019, As talk of the I-word heats up, here’s POLITICO Magazine’s soup-to-nuts answers to all your questions about the politics—and the practical realities—of removing a president.
⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo, Max Boot: Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset http://wapo.st/2D7IJQ9
// 1/13/2019
By @Jzikah
⋙ 💙💙🔄 TheAtlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg (Editor): UNTHINKABLE: 50 Moments That Define an Improbable Presidency http://bit.ly/2RvDFOn
// Jan 2019; Donald Trump’s 50 Most Unthinkable Moments ~ 50 Articles
⋙ 💙💙🔄 Wikipedia: Timeline of investigations into Trump and Russia (2018) http://bit.ly/2Bh12jP
⋙ 💙💙🔄 Axios: Timeline: Every big move in the Mueller investigation http://bit.ly/2Euh3H9
// 12/12/2018
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄 Moyers&Co: Interactive Timeline: Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump http://bit.ly/2uVHc9j
// continually updated
⋙ 💙💙🔄📒 DocumentCloud: Steele Dossier [pdf] http://bit.ly/2y5ZhnF 35p
⋙ 💙💙🔄📒 FBIRecordsVault: Records Between FBI and Christopher Steele http://bit.ly/2KqLoF1
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ AP: Mueller Investigation documents http://bit.ly/2ihbK0l
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ CitJourno: Trump/Russian Mob Connections http://www.citjourno.org
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ CNN, Marshall Cohen, Tal Yellen & Liz Stark: Tracking the Russia investigations (documents) http://cnn.it/2hVCpU5
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Russian Hacking and Influence in the U.S. Election http://nyti.ms/2NqFXeY
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ BrennanCenter: Trump-Russia Investigations http://bit.ly/2yRKcu6
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Politico: The people connected to the Russia probes [ Interactive ] http://politi.co/2FUDhz2 //➔ Democrats, Prosecutors, Law Enforcement/Lobbyists/Media,Team Trump, Foreign Nationals
⋙ 💙💙🔄 TheMoscowProject: Trump’s Russia Cover-Up By the Numbers http://bit.ly/2ycY959
// Center for American Progress; 80+ contacts with Russia-linked operatives https://themoscowproject.org/about/ http://bit.ly/2ycY959
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NBCNews: Russia timeline: Key players, meetings and investigation details http://nbcnews.to/2vtR3YW
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ DailyBeast: Democrats Release the Fusion GPS Testimony on Trump and Russia http://thebea.st/2qMmH1d w attachment [pdf] ⋙ via Dianne Feinstein http://bit.ly/2FjtlPP
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Justice Department Gives Congress Comey’s Memos on Trump http://nyti.ms/2HdLe2Z
// 4/19/2018 ➔ DocumentCloud: http://bit.ly/2HOGC4z
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ DOJ: Indictment of Internet Research Agency LLC et al … [PDF] http://bit.ly/2CqdHzD 37p //➔ Mueller Investigation
// 2/16/2018
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Amy Siskind: The Weekly List ~ “This is How Democracy Ends” https://theweeklylist.org
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Mueller Has List of Questions for Trump http://nyti.ms/2rfDuqK + http://nyti.ms/2HExEKi
// 4/30/2018, Majority Relate to if Trump Obstructed Inquiry on Russia
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: The Trump Lawyers’ Confidential Memo to Mueller, Explained [ Document ] http://nyti.ms/2kKPgq9
// 6/2/2018, NYT article about document: http://nyti.ms/2swIZSc
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ TIME: The Arguments President Trump Has Made Against the Mueller Investigation http://ti.me/2MdeARX
// 6/8/2018
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ TIME: Wikipedia: Links between Trump associates and Russian officials http://bit.ly/2K42VDF
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ WaPo: Who has been charged in the Russia probe and why http://wapo.st/2toNwH2
// continually updated; WaPo Russia page
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ ForeignAffairs Anthology: A New Cold War? Russia and America, Then and Now 1947- http://fam.ag/2KEA4dF
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Justice.gov: Mueller Indictment of 12 Russians in the GRU for Election Hacking [pdf] http://bit.ly/2NbphV6 29p
// 7/13/2018
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ FactCheck.org: Timeline of Russia Investigation http://bit.ly/2KZ4qaQ
// posted 6/7/2018, updated 7/13/2018; Key moments in the FBI probe of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election; Readable
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Legal Process Server: DNC Lawsuit vs Russia, Wikileaks, et al http://bit.ly/2KIOhBq
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT, Linda Qiu: Truth-Testing Trump’s 250-Plus Attacks on the Russia Inquiry http://nyti.ms/2MY609E
// 8/18/2018
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ Justice.gov: Manafort Plea Agreement [pdf] http://bit.ly/2CZiVb7 17p
// 9/14/2018
⋙ 💙💙🔄💽 NYT: Opinion | Operation Infektion: A three-part video series on Russian disinformation http://nyti.ms/2OHqSSV
// 11/12/2018
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ PasteMag, Jacob Weindling: A Year of Trump and Russia: The 75 Stories That Defined the Mueller Investigation in 2018 http://bit.ly/2QWN1SU
// 12/28/2018
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ LawFareBlog: Document: Indictment of Roger Stone [pdf] http://bit.ly/2UdQgmj 24p
// 1/25/2019
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄📋 NYT: Trump and His Associates Had More Than 100 Contacts With Russians Before the Inauguration [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2MAZCps
// 1/26/2019
⋙ 💙💙🔄 BuzzFeedNews: These Secret Files Show How The Trump Moscow Talks Unfolded While Trump Heaped Praise On Putin http://bit.ly/2DWQ2ed
// 2/5/2019; ⏳TIMELINE ⌛️
⋙ 💙💙🔄 WaPo: What we learned about Trumpworld outreach to Russia since Mueller’s investigation began http://wapo.st/2twkXYE
// 2/19/2019, And what we still don’t know.
⋙ 💙💙🔄 ◕📋 NYT, Larry Buchanan and Karen Yourish: Trump Has Publicly Attacked the Russia Investigation More Than 1,100 Times http://nyti.ms/2T2HSsN
// 2/19/2019
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
;
⋙ 💙💙🔄 ◕📋 WaPo, Philip Bump: The 81 people and organizations just looped into the Trump probe — and why they were included http://wapo.st/2SJrw41
// 3/4/2019
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: Full Document: Trump’s Call With the Ukrainian President [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2lfBkbC (Annotated)
// 9/25/2019″
⋙ 💙💙🔄≣ NYT: The Whistle-Blower Complaint: Read the Document [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/2nq4FAD
// 9/26/2019
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ HPSCI: Trump-Ukraine impeachment inquiry report http://bit.ly/2LlnJsX
// 12/3/2019; House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Report: House Judiciary Committee report on their articles of impeachment against President Donald John Trump http://bit.ly/2Ek2rIa 658p
// 10/15/2019
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Lawfare: House Releases Impeachment Trial Brief http://bit.ly/2ucCo3Y document 111p
// 1/18/2019
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Trial Memorandum of the US House of Representatives in the Impeachment Trial of President Donald J Trump http://bit.ly/2uePNsc
// 1/18/2020
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Trial Memorandum of President Donald J Trump http://bit.ly/2NGi2XK 171p
// 1/20/2020
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ Vox, Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Prokop: The ultimate guide to the Donald Trump impeachment saga http://bit.ly/2SoXpkm
// Updated: Feb 5, 2020, 8:06pm EST, Published: Nov 5, 2019, 8:06am EST
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ 📀 Press Here For Impeachment Trial on Cspan
// 1/20/2020-2/5/2020
⋙ 💙💙🔄 📔 This❗️⋙ LawFare: Confronting the Capitol Insurrection [Index Page] http://bit.ly/3mfMDNc
⏳WaPo: The full Trump-Ukraine impeachment timeline http://wapo.st/35odsUl
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⭕ Feb 2021 Second Trump #Impeachment Trial
Day One: Rules etc
Day TWO: C-SPAN: U.S. Senate Impeachment Trial Day 2, Impeachment Managers’ Constitutionality Arguments http://bit.ly/3aa1CCQ
// 2/9/2021;
Day 2 of the impeachment trial of former President Trump for incitement of insurrection began with senators voting 89-11 in favor of the trial organizing resolution. Lead Impeachment Manager Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) then made opening remarks followed by a 13-minute video showing footage of former President Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech and of the actions of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol that day. Afterward, impeachment managers Representatives Raskin, Joe Neguse (D-CO), and David Cicilline (D-RI) presented their arguments for the constitutionality of impeaching a former president. Representative Raskin in his arguments talked about bringing his daughter and son-in-law with him to the Capitol on January 6.
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
Day THREE: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 1 http://bit.ly/374q3zm
// 2/10/2021;
The first part of Day 3 of the impeachment trial of former President Trump for incitement of insurrection began with House impeachment manager Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) asserting that the former president had “surrendered his role as commander in chief” and become “the inciter in chief.” He played the January 6, 2021, video Mr. Trump posted on Twitter in which he told his supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol to “go home.” Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO) then outlined impeachment managers’ plan for arguing their case. In the final segment of part 1, Representatives Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) described the former president’s actions leading up to and after the 2020 election
Day Three: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 2 http://bit.ly/3tYOS9Y
// The Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump continued with House managers presenting video and tweets they say indicate that former President Trump incited the deadly January 6 riot.
Day Three: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 3 http://bit.ly/372bYSY
// Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) Entire remarked on the breach of the Capitol and attacks on police officers.
Day Three: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 3, Part 4 http://bit.ly/3aZ82DV
// An effort by Sen. Mike Lee to remove remarks by the House impeachment managers from the official record sparked confusion on the Senate floor.
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
Day FOUR: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 4, Part 1 http://bit.ly/3rXW1pf
// 2/12/2021
Former President Donald Trump’s defense lawyers made their case that Mr. Trump was innocent of charges of inciting an insurrection. They compared speeches by Democrats and others to the former president’s remarks in their defense, and stated that “the article of impeachment now before the Senate is an unjust and blatantly unconstitutional act of political vengeance.”
Day Four: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 4, Part 2 http://bit.ly/3ddmmeG
// After a recess, Former President Donald Trump’s defense continued to make their case that Mr. Trump was innocent of charges of inciting an insurrection. In this portion of the impeachment trial, attorney Bruce Castor spoke.
Day Four: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 4, Q&A http://bit.ly/3jLkwD0
// In this portion of the second impeachment trial of former President Trump, senators asked questions of both the House managers and Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) then announced that Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman would be receiving the Congressional Gold Medal, due to his actions during the January 6 riots.
Day FIVE: C-SPAN: Senate Impeachment Trial Day 5 http://bit.ly/3b2haHL
// 2/13/2021
The Senate acquits former President Trump of inciting an insurrection, 57-43. Earlier, the House managers and the defense made closing arguments. Also, House Manager Raskin (D-MD) read a written statement from Rep. Herrera Beutler (R-WA).
● Majority Leader Schumer on Impeachment Acquittal of Former President Trump http://bit.ly/2OFAT8V
// Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered remarks after the Senate voted to acquit former President Trump, 57-43. Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to convict Mr. Trump.
● Minority Leader McConnell on Impeachment Acquittal of Former President Trump http://bit.ly/3djH5NM
// Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered remarks after the Senate voted to acquit former President Trump, 57-43. Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to convict Mr. Trump.
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
Twitter Threads
⭕ 9 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 1
💙 🧵 RT @atrupar Rep. Raskin’s opening impeachment trial statement: “Their argument is that if you commit an impeachable offense in your last few weeks in office, you do it with constitutional impunity.” 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359206921039974406?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Here is the entire video timeline of the January 6 insurrection as presented by the House impeachment managers 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359216739054190593?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 10 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 2
🔄 💙🐣🧵 RT @jentaub It’s on. Day 2 of the Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. February 10, 2021. We will have a dinner break at 6 p.m. ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1359548695038087169?s=20
🔄 💙🐣🧵 RT @atrupar Raskin: “This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater. It’s more like like a case where the town fire chief, who’s paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire.”
🔄 💙 WaPo: See all the evidence presented in Trump’s impeachment trial http://wapo.st/3qeb1ii
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⭕ 11 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 3
🔄 💙🧵 RT @jentaub 🇺🇸 It’s on. Day 3. The Trial of Donald Trump 2.0 continues at 12:04 p.m. on February 11, 2021 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1359911216588685317?s=20
// Defense
🔄 💙🧵 RT @atrupar The Thursday installment of Trump’s #ImpeachmentTrial begins with a Baked Alaska clip 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359914413709492232?s=20
⭕ 12 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 4
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @jentaub We have begun. It’s Day 4 of the Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. The defense is putting on their case. The first lawyer is Van Der Veen. 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1360274181510807556?s=20
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar “Lord, infuse them with the spirit of nonpartisan patriotism” — Senate Chaplain Barry Black’s prayer begins the Trump defense portion of the #ImpeachmentTrial 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360275280775028740?s=20
⋙ 🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar [Q&A] Lindsey Graham, Kevin Cramer, and Roger Marshall use an impeachment trial question to own the libs 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360337066215804930?s=20
⭕ 13 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 5
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @jentaub Day 5 of the Donald Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. February 13, 2021. Wonderful! They are going to debate whether to subpoena witnesses and documents ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1360605971198967809?s=20
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar “Lord, touch and move them to believe that end does not justify the means” — Senate Chaplain Barry Black’s prayer begins the Saturday portion of the #ImpeachmentTrial 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360607971055656962?s=20
@Jzikah’s Amazon page: http://amzn.to/3tUTM6Y
⭕ 31 Dec 2021
DailyBeast, David Lurie: Jan. 6 Was Just the Start of Radicalizing Trump’s Republican Party http://bit.ly/3HqlrDm
// Even if Trump didn’t order the coup attempt, his supporters knew they were doing what he wanted.
Donald Trump’s January 2021 coup attempt failed to overturn the election; but Trump has succeeded in transforming the GOP into an ever more radicalized party that rewards extremism, and punishes, or even banishes, those members who fail to support ever more audacious attacks on democracy and the nation’s electoral process. ¤ The Republican Party is now institutionally oriented to work towards the anti-democratic aims of its charismatic leader, Trump.
As the one-year anniversary of the Capitol insurrection approaches, we are only beginning to gain a picture of the full scope of what can now fairly be described as a coup scheme, intended to void the outcome of a presidential election. The scheme was encouraged, if not planned, by the White House, with Trump’s chief-of-staff Mark Meadows serving as field general for the putsch, and encouraging the pursuit of various extreme proposals and bizarre conspiracy theories from a range of co-conspirators, including members of Congress as well as state legislators and freelance neo-fascists such as Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and John Eastman.
It is essential that Congress’ Jan. 6 committee, as well as the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies, continue to seek out every relevant item of evidence regarding this effort to take down the nation’s democracy, and identify the role of each of the schemers. The evidence may well establish that individuals, potentially including Trump himself, are guilty of federal crimes arising from the putsch scheme, such as obstruction of the congressional electoral vote counting proceedings.
Yet regardless of what additional facts the congressional and law enforcement investigations establish, we already know that Trump has succeeded in a broader goal of transforming the Republican Party into a vehicle for ever more radical and extreme attacks on the democratic foundations of the nation. His success is reflected in the fact that Trump no longer needs to tell followers inside and outside of government to play their parts in undermining democracy—they now take the initiative to anticipate Trump’s desire for extreme actions and act upon them.
Historian Ian Kershaw famously described the Third Reich’s operating principle as “working towards the Führer.” Party members anticipated the steps its leader wanted, particularly attacks on political opponents and “undesirables” like Jews, and frequently took them without being asked. Over time, it became clear that those who pursued the most radical, and often violent, steps to serve the party would be met with approbation, while those who hesitated would be met with disfavor or worse.
While Trump is, of course, no Hitler, he and his acolytes have used a similar reward-and-punishment dynamic to relentlessly move the GOP towards a dynamic of ever greater extremism, in which adherence to legal and moral norms is viewed as intolerable weakness.
During 2016, Trump’s most devoted acolyte, his namesake son, responded to news that the Russian government was illicitly aiding his father’s presidential campaign by exclaiming “I love it” in an email, and arranging a meeting in the hope of getting “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from Russia. In early 2021, after Trump lost the election, Meadows likewise responded to fellow extremists’ plans to undermine the electoral vote count by “replacing” duly designated electors with Trump shills by, likewise, declaring “I love it.”
We do not know if Trump expressly blessed either scheme beforehand, but it is clear that both Don Jr. and Meadows understood that they would risk Trump’s ire if they failed to pursue the most extreme attacks on American laws and democratic norms available in Trump’s name.
The GOP’s dynamic of rewarding extremism, and penalizing restraint, has only strengthened since Trump lost the election. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy disavowed his initial support for an investigation of Jan. 6, and ultimately supported the sanctioning of Liz Cheney for participating in the Congressional inquiry into the coup attempt. Cheney and fellow Jan. 6 committee member Adam Kinzinger are now facing a call for their expulsion from the GOP caucus from prominent party activists and institutions that are now singularly dependent on Trump, such as Matt Schlapp and the Club for Growth, as virtually all of their House colleagues cower in silence. Meanwhile, McCarthy, recognizing that his hope to be elected Speaker depends on maintaining the support of Trump’s most radical allies, gives free license to members like Paul Gosar, who recently disclosed evidence establishes was an active participant in the coup effort and who recently “joked” about murdering a House colleague.
At the state level, the impetus within the GOP to work towards Trump is likewise even more powerful than it was during the weeks following the election. Trump’s now-infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, demanding that he “find” additional votes for Trump, failed to induce Raffensperger to corrupt the election, and Trump’s rejection of the election results likely contributed to the runoff losses of both GOP incumbent senators—costing Republicans control of the senate.
Yet during the succeeding months, Trump’s relentless attacks on Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp have induced other Republicans to join in attacking the two for not undoing the outcome of the 2020 election, and to induce opponents who share Trump’s extremist agenda to plan primary challenges against them, making radicalism the norm in the party.
The story is the same in many other states, including Wisconsin, where a GOP legislative leader has responded to Trump’s loss there by attacking the state’s bipartisan election commission (including a commissioner he appointed), while some Wisconsin Republican leaders, including Sen. Ron Johnson, are calling for what amounts to a GOP takeover of the administration of elections in the state. In Arizona, an “audit” that confirmed Trump’s loss has nonetheless served as a rallying cry for efforts to undermine voting rights in that state and others. Across the country, people who claim the 2020 election was “stolen” by Biden are running to take control of the local election machinery to ensure that the next election can be stolen by Trump.
While they rarely direct these actions, Trump and his acolytes have praised these extremists while often threatening retaliation against party members who question such a radical approach.
A case in point is Michigan, where Trump supporters have demanded an Arizona-style audit of the election, despite the fact that a GOP-sponsored probe found no evidence of election fraud. A group of Trump supporters, some of them members of the state legislature, have commenced a campaign to intimidate state party leaders to support this audit, as a sign of support for Trump, declaring that their effort is the first step in a “revolution” against the electoral system.
This brings us back to Jan. 6. Trump’s address to a crowd of supporters that day came after a presidential term in which he openly praised neo-Nazi rioters, encouraged gun-wielding protesters to go to state capitals to “liberate” them from COVID restrictions, and wielded a Bible in front of a church after a crowd of protesters had been cleared for him by a violent police and National Guard attack. It followed weeks during which Trump himself had waged a relentless campaign to delegitimize the results of the election, commencing even before it was held and using every legal and political lever that he could to get himself reinstalled against the will of the people.
The former president claims that he didn’t tell the crowd that gathered for his speech on Jan. 6 to attack the Capitol, but virtually all of the people who did believed they were acting in his interests, and had every reason to believe that their attack would meet with his approbation.
Indeed, evidence that has come to light during recent months has only added further support for their belief. Trump has confirmed that he was wholly unconcerned with Pence’s safety during the insurrection, and failed even to call him as the siege proceeded. We are also now learning that Trump ignored entreaties from legislators inside the Capitol, and even from Don Jr., and Sean Hannity, to call off his supporters’ siege, as only he could have done.
It is also becoming increasingly clear that, as the siege proceeded, Trump’s acolytes, including Rudy Giuliani, and (as reported by The Daily Beast) possibly Peter Navarro, may well have been employing the disruption in the proceedings as an the opportunity to attempt to encourage more legislators to vote against certification—or to at least to delay it until they could engineer the naming of “replacement” electors.
We now know that in the weeks before Jan. 6, a group of legislators had been working hand-in-glove with Meadows and other Trump allies to implement the coup scheme. Most GOP members of Congress had not joined the scheme. But the insurrection contributed to making more of them more pliant Trump allies. Freshman GOP Rep. Peter Meijer has recounted that, in the immediate wake of the insurrection, a number of his colleagues who had planned to vote in favor of certifying Biden’s election reversed course, some out of fear for their own lives.
Since that time, most GOP politicians have routinely endorsed, or at least chosen not to oppose, the extreme attacks on democracy and the electoral system that have become core tenets of the GOP. As I have previously discussed, appeals to an extremist “base” are now such a central element of the party’s political strategy that GOP “leaders” fear losing support if they don’t support conspiracism and anti-democracy. For example, during a recent Minnesota GOP senate debate, all five of the candidates resisted acknowledging that Biden had won the 2020 election.
Even Trump himself has found that his power as a “leader” of an extremist movement depends on his own reliably continuous appeals to extremism. This was starkly evident last week when Trump himself faced criticism from some of his most fervent followers for acknowledging that the COVID vaccine saves lives, and admitting that he received a booster dose.
In short, extremism is Trump’s calling card, and the force that fuels his movement. Accordingly, whether or not Trump ordered the insurrection, he clearly chose to allow it to continue by his silence, likely because Trump believed the attack on the Capitol served his own ends. And during the months that have followed, GOP activists encouraged by Trump have normalized the goals and even the tactics of the insurrectionists—who are now frequently described by Trumpist Republicans as harmless tourists, or patriots. ¤ The party is working towards Trump.
📊 WaPo: 1 in 3 Americans say violence against government can be justified, citing fears of political schism, pandemic http://wapo.st/32zuJ1q
// The Post-UMD poll, coming a year after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, marks the largest share of Americans to hold that view since the question was first asked more than two decades ago.
🐣 RT @NPR Paul Eaton, a retired U.S. Army major general, worries that fractures in the top ranks and poor understanding of how the U.S. government works could lead to a coup in 2024, led or assisted by elements of the military.
⋙ NPR: Retired general warns the U.S. military could lead a coup after the 2024 election http://n.pr/3qDVCsQ
// Retired Major General Paul Eaton says war-gaming and civics education could help assure that the military is better prepared for a contested election.
WaPo: Prosecutors break down charges, convictions for 725 arrested so far in Jan. 6 attack on U.S. Capitol http://wapo.st/3zgvCaU
Of those arrested, 225 people were charged with assault or resisting arrest. More than 75 of those were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon against police officers. The office said 140 police officers, including Capitol officers and members of the D.C. police department, were victimized during the attack.
As the country nears the first anniversary of the storming of the Capitol, the U.S. attorney’s office in the District, the largest office of federal prosecutors in the nation, released a breakdown of the arrests and convictions associated with the attack.
Of those arrested, 225 people were charged with assault or resisting arrest. More than 75 of those were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon against police officers. The office said 140 police officers, including Capitol officers and members of the D.C. police department, were victimized during the attack. ¤ The office said about 10 individuals were charged with assaulting members of the media or destroying their equipment.
Some 640 people were charged with entering a restricted federal building or its grounds. And another 75 were charged with entering a restricted area with a deadly weapon. ¤ Prosecutors in the office have been working with the FBI as well as prosecutors in various locations around the nation. The office said the individuals arrested come from nearly all 50 states.
One person, 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt of California, was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to breach a set of doors deep in the Capitol during the riot. Federal prosecutors later cleared the officer of any wrongdoing in Babbitt’s death.
According to a May estimate by the Architect of the Capitol, the attack caused about $1.5 million worth of damage to the building.
About 165 individuals, the office said, have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, from misdemeanors to felony obstruction. ¤ So far, 70 defendants have received some kind of sentence from a judge. Of those, 31 people were ordered jailed, and 18 were sentenced to home detention. The remaining 21 defendants were placed on probation.
In early December, Robert Scott Palmer, 54, of Largo, Fla., received the longest prison sentence to date among those convicted in the attack. A U.S. District Court judge sentenced him to more than five years in prison. ¤ In October, Palmer pleaded guilty to resisting arrest and assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon. Prosecutors said Palmer broke into the Capitol building and, while inside, threw a wooden plank at police officers; then, they said, while he was on the front line of the riot, he sprayed police officers with a fire extinguisher and hurled the emptied extinguisher at the officers. No officers, prosecutors said, were injured.
The FBI is continuing to identify suspects in the case and is collecting tips at fbi.gov/wanted/capitol-violence, 1-800-CALL-FBI (800-225-5324) or tips.fbi.gov.
🐣 RT @tribelaw Good news. Now it remains to be seen whether only the rioters themselves will be charged; and whether anyone at any level will be charged with seditious conspiracy or with giving aid and comfort to an insurrection. ¤ If not, we’re inviting a repetition that we’re bound to regret.
⋙ 🐣 RT @hugolowell New: Justice Dept has now charged at least 275 rioters connected to the Capitol attack with corruptly obstructing of an official proceeding — for which Trump may also be referred by the Jan. 6 committee.
⭕ 30 Dec 2021
DailyBeast, Julia Davis: How Tucker Carlson Is Boosting Russia’s New Propaganda War http://bit.ly/3zeB7XF
// As Putin and Biden talk, Kremlin mouthpieces are rushing to explain the motivations behind Russia’s surge in aggression. Fox News is helping them do their work.
… Carlson’s talking points often sound identical to those pushed by the Kremlin’s propagandists—or by Putin himself. ¤ During one of his broadcasts on Fox News in December, Carlson argued that “NATO exists primarily to torment Vladimir Putin.” He worried about the possibility of “a NATO takeover of Ukraine,” and described the 2014 Maidan Revolution as a U.S.-organized “coup in Ukraine.” He also baselessly accused Joe Biden of fomenting “a hot war with Russia.” The very next day, translated quotes from Tucker Carlson’s show were widely broadcast on Russia’s state television. After watching Carlson’s remarks during the live taping of 60 Minutes, Igor Korotchenko, member of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Public Council and editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine said: “Excellent performance, with which we can only express solidarity.”
🐣 📋 RT @peterbakernyt In the first year of Trump’s presidency, the S&P 500 hit new records 62 times and finished up 17%.
In the first year of Biden’s presidency, the S&P 500 hit new records 70 times and finished up 29%.
🐣 RT @duty2warn Trump announced he’s holding a press conference on Jan 6th (5PM). All self-respecting media should decline to attend. If the Manhattan DA could indict him on Jan 5th, that would also be nice. Even if they feel they aren’t fully ready to indict, focus on the humor, and the karma.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: People under current DoJ criminal investigation for their role in the trump election lawsuits hosted gatherings to plot to overturn 2020 with multiple people including those with ties to John Eastman and the Arizona fraudit. 1/
⋙ CNBC: Pro-Trump lawyer says his plantations were go-to spots for those aiming to overturn the 2020 election http://cnb.cx/k
// Lin Wood says his plantations in South Carolina were used as a hub for those who wanted to overturn the 2020 election.
● Lin Wood told CNBC he hosted numerous election conspiracy theorists on his plantation properties in South Carolina after the 2020 presidential election.
● His guests included fellow Trump allies attorney Sidney Powell, former national security advisor Mike Flynn and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne.
Lin Wood, a conservative trial lawyer who led a failed legal challenge against the election results in Georgia, said in a lengthy interview that shortly after the 2020 contest last November, he hosted at his massive South Carolina properties fellow right-wing attorney Sidney Powell, former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, and Doug Logan, the CEO of cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas.
Jim Penrose, who says on his LinkedIn profile that he used to work for the National Security Agency, and Seth Keshel, who promotes himself on his Twitter page as a former Army captain and who has spread falsities about the election, according to the Associated Press, also made appearances at Wood’s properties, the attorney said.
Penrose was among a group of people who met with conservative lawyer John Eastman on Jan. 5, the day before the deadly riot on Capitol Hill, attorney and independent journalist Seth Abramson reported. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for inciting the riot, during which his supporters attacked Congress while lawmakers were trying to certify President Joe Biden’s electoral victory. He was acquitted in the Senate.
Eastman wrote a legally dubious memo arguing that former Vice President Mike Pence could reject Biden’s Electoral College victory in the 2020 election. He’s been subpoenaed by a House committee investigating the origins of Jan. 6. Eastman has since said he plans to defy the subpoena. …
Wood told CNBC that after the November election Powell asked him if she and her team could use his South Carolina property known as the Tomotley Plantation in order “to do work on the election cases.” Wood reportedly bought the $7.9 million plantation last year. ¤ Wood, who once represented the late Richard Jewell after he was suspected of being involved with the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, was referred by a federal judge for possible disbarment following his role in contesting the results of the election.
A website highlighting dozens of lawsuits levied by Trump’s campaign and his allies shows that almost all of them failed. Cyber Ninjas conducted an audit of election results in Arizona that eventually confirmed Biden as the victor over Trump in Maricopa County. The audit itself was partially funded by Byrne’s nonprofit, The America Project, which is led by multiple other allies of the former president.
“They set up in my living room and one of the sunrooms. They looked like election central. They had computers, whiteboards. They were working,” Wood said about Powell and her team’s prior work at his residence. Southern Living magazine describes the living room at Tomotley: “Custom built-ins and a working fireplace bring warmth to the spacious living room.”
Wood said that there were a few instances when Powell asked him to assist in her election investigations that were taking place at his new home. ¤ “I remember making a couple of phone calls to speak to individuals that she was trying to talk into being plaintiffs, I believe in Georgia,” Wood said. “I think we had, kind of, passing conversations of what she was learning. I know she talked to me about information about Venezuela.”
Multiple state and federal officials, including former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, have said that there was no widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election. Wood’s move to reveal details about election conspiracy theorists using his property comes after The Daily Beast reported on a growing feud between Wood, Flynn and Powell.
The fight is reportedly linked to Wood’s handling of his former client Kyle Rittenhouse, who was accused of killing two unarmed men during a protest in Wisconsin and was later acquitted. …
DailyBeast, David Lurie: Jan. 6 Was Just the Start of Radicalizing Trump’s Republican Party http://bit.ly/3FMK3pC
NYT: Putin Warns Biden of ‘Complete Rupture’ of U.S.-Russia Relationship Over Ukraine http://nyti.ms/3zbTht9
// President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke with President Biden for 50 minutes about the escalating crisis with Ukraine, but his intentions remained unclear.
President Vladimir V. Putin warned President Biden on Thursday that any economic sanctions imposed on Russia if it moves to take new military action against Ukraine could result in a “complete rupture” of relations between the two nuclear superpowers, a Russian official told reporters on Thursday evening.
The exchange came during a 50-minute phone call that Mr. Putin requested, and which both sides described as businesslike. Yet it ended without clarity about Mr. Putin’s intentions. He has massed 100,000 or so troops on the border with Ukraine, and issued demands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States to pull back their forces in the region, but apparently has not decided whether to order an invasion.
Mr. Biden, for his part, pushed back, according to two American officials. A terse White House statement said he “made clear that the United States and its allies and partners will respond decisively if Russia further invades Ukraine.”
🐣 RT @MichaelCohen212 This morning I was notified by my attorneys @lauferlaw @NYadvocateJKL that the process server successfully effectuated service on #BillBarr while he was vacationing in Virginia. This is the look they got…Happy New Year asshole! https://twitter.com/MichaelCohen212/status/1476652094006435847?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Porter_Anderson Media: @PeterHotez to @Acosta on anti-science aggression: “This is more than disinformation, it’s a killer. Since June 1, 200,000 unvaccinated Americans have needlessly lost their lives. I’ve asked the @JoeBiden administration” to help. “This is a well-funded anti-vax ecosystem.”
⭕ 29 Dec 2021
WaPo: Biden to hold another call with Putin on Thursday afternoon http://wapo.st/3eDrZlX
During a conversation requested by the Russian government, Biden plans to tell Putin that while the United States is prepared to proceed diplomatically, it also stands ready to respond to further incursions with economic sanctions, NATO reinforcement and assistance to Ukrainian efforts to defend itself, all according to a senior administration official.
The conversation will mark the second Biden-Putin call in a month. In a Dec. 7 videoconference, Biden warned Putin not to mount a new invasion and laid out the economic and security costs that Russia would face if the Kremlin went down that path.
Russia is looking to extract security concessions from the United States and its European partners, while simultaneously threatening a new invasion of Ukraine, a U.S. partner nation that is not a member of NATO. Moscow has made several demands, saying Washington needs to provide written guarantees that NATO will no longer expand eastward, a point the White House has dismissed as a nonstarter.
The Biden administration has stressed that Russia will need to begin showing signs of de-escalation before any sort of “diplomatic end game” is possible, a point repeated by the senior administration official previewing the call to reporters on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House. … ¤ The official said that it was not clear why Putin had requested the call but that “it will take a high level of engagement to address this and to try to find a path of de-escalation.”
The administration has previously warned of a variety of responses, which the official reiterated Wednesday. Those include sanctions exceeding those that were imposed in 2014, after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine; increasing the U.S. force posture in Europe; and providing Ukraine with additional material assistance to help it defend itself against a potential invasion.
🐣 RT @mhmck The path to NATO and EU membership is written into Ukraine’s constitution. Ukrainians cannot give that up any more than Americans can give up freedom of speech rights written into their constitution. Ukraine is fundamentally and unalterably a Western nation.
🐣 RT @marceelias Republicans are focused on this as their only strategy for 2022 and 2024. ¤ What more can we do to get Democrats to understand that unless we match them with the same intensity, commitment and focus, this will be game, set, match?
⋙ 🐣 RT @marceelias Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a “slow-motion insurrection.”
🐣 RT @Amy_Siskind This is what I warned about in my Oct article: there is literally a slow motion coup underway, with GOP efforts to take top offices in MI, PA, WI in 2022, and key election official roles, so 2024 is a done deal before we even vote! Democrats doing NOTHING!
⋙ AP: ‘Slow-motion insurrection’: How GOP seizes election power http://bit.ly/3qCJU1w “Never in the country’s modern history has a a major party sought to turn the administration of elections into an explicitly partisan act”
🐣 RT @PeterHotez When the antivaccine disinformation crowd declares twisted martyrdom when bumped from social media or condemned publicly: they contributed to the tragic and needless loss of 200,000 unvaccinated Americans since June who believed their antiscience gibberish. They’re the aggressors
💙 CNN, Paul LeBlanc: The January 6 committee formed 6 months ago. Here’s what it’s uncovered. http://cnn.it/3exXM7B
🐣 RT @ False. The @January6thCmte hasn’t dropped requests for any necessary records. In fact, we’re actively litigating to obtain White House records Trump is trying to conceal. We will not allow him to hide the truth about January 6th, or his conduct, from the American people. Text Block: https://twitter.com/RepLizCheney/status/1476348676142473216?s=20/photo/1
// att: Trump post
⭕ 28 Dec 2021
💽 MSNBC, TheBeatWithAri: Busted: Indicted Trump aide Bannon sees Jan. 6 ‘playbook’ leaked by ally http://on.msnbc.com/3EPXrIn
// Trump ally Steve Bannon is indicted and awaiting trial for hiding evidence about his January 6th plotting. Now, one of his accomplices, Trump veteran Peter Navarro, has leaked information detailing the plan to rally Congressional Republicans to interfere with certifying Biden’s 2020 election win. MSNBC’s Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber is joined by Democratic strategist Chai Komanduri to discuss the revelation and Navarro’s comments likening the effort to the “Green Bay Sweep.”
WaPo Editorial: Putin wants to shut down Russia’s Memorial, but he can’t erase the past http://wapo.st/3Jpl79Y “[Putin] can try to knock down the walls of Memorial, but he cannot extinguish the memory of Soviet crimes, nor of today’s unfortunate return to despotism“
🐣 ◕ RT @nytimes States with lower vaccination rates tend to have had higher Covid-19 death rates, particularly from the most recent wave of Delta variant infections, which hit the South the hardest. https://nyti.ms/3mGzHjz https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1475937556080513028?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheTweetOfJohn Two Trump-appointed federal judges have rejected claims from January 6 defendants that they’re being treated unfairly, because of their conservative politics, compared with left-leaning rioters in Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020.
⋙ CNN: Two Trump-appointed judges reject comparisons between January 6 and Portland political unrest http://cnn.it/3pCMOo0
🐣 RT @juliaioffe Few people can say it better than the utterly eloquent @vkaramurza: “The only thing that this decision today confirms is that the people who are sitting in the Kremlin today consider themselves to be the direct successors to Stalin, Beria, Andropov.”
⋙ TheWorld[]org: Kremlin tries to ‘erase a nation’s history’ with shutdown of leading human rights org, Russian politician says http://bit.ly/3ezf6sV
// Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian opposition politician, joins The World’s host Marco Werman to discuss what’s at stake with the shutdown of Memorial International, which has documented Soviet-era crimes and other human rights abuses for 30 years.
🐣 RT @duty2warn GOP lawmaker clowns learned it from Trump. Trump learned it from Roy Cohn. Cohn learned from reading Goebbels. It’s the same playbook. Lie. Repeat. Admit nothing. Go all in. All the time. Deflect. Distract. Double down for all eternity.
🐣 RT @rollcall NEW: lowa Sen. Charles E.Grassley, the Senate president pro tempore, says he and not Vice President Mike Pence will preside over the certification of Electoral College votes, since “we don’t expect him to be there.”
// 1/5/2021 7:06am
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln It’s clear, every level of the Republican Party was involved in the Jan 6 attacks on our democracy. LP Sr. Advisor @StuartPStevens discusses the intricate planning that went into that failed coup attempt with @JakeTapper on CNN. 💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1475927116315303937?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @CREWcrew This seems like a good time to remind everyone that there are people actively trying to overthrow the government
🧵 📊 ◕ RT @ATheodorodis New @UMassPoll data! After a year that saw a shocking attack on the U.S. Capitol & persistent, discredited claims by Trump & sycophants of a stolen election, we continue to find Republicans & Democrats believing in diametrically opposed “realities.” 📌 https://twitter.com/AGTheodoridis/status/1475942039040757765?s=20
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Trump idolatry has undermined religious faith http://wapo.st/3mASnRB
Much has been written about White evangelicals’ central role in the fraying of democracy. More attention, however, should be paid to the damage the political movement has inflicted on religion itself. ¤ The demographic — which remains in the throes of White grievance and an apocalyptic vision that postulates America (indeed “Western civilization”) is under attack from socialists, foreigners and secularists — forms the core of the MAGA movement. Many have rejected the sanctity of elections, the principle of inclusion and even objective reality.
The consequences have been dire for American politics. The siege mentality has morphed into an ends-justify-the-means style of politics in which lies, brutal discourse and even violence are applauded as necessary to protect “real America.” Essential features of democracy, such as the peaceful transfer of power, compromise with political opponents and defining America as an idea and not a racial or religious identity, have fallen by the wayside.
Sadly, the degradation of democracy has intensified in the wake of Joe Biden’s victory. The doctrinal elevation of the “big lie,” the increase in violent rhetoric and the effort to rig elections all reflect a heightened desperation by the MAGA crowd. This has driven the GOP to new lows (e.g., vaccine refusal to “own the libs,” virtually all House Republicans defending an animation depicting the murder of a congresswoman).
While lovers of democracy around the world view these developments in horror, we should not lose track of the damage the MAGA movement has wrought to religious values. … Robert P. Jones, who leads the Public Religion Research Institute, writes that “in the upside-down world white evangelicalism has become, the willingness to act in self-sacrificial ways for the sake of vulnerable others — even amid a global pandemic — has become rare, even antithetical, to an aggressive, rights-asserting white Christian culture.” The result is reckless self-indulgence that places some evangelicals’ own aversion to “being told what to do” ahead of the health and lives of vulnerable populations.
As self-identified evangelicals reject small inconveniences and show distain for others’ lives, Jones observes, “there is no hint of awareness that their actions are a mockery of the central biblical injunction to care for the orphan, the widow, the stranger, and the vulnerable among us.”
In sum, while the White evangelical political movement has done immeasurable damage to our democracy, its descent into MAGA politics, conspiratorial thinking and cult worship has had catastrophic results for the religious values evangelicals once held dear. Jones writes: “It’s important to say this straight. This refusal to act to protect the vulnerable — particularly because of the low personal costs involved — is raw, callous selfishness. Exhibited by people I love, it is heartbreaking. Expressed by people who claim to be followers of Jesus, it is maddening.”
If these trends continue uninterrupted, we will wind up with a country rooted in neither democratic principles nor religious values. That would be a mean, violent and intolerant future few of us would want to experience.
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs Despite sending tens of thousands of troops to its border with Ukraine, Russia does not want to annex its neighbor, argues @DmitriTrenin. Moscow’s priority is to stop both NATO expansion and threatening Western military activities.
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Dmitri Trenin: What Putin Really Wants in Ukraine http://fam.ag/3z948DZ
// Russia seeks to stop NATO’s expansion, not to annex more territory.
⭕ 27 Dec 2021
🐣 RT @dcexaminer “We are not bluffing,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Monday, per state-run TASS. ¤ “These are our real proposals. The West’s awareness of this needs to be facilitated,
⋙ WashingtonExaminer: Russia ‘not bluffing’ on NATO rollback, warns of ‘large-scale conflict in Europe’ http://washex.am/3sGBHMr
Russian President Vladimir Putin has amassed military forces around Ukrainian borders, ostensibly due to the dangers presented by Ukraine joining NATO at some future date. Putin’s team, which oversaw the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, portrays the latest round of tensions a consequence of NATO expansion over the last 25 years, raising the prospect of a major war in Europe.
“It is important to lower the degree of confrontation caused by the way our U.S. colleagues are looking after their Ukrainian proteges,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview published Sunday. “The course on dragging Kyiv into NATO with the prospect of deploying attack missile systems near our borders creates unacceptable threats to Russia’s security, thus provoking serious military risks for all parties involved, up to a large-scale conflict in Europe.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants to join NATO, but that process has been stalled for nearly two decades. President Joe Biden said in July that “it remains to be seen” whether Ukraine ever will “meet [the] criteria” for membership in the trans-Atlantic alliance, but Russian officials want NATO to close the door on the idea.
“We would like to emphasize that the nonexpansion of NATO and preventing the deployment of weapons systems near the Russian border that threaten Russia’s security will be front and center during the upcoming talks with the United States and NATO,” Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Saturday. “This is something those who until now have been unable to grasp Russia’s position must understand.”
NATO leaders agreed in 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine should have the option at some point of joining the alliance, but Russia has invaded both of those countries in the intervening years, creating territorial disputes that short-circuit using the trans-Atlantic alliance’s collective defense guarantee to avert a conflict.
“Yet the Kremlin has, in effect, exercised … a veto,” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer wrote in October. “Allies appear unenthusiastic … because there is no good answer to the question ‘if Ukraine joins NATO tomorrow, does the alliance then find itself at war with Russia?’” ¤ Putin has sought to pose that question even in the absence of any serious progress toward Ukrainian membership in NATO.
“We demand an official withdrawal of the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest summit relating to Ukraine and Georgia’s [intentions] to join NATO,” Ryabkvo said. “When we say that further expansion of NATO needs to be prevented, when we say that NATO facilities and all kinds of activities that are provocative for Russia need to be rolled back to the positions that existed in 1997 when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed, we are not bluffing.”
🐣 RT @IlvesToomas For those who, like me, love to get into the weeds of claims by Russia, this thread on the Charter of Paris by @DrRadchenko is just what you need to get started on your morning — unless you’re at Stanford, Mike @McFaul, where it’s a bedtime treat.
⋙ 🧵 RT @DrRadchenko Watched Lavrov’s interview on Dec. 22, where he recycled the claim that @mfa_russia uses to justify Russia’s demands for guarantees of NATO’s non-enlargement. Lavrov: “No participant of the OSCE should ensure their security by damaging the security of others.” Let’s do a thread. 📌 https://twitter.com/DrRadchenko/status/1475705458455465986?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 … RT @DrRadchenko To sum up, Lavrov and @mfa_russia’s claims about OSCE commitments are based on partial, highly selective reading of the relevant documents, and are thus little better than propaganda. You are welcome.
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman The only defense for Republicans who were involved in the effort to overturn the election is to cry partisanship, but there is no partisanship in subverting democracy. We must not fall for this false circular argument.
⋙ 🐣 RT @marceelias My prediction for 2022: Before the midterm election, we will have a serious discussion about whether individual Republican House Members are disqualified by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving in Congress. ¤ We may even see litigation. Text Block: https://twitter.com/danielsgoldman/status/1475548582522634242?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheTweetOfJohn Peter Navarro says he and Steve Bannon were behind the last-ditch, coordinated effort by rogue Republicans in Congress to halt certification of the 2020 election results and keep Trump in power, in a plan dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep.”
⋙ DailyBeast, Jose Pagliery: Trump Advisor Peter Navarro Lays Out How He and Bannon Planned to Overturn Biden’s Electoral Win http://bit.ly/3Hg5eRo
// “It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them…”
A former Trump White House official says he and right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon were actually behind the last-ditch, coordinated effort by rogue Republicans in Congress to halt certification of the 2020 election results and keep President Donald Trump in power earlier this year, in a plan dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep.”
In his recently published memoir, Peter Navarro, then-President Donald Trump’s trade advisor, details how he stayed in close contact with Bannon as they put “Green Bay Sweep” in motion with help from members of Congress loyal to the cause.
But in an interview last week with The Daily Beast, Navarro shed additional light on his role in the operation and their coordination with politicians like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
“We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them,” Navarro told The Daily Beast. “It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn’t even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”
… But their hope was to run the clock as long as possible to increase public pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to send the electoral votes back to six contested states, where Republican-led legislatures could try to overturn the results. And in their mind, ramping up pressure on Pence would require media coverage. While most respected news organizations refused to regurgitate unproven conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud, this plan hoped to force journalists to cover the allegations by creating a historic delay to the certification process.
“The Green Bay Sweep was very well thought out. It was designed to get us 24 hours of televised hearings,” he said. “But we thought that we could bypass the corporate media by getting this stuff televised.”
Navarro’s part in this ploy was to provide the raw materials, he said in an interview on Thursday. That came in the form of a three-part White House report he put together during his final weeks in the Trump administration with volume titles like, “The Immaculate Deception” and “The Art of the Steal.”
“My role was to provide the receipts for the 100 congressmen or so who would make their cases… who could rely in part on the body of evidence I’d collected,” he told The Daily Beast. “To lay the legal predicate for the actions to be taken.” (Ultimately, states have not found any evidence of electoral fraud above the norm, which is exceedingly small.)
The next phase of the plan was up to Bannon, Navarro describes in his memoir, In Trump Time.
“Steve Bannon’s role was to figure out how to use this information—what he called ‘receipts’—to overturn the election result. That’s how Steve had come up with the Green Bay Sweep idea,” he wrote.
“The political and legal beauty of the strategy was this: by law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge. For the six battleground states, that would add up to as much as twenty-four hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress.”
“It was better for me to spend that morning working on the Green Bay Sweep. Just checking to see that everything was in line, that congressmen were on board,” he said during the interview. “It was a pretty mellow morning for me. I was convinced everything was set in place.”
Later that day, Bannon made several references to the football-themed strategy on his daily podcast, War Room Pandemic.
“We are right on the cusp of victory,” Bannon said on the show. “It’s quite simple. Play’s been called. Mike Pence, run the play. Take the football. Take the handoff from the quarterback. You’ve got guards in front of you. You’ve got big, strong people in front of you. Just do your duty.”
This idea was weeks in the making. Although Navarro told The Daily Beast he doesn’t remember when “Brother Bannon” came up with the plan, he said it started taking shape as Trump’s “Stop the Steal” legal challenges to election results in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin fizzled out. Courts wouldn’t side with Trump, thanks to what Navarro describes in his book as “the highly counterproductive antics” of Sydney Powell and her Kraken lawsuits. So instead, they came up with a never-before-seen scheme through the legislative branch.
When asked if Trump himself was involved in the strategy, Navarro said, “I never spoke directly to him about it. But he was certainly on board with the strategy. Just listen to his speech that day. He’d been briefed on the law, and how Mike [Pence] had the authority to it.”
Navarro starts off his book’s chapter about the strategy by mentioning how “Stephen K. Bannon, myself, and President Donald John Trump” were “the last three people on God’s good Earth who want to see violence erupt on Capitol Hill,” as it would disrupt their plans.
Indeed, Trump legal advisor John Eastman had penned a memo (first revealed by journalists Robert Costa and Bob Woodward in their book, Peril) outlining how Trump could stage a coup. And Trump clearly referenced the plan during his Jan. 6 speech, when he said, “I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so… all Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people.”
When Pence certified the electoral votes instead, he became what Navarro’s book described as “the Brutus most responsible… for the final betrayal of President Trump.”
Although the bipartisan House committee investigating the violence on Jan. 6 has demanded testimony and records from dozens of Trump allies and rally organizers believed to be involved in the attack on the nation’s democracy, Navarro said he hasn’t heard from them yet. The committee did not respond to our questions about whether it intends to dig into Navarro’s activities.
And while he has text messages, phone calls, and memos that could show how closely an active White House official was involved in the effort to keep Trump in power, he says investigators won’t find anything that shows the Green Bay Sweep plan involved violence. Instead, Navarro said, the investigative committee would find that the mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol building actually foiled their plans, because it incentivized Pence and other Republicans to follow through with certification. ¤ “They don’t want any part of me. I exonerate Trump and Bannon,” he said.
The committee is, however, engaged in a bitter battle with Bannon. The former Trump White House chief strategist refused to show up for a deposition or turn over documents, and he’s now being prosecuted by the Justice Department for criminal contempt of Congress.
Navarro said he’s still surprised that people at the Trump rally turned violent, given the impression he got when he went to see them in person during an exercise run that morning. ¤ “I’m telling you man, it was just so peaceful. I saw no anger. None. Zero,” he said.
TheGuardian: Capitol panel to investigate Trump call to Willard hotel in hours before attack http://bit.ly/32tF1jq
Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, has said the panel will open an inquiry into Donald Trump’s phone call seeking to stop Joe Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January hours before the insurrection.
The chairman said the select committee intended to scrutinize the phone call – revealed last month by the Guardian – should they prevail in their legal effort to obtain Trump White House records over the former president’s objections of executive privilege.
“That’s right,” Thompson said when asked by the Guardian whether the select committee would look into Trump’s phone call, and suggested House investigators had already started to consider ways to investigate Trump’s demand that Biden not be certified as president on 6 January.
Thompson said the select committee could not ask the National Archives for records about specific calls, but noted “if we say we want all White House calls made on January 5 and 6, if he made it on a White House phone, then obviously we would look at it there.”
The Guardian reported last month that Trump, according to multiple sources, called lieutenants based at the Willard hotel in Washington DC from the White House in the late hours of 5 January and sought ways to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January.
Trump first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term, the sources said.
But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, the sources said, on at least one call, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January in a scheme to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.
The former president’s remarks came as part of wider discussions he had with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification, the sources said. …
… Thompson said that the select committee would now also investigate both the contents of Trump’s phone calls to the Willard and the White House’s potential involvement, in a move certain to intensify the pressure on the former president’s inner circle.
“If we get the information that we requested,” Thompson said of the select committee’s demands for records from the Trump White House and Trump aides, “those calls potentially will be reflected to the Willard hotel and whomever.”
A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment about what else such a line of inquiry might involve. But a subpoena to Giuliani, the lead Trump lawyer at the Willard, is understood to be in the offing, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The Guardian reported that the night before the Capitol attack, Trump called the lawyers and non-lawyers at the Willard separately, because Giuliani did not want to have non-lawyers participate on sensitive calls and jeopardize claims to attorney-client privilege.
It was not clear whether Giulaini might invoke attorney-client privilege as a way to escape cooperating with the investigation in the event of a subpoena, but Congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, noted the protection does not confer broad immunity.
“The attorney-client privilege does not operate to shield participants in a crime from an investigation into a crime,” Raskin said. “If it did, then all you would have to do to rob a bank is bring a lawyer with you, and be asking for advice along the way.”
The Guardian also reported Trump made several calls the day before the Capitol attack from both the White House residence, his preferred place to work, as well as the West Wing, but it was not certain from which location he phoned his top lieutenants at the Willard.
The distinction is significant as phone calls placed from the White House residence, even from a landline desk phone, are not automatically memorialized in records sent to the National Archives after the end of an administration.
That means even if the select committee succeeds in its litigation to pry free Trump’s call detail records from the National Archives, without testimony from people with knowledge of what was said, House investigators might only learn the target and time of the calls.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Steve Bannon said today the only thing keeping the GOP from winning a 100 seat majority in the House in 2022 is Marc Elias: “He’s pure evil, but man that brother is tough .. Republicans don’t have the guts to stand up to him .. I admire that. He’s crazy, but he’s a fighter.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @MontyBoa99 Marc Elias’s teams defeated Trump Kraken lawyers, who alleged that
– a dead Hugo Chavez spawned the Dominion Voting machines system
– Italian satellites altered votes
– the US military was seizing US election servers in… Germany
– Chinese bamboo meant voter fraud
Who’s crazy?
WaPo: Committee investigating Jan. 6 attack plans to begin a more public phase of its work in the new year http://wapo.st/32pA77c Public hjearings are planned for winter and spring “followed by an interim report in the summer and a final report ahead of November’s elections”
WSJ: How the Capitol Riot Turned a Partisan Congress ‘Toxic’ http://on.wsj.com/3szy1MB “A list of the top 10 fundraisers in the House, according to Federal Election Commission data, includes some of the most outspoken partisans in both parties”
// Fallout from Jan. 6 attack fractured House relationships, further undercutting comity; magnetometers serve as daily reminder of threat
⭕ 26 Dec 2021
WaPo: House MAGA squad seeks to expand by boosting challengers to fellow Republicans http://wapo.st/3FuChAy ‘Candidates seeking Trump’s approval meet with him at Mar-a-Lago, where he peppers them with questions that test their MAGA bona fides’
“We’re looking at a nihilistic Mad Max hellscape. It will be all about the show of 2024 to bring Donald Trump back into power. … They will impeach Biden, they will impeach Harris, they will kill everything,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist who is sharply critical of Trump.
Trump has taken an active role in selecting candidates, so far doling out dozens of endorsements, and many of the candidates, like Kent, are challenging incumbents in GOP primaries for state and federal positions. For the 2022 House races, Trump has already thrown his support behind more than two dozen Republicans, including five running against Republican incumbents. ¤ Candidates seeking his approval meet with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., where he peppers them with questions that test their MAGA bona fides.
TheAtlantic, Peter Wehner: The Gospel of Donald Trump Jr. http://bit.ly/3sBoRPz “[T]he GOP has lost its moral bearings”
// The former president’s son told a crowd that the teachings of Jesus have “gotten us nothing.”
Trump [Jr] spoke at a Turning Point USA gathering on December 19. He displayed seething, nearly pathological resentments; playground insults (he led the crowd in “Let’s Go, Brandon” chants); tough guy/average Joe shtick; and a pulsating sense of aggrieved victimhood and persecution, all of it coming from the elitist, extravagantly rich son of a former president.
But there was one short section of Trump’s speech that I thought was particularly revealing. Relatively early in the speech, he said, “If we get together, they cannot cancel us all. Okay? They won’t. And this will be contrary to a lot of our beliefs because—I’d love not to have to participate in cancel culture. I’d love that it didn’t exist. But as long as it does, folks, we better be playing the same game. Okay? We’ve been playing T-ball for half a century while they’re playing hardball and cheating. Right? We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference—I understand the mentality—but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay? It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.”
Throughout his speech, Don Jr. painted a scenario in which Trump supporters—Americans living in red America—are under relentless attack from a wicked and brutal enemy. He portrayed it as an existential battle between good and evil. One side must prevail; the other must be crushed. This in turn justifies any necessary means to win. And the former president’s son has a message for the tens of millions of evangelicals who form the energized base of the GOP: the scriptures are essentially a manual for suckers. The teachings of Jesus have “gotten us nothing.” It’s worse than that, really; the ethic of Jesus has gotten in the way of successfully prosecuting the culture wars against the left. If the ethic of Jesus encourages sensibilities that might cause people in politics to act a little less brutally, a bit more civilly, with a touch more grace? Then it needs to go. ¤ Decency is for suckers.
… He believes, as his father does, that politics should be practiced ruthlessly, mercilessly, and vengefully. The ends justify the means. Norms and guardrails need to be smashed. Morality and lawfulness must always be subordinated to the pursuit of power and self-interest. That is the Trumpian ethic. … ¤¤ Donald Trump and his oldest son have become evangelists of a different kind.
Liz Cheney voted with President Trump more than 90 percent of the time but is now persona non grata in the GOP because she is willing to defend the Constitution and the rule of law and stand against a violent assault on the Capitol and an effort to overturn a free and fair election. When Liz Cheney is more despised in the party than the crazed Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Madison Cawthorn, or Donald Trump Jr., you know that the GOP has lost its moral bearings.
🐣 RT @BillPascrell 353 days ago terrorists ransacked the US Capitol and *hours later* 138-of-202 (68%) House republicans voted to make trump a dictator. They tried to finish the rioters’ job and end democracy. Never forget it.
🐣 RT @duty2warn NOT ONE poll before the election had Trump ahead of Biden. There wasn’t a nanosecond in 4 yrs where Trump had a 50% approval from America. He lost EVERY post-election lawsuit. There’s ZERO evidence of fraud. He is psychologically unbalanced. GOP are grifters. Trumpers are chumps.
🐣 RT @PeterHotez At what point do we define such public remarks made by former or current elected officials as hate speech/rhetoric? Since June 1, 2021, I estimate 200,000 unvaccinated Americans lost their lives to Covid because they refused vaccinations despite their widespread availability.
⋙⋙ TheHill: Sarah Palin says she’ll get coronavirus vaccine “over my dead body” http://hill.cm/JKLgT15
⋙ 🐣 RT @PeterHotez How do we define speech that contributes significantly to the loss of American 🇺🇸 lives on a scale we’ve not seen before in modern times?
⋙ 🐣 ◕ RT @PeterHotez Picture says a lot https://twitter.com/PeterHotez/status/1475224183235915777?s=20/photo/1
// COVID-19 deaths by political party
⋙ 🐣 RT @PeterHotez Fyi to give credit, I think I first saw this from @DrEricDing
😅 WaPo: Dave Barry’s 2021 Year in Review http://wapo.st/3yYswrW
// Vaccines, variants and supply chain woes: A look back at the past 12 months
⭕ 25 Dec 2021 🎅🏼🎁 ✨Merry Christmas✨
🐣 RT @Ukraine OTD 30 years ago the USSR collapsed. The greatest geopolitical joy of the XX century! https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/1474625967436009473?s=20/photo/1
// flag of USSR being lowered USSR flag being lowered
⭕ 24 Dec 2021🎄
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski People often ask me what Steve Bannon’s agenda is. It’s complicated because he is all over the place, but the best way to describe it: ¤ Create chaos to destabilize government and institutions to push society to the brink of anarchy, causing people to yearn for authoritarianism.
⋙ 🐣 RT @sandibochum He installed Trump to blow up the administrative state
TheAtlantic, Ron Brownstein: The Republican Axis Reversing the Rights Revolution http://bit.ly/3FvDl78 “[O]ffensives by red-state governments and GOP-appointed federal judges are poised to retrench those common standards across an array of issues”
// We are witnessing a reordering of American life not seen in half a century.
The great divergence is rapidly expanding—and President Joe Biden’s window to reverse it is narrowing. ¤ Since the 1960s, Congress and federal courts have acted mostly to strengthen the floor of basic civil rights available to citizens in all 50 states, a pattern visible on issues from the dismantling of Jim Crow racial segregation to the right to abortion to the authorization of same-sex marriage. But now, offensives by red-state governments and GOP-appointed federal judges are poised to retrench those common standards across an array of issues. The result through the 2020s could be a dramatic erosion of common national rights and a widening gulf—a “great divergence”—between the liberties of Americans in blue states and those in red states.
WaPo, Rob Portman and Jeanne Shaheen: Ukraine stood with the West in 2014. Today we must stand with Ukraine. http://wapo.st/3Hfx0xp “How the West responds now will define the trajectory of our relations with Russia and Putin for the next decade“
Seven years ago, in what Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity, the people of Ukraine stood up to their Russian-backed leaders and made a conscious decision to turn to the West. ¤ Ukrainians chose a free, democratic and independent future. Today, that yearning for freedom is even more pronounced. Recent surveys show strong support among Ukrainians — especially youths — for joining the European Union and NATO. ¤ This is despite unrelenting attempts by Russia to undermine Ukrainian democracy through disinformation and military intimidation, including the illegal annexation of Crimea.
Russian troops invaded the Ukrainian border regions of Donbas in 2014 under the guise of protecting Russian citizens, and they continue to aid separatists fighting there. Ukraine has stood strong and shown remarkable restraint. By contrast, Russia’s aggressive posture has recently increased significantly, with as many as 100,000 Russian troops and 100 battalion tactical groups, including armored tanks and artillery, amassed on Ukraine’s border. Media reports warn that Russia could invade Ukraine as early as January.
Moscow would have the world believe that Russia is merely trying to shore up its border against a threat from Ukraine and NATO. This argument has no merit. Ukraine’s military posture has always been purely defensive in nature. Unlike Russia, Ukraine has upheld its commitments under the Minsk agreements between Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which were designed to ensure a cease-fire in Donbas.
Russia has shown its intent to violate its international commitments by demanding NATO cease expanding to sovereign countries that wish to join, and calling for Ukraine to grant more of its sovereign territory to Russia. ¤ The Biden administration has placed diplomacy at the forefront of its efforts to deter Russia. However, these efforts must be combined with the necessary economic and military measures that would strengthen a diplomatic approach and give it greater credibility.
… Since 2014, the United States has provided more than $2.5 billion in security assistance, and since 2017, we have provided lethal assistance such as antitank missiles and heavy machine guns. This aid was designed to prepare Ukraine for an active conflict in the Donbas — not a full-scale Russian invasion. In Congress, we have advocated to increase security aid: The United States must speed up the pace of assistance and provide antiaircraft, antitank and anti-ship systems, along with electronic warfare capabilities.
Second, the Biden administration should not support any attempts to force Ukraine to cede control in Donbas outside the Minsk agreements. The Russians are using the same playbook there as they have in Crimea and the occupied Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia — seeking to normalize their illegal occupation by backing separatist forces, encouraging the creation of local, pro-Russian governments and issuing Russian passports to local residents. President Biden should not urge Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to grant any concessions outside of the Minsk agreements process, and he must require Russia to withdraw troops from the border before further negotiations begin.
Third, Biden should seriously reconsider the imposition of sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. It is clear that Vladimir Putin is willing to flout international norms to advance what the State Department has described as an emotional agenda to reunite the Soviet Union. Russia has recently used its outsize energy resources as a weapon by exacting geopolitical concessions from the government of Moldova and by refusing to increase outflows to Europe during the recent supply crunch. The administration should work closely with the new German government to keep the pipeline from becoming operational; it is in Europe’s best interests to deny Putin another arm of influence over our allies.
🐣 RT @RFERL The United States grew “arrogant and self-confident” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview published on the eve of the 30th anniversary of his resignation as president of the U.S.S.R.
⋙ RFE/RL: U.S. Became ‘Arrogant’ After Soviet Union Collapsed, Gorbachev Says 30 Years After He Resigned http://bit.ly/3FulVb4
🐣 RT @NPR Soviet leader Gorbachev announced on Christmas Day 1991 that the Soviet Union would break up in 15 separate countries. Since then, there’s often friction among the former Soviet republics, including the current confrontation between Russia and Ukraine.
⋙ NPR, Greg Myre: How the Soviet Union’s collapse explains the current Russia-Ukraine tension http://n.pr/3mvAvrv
🐣 RT @thedailybeast “Trump, stop. Just stop,” said Jan. 6 organizer Ali Alexander
⋙ DailyBeast, Zachary Petrizzo: TrumpWorld Becomes Unglued Over Trump’s Praise of Vaccine and Booster Shots http://bit.ly/3ejmf0D
⭕ 23 Dec 2021
WaPo, Greg Sargent: What Jim Jordan knows about Trump’s coup attempt — and what he may cover up http://wapo.st/3sHW9fW
💽 MSNBC, AllInWithChris: ‘We took the Capitol’: Proud Boy pleads guilty to Jan. 6 conspiracy charges http://on.msnbc.com/3FAO944
// On Wednesday, one of the members of the Proud Boys became the first to admit he was at the Capitol to stop the transfer of power, as part of a cooperation agreement with the government.
WaPo: Thompson says Jan. 6 committee focused on Trump’s hours of silence during attack, weighing criminal referrals http://wapo.st/340TjIV “Trump’s actions could amount to criminally obstructing Congress as it sought to certify the election results”
DailyBeast, Allison Quinn: Putin Loses His Cool When Confronted Over Ukraine, Claims It Belongs to Lenin Anyway http://bit.ly/3sx8XpE “… [W]ho created Ukraine – Lenin Vladimir Ilyich, when he created the Soviet Union.”
// The Russian leader became visibly angry and lashed out at the West for “cheating” Moscow before arguing Ukraine really belongs to Vladimir Lenin.
When a reporter for Sky News asked whether Moscow could give security guarantees and promise not to invade its neighbor, Putin exploded: “You are demanding guarantees from us? It’s you who should give us guarantees. Immediately. Right now. And not talk it over for decades.”
His comments came as Ukraine released satellite images it said showed more Russian forces building up at its border, and the Russian Defense Ministry announced massive “attack” drills in Crimea. ¤ Moscow has repeatedly claimed the moves are in response to what it sees as the threat of an expanding NATO, while Western officials view the Kremlin’s saber-rattling as a form of coercive diplomacy through which it hopes to keep its grip on Ukraine.
Putin repeatedly portrayed Russia as the victim at his press conference, claiming Moscow had been dragged into the Ukraine conflict when it is really just a “mediator. ¤ “They want to make us a party to the conflict, and it’s not like that,” he said. (Apparently in his view it was not the Russian forces seizing Crimea in 2014, the years of Kremlin propaganda, Russian support for separatists, and the reported weapons supplies that made Russia a party to the conflict.) ¤ “And on top of that—no matter what we did, you always expressed ‘concerns.’ Get out of here with your ‘concerns.’ We will do what we consider necessary. We want to ensure our safety,” he said.
Later in the conference, Putin said there was an overall “positive response” from the U.S. to the Kremlin’s “red line” proposals on NATO. ¤ “Our American partners say they’re ready to start discussions early next year in Geneva. Both sides have named representatives and I hope that things will continue along the same path,” he said.
“Our actions will depend on the situation in the sphere of security. We made clear that the further expansion of NATO in the East is not acceptable. We’re not the ones who came to the States with missiles. They’re the ones setting up missiles right on our doorstep,” he said. ¤ “And what if we set up missiles on the border of the U.S. and Canada? Or Mexico?”
Visibly angry, he went on to vent frustration over the idea of a sovereign Ukraine, suggesting the country actually belongs to Vladimir Lenin. ¤ “And who did California belong to?” he asked, apparently referring to California being part of Mexico prior to the Mexican-American War. ¤ “And Texas? Did they forget that or something? Well okay, everyone has forgotten, and they don’t remember the way they now remember about Crimea. We also don’t remember who created Ukraine–Lenin Vladimir Ilyich, when he created the Soviet Union.”
WaPo: Trump’s newest business partner: A Chinese firm with a history of SEC investigations http://wapo.st/3qfbf9O because Trump killed irony a long time ago
// Shanghai-based Arc Capital, an investment firm that has been the target of probes by securities regulators, is at the center of the deal to take Trump’s media venture public.
Arc Capital, an investment advisory firm based in Shanghai, has repeatedly helped create or finance companies with little or no revenue, no customers and office locations that point to P.O. boxes, according to a Washington Post review of regulatory and court filings. One claimed to be developing autonomous drone software despite having no employees; another said it operated a publicly traded in-home bakery “specializing in freshly-made cakes and cupcakes” before saying it pivoted into touch-screen technologies for a “diversified blue-chip client base,” regulatory filings show.
🐣 RT @duty2warn Trump suggesting people should take the vaccine has generated substantial cognitive dissonance among his followers. Some of them might soon suggest that the person speaking could not be Trump and was some CGI trick. If Trump ever says he lost the election, will brains explode?
⋙⋙ 🐣 He did just say he lost the election, offhandedly, in an interview ~ and his exec privilege filing with SCOTUS refers to him as a “former president”
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski In a new interview, Trump admits he lost the 2020 election.
💽 https://twitter.com/objectivereali6/status/1474128006515867652?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @duty2warn To be clear, cognitive dissonance is a term used to describe mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. People tend to seek consistency in their attitudes and perceptions, so this conflict causes feelings of unease or discomfort.
⋙⋙ 🐣“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
🐣 RT @BryanDawsonUSA
Mike Flynn pleaded the 5th
John Eastman pleaded the 5th
Jeff Clark pleaded the 5th
Michael Cohen pleaded the 5th
Roger Stone will plead the 5th
Will Mark Meadows plead the 5th?
Will Trump plead the 5th?
What does #TheDonFather say about pleading the 5th?
💽 https://twitter.com/BryanDawsonUSA/status/1472065551610658820?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BillKristol The Jan. 6 Committee is clearly laying the groundwork for requesting that Trump testify, and if he refuses, for subpoenaing him to do so. He may have arguments (good and bad) for not answering particular questions. I don’t see what argument he has for refusing to testify at all.
🐣 RT @Amy_Siskind It’s worth acknowledging we are living thru a once-in-a-century pandemic, on the heels of a brush with authoritarianism and our nation’s first attempted bloody coup. So if you’re not feeling the holiday cheer or regaling about 2021, that’s okay. Be kind to yourself right now 💜
💙 🧵 RT @SteveSchmidtSES I’d like to share a story. It is an American story that belongs to every one of us. 244 years ago on December 19, 1777, General George Washington led the Continental Army into its winter encampment at Valley Forge. In all, there were 12,000 “soldiers,” 400 women and children (1) 📌 https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1474125177751584769?s=20
// tags: @SteveSchmidtSES Christmas The Cause Valley Forge WW2 FDR Churchill
NYT, Lawrence Tribe, Donald Ayer and Dennis Aftergut: Will Donald Trump Get Away With Inciting an Insurrection? http://nyti.ms/30Vkbsx AG Garland must “hold the leaders of the insurrection fully accountable for their attempt to overthrow the government”
// Mr. Tribe taught constitutional law at Harvard for 50 years. Merrick Garland was one of his students. Mr. Ayer oversaw criminal prosecutions and investigations as Ronald Reagan’s U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California. He later served as deputy attorney general. Mr. Aftergut handled a number of complex investigations and prosecutions as a federal prosecutor in San Francisco.
Mr. Garland’s success depends on ensuring that the rule of law endures. That means dissuading future coup plotters by holding the leaders of the insurrection fully accountable for their attempt to overthrow the government. But he cannot do so without a robust criminal investigation of those at the top, from the people who planned, assisted or funded the attempt to overturn the Electoral College vote to those who organized or encouraged the mob attack on the Capitol. To begin with, he might focus on Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and even Donald Trump — all of whom were involved, in one way or another, in the events leading up to the attack.
While the Justice Department has filed charges against more than 700 people who participated in the violence, limiting the investigation to these foot soldiers would be a grave mistake: As Joanne Freeman, a Yale historian, wrote this month about the insurrection, “Accountability — the belief that political power holders are responsible for their actions and that blatant violations will be addressed — is the lifeblood of democracy. Without it, there can be no trust in government, and without trust, democratic governments have little power.”
The legal path to investigate the leaders of the coup attempt is clear. The criminal code prohibits inciting an insurrection or “giving aid or comfort” to those who do, as well as conspiracy to forcibly “prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” The code also makes it a crime to corruptly impede any official proceeding or deprive citizens of their constitutional right to vote.
Based purely on what we know today from news reports and the steady stream of revelations coming from the House select committee investigating the attack, the attorney general has a powerful justification for a robust and forceful investigation into the former president and his inner circle. As White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows was intimately involved in the effort to overturn the election. He traveled to Georgia last December, where he apparently laid the groundwork for the phone call in which the president pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes.” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio reportedly promoted a scheme to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject duly certified Joe Biden electors. And from their war room at the Willard Hotel, several members of the president’s inner circle hatched the legal strategy to overturn the results of the election.
It is possible that the department is deferring the decision about starting a full-blown investigative effort pending further work by the House select committee. … ¤ But such an approach would come at a very high cost. In the prosecution business, interviews need to happen as soon as possible after the events in question, to prevent both forgetfulness and witness coordination to conceal the truth. A comprehensive Department of Justice probe of the leadership is now more urgently needed than ever.
It is also imperative that Mr. Trump be included on the list of those being investigated. The media has widely reported his role in many of the relevant events, and there is no persuasive reason to exclude him. ¤ First, he has no claim to constitutional immunity from prosecution. The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel has recognized such immunity only for sitting presidents because a criminal trial would prevent them from discharging the duties of their office. Mr. Trump no longer has those duties to discharge. ¤ Nor is exclusion of the former president remotely justified by the precedent President Gerald Ford set in pardoning Richard Nixon to help the country “heal” from Watergate. Even our proud tradition of not mimicking banana republics by allowing political winners to retaliate against losers must give way in the wake of violence perpetrated to thwart the peaceful transition of power. …
Significantly, even if the Atlanta district attorney is able to convict Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump for interfering in Georgia’s election, they could still run for office again. Only convicting them for participating in an insurrection would permanently disqualify them from office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
To decline from the outset to investigate would be appeasement, pure and simple, and appeasing bullies and wrongdoers only encourages more of the same. Without forceful action to hold the wrongdoers to account, we will likely not resist what some retired generals see as a march to another insurrection in 2024 if Mr. Trump or another demagogue loses.
Throughout his public life, Mr. Garland has been a highly principled public servant focused on doing the right thing. But only by holding the leaders of the Jan. 6 insurrection — all of them — to account can he secure the future and teach the next generation that no one is above the law. If he has not done so already, we implore the attorney general to step up to that task.
🐣 RT @gconway3dg [not George Conway] Liz Cheney: — “That fucking guy Jim Jordan. That son of a bitch… I smacked his hand away and told him, ‘Get away from me. You fucking did this.’”
// reportedly said on Jan 6
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Sydney Powell is under federal criminal investigation for her role in January 6th. Merry Christmas!
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski This interview is sending shockwaves through the anti-vax MAGAs this morning. [Trump:] “The vaccine is one of the greatest achievements of mankind .. The ones that get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones who don’t take the vaccine.”
💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1474024520721866789?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 Here’s what Biden said: “Resist the temptation to ascribe motive, because you really don’t know — and it gets in the way of being able to reach a consensus”
NYT: Trump Asks Supreme Court to Block Release of Jan. 6 Records http://nyti.ms/3svII2A If SCOTUS decides against Trump, we’ll know “in the coming weeks”; otherwise, the case will be heard in the spring with a decision announced in late June”: part of “The Big Stall”
// The case is a constitutional clash on the scope of executive privilege and on whether a former president may invoke it when the current one has waived it.
🐣 RT @marceelias My prediction for 2022: Before the midterm election, we will have a serious discussion about whether individual Republican House Members are disqualified by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving in Congress. ¤ We may even see litigation. Text Block: https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1473118873302056961?s=20/photo/1
Text:“Section 3. ¤ No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
WaPo: Trump’s newest business partner: A Chinese firm with a history of SEC investigations http://wapo.st/3qfbf9O because Trump killed irony a long time ago
// Shanghai-based Arc Capital, an investment firm that has been the target of probes by securities regulators, is at the center of the deal to take Trump’s media venture public.
⭕ 22 Dec 2021
WaPo: Inside the nonstop pressure campaign by Trump allies to get election officials to revisit the 2020 vote http://wapo.st/3FqlkXS //➔ Astounding how one person’s psychopathology can set an entire country in a tizzy
💙💙 🔄 HealthLine (2017): Stem Cell Research http://bit.ly/32lMcdt
// 7/8/2017
★ JAMA, Y Tabak et al [CVS]: Incidence and Estimated Vaccine Effectiveness Against Symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection Among Persons Tested in US Retail Locations, May 1 to August 7, 2021 http://bit.ly/3H0JhWa
Our analyses provide real-world evidence on the substantial risk of symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections in unvaccinated persons, who were up to 4 times more likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 between May and August 2021 than vaccinated individuals. Our findings are based on data from more than 1.2 million individuals in the CVS Health database, which is, to our knowledge, the largest national SARS-CoV-2 test data set in the US. Our findings are consistent with a study in which mRNA-1273–elicited antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 variants persisted but at a reduced level 6 months after the second dose,4 and with a case-control study reporting a 0.22 relative risk for SARS-CoV-2 infections in individuals vaccinated with 2-dose mRNA vaccines before the emergence of the Delta variant.5
Chart Key: J&J – Johnson & Johnson; BNT – Pfizer/BioNTech; mRNA – Moderna(The scale on the left is for the vaccines; the scale on the right is the % Delta)
My Notes: This was published today, but the situation has evolved since the data only went through July. This was pre-omicron and pre-booster. But it shows the relative effectiveness of the various vaccines. ⋙ If a person gets a booster of an mRNA vaccine two months after the J&J, their protection is actually better than getting two shots of an mRNA. It’s called cross-immunity – the two technologies complement each other. Also, getting a flu shot is important (I haven’t yet)
💙🐣 📋 RT @Emilie From the founder of Bloomberg News: ¤ Biden’s Economic Performance Has Proved Unbeatable ¤ “America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years.”
⋙ Bloomberg: Biden’s Economic Performance Has Proved Unbeatable http://bloom.bg/3sqOnHl
// No first-year president going back to Carter comes close to matching the current White House occupant’s No. 1 or No. 2 ranking in each of 10 [measures]
🧵 RT @January6thCmte The Committee has requested that Rep Jim Jordan provide information for the committee’s investigation. ¤ Chair @BennieGThompson noted that Jordan was apparently in communication with the former President on 1/6 & he was reportedly involved in efforts to challenge election results. Text Block: 📌 https://twitter.com/January6thCmte/status/1473754870524092425?s=20/photo/1-2
// letter
🐣 RT @ReportsDaNews BREAKING NEWS ¤ Proud Boy Matthew Greene of Syracuse, NY, will plead guilty to CONSPIRACY and OBSTRUCTION of official proceeding. ¤ Greene has agreed to cooperate with the feds. ¤ This is huge.
🧵 RT @rgoodlaw House Select Committee letter to Jim Jordan signals committee may already have testimony at a granular level of what Trump was doing in Oval during the attack. ¤ And raises questions re presidential pardons as attempted get out of jail free cards for individuals involved in Jan. 6 📌 https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1473755276436201478?s=20/photo/1-2
WaPo: House Jan. 6 committee requests information from and meeting with GOP Rep. Jim Jordan about his contact with Trump http://wapo.st/3yPxcAq
🐣 📋 RT @JohnWDean “Studies show that those living in the most pro-Trump counties in the United States are dying from covid-19 at a rate more than five times higher than in the most anti-Trump counties.”
⋙ WaPo: Sarah Palin’s anti-vax talk shows Republicans have become a death cult http://wapo.st/3eiY7v2
🐣 RT @McFaul Simply crazy.
⋙ 🐣 RT @CarlBildt Here comes the first fabrication that could be used to motivate a new 🇷🇺 invasion of 🇺🇦, with the 🇷🇺DefMin saying that 🇺🇸military contractors are preparing something with chemical weapons in Donbas.
⭕ 21 Dec 2021
NewYorker, Joshua Yaffa: Why Is Russia Threatening to Invade Ukraine? http://bit.ly/3oJWDzB
// 12/16/2021; For Putin, the current standoff is a chance to overturn what he sees as an unjust post-Cold War order—and create a new one in its wake.
🧵 RT @RusEmbUSA 1️⃣ We call on @StateDept not to distort the reality. For the sake of de-escalation, the United States should not create anti-Russian military sites near our borders.
📌 https://twitter.com/RusEmbUSA/status/1473529806729928710?s=20
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @nedprice Contrary to statements from the Russian Defense Minister, Russia and its proxies are responsible for escalating tensions, not Ukraine or the United States.
📌 https://twitter.com/StateDeptSpox/status/1473444367918579717?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @RusEmbUSA 2️⃣ In particular, #Washington shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of @NATO, deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former #USSR, not use their infrastructure for any military activities, and not develop bilateral military cooperation with them.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RusEmbUSA 3️⃣ These steps would allow to defuse dangerous tensions in #Europe and conclude agreements on guarantees of equal and indivisible security.
🐣 RT @RealLizUSA [sock puppet] NEW! President Donald J. Trump: “Why isn’t the Unselect Committee of highly partisan political hacks investigating the CAUSE of the January 6th protest, which was the rigged Presidential Election of 2020? Does anybody notice that they want to stay as far away from that topic… Text Block: https://twitter.com/realLizUSA/status/1473300872281178118?s=20/photo/1
Text: Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America
Why isn’t the Unselect Committee of highly partisan political hacks investigating the CAUSE of the January 6th protest, which was the rigged Presidential Election of 2020? Does anybody notice that they want to stay as far away from that topic as possible, the numbers don’t work for them, or even come close. The only thing they can do is not talk about it. Look at what is going on now in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and, to a lesser extent, Michigan where the numbers are horrendously corrupt in Detroit, but the weak Republican RINOs in the Michigan House and Senate don’t want to touch the subject. In many ways a RINO is worse than a Radical Left Democrat, because you don’t know where they are coming from and you have no idea how bad they really are for our Country. The good news is there are fewer and fewer RINOs left as we elect strong Patriots who love America. I will be having a news conference on January 6th at Mar-a-Lago to discuss all of these points,and more. Until then, remember, the insurrection took place on November 3rd it was the completely unarmed protest of the rigged election that took place on January 6th.
🐣 RT @McFaul “Putin wants a replay of the 1945 Yalta agreement (in Russia they even speak of “Yalta 2.0”). In this new version, the United States and Russia (this time excluding Britain) would carve out spheres of influence in Europe. That is completely unacceptable.”
⋙ WaPo, Michael McFaul: Putin wants us to negotiate over the heads of our allies. Washington shouldn’t fall for it. http://wapo.st/32aaKWR
// A return to Yalta is the last thing that the world needs now.
Last week, the Russian government took the highly unusual decision to publish two draft treaties, complete with articles and formal legalistic language, on European security — one between Russia and NATO, one between Russia and the United States. During my five years in the Obama administration, I often participated in talks with the Russians on major agreements, including two that we succeeded in completing, the New START Treaty and Russia’s accession agreement to the World Trade Organization. In those serious negotiations, Moscow never started by issuing a list of demands.
In fact, few serious negotiations begin with one side drafting, let alone publishing, an entire agreement. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move has the feel of an ultimatum. And ultimatums, as we know from history, are often pretexts for annexation or war. Leaders in Washington, Brussels and Kyiv should be worried that Putin does not really want to negotiate a new agreement on European security. His deployment of 175,000 troops on the border suggests, instead, that he is more interested in escalating the current war in eastern Ukraine.
But what if Putin really wants to talk about European security? If so, U.S., Canadian and European leaders should embrace the opportunity. Some of the great pillars of European security of the past — the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, the Vienna Document, the Paris Charter, the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances for Ukraine and the Helsinki Final Act — are either now defunct or no longer serving their originally intended purposes.
Many of the demands in the draft treaties now floated by Putin, however are nonstarters and violate agreements Moscow signed before. To mention but one example, great powers cannot dictate to other countries what multilateral organizations that can and cannot join — contrary to Moscow’s expressed desire to limit’s Ukraine choices regarding affiliations with European security institutions. That violates the Helsinki Final Act. Still, a few ideas in the Russian treaties are worthy of discussion, including limits on arms, deployments and exercises. …
There are many other important European security issues that also need new attention. But this list of amendments to the Russian draft treaties is a good place to test whether Putin is serious about an actual negotiation on a new European security architecture — or whether he’s interested merely in issuing an ultimatum, designed purposely to be rejected, as a pretext for greater military action against Ukraine.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance New from @just_security: evidence is mounting that the most senior defense officials did not want to send troops to the Capitol because they harbored concerns that President Donald Trump might utilize the forces’ presence in an attempt to hold onto power.
⋙ JustSecurity, Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix: Crisis of Command: The Pentagon, The President, and January 6 http://bit.ly/3mnm5te
According to a report released last month, Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of the Defense on Jan. 6, told the Department’s inspector general that he feared “if we put U.S. military personnel on the Capitol, I would have created the greatest Constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.” In congressional testimony, he said he was also cognizant of “fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner” and that “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our Armed Forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification.”
Miller does not specify who held the fears that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, and he wasn’t asked by Congress. However, it’s now clear that such concerns were shared by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as former CIA Director and at the time Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Before Nov. 3, Milley and Pompeo confided in one another that they had a persistent worry Trump would try to use the military in an attempt to hold onto power if he lost the election, the Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported. “This military’s not going to be used,” Milley assured Pompeo.
Milley, according to multiple reports, “feared it was Trump’s ‘Reichstag moment,’ in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it.” ¤ The top officials’ fears were warranted: Donald Trump, his close aides and a segment of Republican political figures had openly discussed the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act or using the military to prevent the transfer of power on the basis of false claims that the election was “stolen.” But the Pentagon’s actions with respect to the National Guard suggest a scenario in which, on the basis of such concerns, a potentially profound crisis of command may have played out on Jan. 6.
Close observers of the events of Jan. 6 have mainly posited two reasons for the delay in mobilizing the Guard. The first explanation is one of bureaucratic failures or managerial weaknesses in the military’s procedures that day. A second explanation is that the military was deliberately serving Trump’s effort to interfere with the election by withholding assistance. ¤ We identify a third explanation: that senior military officials constrained the mobilization and deployment of the National Guard to avoid injecting federal troops that could have been re-missioned by the President to advance his attempt to hold onto power.
[T]he evidence also indicates that the same concerns potentially explain why the Pentagon did not approve deployment of the National Guard in sufficient time – and, indeed, authorized the deployment only after President Trump eventually made a public announcement (at 4:17 pm) that he was not in favor of continued occupation of the Capitol.
What was at stake was the prospect of an illegal order from the President and thwarting a potential scheme to undermine the peaceful transfer of power. Ultimately, the outcome of the Pentagon’s decisions may have been best for the nation, even if it extended the period of time during which Congress was in harm’s way. …
🐣 RT @richsignorelli Read the names of those officials who are responsible for mass deaths in this country. Never forget or forgive.
⋙ 🧵 RT @Schwartzesque Wow. http://bit.ly/3H6DApY Text Block: 📌 https://twitter.com/Schwartzesque/status/1473358574285991938?s=20/photo/1
Text: From: “Birx, Deborah L. EOP/NSC”•
Date: Tuesday, August 25, 2020 at 7:55 AM
To: “Short, Marc T. EOP/OVp”
Subject: FW: For Review: Draft POTUS Remarks – Meeting with Medical Experts
I can’t be part of this with these people who believe in herd immunity and believe we are fine with only protecting the 1.5M Americans in LTCF and not the 80M + with co-morbidities in the populations included the unacceptable death toll among Native Americans, Hispanics and Blacks. With our current mitigation scenario we end up near 300K by Christmas and 500K by the time we have vaccine – close to the 600K live lost with 1918 Flu. We have worked to find a path that is the least disruptive to the economy but moves us under R1 and saves both the economy and American lives. Without masks and social distancing in public and homes we end up with twice as many deaths – we are a very unhealthy nation with a lot of obesity etc – we will never look as good as even Sweden due to our co-morbidities. These are people who
believe that all the curves are predetermined and mitigation is irrelevant – they are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience. I am happy to go out of town or whatever gives the WH cover for Weds. Perhaps do Annapolis and meet with Hogan. Fauci and I could probably do it together – I am open to options. Deb
🐣 RT @SpyTalker Russian Invasion of Ukraine is ‘Almost Certain,’ Cyber Expert Says. Putin not bluffing, argues noted cyber and statecraft expert @DAlperovitch, whose Crowdstrike firm uncovered Moscow’s 2016 DNC hack by @talk_spy
⋙ SpyTalk, Jeff Stein: Russian Invasion of Ukraine is ‘Almost Certain,’ Cyber Expert Says http://bit.ly/3mpXgNw
// Putin not bluffing, argues noted cyber and statecraft expert Dmitri Alperovitch, whose Crowdstrike firm uncovered Moscow’s 2016 DNC hack
🐣 RT @AP Fox News defended Jesse Watters after he used the phrase “kill shot” in a speech urging young conservatives to confront Dr. Anthony Fauci with a hostile interview, saying Watters’ words were taken out of context. Fauci said Watters should be fired.
⋙ AP: Fauci says Fox’s Watters should be fired for comments on him http://bit.ly/3JkxNPs
🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse The Supreme Court opened the floodgates for dark money with Citizens United. That decision broke our campaign finance laws & strained our democracy to the breaking point. It’s time to pass my DISCLOSE Act and clean up this mess.
🧵 RT @duty2warn (1/4) We’re going to answer this question ONCE AND FOR ALL. We heard it asked yet again, after his latest screed. The question is: Does Trump really believe he won the election because it was stolen? Here is the actual answer, sorry if you don’t find it satisfying, but it’s true: 📌 https://twitter.com/duty2warn/status/1473363147683602437?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @duty2warn (2/4) The answer is – it doesn’t matter! It’s the same. To understand this, you have to know Trump’s psychopathology and his aberrant relationship to the truth. In all ways, belief or not belief – it’s the same. There is no concept of “belief.” Only the narrative he puts forth.
⋙ 🐣 RT @duty2warn (3/4) In his universe, there is only HIM. There is only HIS urgency and his needs. Actual belief NEVER seeps into conscious thought. It’s not only the CHOICE of belief that doesn’t enter thought, the very CONCEPT of belief doesn’t either. Thus, it doesn’t matter.
⋙ 🐣 RT @duty2warn (4/4) If you’re asking whether he believed he won the election the day it happened, if he believed the election was stolen the day it happened, the answer is “no”. He knew he lost. That realization was momentary and transitory. He needed it to go away forever. And so, it has.
NBCNews: Republican Rep. Scott Perry says he won’t comply with Jan. 6 panel http://nbcnews.to/3efdh4o
// The committee announced on Monday it was requesting information from the congressman.
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Alex Jones is flipping out after Trump said he got the booster: “Hell, we’re fighting Bill Gates and Fauci and Biden and the New World Order and Psaki and the Davos Group .. and now we’ve got Trump on their team!” 💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1473342766855987205?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 20 Dec 2021
💽 MSNBC, Steve Benen: Why Michael Cohen’s new lawsuit is surprisingly important http://on.msnbc.com/3qd9hqK
// Michael Cohen is suing Donald Trump, Bill Barr, and the Bureau of Prisons in a civil suit that’s a lot more important than you might think.
[AP:] Michael Cohen claimed in a new lawsuit Thursday that Donald Trump retaliated against him for writing a tell-all memoir, saying his abrupt return to federal prison last year endangered his life and amounted to punishment for criticizing the president…. The new lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks damages for “extreme physical and emotional harm” and violations of Cohen’s First Amendment rights.
… Cohen is suing the former president, federal prison officials, and former Attorney General Bill Barr. ¤ And why is this a case worth watching? In part because Cohen’s argument appears to have merit, and in part because of the core allegation he’s raised in the civil case. ¤ Just weeks into home confinement, the lawyer arrived at a New York courthouse, expecting to complete some routine paperwork. What he encountered instead was probation officers asking him to sign a document that would prevent him from publishing a book or speaking to the media during the remainder of his sentence.
Cohen, working on an anti-Trump book, balked, insisting that the request was a violation of his free speech rights under the First Amendment. About 90 minutes later, Cohen was in handcuffs. The Bureau of Prisons had decided to revoke home confinement and sent him back to prison.
By all accounts, this was not normal for released prisoners, and it raised some unsettling questions. Was federal law enforcement punishing Cohen because he’d worked on a book critical of the then-president? Was there a special rule being applied just to him?
In July 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein agreed that it appeared federal officials were trying to silence Cohen. “I’ve never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people,” the federal judge said. “How can I take any other inference but that it was retaliatory?” …
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Breaking: The Jan. 6 select committee is requesting an interview with Republican Scott Perry — the first known effort to talk to a member of Congress about helping Trump in his efforts to overturn the election. https://bit.ly/3qbfnI5
🐣 RT @starsandstripes Service members who overtly support extremist groups or ideas, attempt to recruit others into such ideology, or train, organize or demonstrate in support of an extremist view are to face punishment under new guidance published by the Pentagon on Monday.
⋙ Stripes.com: Pentagon unveils new extremism rules, including potential punishment for social media likes or shares http://bit.ly/3edDqRa
// Warning that extremism in the ranks is increasing, Pentagon officials are issuing detailed new rules prohibiting service members from actively engaging
Service members who overtly support extremist groups or ideas, attempt to recruit others into such ideology, or train, organize or demonstrate in support of an extremist view are to face punishment under new guidance published by the Pentagon on Monday.
The guidance leaves entirely to commanders decisions about punishments for those found to be “actively participating” in extremist activity. Commanders may charge violators criminally, dole out a lesser administrative punishment or simply counsel them on what they did wrong, the guidance states.
Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin instructed the Pentagon to better define extremism, as the Pentagon worked to understand how rampant such ideologies were in the wake of the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by some supporters of then-President Donald Trump. Those involved included some members of the armed forces and dozens of veterans.
“The overwhelming majority of the men and women of the Department of Defense serve this country with honor and integrity,” Austin wrote in a memorandum dated Monday, which was released alongside the updated rules on extremism and a new report on extremist activity in DOD. “We believe only a very few violate [their] oath by participating in extremist activities, but even the actions of a few can have an outsized impact on unit cohesion, morale and readiness — and the physical harm some of these activities can engender can undermine the safety of our people. We owe the men and women of the Department of Defense an environment free of extremist activities, and we owe our country a military that reflects the founding values of our democracy.”
The Countering Extremist Activity Working Group that Austin stood up in April found fewer than 100 service members had likely “participated in some prohibited extremist activities” in the last year, John Kirby, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, told reporters Monday.
Some activity barred by the new rules may be simpler to root out than others, he acknowledged. For example, the rules ban service members from sporting clothing, tattoos or other paraphernalia promoting extremism, financially supporting an extremist cause or distributing extremist literature or materials.
However, service members could also be punished for their online actions, including posting, sharing or “liking” materials that “promote or otherwise endorse extremist activities” on the internet. ¤ That is where a commanders’ discretion will be most important, Kirby said, noting that a service member, perhaps, could “like” a social media post by accident. ¤ “Commanders … know their units. They know their people better than anybody, so that’s why it’s up to them,” he said. “Commanders will have to make that call on their own in terms of what they believe is the right thing to do. … You want to have a conversation here. So it’s not just that a knee jerk reaction to just immediately go to punishment — each case will have to be looked at individually.”
In a six-part definition, the new Pentagon guidance labels extremist activity as any advocating or committing violence against the United States or its people, including plotting for or supporting the overthrow of the government or terrorism against the nation. It also labels any advocacy for “widespread unlawful discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity, or sexual orientation” as extremist activity.
Kirby said the new definitions should be clearer for service members to understand — an issue that was often cited in the extremism stand down discussions Austin ordered across the entire armed forces this year. Service members will receive new training and education on the definitions and the rules, including on social media behaviors that could be problematic, he said Monday. ¤ The new guidance does not include specific examples of extremist groups or organizations nor does it ban personnel from any specific groups. The guidance, Kirby said, is based solely on actual acts and not membership in a group.
Defense officials since late last year have warned that such groups actively recruit service members and veterans for their knowledge of weapons and tactics and a sense of legitimacy that is brought by including former troops, especially combat veterans. For example, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters — groups widely labeled extremist which were both represented in the Jan. 6 riot — often boast of the high number of veterans within their organizations.
Kirby said DOD did not seek to single out particular groups as extremist for its purposes. “Groups can and do change their methodology, their ideals, their motivations, and they can reform themselves or they can disband and reform into something else,” Kirby said. “And, so if we got into coming up with a list of extremist groups, it would be only probably as good as the day we published it, because these groups change.”
Ultimately, those who belong to extremist organizations will likely break the Pentagon rules and punished, Kirby said. ¤ “If you want to be a member of you-pick-it [extremist group] in order to prove your membership you’re probably going to run afoul of one of these criteria sets,” he said.
The Countering Extremist Activity Working Group also recommended the Pentagon update its training for service members departing the military and expand screening for recruits for extremist beliefs. Kirby said Monday the Pentagon was working to implement some of those recommendations.
The Austin-led efforts have been questioned by some lawmakers, especially Republicans who have claimed it was an effort to remove conservatives from the military. Kirby said Monday the Pentagon’s extremism-focused efforts had nothing to do with politics.
“None of this has anything to do with who a service member votes for or doesn’t vote for or their personal political views,” he said. “This isn’t about political leanings or partisan inclinations. It’s about … prohibited extremist activity and active participation in that activity.”
🧵 RT @McFaul Now that Putin has published his ideas for a new European security agreement, let me propose some additional articles to the draft agreement. 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1471910562854588419?s=20
🧵 RT @jennycohn1 If you want to know why Roger Stone is one of the worst people alive, read what he & Andrew Miller (one of his many young male protégés) did to journalist Bob Norman. 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jennycohn1/status/1473133223634890754?s=20
🐣 💽 RT @45rape Letitia James, Psaki, Even Trump. ¤ “This Adam Schiff speech will haunt former President Trump and some Republicans forever and ever” https://twitter.com/45rapeKatiejohn/status/1473053948227563520?s=20/photo/1
// film by ElevenFilms
🐣 RT @HugoLowell Heard that when Trump saw the texts his former White House chief Meadows turned over to the Jan. 6 committee being read out at the contempt vote, he grew furious and told an associate: “What the fuck!”
WaPo: House Jan. 6 committee seeks information from GOP Rep. Perry about communications with Trump White House officials http://wapo.st/3pgAYQe … concerning “Perry’s efforts to install Jeffrey Clark, former Justice Department official, as acting attorney general”
🐣 RT @MuelledSheWrote And there you have it. 😌
🐣 💽 RT @45rapeKatiejohn Letitia James, Psaki, Even Trump. ¤ “This Adam Schiff speech will haunt former President Trump and some Republicans forever and ever” https://twitter.com/45rapeKatiejohn/status/1473053948227563520?s=20/photo/1
// film by ElevenFilms
🐣 RT @HugoLowell Heard that when Trump saw the texts his former White House chief Meadows turned over to the Jan. 6 committee being read out at the contempt vote, he grew furious and told an associate: “What the fuck!”
WaPo: House Jan. 6 committee seeks information from GOP Rep. Perry about communications with Trump White House officials http://wapo.st/3pgAYQe … concerning “Perry’s efforts to install Jeffrey Clark, former Justice Department official, as acting attorney general”
🐣 RT @MuelledSheWrote And there you have it. 😌
💙 🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Jan. 6 Committee Weighs Possibility of Criminal Referrals http://nyti.ms/3FfQn8F The move would could put pressure on DOJ to “examine the conduct of Mr. Trump and his aides as they promoted baseless allegations of voter fraud”
// The House panel is examining whether there is enough evidence to recommend that the Justice Department pursue cases against Donald J. Trump and others.
According to people briefed on their efforts, investigators for the committee are looking into whether a range of crimes were committed, including two in particular: whether there was wire fraud by Republicans who raised millions of dollars off assertions that the election was stolen, despite knowing the claims were not true; and whether Mr. Trump and his allies obstructed Congress by trying to stop the certification of electoral votes.
Behind the scenes, the committee’s day-to-day work is being carried out by a team of 40 investigators and staff members, including former federal prosecutors. The panel has obtained more than 30,000 records and interviewed more than 300 witnesses, including about a dozen last week whom committee members say provided “key” testimony.
In recent weeks, the committee has publicly signaled its interest in the question of criminality. Shortly after obtaining from Mr. Meadows 9,000 pages of documents — including text messages and a PowerPoint presentation — the panel’s top Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, read from the criminal code at a televised hearing.
She suggested that Mr. Trump, by failing to stop the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, might have violated the federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding before Congress.
“We know hours passed with no action by the president to defend the Congress of the United States from an assault while we were trying to count electoral votes,” Ms. Cheney said, adding: “Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?”
It plans to hold televised hearings early next year to lay out for the public how the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement helped lead to the Capitol riot. And it ultimately may propose changes to federal laws, toughening statutes to rein in a president’s conduct and overhauling the Electoral Count Act, which Mr. Trump and his allies sought to exploit in his attempt to cling to power.
At a hearing this month, Ms. Cheney suggested that the committee could subpoena Mr. Trump to answer questions and that criminal penalties would hang over his head if he lied.
“Any communication Mr. Trump has with this committee will be under oath,” she said. “And if he persists in lying then, he will be accountable under the laws of this great nation and subject to criminal penalties for every false word he speaks.”
Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee, said it was “certainly possible” that the panel would make criminal referrals before the investigation concluded.
⭕ 19 Dec 2021
WaPo, David Ignatius: The Biden administration weighs backing Ukraine insurgents if Russia invades http://wapo.st/3qiWXoU
🐣 RT @kasparov63 If you are reading the signposts on the way to apocalypse, the Putin government just released “national standard for mass graves”. ”
⋙ YandexNews: Grave in law: state adopts national standard for mass-casualty burial http://bit.ly/3sgDdot
🐣 RT @ProfHayward Francis Collins is one of the smartest & nicest ppl I’ve ever known. He is a great scientist & a devote evangelical Christian. I am not surprised at all that he resisted this unethical political pressure.
⋙ CNN: Outgoing NIH director says Trump and other Republicans pressured him to endorse unproven Covid-19 remedies and to fire Fauci http://cnn.it/3e9n77K “I was not going to compromise scientific principles to just hold onto the job” ~ Dr. Francis Collins
DailyBeast: Roger Stone Stirs Up Old Feud, Suggests Steve Bannon ‘Gave The Order’ To Breach Capitol On Jan 6 http://bit.ly/3e5HEdg
Stone, who has long been at odds with Bannon over the latter “testify[ing] falsely” against him during his criminal trial, took to the far-right messaging platform Telegram to suggest Bannon was behind the call to “breach” the Capitol building on Jan 6. “It is highly likely that [Steve] Bannon really gave the order to breach the capital [sic] and maneuvered patriots into dangerous positions,” he wrote. “A neophyte Steve Bannon was willing to try crazy things like this to curry favor with Trump who had a [sic] no interest in Bannon’s bullsh*t.”
🐣 RT @duty2warn Trump’s memos were especially deranged yesterday. When he’s feeling maximum pressure, he projects. The projection is a confession. He spoke to Dems putting people in jail. ¤ Glenn Kirschner: “Somebody is SCARED. TO. DEATH. Buckle up, Buttercup. It’s about to come crashing down.”
⭕ 18 Dec 2021
NBCNews, Noah Bookbinder: Trump International Hotel in Washington report exposes gaping corruption loopholes http://nbcnews.to/3J3JJEX Bookbinder is the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW)
// Why does the House report matter? The D.C. hotel was the epicenter of Trump’s graft.
Politico: ‘Stop the Steal’ founder told Jan. 6 committee about contacts with GOP lawmakers http://politi.co/3miBlb6 “Alexander said … he worked with Gosar, Biggs and Brooks to attempt … to pressure lawmakers to overturn the electoral results”
// The description of the testimony comes in a lawsuit Ali Alexander filed to block the committee from obtaining his phone records.
Ali Alexander, who founded the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement and attended the rally that preceded the Capitol attack, told congressional investigators that he recalls “a few phone conversations” with Rep. Paul Gosar and a text exchange with Rep. Mo Brooks about his efforts in the run-up to Jan. 6, his lawyers confirmed in a late Friday court filing. ¤ Alexander also told the Jan. 6 House select committee that he spoke to Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) in person “and never by phone, to the best of his recollection,” his lawyers say.
The description of the testimony comes in a lawsuit Alexander filed to block the committee from obtaining his phone records from Verizon. Alexander says in the suit that the records include contacts with people protected by privileges: religious advisers, people he counsels spiritually and his lawyers. He also indicated that he already shared more than 1,500 text messages with investigators, in addition to sitting for an eight-hour deposition. The Brooks text, he indicated, is among the texts he turned over.
Alexander’s testimony underscores the degree to which the select committee continues to probe the roles of their Republican colleagues in efforts to promote former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud — and their potential support for fringe figures who helped gather people in Washington on Jan. 6, the day Congress was required to certify the 2020 election results.
The panel hasn’t formally requested testimony from any of the GOP lawmakers yet but has continued to ask witnesses about Gosar, Biggs, Brooks and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who helped push a strategy to use the Department of Justice to promote the fraud claims.
Per Alexander’s attorneys Jonathon Moseley and Paul Kamenar, members of Congress may have been on an organizing call with him in early January. Several were invited but he did not take attendance, the lawyers said. They also said Alexander “testified that he had phone conversations with Rep. Brooks’ staff about a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter and how his activists could be helpful.”
Alexander said in a since-deleted video that he worked with Gosar, Biggs and Brooks to attempt to use Congress’ Jan. 6 session certifying Biden’s victory as a chance to pressure lawmakers to overturn the electoral results. ¤ “We four schemed up to put maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Alexander said in the video. ¤ Biggs and Brooks have denied meeting Alexander. Gosar has appeared at events with him but has not elaborated on their relationship.
Alexander also revealed in the filing that he gave the committee details of a call he had on the morning of Jan. 6 with Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr. ¤ “The Select Committee asked him about this call. He stated that it was a short and pleasant call. Ms. Guilfoyle thanked Mr. Alexander for being a leader on voting rights and creating the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement,” Moseley indicated. “The two spoke about the ongoing Georgia election and the GOP primaries that would take place in 2022. The Select Committee seemed satisfied with Alexander’s explanation of that short call.”
🧵 RT @ The question is persistently asked: Why is Putin threatening with war against Ukraine now? A few ideas: 1. Russia’s relative military strength will never be greater than today given stagnant economy & declining technological development. 📌 https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1472302498610397188?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @anders_aslund … In short, this is a good time for Putin to extort as much as possible from the West, but if he actually starts a war in Ukraine, he will be toast & lose power in Russia. Therefore, the West (the US) must just say no! @JakeSullivan46 @ABlinken @UnderSecStateP @POTUS
🐣 RT @duty2war David Cay Johnston, just now on MSNBC, said he expects Vance to bring racketeering charges against Trump. He cited a recent grand jury meeting with an editor of Forbes. Also, Vance’s focus on malice of forethought and intent to deceive, building blocks of a racketeering charge.
🐣 RT @ImSpeaking13 If Cy Vance indicts Trump for racketeering, the RICO Act mandates a twenty-year maximum prison sentence per racketeering count for which the defendant was found guilty.
🐣 RT @Acyn [John] Dean: I’m one who happens to believe the case is so overwhelming against Trump, I don’t see how the department cannot be looking at a criminal prosecution of this former President 💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1472335796589916162?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @TheRickWilson 1/ Two years ago yesterday, the Lincoln Project was born. It feels like it’s been longer, but no matter how many rough moments we faced, the importance of the fight is clearer than ever. ¤ Here’s what we wrote then: 📌 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1472252395648339972?s=20
⋙⋙ NYT (12/17/2020): We Are Republicans, and We Want Trump Defeated http://nyti.ms/3EbDafM
// The president and his enablers have replaced conservatism with an empty faith led by a bogus prophet.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson 2/ “Over these next 11 months, our efforts will be dedicated to defeating Pres Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box and to elect those patriots who will hold the line.” ¤ For four months, we fought largely in the shadows. Republicans hissed their hate and most Democrats shrugged. [thread starts here:]📌 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1472252696577069066?s=20
// includes Project Lincoln videos
🐣 RT @BillPascrell 345 days ago terrorists ransacked the US Capitol and *hours later* 138-of-202 (68%) House republicans voted to make trump a dictator. They tried to finish the rioters’ job and end democracy. Never forget it.
🐣 RT @TristanSnell Trump’s latest rant against “DA’s, AG’s and Dem Law Enforcement” strongly suggests he’s just been told the Manhattan DA and NY AG plan to prosecute him — he’s gotten target letters. ¤ The FBI may have come knocking also. ¤ The more they close in on him, the more he’ll lash out.
🐣 RT @duty2warn At Trump’s core, are feelings of inadequacy, and a desperate quest for legitimacy. His entire life has been a concoction of secrets and lies. Accountants and bankers are talking now. He is terrified of exposure. He is a fraud, and for that to become known, is total humiliation.
⋙ 🐣 RT @duty2warn He is afraid of losing, and desperately clings to the Big Lie. He is afraid of not being able to grift. He is afraid of prosecution, and potential prison. But that’s not what terrifies him. A malignant narcissist is terrified TO THE CORE of one thing above all else – HUMILIATION.
🐣 RT @TomJChicago Trump is choking w/ fear. Analyzing the rant:
1 “All the Democrats want to do is put people in jail” & “destroying people’s lives” means he’s not being offered a deal
2 “Their DAs, AG’s & Dem Law Enforcement” means he’s freaked out over the Manhattan DA since he said “DA’s” first
Text Block: https://twitter.com/TomJChicago/status/1472322585677471748?s=20/photo/1
“All the Democrats want to do is put people in jail. They are vicious, violent, and Radical Left thugs. They are destroying people’s lives, which is the only thing they are good at. They couldn’t get out of Afghanistan without disgracing our Country. The economy and inflation are a disaster. They’re letting thugs and murderers into our Country–their DA’s, AG’s, and Dem Law Enforcement are out of control. This is what happens in communist countries and dictatorships, and they don’t think they’ll be held accountable for rigging the 2020 Presidential Election. The Jan. 6 Unselect Committee is a coverup for what took place on November 3rd, and the people of our Country won’t stand for it.”
⭕ 17 Dec 2021
🔄💙 LawFare: Confronting the Capitol Insurrection [Index Page] http://bit.ly/3mfMDNc
Forbes, Randall Lane: Forbes Testified Before The Trump Grand Jury Yesterday http://bit.ly/329QGDK
// —Here’s Why We Fought Their Subpoena
I was questioned by Mark Pomerantz, the former federal prosecutor who Vance brought in to lead the case. Pretty much every question was a simple yes or no. Under oath, I confirmed the following:
● The methodology that goes into our Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. (He read aloud our 2015 published statement. You can read the largely similar current version here.) And that we apply that methodology consistently across the board. (Trump incorrectly claimed in the story that we somehow have one methodology for him and another for every other billionaire in America.)
● That of the 1,600 or so people who have been on The Forbes 400 since 1982, none of them, as we report in the article, have been more fixated on their net worth than Donald Trump.
● That Trump told me that he was worth “much more than $4.5 billion,” our net worth estimate for him in 2015—and, in fact, that he was worth “much more than $10 billion.”
● That Trump told me that “I look better if I’m worth $10 billion than if I’m worth $4 billion,” as reported in the article. More specifically, that Trump told me that a higher net worth number “was good for financing.”
● That, as I reported in the article, the first time I interviewed Trump for Forbes, in October 1993, Trump told me he was calling from a waiting room in the hospital where his then wife, Marla Maples, had just given birth to Tiffany Trump.
● That Trump, as reported in the article, told me that our estimate of the value of his holdings in Trump Tower should be increased from $530 million by a factor of five or six. And that he said he could sell his stake in Trump Tower “for $2 billion or $2.5 billion or $3 billion.”
● That Trump took Peterson-Withorn and me on a tour of his triplex penthouse in Trump Tower, as reported in the article, and told us the apartment was worth at least twice as much as the $100 million we pegged it at. Peterson-Withorn’s subsequent testimony was directly related to this—specifically, that he told us that his apartment was 33,000 square feet.
● That, as reported, Trump said that during the early 1990s, Forbes’ estimates “were actually high” and he “deserved to be off [the list].”
● That Trump, as I reported in the article, made an unsolicited suggestion for the headline of the 2015 story: “The King.”
📔 Select Committee on COVID-19: Select Subcommittee Releases Further Evidence of Trump Officials’ Pursuit of ‘Herd Immunity’ Strategy, Interference in Public Health http://bit.ly/3H00jUf
💙 WaPo, Dana Milbank: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says http://wapo.st/3e9HMZv
If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own.
Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are most at risk of deteriorating into violence. By law, the task force can’t assess what’s happening within the United States, but Walter, a longtime friend who has spent her career studying conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Rwanda, Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere, applied the predictive techniques herself to this country.
Her bottom line: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.” She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency — the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases — and only time will tell whether the final phase, “open insurgency,” began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6. ¤ Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.
U.S. democracy had received the Polity index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the five years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone; by the end of his presidency, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800. ¤ Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war (six points in three years would qualify as “high risk” of civil war). “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter writes.
Others have reached similar findings. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance put the United States on a list of “backsliding democracies” in a report last month. “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself,” the report said. And a new survey by the academic consortium Bright Line Watch found that 17 percent of those who identify strongly as Republicans support the use of violence to restore Trump to power, and 39 percent favor doing everything possible to prevent Democrats from governing effectively.
The question now is whether we can pull back from the abyss Trump’s Republicans have led us to. There is no more important issue; democracy is the foundation of everything else in America. Democrats, in a nod to this reality, are talking about abandoning President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in favor of pro-democracy voting rights legislation. Republicans will fight it tooth and nail.
The enemies of democracy must not be allowed to prevail. We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, the CIA predicts, “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes.” ¤ It is no exaggeration to say the survival of our country is at stake.
NYT: Jan. 6 Committee May Add New Expertise for Investigation http://nyti.ms/3e8FN7z
// As the panel continues to take testimony, it is looking to do more analysis of social media and possible foreign efforts to sow discord in the U.S. before the Capitol riot.
🐣 RT @MSNBC “It was a horrendous event and I think what they are seeking to find out is something the public needs to know,” Sen. McConnell said of Jan. 6 cmte. probe.
⋙ NBC: McConnell says Jan. 6 committee’s findings are ‘something the public needs to know’ http://nbcnews.to/3F8VxDC
// McConnell’s interest in the investigation is notable given that he had opposed the creation of a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission, calling the idea “slanted and unbalanced.”
🐣 RT @duty2warn It is becoming increasingly clear that the Jan 6th committee knows a lot more than we know that they know, you know?
🐣 RT @harrylitman New emails from DOJ top officials show how raw the Jeffrey Clark coup attempt was and how adamant and united the DOJ brass was about resigning if they exploited the Department to propound a lie to help Trump. Very strong stuff.
💙 📋 WaPo Editorial: The 700-plus miscreants who desecrated the Capitol deserve consequences http://wapo.st/3schT3v “[T]he question persists of why there has yet to be an effort to hold criminally liable the higher-ups who put into motion the events of Jan. 6”
// However manipulated and misguided their passions may be, they cannot trash their government — and democracy itself.
It has been 11 months since a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol intent on disrupting the certification of electoral ballots won by Democrat Joe Biden and overturning the result of a legitimate election. The rioters desecrated the legislative seat of federal government, doing about $1.5 million in physical damages. The violence resulted in the death of five people, including U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick. More than 100 D.C. and Capitol police officers were injured and two officers died by suicide in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6. It was the worst assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812.
To date, more than 700 people have been charged with offenses in federal court, and officials say they won’t quit until all leads have been exhausted. There are those who would overlook or minimize the events of that dark day, which is why we should credit Justice Department officials for their perseverance in trying to bring to justice individuals who in some cases used chemical sprays and wielded batons, flagpoles and other weapons against law enforcement officers. The longest sentence so far was five years in prison, given to Robert S. Palmer, 54, of Largo, Fla., who hurled a plank, a fire extinguisher and a pole at police, and later lied about his actions to authorities.
The Justice Department’s response to Jan. 6 has come under criticism from some quarters. Several federal judges expressed chagrin that people who engaged in an assault on our very democracy were charged with only misdemeanor offenses. And, the question persists of why there has yet to be an effort to hold criminally liable the higher-ups who put into motion the events of Jan. 6.
Notwithstanding those concerns, it is heartening that law enforcement officials across the country — led by the U.S. attorney in D.C. and aided by members of the public — have been so relentless in trying to track down and hold to account every individual who brazenly attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. The message for future miscreants must be: However manipulated and misguided their passions may be, they cannot trash their government — and democracy itself — without having to pay a consequence.
WaPo: 3 retired generals: The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection http://wapo.st/3meW3s2 “More than 1 in 10 of those charged in the [Jan. 6] attacks had a service record”
The signs of potential turmoil in our armed forces are there. On Jan. 6, a disturbing number of veterans and active-duty members of the military took part in the attack on the Capitol. More than 1 in 10 of those charged in the attacks had a service record. A group of 124 retired military officials, under the name “Flag Officers 4 America,” released a letter echoing Donald Trump’s false attacks on the legitimacy of our elections.
Recently, and perhaps more worrying, Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino, the commanding general of the Oklahoma National Guard, refused an order from President Biden mandating that all National Guard members be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Mancino claimed that while the Oklahoma Guard is not federally mobilized, his commander in chief is the Republican governor of the state, not the president. ¤ The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad level — is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the “rightful” commander in chief cannot be dismissed.
All service members take an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution. But in a contested election, with loyalties split, some might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war. ¤ In this context, with our military hobbled and divided, U.S. security would be crippled. Any one of our enemies could take advantage by launching an all-out assault on our assets or our allies.
The lack of military preparedness for the aftermath of the 2020 election was striking and worrying. Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, testified that he deliberately withheld military protection of the Capitol before Jan. 6. Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly scrambled to ensure the nation’s nuclear defense chains were secure from illegal orders. It is evident the whole of our military was caught off-guard.
… The Pentagon should immediately order a civics review for all members — uniformed and civilian — on the Constitution and electoral integrity. There must also be a review of the laws of war and how to identify and deal with illegal orders. And it must reinforce “unity of command” to make perfectly clear to every member of the Defense Department whom they answer to. No service member should say they didn’t understand whom to take orders from during a worst-case scenario.
In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.
Finally, the Defense Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military.
★ 🐣 RT @StarTribune Ethical decision is protecting patients http://strib.mn/3p55TyH via @StarTribune #MayoClinic
⋙ StarTribune: EDITORIAL | Ethical decision is protecting patients http://strib.mn/3p55TyH
// Push by some Minnesota House Republicans to weaken Mayo Clinic’s vaccine requirement is reckless.
🐣 RT @vermontgdg I remain baffled at how much media coverage is the false equivalency of “Dems are in disarray because they’re having legit conversations about real policy” and “GOP in disarray over whether to support democracy.” One is a much bigger—and troubling—story than the other.
🐣 RT @JakeTapper This is the text in question (originally inaccurately IDed as from a House lawmaker) but the Jan 6 committee says it came from the phone of former Secretary Rick Perry, and CNN has verified the phone number is Perry’s https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1471958920902103040?s=20/photo/1
// Lawmaker to Meadows [1/4/2020]: HERE’s an AGRESSIVE STRATEGY: Why can t [sic) the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS.
WaPo: Fla. man sentenced to 5 years for attacking police, the longest Jan. 6 riot sentence yet http://wapo.st/3q6w07F
// Robert S. Palmer watched and cheered rioters, then joined front of mob and hurled fire extinguisher, plank and long pole at police.
🧵 RT @SethAbramson (THREAD) With the BREAKING NEWS that Trump adviser Roger Stone told Congress his testimony about January 6 would tend to incriminate him and subject him to prosecution, PROOF is posting this thread of its reporting on Stone—for which Stone threatened to sue PROOF. Please RETWEET. 📌 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1471897487724228614?s=20
🧵 RT @V7VOA Delivering @SCSTATE1896 winter commencement address, @POTUS says “you’re inheriting an incredible tradition graduating from this university” (an #HBCU). 💽 https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/1471867549348507653?s=20/photo/1
// Biden at South Carolina State
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Jan 6 Comm at work: Parscale told Fox News a year ago he was the architect of a well funded, far reaching plan to “stoke unfounded fears about ‘rampant voter fraud’ in the 2020 election.” If records back up his claims, he could be a revelatory witness.
⋙ DailyBeast: Brad Parscale Says Jan. 6 Panel Subpoenaed His Phone Records http://bit.ly/3sg7p3a
// The former Trump campaign manager had cut ties with Trump before the voting ever started. But the Jan. 6 Committee would like to see his phone records anyway.
WaPo: Russia broadens security demands from West, seeking to curb U.S. and NATO influence on borders http://wapo.st/3saORkJ
// Putin’s far-reaching security demands have been repeatedly ruled out by NATO officials.
🧵 RT @atrupar During a Minnesota GOP gubernatorial debate on Wednesday that was moderated by Hugh Hewitt, every single candidate refused to affirm that Joe Biden won the presidential election legitimately. ¤ Here’s the response from Scott Jensen: 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1471858533939523587?s=20/photo/1
TheHill: Trump sought to ‘undermine’ COVID-19 response, says panel http://bit.ly/3F9Q7Z8
The Trump administration deliberately undermined the nation’s coronavirus response for political purposes, including by weakening testing guidance and championing widespread “herd immunity,” according to a new report from the House panel investigating the pandemic response.
The staff report released Friday was a summation of the year’s work investigating political interference in the pandemic response from Trump officials and the former president himself.
In interviews with officials and from uncovered emails and other documents, the committee found that the former administration failed to heed warnings about supply shortages, blocked public health officials from speaking publicly and neglected the pandemic response in order to focus on the 2020 presidential election and on promoting the lie that the election was “stolen” from Trump through widespread fraud.
New evidence released Friday showed the Trump White House intentionally “softened” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public health guidance for faith communities.
Jay Butler, the deputy director for infectious diseases, told the panel in an interview he was pressured by the White House to publish guidance for faith communities that “softened some very important public health recommendations,” such as removing all references to face coverings, a suggestion to suspend choirs and language related to virtual services.
🐣 RT @stevebenen Did you hear the one about Paul Gosar’s chief of staff trying to catch a Korean plane full of non-existent fraudulent ballots in Arizona?
⋙ MSNBC, Steve Benen: How far did Team Gosar go to pursue election conspiracy theories? http://on.msnbc.com/3F7kmji
🐣 RT @Mediaite Mitch McConnell Shows Support for 1/6 Committee: ‘The Public Needs to Know’ What Was Behind That ‘Horrendous Event’
⋙ Mediaite: Mitch McConnell: ‘The Public Needs to Know’ About January 6 http://bit.ly/3e2ECqg
// Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is doing something that very few Republicans on Capitol Hill are — voicing support for the January 6
DailyBeast: Kanye West’s ‘Independent’ Campaign Was Secretly Run by GOP Elites http://bit.ly/3ITYQkt
// The campaign took steps, experts say, to mask its connections to GOP operatives. That could violate federal election laws.
⭕ 16 Dec 2021
WaPo: ‘A real conflagration’: Wisconsin emerges as front line in war over the 2020 vote http://wapo.st/3qfDHbU
NYT, Frank Bruni: The Line From Fox News to Trump’s Big Lie Is Short and Direct http://nyti.ms/3J9t8Qi
… Fox News has helped to sell the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and there’s a direct line from that lie to the rioting. There’s a direct line from that lie to various Republicans’ attempts to develop mechanisms to overturn vote counts should they dislike the results.
That lie is the root of the terrible danger that we’re in, with Trump supporters being encouraged to distrust and undermine the democratic process. And that lie has often found a welcome mat at Fox News. ¤ It’s a conspiracy-minded, ratings-driven hallucination. Just this week, The Associated Press published a review of “every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states” where Trump has disputed Biden’s victory. It found fewer than 475 cases.
“Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president,” the A.P. reported. “The disputed ballots represent just 0.15 percent of his victory margin in those states. The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.”
🐣 RT @emptywheel The January 6 Committee released evidence that Mark Meadows played a key role in an attempted coup and this is how @wsj and @WaPo reported it.
⋙ WaPo: Meadows referral creates new legal, political challenge for Garland and DOJ http://wapo.st/30AIX0N
⋙ WSJ: How Mark Meadows Ended Up in the Middle of the Fight Over Jan. 6 http://on.wsj.com/3p3wf4f
// Text messages of former White House chief of staff take center stage in House probe of pro-Trump Capitol riot
WSJ: More Than 60,000 Interpreters, Visa Applicants Remain in Afghanistan http://on.wsj.com/3GNW0LQ … and are in various stages of the Visa process; evacuation flights are taking place daily
// About 33,000 of those could be eligible for immediate evacuation, State Department says
🐣 RT @jilevin The Republican Party has become a danger to our democracy and values. https://twitter.com/jilevin/status/1471637282578915329?s=20/photo/1
// text: “I WALKED AWAY FROM THE REPUBLICANS. ¤ I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is corrupt, indecent and immoral. Every one of these complicit leaders will carry this shame through history. Their legacies will be ones of well earned ignominy. They have disgraced their country and brought dishonor to the Party of Lincoln.Today, the Republican Party has become a danger to our democracy and values.”
~ Steve Schmidt, former Republican Strategist
TheBulwark, AB Stoddard: The Attempted Republican Coup Should Be the Democrats’ Leading Message http://bit.ly/3GMwPcz //➔ it should be a combination of this plus that Dems try (and sometimes succeed) in helping people, despite GOP obstruction
🐣 So we pivot from 6 months of not getting BBB passed to 6 months of not getting Voting Rights passed. And no student debt relief. ¤ Oh, but Congress goes home a week earlier? ¤ Sounds like a *winning* strategy
🐣 RT @donwinslow Dear @January6thCmte ¤ The @nytimes has revealed six of the names. ¤ What are you waiting for? ¤ #NameTheTraitors https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1471601321966858241?s=20/photo/1
// Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, Mo Brooks, Scott Perry
WaPo, Paul Waldman: Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin mull whether democracy is worth saving http://wapo.st/3246yYy
🐣 RT @john_sipher Just to be clear. The US (and the military especially) sucks at “information warfare.” Its clownish. This guy is an idiot and dangerous but not because he has some super secret skill.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheTweetofJohn The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol issued a subpoena on Thursday for Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in information warfare who had circulated a detailed and extreme plan to overturn the 2020 election.
⋙⋙ NYT: Jan. 6 Panel Subpoenas Retired Colonel Who Shared Plan to Overturn Election http://nyti.ms/3q0Hg5z
// Phil Waldron has been under scrutiny since a 38-page PowerPoint he circulated was turned over to the panel by former President Donald J. Trump’s last chief of staff.
WaPo, Greg Sargent: A Fox News defector ~ Jonah Goldberg ~ gets it right on Laura Ingraham — and on MAGA http://wapo.st/3sd9QmL Also see Goldberg’s piece in The Dispatch: “Donald Trump’s Megaphone”
NYT: Vaccine Holdouts in Army and Navy Will Be Dismissed, Military Says http://nyti.ms/3paAXNL
// Governors of five states are seeking exemptions for their National Guard troops.
TheDispatch, Jonah Goldberg: Donald Trump’s Megaphone http://bit.ly/3m6jmo7
// Fox News news hosts knew that Trump’s lies were lies—and they amplified them anyhow.
🐣 RT @jseldin .@NATO’s North Atlantic Council expresses grave concern over “the substantial, unprovoked, and unjustified #Russia|n military build-up on the borders of #Ukraine” per statement ¤ “Any further aggression against Ukraine would have massive consequences & would carry a high price”
⋙ 🐣 RT @jennsstoltenberg #NATO Allies are gravely concerned by the substantial Russian military build-up on the borders of #Ukraine & reject false claims of Ukrainian and NATO provocations. Read the statement by the North Atlantic Council
⋙⋙ NATO: Statement by the North Atlantic Council on the situation in and around Ukraine http://bit.ly/3yzFqwn
‼️🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Peter Navarro to Bannon: “You were the hero on J6, Steve. You were the guy who had the .. strategy to go up to Capitol Hill. Pence was the quarterback. We had 100 people working on the .. team who were going to make sure we remanded the results back to the battleground states.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski The 100 people he is talking about are Members of Congress who were supposed to object to the electors, then Pence was supposed to go along with it.
🐣 RT @kyledcheney NEW: One part of the pre-Jan. 6 pressure campaign against Mike Pence has been largely overlooked: Rep. Louie Gohmert’s Dec. 27 lawsuit. The suit is arguably as significant as the Eastman memo but is rarely mentioned in the same breath.
⋙ Politico: The Jan. 6 puzzle piece that’s going largely ignored http://politi.co/30AmocI
// Rep. Louie Gohmert sued then-Vice President Mike Pence on Dec. 27. Donald Trump’s involvement in the case remains unclear.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) sued Pence on Dec. 27, just as Trump was ratcheting up his pressure campaign against his vice president. Backed by a squad of lawyers associated with Trump ally and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, Gohmert argued Pence should assert unilateral control over certification, governed only by the vague wording of the Twelfth Amendment.
Gohmert’s move forced Pence to publicly resist Trump’s subversion of the election, only a week before the fateful Jan. 6 joint session of Congress. When the Justice Department stepped in to defend Pence from the lawsuit on Dec. 29, it marked the first time Pence signaled he wouldn’t fold to Trump’s demands.
Pence allies have long believed that Trump played a role in Gohmert’s legal strategy, and they’ve indicated that Trump was frustrated that the Justice Department intervened to defend his vice president against Gohmert’s suit. But what remains unknown is just how involved Trump was in Gohmert’s legal strategy. A spokesperson for the former president did not respond to a request for comment.
And while it’s unclear whether the Jan. 6 select panel is probing the genesis of Gohmert’s suit — which was quickly rejected by federal district and appellate courts in Texas — one committee member described it as an important episode in the runup to the violence at the Capitol. ¤ “It’s a significant detail in that it was part of a plan to isolate and coerce Pence,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).
A litany of new details about Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence have emerged in recent weeks. Those include memos from Trump attorneys John Eastman and Jenna Ellis that lay out fringe legal rationales for halting certification, as well as proof of further public and private force exerted by Trump himself. Gohmert’s suit is rarely mentioned in the publicly available pre-Jan. 6 timetable.
Gohmert’s goal, outlined in the suit, was to force Pence to ignore the 130-year-old law that governs the final certification of presidential elections and instead wield total authority over the proceedings. Pence ultimately decided that he lacked this power and his role was almost entirely ceremonial. He revealed his final decision on Jan. 6, shortly before a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol amid chants that he was a “traitor” and should be hanged.
As for why Gohmert led the suit, Powell has publicly indicated that one reason was because Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has jurisdiction over his home state of Texas. Alito, Powell argued, might have bought more time for pro-Trump forces to reverse the results by blocking Pence from certifying Biden’s victory. (There’s no evidence Alito was considering this).
As for why Gohmert led the suit, Powell has publicly indicated that one reason was because Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has jurisdiction over his home state of Texas. Alito, Powell argued, might have bought more time for pro-Trump forces to reverse the results by blocking Pence from certifying Biden’s victory. (There’s no evidence Alito was considering this).
The Texan made headlines at the time, though, after the district court rejected his court challenge. He said the effect of the court decision would leave street violence as the only option to contest the election. ¤ “In effect, the ruling would be that you’ve got to go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM,“ Gohmert said on Newsmax on Jan. 1.
One aspect of Gohmert’s legal fight that went unnoticed at the time but is relevant in hindsight: One of Pence’s Justice Department defenders was Jeffrey Clark, then acting assistant attorney general. ¤ In recent months, House and Senate investigators have revealed that Clark was marshaling allies inside DOJ who might help him deploy the department in support of Trump’s bogus claims of voter fraud. He pressured department leaders to issue a letter calling into question the results in multiple states, a push that then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen resisted. Trump came within inches of removing Rosen and installing Clark as acting attorney general, but relented amid a promise of mass resignations.
🐣 🖼 RT @ungubunugu1274 War means Peace https://twitter.com/ungubunugu1274/status/1471311438476201987?s=20/photo/1
// Photos: At Willard Hotel: Bannon, Giuliani, Eastman, Stone, Epstein, Jason Miller
🐣 RT @tribelaw The Big Lie is now metastasizing into a Swarm of Lies . . .
⋙ 🐣 RT @OMGno2trump What’s crazier?
– Laura Trump saying Trump tried to warn people about Jan 6th insurrection
– Fox reporting it as if it’s true with no questioning or fact checking
– Or the Maga crowd that will totally buy the story
It’s not a good look for so many in US to be willfully insane.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Lara Trump claims that Trump tried to warn people about January 6th
💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1471308742088028166?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AnaCabrera A confirmed tornado was reported over Plainview, in SE Minnesota, just after 8pm local time tonight. This is the first tornado ever reported in the state of Minnesota during the month of December, according to NOAA data.
🐣 RT @BillKristol “What have Republicans done? The worst among them are complicit while the slightly less dangerous are still gaslighting…They are contemptuous of accountability…They have refused to disavow any of the revelations…There will be no further defections.”
⋙ TheBulwark, AB Stoddard: The Attempted Republican Coup Should Be the Democrats’ Leading Message http://bit.ly/3GMwPcz
⭕ 15 Dec 2021
WaPo, Dana Milbank: The bulldogs of Benghazi roll over for insurrectionists http://wapo.st/3yD4DWH “The differing responses to the two tragedies show the rank hypocrisy in the Republican Party and the sickness that has taken hold of it”
🐣 RT @swin24 I am trying to think of someone who recently has so epically and colossally punched himself, this many times in such a short period of time, in his own dick this hard, as much as Mark Meadows has managed to do so; and the only other name coming to mind so far is Mark Meadows
⋙ 🐣 RT @swin24 And he did it throughout the course of a singular mission to try to make Donald Trump happy, and now Trump has been constantly shit-talking Meadows behind his back, this is one reason why game-show racism cults can backfire for its faithful adherents
🐣 RT @swin24 The irony is that if trump did try Flynn’s idea to do a fascistic military intervention, the military woulda said no, and likely no one dies. Various top aides to Trump, including Meadows, worked together to steer Trump towards slightly less blatantly authoritarian steps. Then…
⋙ 🐣 RT @swin24 …he picks one of their “less crazy” prescriptions that results in flabby insurrection and a body count, including one of the Blue Lives keeps telling you he cares so effusively for. And the daily covid death counts are climbing, can we have 2020 back now
WaPo, Philip Bump: Ten minutes of dishonest fury, presented to an audience of millions http://wapo.st/3DZ0Gge Life down the rabbit hole. (My head hurts)
💙 NYT: Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power http://nyti.ms/3EZZtGx
// A small circle of Republican lawmakers, working closely with President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, took on an outsize role in pressuring the Justice Department, amplifying conspiracy theories and flooding the courts in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
🐣 RT @HillaryClinton The Big Lie is just that.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AP An @AP review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 cases of fraud — a number so small it would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.
⋙⋙ AP: Far too little vote fraud to tip election to Trump, AP finds http://bit.ly/3GEaSfM
// Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance A key take away from the Jan 6 Comm’s work – they aren’t treating that day as a stand-alone event. They view it as the culmination of Trump’s efforts to steal the election, including coercion in GA & the plan to replace DOJ leadership with someone who’d further the big lie.
WaPo, Aaron Blake: The GOP plotted to overturn the 2020 election before it was even over http://wapo.st/3IVutd4
What we’ve learned in recent days has driven that home about as well as anything — including the latest disclosure about Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’s text messages.
As the calendar turned to Nov. 4, 2020 — the morning after Election Day — the results of the presidential race were still up in the air. The New York Times analyzed the incomplete results that morning with a headline that stated, “Can Biden Still Win? Yes.” We here at The Washington Post wrote that it remained “a tight race to 270 electoral votes,” with plenty of doubt about the outcome.
It wouldn’t be until late that day that Michigan and Wisconsin would be called for Joe Biden, at which point it looked like he had an edge — though the outcome would still be in doubt for three more days.
But even as all this was playing out on Nov. 4, momentum was building behind a drastic step. As Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) detailed Tuesday night, a Republican member of Congress texted then-White House chief of staff Meadows that same day with an idea for an “AGRESSIVE [sic] STRATEGY.”
“Why can t [sic] the states of GA NC PENN and other R[epublican] controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the [Supreme Court],” wrote the lawmaker, who was not identified.
… This member of Congress was advocating for appointing alternate electors in states that were still up in the air. Pennsylvania wouldn’t be called for Biden until Nov. 7, and Georgia wouldn’t go for him until Nov. 19. North Carolina was ultimately called for Trump, but not until Nov. 13. ¤ [Kyle] Cheney notes that the text lays bare what this was really about: “scrapping democracy before the votes were even counted.” ¤ To be clear, the idea that Republicans might try to appoint alternate slates of electors had been floating around for a while — even before the election — and Trump had previewed baseless claims of fraud both before Election Day and in the wee hours of Nov. 4. It was clear Trump was going to fight a loss.
What this new evidence reinforces is that Republicans and those around Trump didn’t really care about actual evidence of fraud — or anything that could even plausibly be read as amounting to it — before leaping into “AGRESSIVE” and “highly controversial” measures to overturn the election. That evidence never arrived even later, of course, but claims about it were significantly more speculative so soon after the election.
Alternet: Jim Jordan’s office admits he sent Mark Meadows a plan to overturn the election from Biden http://bit.ly/33rJ6Vj So, it was him! ● Text Block: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1471240752701267969?s=20/photo/1
In his text to Meadows, the far-right Jordan wrote, “On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all — in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence. ‘No legislative act,’ wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78, ‘contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.’”
Jordan continued, “The court in Hubbard v. Lowe reinforced this truth: ‘That an unconstitutional statute is not a law at all is a proposition no longer open to discussion.’ 226 F. 135, 137 (SDNY 1915), appeal dismissed, 242 U.S. 654 (1916).”
Jordan’s office, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney, has “confirmed” that he sent that text to Meadows — who, the U.S. House of Representatives voted, should be held in contempt of Congress for failing to cooperate with the January 6 committee.
NYT, Thomas Edsall: How to Tell When Your Country Is Past the Point of No Return http://nyti.ms/3q1pLSI
🐣 RT @SAPinker Though both ideological tribes bear some responsibility for political polarization, the two major American political parties are far from symmetrical, particularly in the most fundamental commitment.
⋙ 🐣 ◕ RT @RichardHanania Indistinguishable https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1470987252431933444?s=20/photo/1
// V-Dem Institute’s index for how “anti-pluralist” a party is (w FoxNews marker)
🔆 This❗️⋙ Reuters: The military-intelligence veterans who helped lead Trump’s campaign of disinformation http://reut.rs/3GNifSc Including Mike Flynn and Phil Waldron, a PSYOPs expert who briefed GOP legislators
// After Donald Trump lost the White House, ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and three other current and former U.S. Army officers challenged the vote’s legitimacy and pushed baseless conspiracy claims. Military ethicists say their actions threaten to weaken the public’s faith in democracy.
During the Afghan and Iraq wars, the careers of two military officers often intersected. Army General Michael Flynn and an Army Reserve colonel named Phil Waldron worked together on secret projects in both countries, Waldron said. When Flynn was appointed to run the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Waldron said he worked at the DIA’s clandestine service.
Flynn was an intel expert. Waldron’s specialty was psychological operations, or PSYOPs – targeting foreign adversaries, as an Army field manual describes, “to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”
Now the two military veterans, along with at least two other retired and reserve officers, are engaged in a new mission, this time with a domestic target: They are central to the far-right effort to persuade Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.
For the past year, Flynn, Waldron and other intelligence veterans have helped propagate some of the outlandish theories undercutting Americans’ faith in democracy. They pitched false accusations to lawmakers and the public about how the election had been compromised, pushed spurious lawsuits to challenge its outcome, and bankrolled efforts to conduct partisan audits of the results. They provided briefings to members of Congress on methods for overturning the election, and worked aside some of the leading actors in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement.
“I think we’re doing a huge service,” Waldron told Reuters in an interview. ¤ In these efforts, Flynn, Waldron and their colleagues publicly touted their military-intelligence training, arguing that their expertise on the battlefield provided them special insight into alleged election fraud at home in America.
🧵 RT @RepLizCheney Thread: Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham have now reconfirmed their views that the violence on January 6th was unjustified and unacceptable. (1/4) 📌 https://twitter.com/RepLizCheney/status/1471151118038315013?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepLizCheney Mark Meadows turned over many texts he received to the Committee. Hannity and Ingraham are standing by the texts they sent to Meadows on January 6 urging that President Trump take immediate action to stop the violence. (2/4)
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepLizCheney As we know, for multiple hours, President Trump chose not to take the specific and immediate action many urged – as the violent mob besieged & invaded the Capitol, attacked & injured scores of Capitol Police, & obstructed Congress’s count of electoral votes. (3/4)
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepLizCheney This was a supreme dereliction of the President’s duty, and the @January6thCmte is examining these issues in detail. (4/4)
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews #Russia’s state TV host Olga Skabeeva described the launch of an Otvet advanced anti-submarine missile by the Russian Pacific Fleet’s frigate Marshal Shaposhnikov as Moscow’s response to the discussions of “sanctions from hell” in the U.S. Senate. “Otvet” means “Response.”
🐣 RT @MichaelArt123 Claire McCaskill[:] Personal account for emails!! These guys have some nerve don’t they? After all the crap they gave Hillary
Docs confirm Meadows used personal gmail accounts, a personal cellphone, and Signal for official business and to send communications related to January 6th
💙 ✅ RT @PolitiFact Nearly a year later, there is zero evidence to say that Jan. 6 was an antifa operation, a tourist visit, a false flag, or an uneventful day to forget. Lies about the Capitol insurrection is this year’s Lie of the Year: http://bit.ly/3INKQbM
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote THREAD: A couple of interesting things. I’m sure you’ve noticed by now the deliberate legalese used by Liz Cheney repeatedly during recent hearings. “Whether trump by action or inaction corruptly sought to obstruct or impeded Congress’ official proceeding.” This is no accident 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1470938692004892675?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote … Where am I going with this? I just find it deliberate and fascinating that the committee co-chair is using criminal language to describe trump’s behavior that’s currently being used by the DoJ to charge insurrectionists, and that a judge just ruled they could. END
⭕ 14 Dec 2021
🐣 RT @LionHunterMusic That means all @HouseGOP seditionists, and @SenMikeLee, @RandPaul, @marcorubio, @SenRonJohnson & @SenJohnKennedy are disqualified in the 2022 elections… Text Block: https://twitter.com/LionHunterMusic/status/1470832918658371585?s=20/photo/1
14TH AMENDMENT (Amendment XIV), Section 3
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
DailyBeast, Matt Lewis: Old Man Trump Is Looking Weaker and Weaker—Sad! http://bit.ly/32hosXC “[J]ust 44 percent of Republicans want him to run for president again (and 32 percent want him out of politics altogether)”
// People don’t want him to go away mad, they just want him to go away.
TheHill: Trump says Pence ‘mortally wounded’ in GOP because of actions on Jan. 6 http://bit.ly/3q7j1Tr “I was disappointed in one thing, but it was a big thing. Mike should have sent those crooked votes back to the legislatures and you would have had a different [election] result”
Former President Trump said this weekend that former Vice President Mike Pence has been “mortally wounded” by allowing the congressional certification of the 2020 election results.
“I was disappointed in one thing, but it was a big thing,” Trump said during a ticketed event in Sunrise, Fla., on Saturday, according to CNN. ¤ “Mike should have sent those crooked votes back to the legislatures and you would have had a different result in the election, in my opinion,” the former president told the audience at the stop on Bill O’Reilly’s “History Tour.”
Trump implied that Pence wouldn’t get support from voters because of his alleged inaction on Jan. 6. ¤ “I think Mike has been very badly hurt by what took place in respect to January 6. I think he’s been mortally wounded, frankly, because I see the reaction he’s getting from people,” Trump added, per CNN.
RawStory: The emperor has no clothes: Trump supporters are abandoning former president as his weaknesses are exposed http://bit.ly/31QWSRf
In two separate pieces published on Tuesday, longtime conservative commentators explained that while Donald Trump still looks like the frontrunner for the 2024 GP presidential nomination, there are warning signs that his influence in the Republican Party is waning as his act grows old and fans seem to have grown weary of him.
Writing for the Daily Beast, Matt Lewis stated that there is more than enough evidence that conservative voters are beginning to ignore the former president as evidenced by the poor showing so far by potential 2022 GOP candidates he has endorsed and this past weekend’s rallies in his new home state of Florida that were poorly attended.
In the LA Times, conservative Jonah Goldberg hammered home the same point. ¤ Noting that a recent poll shows that about half of Republicans questioned indicated that don’t want to see Trump run again, Goldberg explained that boredom with Trump could mean conservatives and GOP lawmakers can feel free to ignore him.
🐣 RT @CheriJacobus FB pal: Trump was waiting to see if the coup was going to succeed. After 187 minutes Pence had not been sent to the gallows, AOC & Pelosi’s heads were not up on spikes and the coup dissolved into madness & disorganization. But make no mistake, Trump knew exactly what he was doing
TheHill: Judge dismisses Trump suit to block Congress from getting tax returns http://bit.ly/3INKyBH ~ a judge Trump appointed who mentions that even though tax returns are private, it is entirely up to the committee chairman to determine whether to release them
WaPo: Text messages to Meadows renew focus on Trump’s inaction during Jan. 6 attack http://wapo.st/3IQYomP
On Tuesday, Cheney read aloud texts that Republican members of Congress had sent Meadows on Jan. 6 after rioters breached the Capitol. The disclosures came as the House was poised to vote to hold Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress for defying the committee’s subpoena. ¤ “It is really bad up here,” one said, according t, mo Cheney. Others texted, “The president needs to stop this ASAP” and “Fix this no )
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) read one message to Meadows from an unidentified sender regarding the possibility that Jeffrey Clark — the former acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, who appeared open to pursuing Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results — would replace Jeffrey Rosen, then the acting attorney general.
“I heard Jeff Clark is getting put in on Monday. That’s amazing. It will make a lot of patriots happy. And I’m personally so proud that you are at the tip of the spear and I could call you a friend,” Schiff said the Jan. 3 text read.
Most of the focus this week, however, has been on the fact that Meadows is one of a few people who may be able to provide insight into why Trump stayed silent for hours while the Capitol was ransacked by his supporters rather than call off the mob and then released a video hours later that praised the rioters even as he asked them to stop their offensive on Congress.
During a committee meeting Monday night, Cheney revealed several other texts to Meadows from Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade and Sean Hannity, all of whom have since downplayed the severity of the insurrection in their coverage. On Jan. 6, however, the urgency in their entreaties to Meadows was clear.
“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Ingraham wrote.
“Please get him on TV,” Kilmeade wrote, adding that the attack was “destroying everything you have accomplished.”
Hannity similarly asked Meadows if Trump could “make a statement” and “ask people to leave the Capitol.”“As we saw last night, dozens of texts — including from Trump administration officials, from members of the press, from Donald Trump Jr. — urged immediate action by the president,” Cheney said Tuesday. “But we know hours passed with no action by the president to defend the Congress of the United States from an assault while we were trying to count electoral votes.”
Timestamps for the newly released text messages to Meadows are not yet publicly known, but from the moment the Capitol was breached at 2:11 p.m. on Jan. 6, Trump resisted calls to intervene for 187 minutes — more than three hours — while watching the riot play out on television. In the first two hours alone, the mob broke into both the House speaker’s office and the Senate chamber. Three rioters died in that time frame, and scores of police officers were assaulted, some with their own weapons, while dozens of lawmakers feared for their lives in hiding.
Through it all was a lack of action from Trump. In the first message Trump posted to Twitter after the Capitol was breached, he continued to blame Vice President Mike Pence for not blocking the certification of the 2020 election results. At the time, some in the mob outside the Capitol were chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and Pence himself was being evacuated with his family to a secured location.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m. that day. ¤ At 2:38 p.m., Trump tweeted, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
At some point after the 2:38 p.m. tweet, Trump Jr. texted Meadows with a frantic request for his father, according to messages read aloud Monday by Cheney.
“He’s got to condemn this s — t ASAP,” Trump Jr. wrote, according to Cheney. “The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.” ¤ “I’m pushing it hard,” Meadows responded. “I agree.” ¤ “We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now,” Trump Jr. continued. “It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”
At 2:45 p.m., Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman also sent Meadows a series of text messages: “Do something for us … We are under siege in the cpaitol [sic] … There’s an armed standoff at the house chamber door … We’re all helpless …” Sherman said he never received a response, but the timing of his texts would indicate Meadows had been made further aware of the severity of the situation from someone inside the Capitol even after Trump’s second tweet.
At 3:13 p.m., Trump tweeted: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order — respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”
It would be more than an hour before Trump addressed the nation again, and it wouldn’t be until the worst of the attack had subsided. At 4:17 p.m., he posted a video to his Twitter account, telling rioters, “Go home. We love you, you’re very special.”
“I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” Trump said in the video, continuing to push his baseless claims that the 2020 election had been rigged against him. “But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt. It’s a very tough period of time … So go home. We love you, you’re very special.”
The Washington Post has previously reported that several other high-profile Republicans attempted to contact Trump or his closest aides during the insurrection to get him to call off the mob. Some of those included Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former senior counselor Kellyanne Conway and former communications director Alyssa Farah, who told Meadows, “If someone doesn’t say something, people will die.” Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) also called Meadows to request help from the National Guard.
On Monday, Cheney said the newly revealed texts were “further evidence of President Trump’s supreme dereliction of duty during those 187 minutes.” ¤ “Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceedings to count electoral votes?” Cheney said the committee was seeking to determine.
Immediately after the insurrection, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) said McCarthy had relayed details of his call with Trump, noting Trump had “initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol.” ¤ According to Herrera Beutler, after McCarthy told Trump it was his supporters storming the Capitol, Trump responded: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” Three months later, McCarthy claimed that Trump had been unaware of the attack until McCarthy called him to urge his supporters to go home.
On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters he was not personally in contact with Meadows or other White House officials on Jan. 6 to try to get Trump to call off the riot. ¤ “But I do think we’re all watching, as you are, what’s unfolding on the House side, and it will be interesting to reveal all the participants that were involved,” said McConnell, who had worked to block the formation of an independent Jan. 6 commission in May.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday said it was not surprising some of Trump’s public boosters had been revealed to be among those who had privately begged him to tamp down the riot. ¤ “Well, it’s disappointing and unfortunately not surprising that some of the very same individuals who are willing to warn, condemn and express horror over what happened on January 6 in private … were totally silent in public or even worse, were spreading lies and conspiracy theories and continue to, since that time,” Psaki said.
WaPo: Man who threatened to shoot Pelosi and brought guns and ammo to D.C. is sentenced to 28 months http://wapo.st/3yr5Yje
// Cleveland Meredith Jr. repeatedly texted family and friends saying he hoped to shoot Pelosi and assault the nation’s capital
🐣 RT @cbouzy I love you Lawrence, but this isn’t it. Trump knew precisely what he was doing; he was hoping the mob would murder members of Congress. Fox hosts, members of Congress, Donald Jr…etc., were contacting him because they knew he was going full coup and they were terrified.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Lawrence Each person texting the White House on Jan 6—Fox hosts, members of Congress, Donald Trump Jr—was certain of one thing: Donald Trump had no idea what to do.
They knew they had to tell the incompetent president what to do.
They knew the Commander in Chief was unfit to serve.
⋙⋙ 🐣 trying to figure which is worse
🐣 RT @January6thCmte “If he [Meadows] can get away of ignoring the law, if witnesses summoned before Congress can merely pick and choose when they comply, our power of oversight will be gone and along with it our cherished system of checks and balances.- @RepAdamSchiff 💽 https://twitter.com/January6thCmte/status/1470894143178219523?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @duty2warn Trump LOST the House, Presidency AND Senate. Got suspended by Twitter and FB. Deutsche Bank cut ties. PGA bumped his club. Corporate America steers clear. Company, CFO indicted. When Nat’l Archives gets records and Congress gets taxes, he’ll be a future convict. He’s quite upset
NYT: Proud Boys Regroup, Focusing on School Boards and Town Councils http://nyti.ms/3DQftd3
// The far-right nationalist group has become increasingly active at school board meetings and town council gatherings across the country.
🐣 RT @Hobie_SHRED https://twitter.com/Hobie_SHRED/status/1470833835378053120?s=20/photo/1
// Ingraham, Kilmeade, Hannity: what they texted Meadows vs what they said on their shows
WaPo: Trump’s longtime accountant testifies to N.Y. grand jury in criminal probe http://wapo.st/31PZajz
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski What did we learn last night?
1. All the Fox hosts had Meadows cell number.
2. They either didn’t have Trump’s, or he was blowing them off.
3. They believed Trump and only Trump had the ability to control the mob.
4. They believed they had influence over Trump and could … get him to do what they wanted.
5. Meadows either never relayed their messages to Trump or he blew them off.
6. Everyone in Trump’s orbit – media, friends, WH staff, Cabinet, family, and Members of Congress were begging him to tell them to stop but he refused to do anything.
🧵 RT @atrupar Fox News has spent a year pumping viewers’ brains full of nonsense about Jan 6 being the work of antifa, or an FBI trap, that the officers who were assaulted are actually crisis actors. The Meadows texts reveal how fraudulent and disingenuous all this work to rewrite history is. 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1470849247528505352?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar And yet there is no doubt that Fox succeeded in shaping how viewers think about that day. Hell, after all the gaslighting it was helpful for me to read the texts and be reminded of how it actually went down. The platform they have is a powerful one and they use it to do bad stuff
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar But how does Fox respond to being exposed as total frauds? They completely ignore it. So viewers who don’t pay attention to other news sources might not even know that Hannity & Ingraham & Kilmeade have been exposed. Instead, they spend the day on nonsense like the segment below. https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1470851313131044867?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @brianklaas If you break the way people get credible information, you break democracy.
⋙ 🐣 RT @WalshFreedom The problem remains the same: The people who need to be told the truth about these January 6th texts never will be told the truth.
🐣 RT @costareports “It will be interesting to reveal all the participants who were involved.” [~McConnell] 💽 https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1470834849971945473?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Acyn Greene: *calls Democrats communists*
Raskin: We are not communists as the gentle lady from Georgia suggested, that’s just the friends of the former President who you lionize like the dictator of North Korea and Vladimir Putin..so those are your friends, don’t put them on our side
🐣 RT @harrylitman Wow. @Liz_Cheney going straight to possible criminal culpability by Trump as reason they need Meadows’s testimony. They are not messing around. Also puts maximum pressure on Meadows- without his testimony, nobody to defend Trump.
WaPo: The Meadows texts and the weird PowerPoint take Jan. 6 inside the White House http://wapo.st/3m7tAV9 ‼️‘Caution about the PowerPoint is justified: As Philip Bump documented, there are questions about its authenticity and how seriously the West Wing took it’
// Full: Early caution about the PowerPoint was justified: As my colleague Philip Bump documented, there were questions about its authenticity and how seriously the West Wing took the document’s outlandish claims.
WaPo: DC attorney general sues Proud Boys, Oath Keepers over Jan 6 attack http://wapo.st/33vqfc8 “Racine said the goal of the Jan. 6 lawsuit is ‘full restitution and recompense’ for the city of Washington, which has incurred huge costs for treating hundreds of injured officers”
D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) on Tuesday sued the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers over the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, seeking to use a law written to cripple the Ku Klux Klan to exact stiff financial penalties from the far-right groups that Racine alleges were responsible for the violence.
The lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., cites the modern version of an 1871 law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was enacted after the Civil War to safeguard government officials carrying out their duties and protect civil rights. Two similar suits have been filed already this year related to Jan. 6 — one by Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, and another by a number of police officers who fought the rioters that day.
Racine’s suit, however, is the first effort by a government agency to hold individuals and organizations civilly responsible for the violence at the U.S. Capitol on the day Congress ceremonially confirmed President Biden’s 2020 election victory.
A similar legal tactic led to a $26 million verdict last month against more than a dozen of the nation’s most influential white supremacists and hate groups for their role in the deadly 2017 United the Right rally in Charlottesville. That trial evidence drew heavily on the defendants’ text messages, social media posts and videos to reconstruct how they conspired in advance of the violence.
Racine said the goal of the Jan. 6 lawsuit is “full restitution and recompense” for the city of Washington, which has incurred huge costs for treating hundreds of injured officers. “I think the damages are substantial,” he said in a phone interview. “If it so happens that it bankrupts or puts these individuals and entities in financial peril, so be it.” ¤ The suit names as defendants Proud Boys International LLC, Oath Keepers and dozens of their most high-profile members — mostly individuals who are charged in federal court with committing crimes related to Jan. 6.
Racine declined to say whether he’d discussed the lawsuit with the U.S. Justice Department officials overseeing those criminal cases. Federal prosecutors have filed conspiracy charges against individuals affiliated with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and the FBI continues to investigate those groups’ activities in the days and months leading up to Jan. 6.
Racine’s civil suit was put together with the backing of two nonprofit groups that focused on the Jan. 6 assault: the States United Democracy Center and the Anti-Defamation League. Those groups and two private law firms served as pro bono outside counsel to the attorney general as he developed the case.
“There is no substitute for bringing a civil suit that seeks damages against each of the individuals and groups responsible,” said Norman Eisen, a veteran of the Obama White House Counsel’s Office who co-chairs the Democracy Center with former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican. “It is a way to assure those bad actors never do it again.” ¤ The lawsuit also aims to unravel the financing behind the groups. “I’m particularly interested in understanding the financial apparatus of these individuals and entities and where the money came from,” Racine said.
One of the most badly injured was D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who was shocked with a stun gun as rioters dragged him down the steps of the Capitol. Fanone lost consciousness and was stripped of his badge and gun; he suffered a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury.
“The domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol and violently assaulted hundreds of brave law enforcement officers were stoked by groups promoting The Big Lie,” Fanone said in a statement. “Those of us who suffered physical and emotional harm trying to defend democracy will never forget, nor will we cease working to hold accountable everyone responsible for inciting the mob, wherever the evidence may lead.”
The lawsuit draws heavily on evidence gathered by federal prosecutors seeking to prove that dozens of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys members conspired to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. It says the defendants conspired “to prevent, interrupt, hinder, and impede, through force, intimidation, and threat . . . United States officials from discharging official duties of their offices and positions of trust as part of the formal process for counting and certifying the count of electoral votes for the 2020 presidential election and declaring a winner of the 2020 presidential election.”
In the criminal cases, prosecutors have drawn on encrypted chats and emails to claim that the Oath Keepers planned for weeks in advance of Jan. 6 — recruiting new members, engaging in paramilitary training, setting up radios to stay in communication and stashing guns just across the river in Virginia. ¤ Prosecutors say one Florida Oath Keepers member said in a Dec. 19 Facebook message that he had “formed an alliance” with the Proud Boys to “shut this [expletive] down,” and later referred to the Proud Boys as a “force multiplier.” On Jan. 6, according to prosecutors, several Oath Keepers entered the Capitol in a militarylike “stack” with the goal of disrupting the electoral college count.
Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers’ founder, has not been charged with a crime, nor is he named as a defendant in Racine’s lawsuit. Charging papers in the criminal cases refer to him simply as “Person One.” Prosecutors say he designated leaders for the Jan. 6 operation, huddling with them before they went in the building and staying in touch with them as they stormed the Capitol.
WaPo, Greg Sargent: Fox News hosts grew alarmed about Jan. 6 — after feeding the ‘big lie’ themselves http://wapo.st/3qeHUwz “MediaMatters documented an extraordinary range of hyperbolic, unhinged and outright false claims on Fox about the election in its aftermath”
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: A federal court has ruled that obstructing the electoral vote count is illegal. Trump should panic. http://wapo.st/3oRXHSe //➔ Whether Trump intended violence doesn’t matter; all that matters is if he “corruptly” intended to disrupt the “official proceeding”
U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich ruled last week that an effort to interrupt the counting of the electoral votes can be a crime — even if no violence was contemplated.
Friedrich’s ruling came in the case against Ronald Sandlin and Nathaniel DeGrave, two men accused of storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. In doing so, she refused to throw out charges that they had “corruptly” obstructed an official proceeding before Congress by “entering and remaining in the United States Capitol without authority and committing an act of civil disorder, and engaging in disorderly and disruptive conduct.”
“This December 10 Friedrich opinion does indeed seem important to me,” constitutional legal scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. Whether it is an obstruction charge — or a charge of sedition or conspiracy to commit sedition (under either sections 2383 or 2384 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code) — Tribe observes that the principal obstacle to prosecution has been “the argument that the electoral count certification in the Joint Session of Congress is too ministerial to count as an official proceeding.” However, Tribe concludes, “This federal court opinion undercuts that line of argument.”
Former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal has been voicing this exact argument for some time. “Judge Friedrich’s decision means the prosecutors don’t have to show someone intended violence for it to be a crime,” he explains. “So long as the intent was to influence and disrupt the congressional function of counting the votes, that is sufficient — so long as it was done ‘corruptly.’ ” Katyal notes that the judge cited “a prior ruling by a conservative superstar jurist, Judge Laurence Silberman, [who] defined ‘corruptly’ to be to be doing something by unlawful means.”
Too many people have let themselves be sidetracked into looking for a connection between Trump and the violence of Jan. 6. But that evidence is unnecessary because the crime here is the end result — the intended disruption of the House electoral vote-counting. And from every document, news report or tell-all book we have seen, that is precisely what Trump tried to do. Simply because he told the world about his corrupt intent does not make it any less illegal.
⭕ 13 Dec 2021
WaPo: House Jan. 6 committee votes to hold Meadows in contempt, details texts from Trump allies who wanted him to call off rioters http://wapo.st/3IPxUlO
WaPo: Fox News hosts urged Meadows to have Trump stop Jan. 6 violence, texts show http://wapo.st/3ymnrJM
// Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade expressed alarm, concern, according to messages shared during House select committee hearing
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote I’m about to go to sleep. December 13th, 2021, and I’m imagining people in the future studying this day. We were all here to witness it, and whether democracy prevails, or whether it fails, today will be talked about for centuries.
🧵 RT @TheRickWilson 1/ It’s a message the great unwashed MAGAe horde won’t clearly understand; Hannity, Ingraham, Kilmeade, et al at Fox knew exactly how bad this was and were acting behind the scenes to stop it. ¤ The whole kayfabe of utter loyalty to the Dear Leader is just that. 💽 📌 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1470592011656962049?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson 2/ “Hurrr durrrr Hannity pwns duh cucks” is sucker bait. Every one of them — most ESPECIALLY Baron Tucker Von Fishsticks — are performance artists who don’t know, understand, or embrace conservatism. They’re actors in Rupert’s Winger Minstrel Show.
🐣 RT @brhodes Waiting for the self-reflection from political media about their rabid and sanctimonious interest in the use of personal email for work purposes until precisely November 8, 2016.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Documents confirm that Meadows had been using personal gmail accounts, a personal cellphone, and Signal for official business and to send communications related to January 6th
🧵 RT @SteveSchmidtSES Fox News hosts and executives hold their audience in complete contempt. They despise them. The disrespect shown to the audience is unprecedented in broadcast history. The lying is ceaseless and every word is delivered with blind faith that the audience is stupid and oblivious 📌 https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1470618661224431618?s=20
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Absolutely the correct action by DOD to discharge military personnel refusing COVID vaccine. The Armed Forces must deploy and fight on short notice. This is a science based health directive. They also must unequivocally obey lawful orders.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @AP BREAKING: Air Force discharges 27 over the coronavirus vaccine mandate. They are believed to be the first U.S. service members removed over the shot mandate. http://apne.ws/sVaMMoQ
🐣 They’ll go straight to joining the rightwing militias and vigilantes
🐣 RT @NPR In the messages, Donald Trump Jr. and Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity urge Meadows to get then-President Donald Trump to tell his supporters to leave the Capitol. https://n.pr/3m0lXQc https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1470593908702953474?s=20/photo/1
Text messages sent to Mark Meadows during the Jan 6th siege
“POTUS has to come out firmly and tell protestors to dissipate. Someone is going to get killed”
“Mark, he needs to stop this. Now”
“TELL THEM TO GO HOME”
“POTUS needs to calm this s*** down.
As the violence continued, one of the President’s sons texted Meadows:
“He’s got to condemn this s*** Asap. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.” Donald Trump, Jr. texted.
🐣 RT @GetWisdomDude Shake The Justice Dept. ¤ Amendment 14 Sec 3
No Person Shall Be A Senator or Representative In Congress or Elector Of President & Vice-President Who, Having Previously Taken An Oath To Support The Constitution Of The US, Shall Engage In Insurrection or Rebellion Against The Same. 💽 https://twitter.com/GetWisdomDude/status/1470541800494575618?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Fox News hosts urged Meadows to have Trump stop Jan. 6 violence, texts show http://wapo.st/3ymnrJM “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
// Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade expressed alarm, concern, according to messages shared during House select committee hearing
🔆 This❗️⋙ USAToday Editorial: Democracy in the balance: Revise Senate filibuster to protect elections and voting rights http://bit.ly/3ymoOYK
//. Our View: America is facing a take-no-prisoners assault on fair elections that can be defeated by elements of the Freedom to Vote Act pending before Congress.
💙 🧵 RT @JillWineBanks 1/ #Jan6thCommittee votes to hold @MarkMeadows in contempt. This is the right decision, but commentators saying that Meadows has a stronger case for ExecPriv than Bannon are wrong. Both have ZERO basis for claiming privilege. Here’s why – and it’s worth reading the full thread. 📌 https://twitter.com/JillWineBanks/status/1470578742309314567?s=20
🐣 RT @JillWineBanks The powerpoint @MarkMeadows gave the #Jan6thCommittee presents an interesting similarity to #Watergate. Like #OperationGemstone that was presented to Nixon’s AG laying out the Watergate DNC break-in, here the crimes of Jan 6 were laid out in the PPT and given to Trump’s CofS.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Don Jr. texts Meadows, “He’s got to condemn this shit ASAP.” Meadows responds: “I’m pushing it hard.” ¤ In other words, Meadows was talking to Trump and pushing him to stop the insurrection. Trump refused. Trump knew was happening, and he refused to act. He was pro-insurrection.
🐣 RT @January6thCmte “These texts leave no doubt: the White House knew exactly what was happening at the Capitol. Members of Congress, the press, and others wrote to Mark Meadows as the attack was underway.”-Vice Chair @RepLizCheney 💽 https://twitter.com/January6thCmte/status/1470578269628026882?s=20
🐣 RT @allinwithchris Before voting to hold Mark Meadows in contempt, the January 6th committee revealed text messages in which Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Brian Kilmeade begged Mark Meadows to get Trump to call of the riot.
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, AllIn: Jan. 6 panel: Fox News hosts texted Meadows amid riot, urged intervention http://on.msnbc.com/3IID7vL
// Mehdi Hasan: “On what grounds do we call other countries ‘failed states’? How, in the United States of America, in 2021, are we asking teachers to scramble on the ground for cash, as a stadium full of people cheer and jeer?”
🐣 RT @MayaWiley Remember how outraged Republicans in Congress were over Hillary Clinton using personal server for emails? #Meadows used personal emails and Signal. #Jan6thCommittee
🐣 RT @mkraju A GOP lawmaker texted Meadows on Jan. 7. The lawmaker wrote: “Yesterday was a terrible day. We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked,” per Jan. 6 committee. They don’t say who it was
NYT, David Leonhardt: America’s Anti-Democratic Movement http://nyti.ms/3s7sEUy
// It’s making progress.
🐣 RT @mkraju A GOP lawmaker texted Meadows on Jan. 7. The lawmaker wrote: “Yesterday was a terrible day. We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked,” per Jan. 6 committee. They don’t say who it was
🐣 RT @LincolnWatchman Nobody has taken it to Donald Trump & his sycophants more savagely than @SteveSchmidtSES over the last few years. ¤ Here are some of Steve’s greatest takedowns & some inspiration at the end. ¤ If you love Steve, this is a MUST watch! ¤ Savage Schmidt 💽 https://twitter.com/LincolnWatchman/status/1470484282791669770?s=20/photo/1
AP: Judge refuses to toss key charge in Capitol riot case http://bit.ly/3m1n6Hi “An indictment charges Sandlin and DeGrave with obstruction of an official proceeding on Jan. 6, when … Congress convened at the Capitol to certify President Joe Biden’s electoral victory”
🐣 RT @ericgarland Mark Meadows’ contempt referral is out and:
– He coordinated with the coup planners out of the White House
– He promised that the National Guard would protect Trump supporters during the attaack
– Ran the attempt to overturn Georgia’s electors…
⋙ Document [pdf] http://bit.ly/3DQEaGa 51p
Excerpts: The events of January 6, 2021, involved both a physical assault on the Capitol building and law enforcement personnel protecting it and an attack on the constitutional process central to the peaceful transfer of power following a presidential election. The counting of electoral college votes by Congress is a component of that transfer of power that occurs every January 6 following a presidential election. This event is part of a complex process, mediated through the free and fair elections held in jurisdictions throughout the country, and through the statutory and constitutional processes set up to confirm and validate the results. In the case of the 2020 presidential election, the January 6 electoral college vote count occurred following a series of efforts in the preceding weeks by Mr. Trump and his supporters to challenge the legitimacy of, disrupt, delay, and overturn the election results.
According to eyewitness accounts as well as the statements of participants in the attack on January 6, 2021, a purpose of the assault was to stop the process of validating what then-President Trump, his supporters, and his allies had falsely characterized as a ‘‘stolen’’ or ‘‘fraudulent’’ election. The claims regarding the 2020 election results were advanced and amplified in the weeks leading up to the January 6 assault, even after courts across the country had resoundingly rejected Trump campaign lawsuits claiming election fraud and misconduct, and after all States had certified the election results. As part of this effort, Mr. Trump and his associates spread false information about, and cast doubts on, the elections in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia, among other states, and pressed Federal, State, and local officials to use their authorities to challenge the election results.
To fulfill its investigative responsibilities, the Select Committee needs to understand the events and communications in which Mr. Meadows reportedly participated or that he observed.
Mr. Meadows was one of a relatively small group of people who witnessed the events of January 6 in the White House and with then-President Trump. Mr. Meadows was with or in the vicinity of then-President Trump on January 6 as he learned about the attack on the U.S. Capitol and decided whether to issue a statement that could stop the rioters.28 In fact, as the violence at the Capitol unfolded, Mr. Meadows received many messages encouraging him to have Mr. Trump issue a statement that could end the violence, and one former White House employee reportedly contacted Mr. Meadows several times and told him, ‘‘[y]ou guys have to say something. Even if the president’s not willing to put out a statement, you should go to the [cameras] and say, ‘We condemn this. Please stand down.’ If you don’t, people are going to die.’’29
Moreover, Mr. Meadows reportedly spoke with Kashyap Patel, who was then the chief of staff to former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, ‘‘nonstop’’ throughout the day of January 6.30 And, among other things, Mr. Meadows apparently knows if and when Mr. Trump was engaged in discussions regarding the National Guard’s response to the Capitol riot, a point that is contested but about which Mr. Meadows provided documents to the Select Committee and spoke publicly on national television after President Trump left office.31
Beyond those matters, the Select Committee seeks information from Mr. Meadows about issues including the following:● Mr. Meadows exchanged text messages with, and provided guidance to, an organizer of the January 6th rally on the Ellipse after the organizer told him that ‘‘[t]hings have gotten crazy and I desperately need some direction. Please.’’32
● Mr. Meadows sent an email to an individual about the events on January 6 and said that the National Guard would be present to ‘‘protect pro Trump people’’ and that many more would be available on standby.33
● Mr. Meadows received text messages and emails regarding apparent efforts to encourage Republican legislators in certain States to send alternate slates of electors to Congress, a plan which one Member of Congress acknowledged was ‘‘highly controversial’’ and to which Mr. Meadows responded, ‘‘I love it.’’ Mr. Meadows responded to a similar message by saying ‘‘[w]e are’’ and another such message by saying ‘‘Yes. Have a team on it.’’34
● Mr. Meadows forwarded claims of election fraud to the Acting leadership of DOJ for further investigation, some of which he may have received using a private email account and at least one of which he had received directly from people associated with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.35
● He also reportedly introduced Mr. Trump to then-DOJ official Jeffrey Clark.36 Mr. Clark went on to recommend to Mr. Trump that he be installed as Acting Attorney General and that DOJ should send a letter to State officials urging them to take certain actions that could affect the outcome of the November 2020 election by, among other things, appointing alternate slates of electors to cast electoral votes for Mr. Trump rather than now-President Biden.37
● Mr. Meadows participated in meetings and calls during which the participants reportedly discussed the need to ‘‘fight’’ back against ‘‘mounting evidence’’ of purported voter fraud after courts had considered and overwhelmingly rejected Trump campaign claims of voter fraud and other election irregularities. He participated in one such meeting in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump and Members of Congress, which he publicly tweeted about from his personal Twitter account shortly after.38 He participated in another such call just days before the January 6 attack with Mr. Trump, Members of Congress, attorneys for the Trump re-election campaign, and ‘‘some 300’’ State and local officials to discuss the goal of overturning certain States’ electoral college results on January 6, 2021.39
● Mr. Meadows traveled to Georgia to observe an audit of the votes days after then-President Trump complained that the audit had been moving too slowly and claimed that the signature-match system was rife with fraud.40 That trip precipitated Mr. Trump’s calls to Georgia’s Deputy secretary of state and, later, secretary of state.41 In the call with Georgia’s secretary of state, which Mr. Meadows and an attorney working with the campaign also joined, Mr. Trump pressed his unsupported claims of widespread election fraud, including claims related to deceased people voting, forged signatures, out-of-State voters, shredded ballots, triple-counted ballots, Dominion voting machines, and suitcase ballots, before telling the secretary of state that he wanted to find enough votes to ensure his victory.42 At one point during the call, Mr. Meadows asked ‘‘in the spirit of cooperation and compromise, is there something that we can at least have a discussion to look at some of these allegations to find a path forward that’s less litigious?’’43 At that point, Mr. Trump had filed two lawsuits in his personal capacity and on behalf of the campaign in Georgia, but the United States had not filed—and never did file—any. Mr. Meadows used a personal account in his attempts to reach the secretary of state before.44
● Mr. Meadows was chief of staff during the post-election period when other White House staff, including the press secretary, advanced claims of election fraud. In one press conference, the press secretary claimed that there were ‘‘very real claims’’ of fraud that the Trump re-election campaign was pursuing and said that mail-in voting was one that ‘‘we have identified as being particularly prone to fraud.’’45
● Trump spoke to rally goers and, presumably, just after the attack on the Capitol had started.54
It is apparent that Mr. Meadows’s testimony and document production are of critical importance to the Select Committee’s investigation. Congress, through the Select Committee, is entitled to discover facts concerning what led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, as well as White House officials’ actions and communications during and after the attack. Mr. Meadows is uniquely situated to provide key information, having straddled an official role in the White House and unofficial role related to Mr. Trump’s reelection campaign since at least election day in 2020 through January 6.
⇈ ⇊
WaPo, Greg Sargent: Mark Meadows’s coverup of Trump’s coup attempt is falling apart http://wapo.st/3DSm9HB
⋙ Index: http://bit.ly/3DVGJ9L
⋙⋙ Core Report [pdf]: http://bit.ly/3DQEaGa 51p
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 A Russian invasion of Ukraine is a risky option for Putin. Potential high intensity ground combat followed by guerrilla warfare. Almost certain to generate enhanced economic retaliation by the West. NATO will be energized by fear…. Who’s next? https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/1470435289038348292?s=20
⭕ 12 Dec 2021
🐣 RT @McFaul Putin invaded Georgia & Ukraine, helped to shoot down a Dutch airplane, meddled in US elections, poisoned Litvinenko & Skripal in the UK, but the West is allegedly threatening Russia, not the other way around. Orwellian.
⋙ 🐣 RT @BBCSteveR Tonight’s anti-Gorbachev/anti-Yeltsin monologue by Kiselev on Russian TV is designed I think to (a) big up Putin’s role in modern Russia (b) stoke resentment among the Russian public over Moscow’s lost influence (c) convince viewers Russia’s under threat. Here’s part of it: Text Block: https://twitter.com/BBCSteveR/status/1470090008140914689?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @justinbaragona Jake Tapper: “Make no mistake, the folks from this movement do not believe in free and fair elections. They do not believe in your vote counting unless you vote for them. Their platform is disenfranchisement and derangement. It is undemocratic and it’s frankly un-American.” 💽 https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1470046433017577478?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Meadows Was Deeply Involved in Fighting Election Outcome, Jan. 6 Panel Says http://nyti.ms/3ykNl0q
// The House committee laid out its case for a contempt of Congress charge against Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to former President Donald J. Trump.
Before coming to loggerheads with the panel, Mr. Meadows provided more than 9,000 pages of records to the committee. The information they contained raised additional questions, the panel said. ¤ Among the emails and text messages that Mr. Meadows turned over were the following, the panel said:
● A Nov. 7 email that discussed an attempt to arrange with state legislators to appoint slates of pro-Trump electors instead of the Biden electors chosen by the voters. Mr. Meadows’s text messages also showed him asking members of Congress how to put Mr. Trump in contact with state legislators.
● Text messages Mr. Meadows exchanged with an unidentified senator in which he recounted Mr. Trump’s view on Vice President Mike Pence’s ability to reject electors from certain states. Mr. Trump “thinks the legislators have the power, but the VP has power too,” Mr. Meadows wrote.
● A Jan. 5 email in which Mr. Meadows said the National Guard would be present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 to “protect pro Trump people.”
● Emails from Mr. Meadows to Justice Department officials on Dec. 29, Dec. 30 and Jan. 1 in which he encouraged investigations of voter fraud, including allegations already rejected by federal investigators and courts.
● Text messages Mr. Meadows exchanged with members of Congress as violence engulfed the Capitol on Jan. 6 in which lawmakers encouraged him to persuade Mr. Trump to discourage the attack, as well as a text message sent to one of the president’s family members in which Mr. Meadows said he was “pushing hard” for Mr. Trump to “condemn this.”
● Text messages reflecting Mr. Meadows’s private skepticism about some of the wild public statements about allegations of widespread election fraud and compromised voting machines that were put forth by Sidney Powell, a lawyer working with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.
🧵 RT @SethAbramson (THREAD) This thread includes my thoughts on the lengthy report just issued by the House January 6 Committee—which seeks a congressional referral to DOJ for Contempt of Congress against former GOP congressman and Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. I hope you’ll read on and share. 📌 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1470226336904003585?s=20
🐣 RT @duty2warn “Jan 6th and The Big Lie are far worse than Watergate. Richard Nixon cheated to win and resigned. Donald Trump refused to acknowledge losing and attempted to overthrow the government. Nixon had intelligence and a conscience. Trump has only ignorance and vanity.” – John Dean
🐣 RT @FrankFigliuzzi Subversion of our military: Meadows Jan. 5 email indicated National Guard on standby to ‘protect pro Trump people,’ investigators say – POLITICO
⋙ Politico: Meadows Jan. 5 email indicated Guard on standby to ‘protect pro Trump people,’ investigators say http://politi.co/3dKH0ln “[T]he message is part of a 51-page document released Sunday by the select panel a day before it is set to vote to hold Meadows in contempt”
// The context for the message is unclear, but it comes amid scrutiny of the Guard’s slow response to the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol.
⭕ 11 Dec 2021
NYT: In Bid for Control of Elections, Trump Loyalists Face Few Obstacles http://nyti.ms/3sfiQYX “‘This is a five-alarm fire,’ said Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan”
// A movement animated by Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election lies is turning its attention to 2022 and beyond.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom This is how close we came to a coup, and Eastman and Rudy and the other GOP seditionists can spare us their bullshit. This was a direct attack on the Constitution hatched in the White House. Yes, Pence gets credit for not doing it, but none for refusing to go public even now.
⋙ 🧵 RT @costareports (thread) Based on our reporting, Eastman begins drafting his memo in late Dec. and Trump WH has it by the new year. WH then gives it to Sen. Lee and others on Jan. 2, as we document in “Peril.” ¤ But by Jan. 3, after Pence meets w/ Sen. Parliam., it’s clear he’s not coming along. 📌 https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1469680144726040577?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Now, months after “Peril” was published, we are learning more about both Meadows and that key day, January *4th.* ¤ Think of it as the set-up day for the eve of the insurrection, Jan. 5, when Bannon and Giuliani work from the Willard and Trump pressures Pence, 1 on 1, in Oval.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Read this: “The powerpoint was presented on 4 January to a number of Republican senators and members of Congress, the source said.” ¤ Meadows was in possession of a PowerPoint that echoed Eastman memo. (The origin story of the PP is a key reporting target.)https://theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/10/trump-powerpoint-mark-meadows-capitol-attack
⋙ 🐣 RT @ We now know that in the critical Jan. 4-5 period, where the pressure on Pence is Level 10/10, you have not only the principals leaning on the VP, but numerous docs circulating to make the case.
-Eastman memos
-PowerPoints
-And Jenna Ellis memos (see below)
https://cnn.com/2021/12/10/politics/jenna-ellis-trump-lawyer-memos-pence-biden/index.html
⋙ 🐣 RT @ But despite all of these docs and PowerPts, the most revealing thing of this period isn’t a document. It’s what he says to Pence on Jan. 5. ¤ At the end of the day, Trump isn’t looking to these docs to make his case. He looks to the gathering mob in the streets. (Ch. 43, “Peril”)
⋙ 🐣 RT @ “If these people say you had the power, wouldn’t you want to?” Trump asked.
“I wouldn’t want any one person to have that authority,” Pence said.
“But wouldn’t it almost be cool to have that power?” Trump asked.
“No,” Pence said.
/end
WaPo: Election denier who circulated Jan. 6 PowerPoint says he met with Meadows at White House http://wapo.st/3Gviq4c “[I]t is not clear how widely the PowerPoint was circulated or how seriously the ideas in it were considered”
A retired U.S. Army colonel who circulated a proposal to challenge the 2020 election, including by declaring a national security emergency and seizing paper ballots, said that he visited the White House on multiple occasions after the election, spoke with President Donald Trump’s chief of staff “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed several members of Congress on the eve of the Jan. 6 riot.
Philip Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN,” Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House.
A version of the presentation made its way to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on Jan. 5. That information surfaced publicly this week after the congressional committee investigating the insurrection released a letter that said Meadows had turned the document over to the committee.
Although Trump at the time was pressuring Pence to delay certifying Biden’s victory, it is not clear how widely the PowerPoint was circulated or how seriously the ideas in it were considered. A lawyer for Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, said on Friday that there was no indication that Meadows did anything with the document after receiving it by email.
Still, Waldron’s account of his interactions with the White House, together with a 36-page version of the presentation that surfaced online this week and was reviewed by The Post, shed new light on the wild theories and proposals that circulated among the people advising Trump as they worked to overturn his election defeat, causing a crisis at the heart of government. They suggest that Meadows, who also pressed senior Justice Department leaders to investigate baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud, was more directly in contact with proponents of such theories than was previously known.
One person familiar with the matter confirmed that Meadows met with Waldron at the White House in December, although a person familiar with Meadows’s thinking stressed that Meadows had “little or nothing to do” with Waldron and did not endorse the document. The person said that Meadows’s role, as chief of staff, was often to receive information and pass it along to an appropriate recipient. He said Meadows often did this without endorsing the substance of a given idea or suggestion.
In early January, Waldron was working alongside Trump’s attorneys Giuliani and John C. Eastman from a suite at the Willard hotel in downtown Washington, gathering purported evidence of election fraud, The Post previously reported. Waldron was a supporting witness for Giuliani at hearings on election fraud held by lawmakers in battleground states after the 2020 vote. …
Waldron said that on Jan. 5 he was among about a half-dozen people who briefed several members of Congress in a congressional office. He declined to identify the members without their permission and said that others may have joined by video. The members were “shocked” by the presentation but did not commit to any action, Waldron recalled.
Waldron, 57, who is based in Dripping Springs, Tex., told The Post that before the election, he started working with the Texas company Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG). Russell J. Ramsland Jr., ASOG’s leader, was also photographed at the Willard in the days before the riot, and Eastman told The Post that he met Ramsland around that time. Over the previous two years, the firm promoted claims about the dangers of electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors, The Post has reported.
Waldron served in the Army, Army Reserve, Texas Army National Guard and the Individual Ready Reserve from May 1986 to June 2016 and received multiple service awards, an Army spokesman told The Post last year, adding that Waldron retired as a psychological operations and civil affairs officer. Waldron was deployed to Iraq from 2004 to 2005, the spokesman said.
Waldron has said that the team behind the PowerPoint included former intelligence officers and military veterans and was supported by hundreds of “digital warriors” who provided research. Jovan H. Pulitzer, a Texas-based entrepreneur who is a vocal election denier, told The Post that he contributed material for it.
Since January, Waldron has built a significant following among Trump supporters by continuing to spread false claims about election fraud, including onstage at an August conference hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. ¤ Waldron also has promoted the ongoing campaign for “audits” of the 2020 election, including the Republican-commissioned review of 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz.
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann consulted Waldron in deciding to hire the Florida firm Cyber Ninjas to conduct that review, according to text messages that the nonprofit American Oversight obtained through a public records request.
Waldron was named in a 2020 state corporate filing as the chief executive of PointStream Inc. of Dripping Springs, which bills itself as a discreet cybersecurity firm. Specialties that PointStream touts on its website include “deep access to the Internet of Things, Social Media, and Dark Web,” conducting untraceable “cyber lurking,” and providing data sets “virtually unknown” to either private industry or the U.S. government.
⭕ 10 Dec 2021
💙 WaPo, Ron Filipkowski: I monitor Trump’s die-hard base. They’re still plotting out in the open. http://wapo.st/3rYJgOl The coup has gone Local, but backed by Big Bucks frum the Usual Suspects and new ones, bolstered by grassroots grifting
// The same activists behind Jan. 6 are moving into local, grass-roots organizing now
Not quite a year ago, on Dec. 19, 2020, Donald Trump lit a match. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” he tweeted. “Be there, will be wild!” That night, on the social network Parler, a user posted, “Build the gallows.”
Two researchers offered to help me anonymously. I’ve been a criminal lawyer for almost three decades, first as a federal and state prosecutor and now as a defense attorney. My background, combined with the research skills of my team, has allowed us to monitor and track right-wing groups across a wide array of platforms. We watch obscure livestream events and listen to podcasts and radio broadcasts, and I have attended events in person. We follow influencers and organizations wherever they are on social media — Facebook, Twitter, Parler, Gab, Telegram, YouTube, Gettr, Rumble, Frank Speech and other, darker places.
What we’re seeing is that many of the activists and influencers who promoted and attended the rally that became the violent attempt to stop the certification of President Biden’s election have now turned their attention to three primary targets: school boards, city and county commissions, and secretaries of state and supervisors of elections. The new endeavors give the appearance of grass-roots efforts but feature familiar characters teaming up with organizations long involved with financing and leading disruptions, protests and disinformation campaigns on a variety of issues — organizations like Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute, the Council for National Policy, Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation’s Action branch and Liberty Counsel. What’s more, some of these activists have harnessed the anger, fear and resentment they have helped churn up and are using it for their personal and financial benefit. We began noticing this shift between February and March, as these leaders launched new websites, created new business entities, and restarted their events and rallies.
Figures like Stephen K. Bannon, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Charlie Kirk and Flynn are regulars on the circuit mobilizing people to take on local governments. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast has promoted and featured potential candidates who have visited and trained on the Precinct Strategy website, which provides information and tools for becoming voting precinct captains and committeemen. People in these roles, although not often talked about, can be powerful decision-makers in local and state elections. As The Washington Post recently reported, Trump supporters are using similar strategies to replace officials in a multitude of local and state offices, “including volunteer poll watchers, paid precinct judges, elected county clerks and state attorneys general.”
To boost the movement’s power in local politics, a new nonprofit, County Citizens Defending Freedom USA (CCDFUSA), took shape early this summer and partnered with a number of groups, including Kirk’s Turning Point USA and America’s Future, a long-standing right-wing nonprofit where Flynn was appointed chairman in May. CCDFUSA hosts action trainings, meetings, candidate meet-and-greets and protests, which focus on mask mandates, vaccine requirements and critical race theory. This organization has grown quickly and quietly, and already has had an impact in Florida. CCDFUSA takes Bannon’s “precinct strategy” and applies those lessons and others to mobilize its local activists. Stone attends its anti-mandate rallies. The group’s presence across social media, local events across the country and nightly news programs helps it advance its goal of replacing traditional Republican politicians with MAGA-minded operatives.
NYT: Self-Proclaimed Proud Boys Member Gets 10 Years for Violence at Portland Protests http://nyti.ms/3DIGBdO
// Prosecutors called Alan Swinney, 51, a “white nationalist vigilante cowboy” who shot a man in the eye with a paintball gun.
NPR: READ: Key excerpts from the Supreme Court ruling on S.B. 8, the Texas abortion case http://n.pr/3pPhQaL
“The clear purpose and actual effect of S. B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings. It is, however, a basic principle that the Constitution is the “fundamental and paramount law of the nation,” and “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). Indeed, “[i]f the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.” United States v. Peters, 5 Cranch 115, 136 (1809). The nature of the federal right infringed does not matter; it is the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system that is at stake.” ~ Chief Justice John Roberts
WaPo: Supreme Court says Texas abortion providers may proceed with challenge of six-week ban, leaves law in effect for now http://wapo.st/30g06Nf
NYT: U.K. Court Rules Julian Assange Can Be Extradited to U.S. http://nyti.ms/3lQFbaU
// The WikiLeaks founder can still appeal the verdict, which would leave him facing espionage charges that could put him in prison for decades.
⭕ 9 Dec 2021
WaPo: Democrats just proved they can get around the filibuster — when they want to http://wapo.st/3GDi5wx
// 10 for overrides 1 against; The debt ceiling deal reveals the arbitrary nature of the supposed customs of the upper chamber
🐣 RT @WhiteHouse Today, @POTUS held a call with President Zelenskyy and reaffirmed our unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. He also called leaders of the B9 to brief them on his call with President Putin and underscore our commitment to Transatlantic security.
🧵 RT @JudiciaryDems Meadows’ involvement in the events leading to Jan 6 isn’t up for debate. Our investigation found that, without a doubt, he asked Acting AG Rosen to initiate baseless election fraud investigations on behalf of Trump—and this “Big Lie” helped incite the insurrection. ¤ KEY POINTS ⬇️ 📌 https://twitter.com/JudiciaryDems/status/1469017329421983748?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @JudiciaryDems .@JudiciaryDems found that from 12/29-1/11, Meadows asked DOJ to: 1) Investigate various discredited claims of election fraud in Georgia that the Trump campaign was unsuccessfully pursuing in court;
⋙ 🐣 RT @JudiciaryDems 2) Investigate false claims of “signature match anomalies” in Fulton County, Georgia, even though Republican state elections officials had made clear “there has been no evidence presented of any issues with the signature matching process.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @JudiciaryDems 3) Investigate a theory known as “Italygate,” promoted by a Rudy Giuliani ally, which held that the CIA and an Italian IT contractor used military satellites to manipulate voting machines and change Trump votes to Biden votes. Meadows also asked DOJ to meet with Giuliani.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JudiciaryDems 4) Investigate a series of claims of election fraud in New Mexico that had been widely refuted and in some cases rejected by the courts, including a claim that Dominion Voting Systems machines caused late-night “vote dumps” for Democratic candidates.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JudiciaryDems ICYMI: “Meadows Pressed Justice Dept. to Investigate Election Fraud Claims”
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @JudiciaryDems BREAKING NEWS: Documents uncovered by the Senate Judiciary Committee and Chair @SenatorDurbin reveal that Mark Meadows pressured DOJ to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election in an attempt to nullify the results.
⋙⋙⋙ NYT (6/5/2021): Meadows Pressed Justice Dept. to Investigate Election Fraud Claims http://nyti.ms/3q2erWz
// Emails show the increasingly urgent efforts by President Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JudiciaryDems A breakdown of @JudiciaryDems interim report on our continued investigation into Meadows, Jeffrey Clark, and others involved in President Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election:
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @JudiciaryDems (10/17/2021) WHAT WE FOUND in our investigation into former President Trump’s campaign to pressure DOJ to overturn the 2020 Election. ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️ 📌 https://twitter.com/JudiciaryDems/status/1446190492627111947?s=20
WaPo, Nancy Gertner and Lawrence Tribe: The Supreme Court isn’t well. The only hope for a cure is more justices. http://wapo.st/3oHwuBL “This is a uniquely perilous moment that demands a unique response.”
In voting to submit the report to the president neither of us cast a vote of confidence in the Supreme Court itself. Sadly, we no longer have that confidence, given three things: first, the dubious legitimacy of the way some justices were appointed; second, what Justice Sonia Sotomayor rightly called the “stench” of politics hovering over this court’s deliberations about the most contentious issues; and third, the anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian direction of this court’s decisions about matters such as voting rights, gerrymandering and the corrupting effects of dark money.
Those judicial decisions haven’t been just wrong; they put the court — and, more important, our entire system of government — on a one-way trip from a defective but still hopeful democracy toward a system in which the few corruptly govern the many, something between autocracy and oligarchy. Instead of serving as a guardrail against going over that cliff, our Supreme Court has become an all-too-willing accomplice in that disaster.
Worse, measures the court has enabled will fundamentally change the court and the law for decades. They operate to entrench the power of one political party: constricting the vote, denying fair access to the ballot to people of color and other minorities, and allowing legislative district lines to be drawn that exacerbate demographic differences. As a result, the usual ebb and flow that once tended to occur with succeeding elections is stalling. A Supreme Court that has been effectively packed by one party will remain packed into the indefinite future, with serious consequences to our democracy. This is a uniquely perilous moment that demands a unique response. …
Hand-wringing over the court’s legitimacy misses a larger issue: the legitimacy of what our union is becoming. To us, that spells a compelling need to signal that all is not well with the court, and that even if expanding it to combat what it has become would temporarily shake its authority, that risk is worth taking.
NYT: Appeals Court Rejects Trump’s Bid to Shield Material From Jan. 6 Inquiry http://nyti.ms/3GLDRhV
// A three-judge panel held that Congress’s oversight powers, backed by President Biden’s decision not to invoke executive privilege over the material, outweighed Mr. Trump’s residual secrecy powers.
WaPo: Trump White House records can be released in Jan. 6 probe pending Supreme Court review, appeals court rules http://wapo.st/3DGogxS
// Former president seeks to keep White House papers from congressional committee investigating Capitol riot in first legal case testing whether a sitting president can waive a predecessor’s claim of executive privilege
⋙⋙ 📔 USCourtofAppeals (D.C.): Document [pdf] http://bit.ly/3oEs0M4 68p
// Trump’s appeal denied unanimously; put on 14-day hold so Trump can appeal to SCOTUS
On the record before us, former President Trump has provided no basis for this court to override President Biden’s judgment and the agreement and accommodations worked out between the Political Branches over these documents. Both Branches agree that there is a unique legislative need for these documents and that they are directly relevant to the Committee’s inquiry into an attack on the Legislative Branch and its constitutional role in the peaceful transfer of power.
More specifically, the former President has failed to establish a likelihood of success given (1) President Biden’s carefully reasoned and cabined determination that a claim of executive privilege is not in the interests of the United States; (2) Congress’s uniquely vital interest in studying the January 6th attack on itself to formulate remedial legislation and to safeguard its constitutional and legislative operations; (3) the demonstrated relevance of the documents at issue to the congressional inquiry; (4) the absence of any identified alternative source for the information; and (5) Mr. Trump’s failure even to allege, let alone demonstrate, any particularized harm that would arise from disclosure, any distinct and superseding interest in confidentiality attached to these particular documents, lack of relevance, or any other reasoned justification for withholding the documents. Former President Trump likewise has failed to establish irreparable harm, and the balance of interests and equities weigh decisively in favor of disclosure.2
For those reasons, we affirm the district court’s judgment denying a preliminary injunction as to those documents in the Archivist’s first three tranches over which President Biden has determined that a claim of executive privilege is not justified.
Politico: National Archives: Meadows may not have stored all Trump-era records ‘properly’ http://politi.co/31JOOBp “Mark Meadows and the National Archives are in talks over potential records he did ‘not properly’ turn over from his personal phone and email”
// The acknowledgment comes amid his clash with the committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
WaPo: A conservative group debunks Trump’s voter-fraud claims (yet again) http://wapo.st/3y8pBfW Add Wisconsin to Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to the list of states that investigated and found no evidence of “widespread voter fraud”
Repeatedly now, conservatives who are sympathetic to voter-fraud allegations have conducted audits in the key states that Donald Trump contested in 2020. And repeatedly, they have come up empty when it comes to finding anything amounting to the widespread fraud that Trump claimed — and they have often explicitly debunked him.
The latest example comes in Wisconsin, where the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty conducted its own 10-month review parallel to the one spearheaded by state legislative Republicans. Its report argues that certain procedures weren’t adequately followed. But on the big issue of voter fraud — the one Trump and his allies have hyped as proof that he actually won — the institute is pretty emphatic in its conclusion.
“There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud,” the report says. “In all likelihood, more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump. We found little direct evidence of fraud, and for the most part, an analysis of the results and voting patterns does not give rise to an inference of fraud.”
When any such group is conducting an audit, it’s fair to ask what viewpoint it comes from. This is a group that thinks voter fraud is an issue worth probing. It also casts doubt on the severity of the Jan. 6 insurrection. But it describes Trump’s attempts to overturn the election through Congress as “shameful.” ¤ In other words, it’s a pretty mainstream conservative group that was open to finding something nefarious. And after 10 months, it found no evidence of significant fraud.
It’s not alone.
● In Georgia, a post-election audit of paper ballots was conducted by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), who made combating voter fraud a centerpiece of his 2018 campaign for the job. He concluded: “The audit confirmed that the original machine count accurately portrayed the winner of the election.” Raffensperger also conducted a later signature-match audit in Atlanta-based Cobb County, an issue he said raised legitimate questions. It, too, came up empty. “This audit disproves the only credible allegations the Trump campaign had against the strength of Georgia’s signature match processes,” he said.
● In Michigan, a review run by another voter-fraud-focused Republican, state Sen. Edward McBroom (R), was arguably even harsher on Trump and his allies. It said of a popular claim of vote-switching in Antrim County that was pushed by Trump and his allies: “The Committee finds those promoting Antrim County as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election place all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility.” And of the idea of a ballot dump in Detroit-based Wayne County: “The data suggests that there was no anomalous number of votes cast solely for the president, either in Wayne County or statewide.”
● In Arizona, a review of ballots in Phoenix-based Maricopa County by the so-called Cyber Ninjas was extensively hyped by Trump and allies. It wound up confirming the accuracy of the results. While raising other concerns, it stated, “The paper ballots are the best evidence of voter intent, and there is no reliable evidence that the paper ballots were altered to any material degree.”
Republicans, of course, will continue to point to the alleged reasons for suspicion of the process. But at some point, with Trump still claiming a “stolen” election with gusto more than a year later, you would think that anyone interested in truly reforming our elections might start with acknowledging that the basis offered by the Republican Party’s leader has been found to be bunk over and over again — including, most notably, by would-be allies in the fight.
🐣 RT @CharlesPPierce This is the damndest government record I’ve read since the transcript of the smoking-gun tape was released in August of 1974. And it’s 10 times as insane.
⋙ Esquire, Charles Pierce: Mark Meadows Provided the January 6 Committee With a Truly Insane Document http://bit.ly/3dAbeay
// No wonder the ex-White House chief of staff is reluctant to testify.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chair of the House special committee investigating the insurrection of January 6, is showing himself to have a very deft hand with the stiletto. In response to the duplicity of former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who bailed on cooperating with the committee and then launched a comical lawsuit against it, Thompson released a document Meadows had provided to the committee and, WILL O’GOD!, it’s the damndest government record I’ve read since the transcript of the smoking-gun tape was released in August of 1974. And it’s 10 times as insane. Seriously, this thing reads like it was put together by Moe, Larry, and Curly Hitler, except it was received and taken seriously by the stooges who were running the government and organizing resistance to a free election.
You have to wade through a bunch of Sidney Powell-Rudy Giuliani bilge about election ratfcking by China and Venezuela, and a timeline that apparently was put together by someone on blotter acid, to get to the real good stuff, which is about how to steal the election in Washington and to use the American military as your button men.
[ … Excerpts … ]
Meadows clearly knew that he’d handed over this seditious sci-fi over to the committee before he bailed on cooperating, so I’m inclined to believe that, perhaps through its gathering of texts and voicemails, the committee obtained further evidence that scared Meadows into withdrawing and then suing the committee itself, which is a doomed and futile effort to run out a clock he no longer controls. …
The committee is clearly getting there. I remember Jimmy Breslin writing that Richard Nixon’s political life was being sliced away through paper cuts delivered by the pages of documents in the offices of the special prosecutor and the staff of the House Judiciary Committee. It’s a helpful metaphor.
⬇️
⋙⋙ Document: Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN http://bit.ly/31MSVwy 36p
🧵 RT @RepLizCheney Thread for those interested in the @January6thCmte’s progress: The Committee has already met with nearly 300 witnesses; we hear from four more key figures in the investigation today. We are conducting multiple depositions and interviews every week. (1/4) 📌 https://twitter.com/RepLizCheney/status/1469005186257596419?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepLizCheney We have received exceptionally interesting and important documents from a number of witnesses, including Mark Meadows. He has turned over many texts from his private cell phone from January 6th. (2/4)
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepLizCheney We have litigated and won Trump’s executive privilege case in Federal District Court. The Federal Appellate Court has expedited the appeal, and we anticipate a ruling regarding many more Trump White House documents soon. ¤ The investigation is firing on all cylinders. (3/4)
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepLizCheney Do not be misled: President Trump is trying to hide what happened on January 6th and to delay and obstruct. We will not let that happen. ¤ The truth will come out. (4/4)
Mediaite: Trump Ordered Staff to ‘Bust Some Heads’ at Black Lives Matter Protest Prior to Bible Photo Op, Meadows Book Reveals http://bit.ly/3dCVbsQ
⭕ 8 Dec 2021
NYT: Meadows Sues Pelosi in Bid to Block Jan. 6 Committee Subpoena http://nyti.ms/31K7P6u
// The suit came hours after the committee said it would prepare a criminal contempt of Congress referral against Mark Meadows, who was President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff on Jan. 6.
In a statement Wednesday night, Mr. Thompson and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice chair, said that Mr. Meadows’s “flawed lawsuit won’t succeed at slowing down the select committee’s investigation or stopping us from getting the information we’re seeking.”
The committee has now interviewed more than 275 witnesses and obtained tens of thousands of documents. Those cooperating include some members of former Vice President Mike Pence’s inner circle, including Marc Short, his former chief of staff. But several high-profile witnesses are stonewalling the panel, in line with a directive from Mr. Trump.
Mr. Meadows joins Mr. Trump is suing the committee to try to block its investigation. The former president is battling in court to prevent the release of documents requested by the committee that he says are subject to executive privilege, though the Biden administration has refused to assert that claim.
WaPo: New details emerge on Mark Meadows’s role in trying to overturn election as Jan. 6 panel moves to hold him in contempt http://wapo.st/31GHzu7 “The information released … suggests that Meadows was deeply involved in the effort to overturn the election results”
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said it is preparing to hold Mark Meadows in criminal contempt for not complying with its subpoena as it laid out evidence Wednesday showing the former White House chief of staff’s support for efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), in a letter to Meadows attorney George Terwilliger III, criticized Meadows’s decision to no longer cooperate with the panel. The onetime North Carolina congressman reversed course this week, arguing the panel was pressuring him to discuss issues that former president Donald Trump said are protected by executive privilege.
In his letter, Thompson details some of the emails and text messages Meadows had already handed over to the committee, providing one of the first glimpses of internal communications the panel has obtained that illuminate the actions of Trump and his allies. The new materials show Meadows was involved in early discussions to appoint an alternate slate of electors to replace those prepared to certify Joe Biden the victor in certain states, including an email sent days after the election that described a “a direct and collateral” attack on the results.
The letter highlights the committee’s focus not just on the specific events of Jan. 6 but the actions undertaken by Trump and his associates leading up to that day, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol while echoing the false claims he made about a stolen election.
The panel appears to be focusing heavily on an effort by Trump’s allies to develop a plan in which Vice President Mike Pence would have halted Congress’s certification of the election on Jan. 6 to allow Republican state legislators to investigate the unfounded fraud claims. Trump privately and publicly pressured Pence to embrace the plan, but the vice president would not, arguing he did not have the power to do so under the Constitution.
The information released by the panel Wednesday suggests that Meadows was deeply involved in the effort to overturn the election results. ¤ Along with the discussion to appoint an alternate slate of electors, Thompson outlined in his letter other documents Meadows has already provided to the committee, including a Jan. 5 email “regarding a 38-page PowerPoint briefing titled ‘Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN’ that was to be provided ‘on the hill’ ” and a Jan. 5 “email about having the National Guard on standby.”
The text messages produced by Meadows also include a Nov. 6, 2020, correspondence “with a Member of Congress apparently about appointing alternate electors in certain states as part of a plan that the Member acknowledged would be ‘highly controversial’ and to which Mr. Meadows apparently said, ‘I love it.’ ”
Meadows also turned over messages about “the need for the former President to issue a public statement that could have stopped the January 6th attack on the Capitol,” according to Thompson, along with an early-January 2021 text message exchange between Meadows and an unnamed organizer of the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse that proceeded the attack on the Capitol.
“All of those documents raise issues about which the Select Committee would like to question Mr. Meadows and about which you appear to agree are not subject to a claim of privilege,” Thompson wrote to Terwilliger.
Thompson noted that information Meadows provided came from his personal cellphone and email address instead of his government accounts, raising questions about whether he has turned over that information to the National Archives as required.
The criminal contempt charge is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $1,000. ¤ Meadows’s refusal to sit for an interview with the panel, as previously agreed, marks a reversal following Trump’s angry outbursts against Meadows about his new memoir, “The Chief’s Chief,” which was published Tuesday after its contents were reported by several news organizations last week.
WaPo: Low-profile heiress who ‘played a strong role’ in financing Jan. 6 rally is thrust into spotlight http://wapo.st/3y6sduN “Julie Fancelli, the 72yo daughter of the founder of the Publix … wired a total of $650K to three organizations that helped stage and promote the event”
WaPo Editorial: The U.S. must stand firm for Ukraine — and international law http://wapo.st/3oAUUN5
💙 💽 🔆 This❗️⋙ USStateDept: The Summit for Democracy. http://bit.ly/3dzf3gh
USAToday: ‘The crisis we face is real’: Blinken on why Biden is convening a Summit for Democracy http://bit.ly/30bPvms
// by Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State
BrennanCenterforJustice: Addressing Insider Threats in Elections. http://bit.ly/31Bgfxw
// There is an active effort to recruit rogue election officials to sabotage elections across the country.
Election officials were some of the biggest heroes of the 2020 election. After a grueling year that saw a pandemic, unprecedented disinformation efforts, and the highest turnout in over a century, they stood up to pressure from political actors seeking to overturn or cast doubt on the election results in key states. This collective, bipartisan effort helped avoid a constitutional crisis last year.
But the effort to sabotage our elections has only intensified, which is why Congress and state and local governments must take critical steps to protect against insider threats.
⭕ 7 Dec 2021
WaPo: An angry rift between Trump and Bannon signals the far-right’s future http://wapo.st/3dtyVRX
⭕ 6 Dec 2021
💙 WaPo Mag: Jamie Raskin’s Year of Grief and Purpose http://wapo.st/3lR6DW7 “What was there to be afraid of when the worst thing imaginable had already happened to him?”
// A son’s suicide, an attack on the Capitol and a congressman’s renewed sense of mission
WaPo, Greg Sargent: GOP election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg issues a frantic warning to his own party about Trump and 2024 http://wapo.st/3EGxlbl
WaPo: Rep. Devin Nunes to leave Congress to become Trump media company CEO http://wapo.st/3EvsNVm
🐣 RT @CheriJacobus Why does Trump seem so confident Garland will let him off the hook for obvious, blatant obstruction of justice to the point where he’s openly bragging about it? ¤ Because he knows he’s gonna skate.
⋙ 🧵 RT @Acyn Trump: Don’t forget, I fired Comey. Had I not fired Comey, you might not be talking to me right now about a beautiful book about four years in the White House and we’ll see about the future. 💽 📌 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1467669035756052484?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Trump: If I didn’t fire Comey, they were looking to take down the President of the United States… 💽 📌 I don’t think could’ve survived if I didn’t fire him https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1467674845987016707?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Putin has a flare for the dramatic. I was awake in the wee hours monitoring Y2K when on Jan 1, 2000 he suddenly appeared on tv and took over the reins from Yeltsin. ¤ In December 1991, 30 years ago, what Putin called “The greatest tragedy of the 20th century,” the fall of the USSR took place: ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1468101351561482243?s=20/photo/1
The Dissolution of the Soviet Union: TIMELINE
Source: WikipediaBefore Dec 1, 1991, many Soviet states have declared independence, including the Baltics
On December 1, Ukraine votes to become independent (91% in favor)
On December 8, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus secretly sign the Belavezha Accords, stating the Soviet Union has ceased to exist; it’s replaced by a looser Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), other states will be invited to join
On December 12, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR formally ratifies the Belavezha Accords
On December 21, representatives of 8 of the 12 remaining republics – all except Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, and Lithuania – sign the Alma-Ata Protocol, confirming the dissolution of the Union, accepting the CIS; Gorbachev agrees to resign
On December 25, Gorbachev resigns in a nationally televised speech; the flag of the USSR is lowered and replaced by the Russian tricolor
On December 26, the Soviet of Republics, the upper chamber of the Union’s Supreme Soviet, votes the Soviet Union out of existence
Through 2019, the CIS performed certain transitional functions, and has continued to exist among several states as a devolving trade/military cooperation (Ukraine exited in 2018)
Politico: Ex-DC Guard official says generals lied to Congress about Jan 6 http://politi.co/3lFtdkw Col Earl Matthews calls two Army generals—Gen Charles Flynn, dep chief of staff for operations on Jan 6, and Lt Gen Walter Piatt, dir of Army staff—“absolute and unmitigated liars”
// In a 36-page memo to the Capitol riot committee, Col. Earl Matthews also slams the Pentagon’s inspector general for what he calls an error-ridden report.
❗️🐮🐮🐮❗️⋙ Politico: Devin Nunes will leave Congress http://politi.co/3pACKu6
// Nunes, who was first elected in 2002, ascended to chair the House Intelligence Committee in 2015.
WaPo: Tomorrow’s crucial Biden/Putin call could be a matter of war and peace http://wapo.st/3Isy7v2
WaPo: Putin expected to demand guarantee in Biden call that NATO won’t expand east http://wapo.st/31Hkg3a
WaPo: Bob Dole: America needs unity to rediscover its greatness http://wapo.st/3lFk23y
WaPo: Justice Dept. sues Texas over state redistricting maps, citing discrimination against Latinos http://wapo.st/3pvIjdl
🔆 This❗️⋙ TheAtlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg: A Party, and Nation, in Crisis http://bit.ly/3IpqNjA
// The GOP’s leaders are attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy.
🔆 This❗️⋙ TheAtlantic, Barton Gellman: JANUARY 6 WAS PRACTICE http://bit.ly/3rDDDF2
// Donald Trump is better positioned to subvert an election now than he was in 2020.
⭕ 5 Dec 2021
DailyBeast, David Rothkopf: America Is One Gut Punch Away From Throwing in the Towel on Democracy http://bit.ly/3EtLQPO
// This is a moment to attend to the business of bringing together all Americans with a sense of aspiration and a common purpose, before it’s too late.
⭕ 4 Dec 2021
WaPo, Aaron Miller and Richard Sokolsky (Carnegie): Biden is right that global democracy is at risk. But the threat isn’t China. http://wapo.st/3Dr4TJh “America has a glass-house problem, and it needs to promote its democratic virtues with considerable humility”
⭕ 3 Dec 2021
WaPo, Dana Milbank: A.I. analysis: The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump http://wapo.st/3dkeIhu “Too many journalists are caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction. It’s time to take a stand”
WSJ: U.S. to Urge Democracies to Sanction Corrupt Foreign Officials, Human-Rights Abusers http://on.wsj.com/3rzMuHG “White House officials have said they see the sanctions as an important tool in the Biden administration’s efforts to spark what it calls a Democratic renewal” around the globe
// Biden administration will unveil sanctions in run-up to Summit for Democracy
🐣 RT @tribelaw A law professor taking the 5th to avoid answering questions from Congress about an attempted coup and an insurrection?! A virtual confession of criminal sedition, by my lights.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote I’d bet my cat that @JusticeOIG has interviewed Rosen, Donaghue, & other DoJ officials about the conduct of Eastman & Clark who are about to plead the 5th to the 1/6 committee. I’d bet the other cat the IG will make criminal referrals to Garland, who has sworn to follow them.
WaPo, Norm Eisen et al: Trump’s lawyers are pleading the Fifth. Congress can still make them talk. http://wapo.st/3luZt9J
// The committee investigating Jan. 6 has options to test Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman’s assertions of privilege
… [T]he Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination — not against public condemnation. The mere invocation of the amendment by a former high-ranking Justice Department official before a congressional committee investigating an attempt to overturn the election is a scarlet letter. It is one now affixed to Trump, his entire White House and his administration’s Justice Department. If nothing else, Clark’s gambit underscores the critical mission of the committee — and that it is on to something.
Politico: Eastman takes the Fifth with Jan. 6 committee http://politi.co/3lB3xFw
// The attorney, who helped former President Donald Trump contest the 2020 election, asserted his right against self-incrimination in a Dec. 1 letter to the Capitol riot panel.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Russia planning massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns http://wapo.st/3rvAcQR
NYT, Jamelle Bouie: The Trump Conspiracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight http://nyti.ms/3Ihq43R ~ “the plot to restore Donald Trump to power over and against the will of the voters” in 2024
When people plot to do wrong, they often do so in plain sight. To the extent that they succeed, it is at least partly because no one took them as seriously as they should have.
And so it goes with the plot to restore Donald Trump to power over and against the will of the voters. The first attempt, prefigured in Trump’s refusal in 2016 to say whether he would accept the results of the presidential election, culminated in an attack on the Capitol this year, broadcast on camera to the entire world. Since then, the former president and his allies have made no secret of their intent to run the same play a second time.
Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official, hosts a popular far-right podcast where he has urged his listeners to seize control of local election administration. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” he said in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
Those listeners were, well, listening. “Suddenly,” according to a recent ProPublica investigation, “people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.”
Many of these new activists very much want to “stop the steal.” In Michigan, notes ProPublica, “one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party’s executive director, who contradicted Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned.” In Arizona, likewise, new Bannon-inspired precinct officers have “petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the State Senate Republicans’ ‘forensic audit’ of 2020 ballots.”
The obvious point of all this is to eliminate resistance should the outcome of the 2024 presidential election come down, once again, to the fortitude of local officials. In his desperate fight to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election, Trump probed for and found the soft spots in our electoral system. His supporters are fighting to make them more vulnerable.
In tandem with the fight to seize control of election administration is an effort to gerrymander battleground states into nearly permanent Republican legislative majorities. “In Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia,” according to my colleagues in the newsroom, “Republican state lawmakers have either created supermajorities capable of overriding a governor’s veto or whittled down competitive districts so significantly that Republicans’ advantage is virtually impenetrable — leaving voters in narrowly divided states powerless to change the leadership of their legislatures.”
In these states, Democrats could win a narrow majority of voters but gain fewer than half of the seats in the state legislature, while Republicans could win with that same majority and gain far more than half the seats. It’s an affront to the ideal of political equality, to say nothing of the “one person, one vote” standard enshrined in the 1964 Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims. A system in which some voters are worth much more than others — and where popular majorities are locked out of power if they contain the wrong kinds of people — is many things, but it isn’t a democracy (or, if you prefer, a “republic”).
These impenetrable supermajorities serve a purpose beyond simple partisan advantage. The belief that Trump actually won the 2020 election is backed by the belief that elections are less about persuasion and more about rigging the process and controlling the ballots. And in the swing states that Trump lost, his strongest allies have pushed the radical idea that state legislatures have plenary authority over presidential elections even after voters have cast their ballots. Trump may lose the vote in Arizona, but under this theory, the legislature could still give him the state’s electoral votes, provided there is some pretext (like “voter fraud,” for example). What this would mean, in practice, is that these legislatures could simply hand their state’s electoral votes to Trump even if he were defeated at the ballot box.
It’s with this in mind that we should look to Wisconsin, where Republicans are fighting to seize control of federal elections in the state now that they’ve gerrymandered themselves into an almost-permanent legislative majority. (The Wisconsin Republican Party, along with the one in North Carolina, has been at the vanguard of the authoritarian turn in the national party.)
Last month, Senator Ron Johnson said that lawmakers in his state could take control of federal elections even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in opposition. “The State Legislature has to reassert its constitutional role, assert its constitutional responsibility, to set the times, place and manner of the election, not continue to outsource it through the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Johnson said, in reference to the bipartisan commission Republicans had established to manage elections. “The Constitution never mentions a governor.”
And of course, Trump is taking an active role in all of this. From his perch in Mar-a-Lago, he has endorsed candidates for state legislative elections in Michigan with the clear hope that they would help him subvert the election, should he run as the Republican nominee for president in 2024. “Michigan needs a new legislature,” Trump wrote last month in one such endorsement. “The cowards there now are too spineless to investigate Election Fraud.”
Increasingly untethered from any commitment to electoral democracy, large and influential parts of the Republican Party are working to put Trump back in power by any means necessary. Republicans could win without these tactics — they did so in Virginia last month — but there’s no reason to think that the party will pull itself off this road.
Every incentive driving the Republican Party, from Fox News to the former president, points away from sober engagement with the realities of American politics and toward the outrageous, the antisocial and the authoritarian. ¤ None of this is happening behind closed doors. We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.
⭕ 2 Dec 2021
CNBC: House probe will hold public hearings in 2022 detailing Jan. 6 Capitol riot and Trump White House response ‘in vivid color,’ Liz Cheney says http://cnb.cx/31optfW
WaPo Editorial: Donald Trump: Superspreader in chief http://wapo.st/31n6bIc
⭕ 1 Dec 2021
WaPo, Dana Milbank: ‘Roe’ is dead. The Roberts Court’s ‘stench’ will live forever. http://wapo.st/3G6e4R8
Public opinion hasn’t changed. The science hasn’t fundamentally changed. No new legal theory has been promulgated. The only difference is the court now has a majority hellbent on settling scores in the culture wars. “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked her colleagues. “I don’t see how it is possible.”
Before Kagan spoke those words, I had spent the morning outside the court, watching abortion foes literally shout down the other side. Police used metal barricades to split First Street NE in front of the court into equal sections for the opposing sides, each with a soundstage. Not content with that arrangement, a group of antiabortion demonstrators invaded the other side and took turns drowning out the speakers there with a pole-mounted bullhorn at ear-shattering volume: ¤ “Maybe some of you should have been aborted, you wicked, nasty disgusting, ungodly — I don’t even want to call you women! You are bloodthirsty animals!” ¤ “This is what happens when you allow women to emasculate men! God hates you!” ¤ “In the name of Jesus Christ, shut your vile, sick mouth!” ¤ They heckled a Black speaker: “Go to Chicago! Black-on-Black killing is off the charts! … You don’t mind taking the White man’s dollar when he wants to kill babies!”
It was the abortion debate in a nutshell. There were at least as many abortion rights activists in the crowd. They carried balloons saying “Bans Off Our Bodies,” and fake People magazine covers calling Justice Brett Kavanaugh the “Sexist Man Alive.” Some held a sit-in on Constitution Avenue. Some chanted “Ho-ho, hey-hey, abortion rights are here to stay.” Lawmakers and other speakers voiced earnest bromides: “Abortion is essential … Fair and equitable treatment … Oppression has no place in America.”
But the other side was louder, and full of rage. They displayed scores of posters showing bloody, larger-than-life fetuses and body parts. They got in faces. And they screamed. “You deserve capital punishment! … You deserve what’s coming to you! … You’re a vile, anti-God, anti-Christ sicko!”
This is what the Roberts Court has chosen to reward.
Overturning Roe will complete the court’s decline into political hackery that began with Bush v. Gore, continued with Citizens United (corporations are people!), accelerated with the gutting of the Civil Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, and reached terminal velocity with the virtual theft of a court seat by Senate Republicans in 2016. Now, after conservatives complained for years about the “arbitrary” standard of fetal viability, the justices are considering a more arbitrary standard of 15 weeks. Is it any wonder public confidence in the Supreme Court just hit a new low?
Justice Stephen Breyer, the court’s senior liberal, referred to the damage. “We have to have public support,” he said, “and that comes primarily from people believing that we do our job.” Breyer said Americans would conclude from the overturning of Roe that justices are “just politicians. And that’s what kills us as an American institution.”
… About half the states would effectively ban abortion once the Supreme Court rules, many without exceptions for rape or incest. Rich women could still travel for abortions. Poor women, and disproportionately women of color, would go to back alleys or be forced to give birth, often at risk to their lives.
Here’s whatever else is going on: “The court has never revoked a right that is so fundamental to so many Americans,” argued Biden administration solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar, “and so central to their ability to participate fully and equally in society.”
Until now, that is. Roe is dead. It’s all over but the shouting.
🐣 RT @timodc In October 2020 I wrote a detailed timeline positing that Trump had COVID during the 1st debate, endangered Biden, and covered it up. It turns out in his book Mark Meadows just…wrote it out. ¤ More in my latest: “Trump Tried To Kill Biden With COVID-19”
⋙ TheBulwark, Tim Miller: Trump Tried to Kill Biden with COVID-19 http://bit.ly/3lve1GF
// It turns out that Trump knew he had COVID at the first presidential debate, but lied about it. And then covered it up.
⋙⋙ TheBulwark, Tim Miller (Oct 2020): The Truth About Trump’s COVID Test Timeline http://bit.ly/31jMiBp
// 10/5/2020; Why the president is hiding his previous COVID tests and lying about what he knew and when.
WaPo, Aaron Blake: The reckless timeline of Trump’s positive coronavirus test http://wapo.st/3d9h82v //➔ like something out of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”
Donald Trump claimed more than a dozen times that he was the most transparent president in history. But according to a top aide and ally, when he tested positive for the coronavirus for the first time in the fall of 2020, his White House did not disclose it, went forward with events including one with veterans and a debate, and then spent weeks refusing to confirm reporters’ correct suspicions that it had hidden Trump’s diagnosis.
WaPo, Michael McFaul and Oleksiy Honcharuk: The best response to Russia’s threats is a closer relationship with Ukraine http://wapo.st/3rB5hlU
WaPo: House Jan. 6 committee votes to hold former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark in criminal contempt http://wapo.st/3ltYvux “The committee has portrayed Clark and Bannon as outliers, saying that more than 200 witnesses have already cooperated with the investigation”
⭕ 30 Nov 2021
WaPo: Tensions with Russia loom over NATO talks http://wapo.st/3d87Bss ““Part of [Russia’s] playbook is to attempt to create and manufacture a so-called provocation as justification for something that Russia is planning to do all along,” ~ Sec of State Anthony Blinken
NYT: Appeals Court Questions Trump’s Bid for Secrecy on Jan. 6 Papers http://nyti.ms/3DemrIi “At issue … is whether Mr. Trump is so likely to lose the case that the National Archives should be permitted to turn over batches of records to the House committee right away”
// The case presents the novel question of what happens when a current president and a former one disagree about invoking executive privilege.
At issue before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is whether Mr. Trump is so likely to lose the case that the National Archives should be permitted to turn over batches of records to the House committee right away, or whether they should stay blocked while the case is fully litigated.
🔊 WaPo, Ruth Marcus: The Rule of Six: A newly radicalized Supreme Court is poised to reshape the nation [with audio] http://wapo.st/3EahJg7 “Thiis is what they’ve been scheming for” ~ Ruth Marcus on @TheLastWord with @Lawrence
WaPo: Prosecutors demanded records of Sidney Powell’s fundraising groups as part of criminal probe http://wapo.st/3Eafych “Defending the Republic contributed $550,000 to fund a Republican-commissioned review of nearly 2.1 million ballots cast last year in Arizona”
// A subpoena issued by the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. sought communications and other documents related to fundraising and accounting by Defending the Republic
WaPo: Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows cooperating with Jan. 6 committee http://wapo.st/3D3R3MI
// Meadows has provided records to the committee investigating the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob and will give a deposition
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING :: HUGE :: Trump called the Willard from the White House multiple times on the night of 1/5 and spoke to his lieutenants in the War Room about how to stop the certification of the election. I speak with the Guardian on today’s @dailybeanspod
🔆 This❗️⋙ TheGuardian: Trump called aides hours before Capitol riot to discuss how to stop Biden victory http://bit.ly/3FZ2tDd “Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard”
// Sources tell Guardian Trump pressed lieutenants at Willard hotel in Washington about ways to delay certification of election result
⋙⋙ ⋙ 🐣 (still no indication Trump knew or planned the breach of the Capitol, though he was in no hurry to call it off)
Hours before the deadly attack on the US Capitol this year, Donald Trump made several calls from the White House to top lieutenants at the Willard hotel in Washington and talked about ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win from taking place on 6 January.
The former president first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his largely ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term.
But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January, and delay the certification process to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.
The former president’s remarks came as part of strategy discussions he had from the White House with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification.
Multiple sources, speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, described Trump’s involvement in the effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard. The conversations also show Trump’s thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack and halted Biden’s certification, until it was later ratified by Congress.
The former president’s call to the Willard hotel about stopping Biden’s certification is increasingly a central focus of the House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol attack, as it raises the specter of a possible connection between Trump and the insurrection.
Several Trump lawyers at the Willard that night deny Trump sought to stop the certification of Biden’s election win. They say they only considered delaying Biden’s certification at the request of state legislators because of voter fraud.
The former president made several calls to the lieutenants at the Willard the night before 6 January. He phoned the lawyers and the non-lawyers separately, as Giuliani did not want non-lawyers to participate on legal calls and jeopardise attorney-client privilege.
Trump’s call to the lieutenants came a day after Eastman, a late addition to the Trump legal team, outlined at a 4 January meeting at the White House how he thought Pence could usurp his role in order to stop Biden’s certification from happening at the joint session.
At the meeting, which was held in the Oval Office and attended by Trump, Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short and his legal counsel Greg Jacob, Eastman presented a memo that detailed how Pence could insert himself into the certification and delay the process.
The memo outlined several ways for Pence to commandeer his role at the joint session, including throwing the election to the House, or adjourning the session to give states time to send slates of electors for Trump on the basis of election fraud – Eastman’s preference.
Then– acting attorney general Jeff Rosen and his predecessor, Bill Barr, who had both been appointed by Trump, had already determined there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the 2020 election.
Eastman told the Guardian last month that the memo only presented scenarios and was not intended as advice. “The advice I gave the vice-president very explicitly was that I did not think he had the authority simply to declare which electors to count,” Eastman said.
Trump seized on the memo – first reported by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril – and pushed Pence to adopt the schemes, which some of the other lieutenants at the Willard later told Trump were legitimate ways to flip the election.
But Pence resisted Trump’s entreaties, and told him in the Oval Office the next day that Trump should count him out of whatever plans he had to subvert the results of the 2020 election at the joint session, because he did not intend to take part.
Trump was furious at Pence for refusing to do him a final favor when, in the critical moment underpinning the effort to reinstall Trump as president, he phoned lieutenants at the Willard sometime between the late evening on 5 January and the early hours of 6 January.
From the White House, Trump made several calls to lieutenants, including Giuliani, Eastman, Epshteyn and Bannon, who were huddled in suites complete with espresso machines and Cokes in a mini-fridge in the north-west corner of the hotel.
On the calls, the former president first recounted what had transpired in the Oval Office meeting with Pence, informing Bannon and the lawyers at the Willard that his vice-president appeared ready to abandon him at the joint session in several hours’ time.
“He’s arrogant,” Trump, for instance, told Bannon of Pence – his own way of communicating that Pence was unlikely to play ball – in an exchange reported in Peril and confirmed by the Guardian.
But on at least one of those calls, Trump also sought from the lawyers at the Willard ways to stop the joint session to ensure Biden would not be certified as president on 6 January, as part of a wider discussion about buying time to get states to send Trump electors.
The fallback that Trump and his lieutenants appeared to settle on was to cajole Republican members of Congress to raise enough objections so that even without Pence adjourning the joint session, the certification process would be delayed for states to send Trump slates.
It was not clear whether Trump discussed on the call about the prospect of stopping Biden’s certification by any means if Pence refused to insert himself into the process, but the former president is said to have enjoyed watching the insurrection unfold from the dining room.
But the fact that Trump considered ways to stop the joint session may help to explain why he was so reluctant to call off the rioters and why Republican senator Ben Sasse told conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt that he heard Trump seemed “delighted” about the attack.
The lead Trump lawyer at the Willard, Giuliani, appearing to follow that fallback plan, called at least one Republican senator later that same evening, asking him to help keep Congress adjourned and stall the joint session beyond 6 January.
In a voicemail recorded at about 7pm on 6 January, and reported by the Dispatch, Giuliani implored Republican senator Tommy Tuberville to object to 10 states Biden won once Congress reconvened at 8pm, a process that would have concluded 15 hours later, close to 7 January.
“The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow – ideally until the end of tomorrow,” Giuliani said.
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment on this account of Trump’s call. Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment. Eastman, Epshteyn and Bannon declined to comment.
Trump made several calls the day before the Capitol attack from both the White House residence, his preferred place to work, as well as the West Wing, but it was not certain from which location he phoned his top lieutenants at the Willard.
The White House residence and its Yellow Oval Room – a Trump favorite – is significant since communications there, including from a desk phone, are not automatically memorialized in records sent to the National Archives after the end of an administration.
But even if Trump called his lieutenants from the West Wing, the select committee may not be able to fully uncover the extent of his involvement in the events of 6 January, unless House investigators secure testimony from individuals with knowledge of the calls.
That difficulty arises since calls from the White House are not necessarily recorded, and call detail records that the select committee is suing to pry free from the National Archives over Trump’s objections about executive privilege, only show the destination of the calls.
House select committee investigators last week opened a new line of inquiry into activities at the Willard hotel, just across the street from the White House, issuing subpoenas to Eastman and former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik, an assistant to Giuliani.
The chairman of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, said in a statement that the panel was pursuing the Trump officials at the Willard to uncover “every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress”.
⭕ 29 Nov 2021
CNN: Patriots 45 MAGA Gang’ planned violence on January 6, prosecutors say http://cnn.it/3ph0Wlr
Federal prosecutors have indicted a trio of alleged US Capitol rioters — including one who is accused of assaulting DC police officer Michael Fanone — for planning to be violent together on January 6, according to court records and a Justice Department statement on Monday.
One defendant, Edward Badalian, a 26-year-old from California, allegedly wrote to his co-defendants “We need to violently remove traitors and if they are in key positions rapidly replace them with able bodied Patriots,” according to the indictment. ¤ “We don’t want to fight antifa lol we want to arrest traitors,” he also wrote.
The group communicated on Telegram under the name “Patriots 45 MAGA Gang,” prosecutors said, riffing about their anger toward officials who supported the 2020 election result and gloating about the violence of the siege. They also attended pro-Trump and anti-coronavirus mask mandate rallies in Southern California, prosecutors said.
Before January 6, they collected weapons and gear, including a stun gun, pepper spray, gas masks and walkie-talkies, and traveled together to the January 6 Stop the Steal rallies, according to the Justice Department. The day before the riot, they “joined a caravan” in Kentucky headed toward DC, setting up a radio app on cellphones so the caravan could communicate, the indictment said.
Badalian and another defendant, Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, “used the Patriots 45 group chat as a platform to advocate violence against certain groups and individuals that either supported the 2020 presidential election results, supported what the group perceived as liberal, or communist ideologies, or held positions of authority in the government,” prosecutors wrote. ¤ The prosecutors noted that Badalian told another person he wanted to assassinate Joe Biden
The third defendant’s name is still under seal. The third defendant, on January 6 at the Ellipse, asked another person via text to “roll in force” with the group and texted at almost 2 p.m. “the battle has begun,” the indictment said.
The unnamed defendant and Rodriguez then scuffled with police at entryways to the Capitol with Rodriguez hurling a flagpole and discharging a fire extinguisher and the unnamed defendant telling officers “liberty or death, gentlemen!” according to the indictment.
This is a notable new conspiracy case in the January 6 dragnet, which has arrested nearly 700 federal defendants. The Justice Department has already pursued several high-profile groups of defendants including members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for allegedly planning or coordinating their participation in the riot. The conspiracy cases and the police assault cases are some of the most serious allegations against January 6 riot participants, and the indictment related to the “Patriots 45 MAGA Gang” group combines both of those types of charges. ¤ The Justice Department charged has previously charged Rodriguez with using a stun gun on DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone.
CNN: World’s first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say http://cnn.it/3d9cwJn “The research was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency” (DARPA)
// #TheBlacklist
🐣 RT @anders_aslund Today @ZelenskyyUa dismissed the highly considered head of SBU counterintelligence Major General Aleksandr Rusnak, whom he appointed in September 2019. ¤ What is going on?!
💙 🖼 WaPo: Jill Biden’s first White House Christmas brings back a warmer, simpler vibe http://wapo.st/3FVZ73S The gingerbread White House is surrounded by community buildings, including a school, a hospital, a police station, a post office and a fire station
// The first lady chose “Gifts From the Heart” as this year’s theme, filling rooms with shooting stars and peace doves
WaPo: Jan. 6 committee prepares to hold former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark in criminal contempt http://wapo.st/31cxF2X “[T]he committee could move to hold yet another witness, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in contempt before the week is over”
WaPo: Trump allies work to place supporters in key election posts across the country, spurring fears about future vote challenges http://wapo.st/3pfMpGi “… including volunteer poll watchers, paid precinct judges, elected county clerks and state attorneys general”
⭕ 28 Nov 2021
Politico: DOJ: Bannon attempting ‘frivolous’ effort to turn court case into media spectacle http://politi.co/3lj3wpH “The defense’s misleading claims, failure to confer, unexplained wholesale opposition, and extrajudicial statements make clear the defense’s real purpose” ~ DOJ
// Prosecutors seek to turn ex-Trump aide’s combative out-of-court statements against him.
The Justice Department on Sunday night accused Steve Bannon’s defense team of lodging “frivolous” legal complaints in order to cause a public dust-up with prosecutors as he battles criminal charges for attempting to thwart the House’s Jan. 6 select committee.
In a 10-page filing, prosecutors said an attorney for Bannon, Evan Corcoran, had repeatedly rebuffed their efforts to negotiate an evidence-sharing agreement, a standard part of the process in criminal trials. Instead, the prosecution said, Bannon’s defense used a public court filing Wednesday — and a statement to the Washington Post — to complain about the case.
“The defense’s misleading claims, failure to confer, unexplained wholesale opposition, and extrajudicial statements make clear the defense’s real purpose: to abuse criminal discovery to try this case in the media rather than in court,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Vaughn wrote.
⭕ 27 Nov 2021
🐣 RT @McFaul Deterring Russian aggression in Europe is a major challenge for the free world. NATO’s intellectual and physical resources should remain laser-like focused on this vital security objective.
⭕ 26 Nov 2021
🧵 RT @duty2warn Democracy is hard. It’s about process, debate, and the common good. It doesn’t rely on sound bites and slogans. It doesn’t peddle irrational fear, and it doesn’t hit you on the head with hyperbole. Democracy requires a majority willing and able to distinguish truth from untruth. 📌 https://twitter.com/duty2warn/status/1464270414419431434?s=20
🧵 RT @richsignorelli Given speculation as to whether Trump is being investigated for his fed crimes, I would like to provide an overview of some of the investigatory methods available to @TheJusticeDept w/ regard to prosecuting Trump, et al & whether such methods would be publicized at this time: 📌 1/ https://twitter.com/richsignorelli/status/1464281200026177542?s=20
⭕ 25 Nov 2021
NYT: A Trump Investigation Enters a Critical Phase http://nyti.ms/30ZL0M9
// New developments come as Cyrus Vance Jr., the prosecutor overseeing the inquiry, enters his final weeks as Manhattan district attorney.
🐣 RT @TheAtlantic “The usual suspects in the pro-Trump media ecosystem will of course endorse and repeat everything Trump says, no matter how outlandish. But it’s not pro-Trumpers who are leading the latest round of Trump-Russia denialism,” @davidfrum writes:
⋙ 🐣 RT @arianapikary @davidfrum at it again, reminding media of all stripes: “The factual record on Trump-Russia has been set forth most authoritatively by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina.”
💙 ⋙⋙ TheAtlantic, David Frum: It Wasn’t a Hoax http://bit.ly/3HSOTmK
// People with scant illusions about Trump are volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.
… The usual suspects in the pro-Trump media ecosystem will of course endorse and repeat everything Trump says, no matter how outlandish. But it’s not pro-Trumpers who are leading the latest round of Trump-Russia denialism. This newest round of excuse-making is being sounded from more respectable quarters, in many cases by people distinguished as Trump critics. …
The factual record on Trump-Russiahas been set forth most authoritatively by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee (pdf: http://bit.ly/3ayY0c1 966p) then chaired by Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina. I’ll reduce the complex details to a very few agreed upon by virtually everybody outside the core Trump-propaganda group.
● Dating back to at least 2006, Trump and his companies did tens of millions of dollars of business with Russian individuals and other buyers whose profiles raised the possibility of money laundering. More than one-fifth of all the condominiums sold by Trump over his career were purchased in all-cash transactions by shell companies, a 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found.
● In 2013, Trump’s pursuit of Russian business intensified. That year, he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Around that time, Trump opened discussions on the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow, from which he hoped to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars, if the project advanced to completion,” in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
● Trump continued to pursue the Tower deal for a year after he declared himself a candidate for president. “By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found. Trump’s representatives directly lobbied aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in January 2016. Yet repeatedly during the 2016 campaign, Trump falsely stated that he had no business with Russia—perhaps most notably in his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, in October 2016.
● Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to “harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Again, that’s from the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
● The Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos “likely learned about the Russian active measures campaign as early as April 2016,” the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote. In May 2016, Papadopoulos indiscreetly talked with Alexander Downer, then the Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, about Russia’s plot to intervene in the U.S. election to hurt Clinton and help Trump. Downer described the conversation in a report to his government. By long-standing agreement, Australia shares intelligence with the U.S. government. It was Papadopoulos’s blurt to Downer that set in motion the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, a revelation authoritatively reported more than three years ago.
● In June 2016, the Trump campaign received a request for a meeting from a Russian lawyer offering harmful information on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump advisers accepted the meeting. The Trump team did not obtain the dirt they’d hoped for. But the very fact of the meeting confirmed to the Russian side the Trump campaign’s eagerness to accept Russian assistance. Shortly after, Trump delivered his “Russia, if you’re listening” invitation at his last press conference of the campaign.
● WikiLeaks released two big caches of hacked Democratic emails in July and October 2016. In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”
● Through its ally Roger Stone, the Trump campaign team assiduously tried to communicate with WikiLeaks. Before the second WikiLeaks release, “Trump and the Campaign believed that Stone had inside information and expressed satisfaction that Stone’s information suggested more releases would be forthcoming,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In late summer and early fall 2016, Stone repeatedly predicted that WikiLeaks would publish an “October surprise” that would harm the Clinton campaign.
● At the same time as it welcomed Russian help, the Trump campaign denied and covered up Russian involvement: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the Intelligence Committee found.
● In March 2016, the Trump campaign accepted the unpaid services of Paul Manafort, deeply beholden to deeply shady Russian business and political figures. “On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with a man the Intelligence Committee identified as a Russian intelligence officer. “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services … represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee found. Through 2016, the Russian state launched a massive Facebook disinformation program that aligned with the Trump campaign strategy.
● At crucial moments in the 2016 election, Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals: scoffing at NATO support for Estonia, denigrating allies such as Germany, and endorsing Britain’s exit from the European Union.
● Throughout the 2016 election and after, people close to Trump got themselves into serious legal and political trouble by lying to the public, to Congress, and even to the FBI about their Russian connections.The confirmed record may not add up to a criminal conspiracy either, not as that concept is defined by U.S. law. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team stated that they could not prove any such conspiracy. But the confirmed record suggests an impressive record of cooperation toward a common aim—even if the terms of the cooperation were not directly communicated by one party to the other.
Since Donald Trump declared for president in 2015, it’s seldom been possible to get to the bottom of one scandal before Trump distracts attention with a bigger and worse scandal. For more than a year, the United States has been convulsed by Trump’s frontal assault on election integrity and the peaceful transfer of power. He has, one by one, eliminated from politics Republicans who upheld the rule of law, and urged their replacement by stooges who repeat his Big Lie. Republican candidates for office talk more and more explicitly about taking power by violence if necessary. These dark threats have understandably overwhelmed the effort to fill in the blanks of the Trump-Russia scandal of yesteryear. …
The Steele dossier undertook to answer the question “What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia?” The Senate Intelligence Committee found that the FBI investigation gave the Steele dossier “unjustified credence.” But the disintegration of the dossier’s answers has not silenced the power of its question.
It was to silence that question that the outgoing Trump administration appointed a special counsel of its own to investigate its investigators. John Durham has now issued three indictments, all for lying to the FBI about various aspects of the Steele dossier. None of these indictments vindicate Trump’s claims in any way. It remains fact that Russian hackers and spies helped his campaign. It remains fact that the Trump campaign welcomed the help. It remains fact that Trump’s campaign chairman sought to share proprietary campaign information with a person whom the Senate report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.” It remains fact that Trump hoped to score a huge payday in Russia even as he ran for president. It remains fact that Trump and those around him lied, and lied, and lied again about their connections to Russia.
Anti-anti-Trump journalists want to use the Steele controversy to score points off politicians and media institutions that they dislike. But as media malpractice goes, credulous reliance upon the Steele dossier is just a speck compared with—for example—the willingness of the top-rated shows on Fox News to promote the fantasy that the Democratic Party hacked itself, then murdered a staffer named Seth Rich to cover up the self-hack. (Some versions of this false claim include suggesting that Rich himself committed the crime.) Fox News ultimately settled with Rich’s family for an undisclosed sum even as the Fox host who had done most to promote the false story insisted on his radio show that he had retracted nothing. The story was crazy and cruel. But the story protected Trump, and that was proof enough for a media organization much more powerful than any of those that accepted the Steele dossier. …
Related:
● Franklin Foer (8/19/2020): Russiagate was not a hoax http://bit.ly/2ZtRzpC
● Franklin Foer (June 2020) Putin is well on his way to stealing the next election http://bit.ly/3bqCrZM
● Jurecic & Wittes (5/5/2020): To Trump, ‘Complete and Total Exoneration’ Is Always Right Around the Corner http://bit.ly/3CSDlfz
⭕ 24 Nov 2021
WaPo, Vladimir Kara-Murza: A congressional proposal reveals the Kremlin’s Achilles’ heel http://wapo.st/3r82WyP House Res. 806 “stipulates that any attempt by Putin to remain in power after the end of his final term in 2024 ‘shall warrant nonrecognition [by] the United States’”
Rarely has a congressional resolution jolted the halls of power in Moscow as did House Resolution 806, a bipartisan initiative introduced last week. In a two-page draft referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) offer the “sense of the House of Representatives” that recent constitutional amendments in Russia waiving President Vladimir Putin’s term limits were “illegitimate.” The text further stipulates that any attempt by Putin to remain in power after the end of his final term in 2024 “shall warrant nonrecognition on the part of the United States.”
The proposal should not come as a surprise. Extensive legal analyses have concluded that last year’s amendments enabling Putin to become, in effect, president for life were adopted with serious breaches of legal procedure. Among other things, the process violated the legal requirements that amendments be passed individually rather than en bloc and that the meaning of the first two chapters of the Constitution should remain unchanged. The farcical “plebiscite” that ratified them violated both domestic electoral law and Russia’s commitments to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
A March legal opinion from the Venice Commission — the top legal body of the Council of Europe, which includes Russia — assessed the amendments as “a serious danger for the rule of law” and the procedure for their enactment as “clearly inappropriate.” In September, the European Parliament called the amendments “illegal” and condemned “any attempt by President Putin to remain in office beyond the end of his current and final presidential mandate on 7 May 2024.” The Kremlin and its talking heads responded with customary criticism.
Needless to say, the House proposal is neither provocative nor unusual. The notion of withholding recognition from illegitimate foreign rulers is well entrenched in U.S. foreign policy precedent — from President Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to recognize self-proclaimed Mexican leader Victoriano Huerta to President Ronald Reagan’s withdrawal of recognition from Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos. More recently, and more relevantly, the United States refused to accept the fraudulent election “victories” of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. To this day, the two men are not recognized by Washington as legitimate leaders. Given the similarities between the regimes in Belarus and Russia, derecognition of Putin would bring a welcome consistency to U.S. diplomatic standards.
The difference, of course, would be in the impact. However authoritarian and corrupt at home, the regimes of Maduro and Lukashenko are not as integrated as Putin’s into the global system, and not as dependent on their stakeholders’ personal access to Western countries, banks and financial institutions. Kremlin officials and oligarchs have long treated our country as a looting ground — while taking the spoils of their loot to the West, where their money is protected by the very same rule of law they deny our citizens. It is estimated that private Russian assets abroad range from $800 billion to $1.3 trillion, with much of this wealth likely linked to Putin himself. Recent exposés by investigative journalists, including the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers, offered only small glimpses into the vast foreign holdings of Putin’s inner circle.
WSJ: Trump’s False Claims of Voter Fraud Test GOP Candidates http://on.wsj.com/3l969Ky
// Former President Donald Trump’s campaign falsely claiming he won the 2020 election and demanding redress is turning voter fraud into a litmus test for Republicans seeking office in the 2022 House and Senate elections. The Wall Street Journal’s Alex Corse tells WSJ What’s News host Peter Granitz what this means for GOP candidates and voter confidence in the electoral system.
WaPo: CIA director warns Russian spies of ‘consequences’ if they are behind ‘Havana Syndrome’ incidents http://wapo.st/30TWRuM
CIA Director William J. Burns delivered a confidential warning to Russia’s top intelligence services that they will face “consequences” if they are behind the string of mysterious health incidents known as “Havana Syndrome” afflicting U.S. diplomats and spies around the world, according to U.S. officials familiar with the exchange.
During a visit to Moscow earlier this month, Burns raised the issue with the leadership of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, and the country’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. He told them that causing U.S. personnel and their family members to suffer severe brain damage and other debilitating ailments would go beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior for a “professional intelligence service,” said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss highly sensitive conversations.
The main purpose of Burns’s trip to Moscow was to put the Kremlin on notice that Washington was watching its troop buildup on the border of Ukraine and would not tolerate a military attack on the country, officials said. ¤ His appearance in Moscow at the behest of President Biden was designed to convey Washington’s seriousness. The CIA chief — a former deputy secretary of state and ambassador to Russia — has handled some of the president’s most sensitive missions, including senior-level engagement with the Taliban after its takeover of Afghanistan.
⭕ 23 Nov 2021
WaPo: Spencer, Kessler, Cantwell and other white supremacists found liable in deadly Unite the Right rally http://wapo.st/3r7UnnA
💽 TheHill: Wray says FBI domestic terrorism caseload has ‘exploded’ since last year http://bit.ly/3xfSkyO
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday testified to a Senate committee that his agency’s domestic terrorism caseload had “exploded” since early 2020, in particular cases involving racially or ethnically motivated crimes.
“Since the spring of 2020, so for the past 16, 18 months or so, we have more than doubled our domestic terrorism caseload from about 1,000 to around 2,700 investigations, and we have surged personnel to match, more than doubling the amount of people working that threat than the year before,” Wray testified during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on threats to the homeland.
“Certainly, the domestic terrorism caseload has exploded, and meanwhile the international terrorism caseload hasn’t subsided,” Wray said later during questioning from senators.
Wray noted that the “biggest chunk” of racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism the FBI tracks is now “favoring white supremacy.” ¤ “We collect information about that threat. We have, as you say, prioritized that threat at a national threat priority level,” Wray said.
Wray’s testimony came a year after he testified to the House Homeland Security Committee that racially motivated violent extremism was the main issue pursued within FBI domestic terrorism cases. ¤ It also came as the FBI continues to respond to and investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, an issue Wray noted in his written testimony the FBI perceives as domestic terrorism.
Social media was used to help organize the Jan. 6 incident. Wray stressed Tuesday that the use of social media has transformed domestic terrorism and helped connect those who previously might not have posed a threat. ¤ “Some of these same people before might have been stewing away in the basement or the attic in one part of the country and not communicating with each other, but today terrorism moves at the speed of social media,” Wray said. ¤ “You have the ability of lone actors disgruntled in one part of the country to spin up similar, like-minded individuals in other parts of the country and urge them into action or inspire them into action,” he added.
WaPo Editorial: America is sick with information disorder. Time for a cure. http://wapo.st/3cFlP3R “[T]wo forces — existing misconceptions and social media’s tools that amplify them — work in tandem. Any … strategy to treat the country’s information disorder must do the same”
“Information disorder” is a malady that comes in many forms, from made-up news to manipulated media to misunderstood satire. According to a six-month investigation by a commission at the Aspen Institute, the United States is not trying nearly hard enough to find a cure.
Disinformation, the authors say, often isn’t about persuading people to believe something new but about giving them permission to believe things they were inclined to think from the start — exploiting bigotry and division where it already exists rather than creating it where it doesn’t. At the same time, these malignant campaigns are real, and require concrete action to confront. The Aspen Institute’s report recognizes that these two forces — existing misconceptions and social media’s tools that amplify them — work in tandem. Any comprehensive government strategy to treat the country’s information disorder must do the same.
⋙ 💙❤️📔 AspenInstitute: Commission on Information Disorder [pdf] http://bit.ly/3HO86WE 80p
// Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises. When bad information becomes as prevalent, persuasive, and persistent as good information, it creates a chain reaction of harm.
🐣 RT @January6thCmte BREAKING: The Select Committee subpoenas individuals and organizations linked to the violent attack on the Capitol:
• Proud Boys International, L.L.C.
• Henry “Enrique” Tarrio (Leader of Proud Boys)
• Oath Keepers
• Elmer Stewart Rhodes (President of Oath Keepers)
• Robert Patrick Lewis (Chairman) / 1st Amendment Praetorian
⋙ 🐣 RT @January6thCmte We believe the individuals and organizations we subpoenaed today have relevant information about how violence erupted at the Capitol and the preparation leading up to this violent attack.
🔆 This❗️⋙ January6th.house.gov: Select Committee Subpoenas Groups and Individuals Linked to Violent Attack on the Capitol on January 6th http://bit.ly/32xByjH
“The Select Committee is seeking information from individuals and organizations reportedly involved with planning the attack, with the violent mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, or with efforts to overturn the results of the election. We believe the individuals and organizations we subpoenaed today have relevant information about how violence erupted at the Capitol and the preparation leading up to this violent attack. The Select Committee is moving swiftly to uncover the facts of what happened on that day and we expect every witness to comply with the law and cooperate so we can get answers to the American people.”
The Select Committee issued subpoenas for records and testimony from three organizations and a number of associated individuals.
Members of Proud Boys International, L.L.C., called for violence leading up to January 6th, and at least 34 individuals affiliated with the Proud Boys have been indicted by the Department of Justice in relation to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Many individuals associated with the Proud Boys repeatedly spread the former President’s unsupported claim that the 2020 election was stolen and suggested the use of force against police officers and government officials. Henry “Enrique” Tarrio was Chairman of the Proud Boys during the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Though Mr. Tarrio was prevented from entering Washington, D.C., on January 6th, he was allegedly involved in the Proud Boys’ preparation for the events at the Capitol.
Individuals associated with the Oath Keepers organization were similarly involved in planning and participating in the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6th. Eighteen members of the Oath Keepers were indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly planning a coordinated attack to storm the Capitol, including by traveling to Washington, D.C., with paramilitary gear and supplies. Elmer Stewart Rhodes is President of the Oath Keepers. Prior to January 6th, Mr. Rhodes repeatedly suggested the Oath Keepers should engage in violence to ensure their preferred election outcome. On January 6th, Mr. Rhodes was allegedly in contact with several of the indicted Oath Keepers members before, during, and after the Capitol attack, including meeting some of them outside the Capitol.
1st Amendment Praetorian is an organization that provided security at multiple rallies leading up to January 6th that amplified the former President’s unsupported claim that the election was stolen. On January 4th, the 1st Amendment Praetorian Twitter account suggested that violence was imminent. Robert Patrick Lewis, Chairman of 1st Amendment Praetorian, was listed as a speaker on the permit for the January 5th rally on Freedom Plaza. On January 6th, Mr. Lewis tweeted: “Today is the day that true battles begin.” The day after, Mr. Lewis claimed that he was involved in “war-gaming” to continue efforts to overturn the election results.
The letters to the witnesses can be found here:
● Proud Boys International, L.L.C.
● Henry “Enrique” Tarrio
● Oath Keepers
● Elmer Stewart Rhodes
● Robert Patrick Lewis/1st Amendment Praetorian
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Verdict reached in Charlottesville Unite the Right rally trial http://wapo.st/3r7UnnA “The jury … awarded $500,000 in punitive damages against all 12 individual defendants, and $1 million against five white nationalist organizations on that conspiracy count”
WaPo: House Jan. 6 committee intensifies focus on law enforcement failures that preceded Capitol attack http://wapo.st/3FGNyxh They are “scrutinizing in particular multiple warnings of possible violence that went unheeded by the FBI”
⭕ 22 Nov 2021
WaPo: Judge orders two lawyers who filed suit challenging 2020 election to pay hefty fees: ‘They need to take responsibility’ http://wapo.st/3xcURdj The judge called the suit “the stuff of which violent insurrections are made”
NYT: Court Urged to Let Jan. 6 Panel See Trump White House Files http://nyti.ms/3HJ9nhJ
// In appellate briefs, lawyers for the House and the Justice Department argued against the former president’s claim of executive privilege.
⋙ 💙📔 House Brief [pdf] http://bit.ly/3FCnnrG 69p [Begin p16 for Chronology]
⋙ 📔 DOJ Brief [pdf] http://bit.ly/3DQQS8Q 65p
In a 69-page brief, lawyers for the House urged the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to permit the House committee investigating the riot to see the files without waiting for litigation over Mr. Trump’s privilege claim to be fully resolved.
They stressed that the constitutional privilege exists to protect the executive branch, not an individual person, and that the incumbent president had declined to assert the privilege in this case. The lawyers for the House called Mr. Trump’s assertion of executive privilege “unprecedented and deeply flawed” and said the judiciary should not permit it to interfere with the work of Congress.
Earlier this month, a Federal District Court judge in the District of Columbia, Tanya Chutkan, ruled that Congress’s constitutional oversight powers, backed by Mr. Biden, outweighed Mr. Trump’s residual secrecy powers, so the National Archives could proceed with its plan to turn over tranches of the files on a rolling basis.
Judge Chutkan declined a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to nevertheless block the agency from providing the files to Congress while they appealed her ruling. But a three-judge panel of the appeals court instituted a short-term hold. It has scheduled arguments for Nov. 30.
Both as president and now out of office, Mr. Trump has pursued a strategy of using the slow pace of litigation to run out the clock on congressional oversight efforts. In a brief last week, Jesse R. Binnall, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, argued that the appeals court should keep the hold in place while the issues are fully litigated.
But in a separate 65-page brief filed on Monday, the Justice Department, which is representing the National Archives, also urged the appeals court panel to defer to Mr. Biden’s decision that the circumstances of the Jan. 6 attack were so extraordinary that they justified making an exception to the executive branch’s general interest in protecting the confidentiality of presidential records.
Politico: Capitol riot suspect’s court hearing turns to potential criminal charge for Trump http://politi.co/3r1eDqR
// The judge and lawyers discuss whether the then-president’s pressure on Vice President Mike Pence could have amounted to obstruction.
≣ Jan6Committee: Select Committee Subpoenas Individuals Involved in Planning and Organizing the Rallies and March Preceding January 6th Attack http://bit.ly/30OFHyC including Alex Jones and Roger Stone; links to letters
// Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
“The Select Committee is seeking information about the rallies and subsequent march to the Capitol that escalated into a violent mob attacking the Capitol and threatening our democracy. We need to know who organized, planned, paid for, and received funds related to those events, as well as what communications organizers had with officials in the White House and Congress. We believe the witnesses we subpoenaed today have relevant information and we expect them to cooperate fully with our effort to get answers for the American people about the violence of January 6th.”
The Select Committee issued subpoenas for records and testimony to the following individuals:
Dustin Stockton, who reportedly assisted in organizing a series of rallies after the November 2020 election advancing unsupported claims about the election’s outcome, including the rally at the Ellipse on January 6th immediately preceding the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Mr. Stockton reportedly was concerned that the rally at the Ellipse would lead to a march to the Capitol that would mean “possible danger” which he said “felt unsafe,” and these concerns were escalated to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Jennifer Lawrence, who along with her fiancé, Mr. Stockton, reportedly was involved in organizing rallies following the November 2020 Election, including the Ellipse rally in Washington, DC on January 6th that immediately preceded the violent attack on the Capitol.
Taylor Budowich, who reportedly solicited a 501c(4) organization to conduct a social media and radio advertising campaign encouraging attendance at the January 6th Ellipse rally and advancing unsupported claims about the result of the election.
Roger Stone was reportedly in Washington on January 5th and 6th, spoke at rallies on January 5th, and was slated to speak at the January 6th rally at the Ellipse that directly preceded the violent attack on the Capitol. Before traveling to Washington, Mr. Stone promoted his attendance at the rallies and solicited support to pay for security through the website stopthesteal.org. While in Washington, Mr. Stone reportedly used members of the Oath Keepers as personal security guards, at least one of whom has been indicted for his involvement in the attack on the Capitol. Mr. Stone has made remarks that he was planning to “lead a march to the Capitol” from the Ellipse rally.
Alex Jones reportedly helped organize the rally at the Ellipse on January 6th that immediately preceded the attack on the Capitol, including by facilitating a donation to provide what he described as “eighty percent” of the funding. Mr. Jones spoke at the January 5th rally on Freedom Plaza that was sponsored by the Eighty Percent Coalition. Mr. Jones has stated that he was told by the White House that he was to lead a march from the January 6th Ellipse rally to the Capitol, where President Trump would meet the group and speak. Mr. Jones has repeatedly promoted unsupported allegations of election fraud, including encouraging individuals to attend the Ellipse rally on January 6th and implying he had knowledge about the plans of the former President with respect to the rally.
The letters to the witnesses can be found here:
Duston Stockton
Jennifer Lawrence
Taylor Budowich
Roger Stone
Alex Jones
CNN: New January 6 committee subpoenas issued for 5 Trump allies including Roger Stone and Alex Jones http://cnn.it/30M1wPV
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Roger Stone and Alex Jones subpoenaed by House committee investigating Jan. 6 attack on Capitol by pro-Trump mob http://wapo.st/3xbZHau
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: U.S. listed as a ‘backsliding’ democracy for first time in report by European think tank http://wapo.st/3kZPfye “The U.S, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself“ ~ International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy 2021
⋙ 📔🐣 The International IDEA*’s Global State of Democracy 2021 Report: http://bit.ly/30OUnh6 *The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
// “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” the International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy 2021 report said.
🐣 RT @EJDionne “GOP congressman urges supporters to be ‘armed’ and ‘dangerous’…The more one of the nation’s major political parties is ‘tolerant of at least some persistent level of violence in American discourse,’ the scarier our public life will become.”@stevebenen
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, Steve Benen: GOP congressman urges supporters to be ‘armed’ and ‘dangerous’ http://on.msnbc.com/30UlCqU
// Following the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Rep. Madison Cawthorn told his allies, “Be armed, be dangerous and be moral.”
WaPo: N.Y. prosecutors set sights on new Trump target: Widely different valuations on the same properties http://wapo.st/3FFltqk (This isn’t “new”)
// Records gathered by prosecutors suggest the Trump Organization used high or low values on the same properties to get tax breaks or to impress lenders.
NYT: Trying to Blur Memories of the Gulag, Russia Targets a Rights Group http://nyti.ms/3qYKpoD
//. Prosecutors are trying to shut down Memorial International, Russia’s most prominent human rights group, as the Kremlin moves to control the historical narrative of the Soviet Union.
WaPo, Max Boot: Republicans are fomenting violent extremism — and are also hostage to the extremists http://wapo.st/3xfsuLC “We are at the greatest peril since the early 1970s — when the threat emanated from the left — of a violent insurgency in America”
The United States has a serious problem with political violence, particularly right-wing violence, which has overtaken Islamist attacks as the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat. The list of right-wing outrages includes Oklahoma City 1995 (168 dead), Pittsburgh 2018 (11 dead) and El Paso 2019 (23 dead). The 2020 Kenosha, Wis., shooting, which left two dead, is part of the same alarming trend. Even though Kyle Rittenhouse was found last week to have acted in self-defense, he remains morally culpable for showing up with an assault-style rifle at a protest, looking for trouble.
In many other instances — e.g., the 2018 pipe bombing attempts targeting critics of President Donald Trump — tragedy was only narrowly averted. The Jan. 6 riot was both horrible and not nearly as bad as it could have been: Though 140 police officers were injured in the worst assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812, the insurrectionists did not succeed in killing or kidnapping any lawmakers.
Faced with this alarming trend, a responsible political party would damp down its incendiary rhetoric and urge its supporters to moderate their zeal. That is not what Republicans are doing. They continue to fan the flames of hatred, violence and division.
Many on the right routinely depict Democrats as America’s enemies. At one recent conference, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said, “The left hates America,” while Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said: “Their grand ambition is to deconstruct the United States of America.” At the same time, Republicans make a fetish of gun ownership and use; weapons of war are the hottest fashion accessory in GOP campaign ads.
The message many Republicans receive is that violence is justified to save the United States from a leftist takeover. An audience member at a pro-Trump event spoke for many when he asked: “When do we get to use the guns?”
An American Enterprise Institute poll found that 39 percent of Republicans believe, “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” Another survey by the University of Chicago found that 21 million adults believe the “use of force is justified” to restore Trump to the presidency.
We are at the greatest peril since the early 1970s — when the threat emanated from the left — of a violent insurgency in America. Indeed, the scattered terrorist attacks we have seen in recent years might be the early stages of such an uprising. If we see a full-blown insurgency — something that becomes more likely if Trump runs and loses again in 2024 — it would bear roughly the same symbiotic relationship to the GOP that the IRA had to the Sinn Fein party: It would be the armed wing of a larger right-wing movement. Trump made the relationship explicit when he told the Proud Boys, an armed group that later took part in the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, to “stand back and stand by.” …
Republicans are complicit in fomenting violent extremism — and they have also become hostage to the extremists in their ranks. It’s an ugly situation familiar from other people’s civil wars, and it portends more grief and bloodshed for a country that has already seen far too much of both. It’s not too late to avert a wider insurgency, but it will require Republicans to dial down their violent and apocalyptic rhetoric — which they show no sign of doing.
WaPo: A MAGA squad of Trump loyalists sees its influence grow amid demands for political purity among Republicans http://wapo.st/3oTmOmp “[T]hey enjoy support from the former president … , who praises them at rallies and echoes their incendiary rhetoric”
⭕ 21 Nov 2021
RollingStone, Hunter Walker: Leaked Texts: Jan. 6 Organizers Say They Were ‘Following POTUS’ Lead’ http://bit.ly/3cyMI9B //➔ Sounds like Women for America Firsf/March for Trump planned peaceful protest with WH, disputed w Ali Alexander over Stop the Steal “Wild Protest”
// Rally planners coordinated closely with the White House before Jan. 6 and readied a dinner party while the Capitol was under siege, according to leaked group text messages obtained by Rolling Stone
… Two sources who were involved in planning the Ellipse rally previously told Rolling Stone they had extensive interactions with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The text messages provide a deeper understanding of what that cooperation entailed, including an in-person meeting at the White House. Rally organizers also described working with Trump’s team to announce the event, promote it, and grant access to VIP guests.
Rolling Stone reviewed the text messages in a phone where they were originally received and timestamped. The messages from Amy Kremer and her daughter, Kylie Jane Kremer, came from phone numbers that have been used by both women. We are publishing excerpts of these messages as they were originally written including some typos.
Kremer, who began her political career as a Tea Party activist, is the chairwoman of Women For America First, the pro-Trump organization that obtained the permit for the Ellipse rally. Kylie is the group’s executive director.
Along with Women For America First, Amy Kremer was also a leader of March For Trump, a group that was launched in 2019 to protest against Trump’s first impeachment. In late November of 2020, after Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden, March For Trump began a bus tour with events around the country, where Kremer and other conservative activists promoted false conspiracy theories about the election and called for the results to be overturned. On Nov. 28, 2020, the day before the bus tour began, Kremer texted fellow activists in a group chat. ¤ “Welcome to the March for Trump bus tour,” Kremer wrote. “We are going to save the world!”
Two days later, Kremer texted some of the organizers to let them know she was temporarily getting off the bus to travel to Washington for a White House meeting. ¤ “For those of you that weren’t aware, I have jumped off the tour for the night and am headed to DC. I have a mtg at the WH tomorrow afternoon and then will be back tomorrow night,” wrote Kremer. “Rest well. I’ll make sure the President knows about the tour tomorrow!”
The message describing Kremer’s White House meeting is one of several where she and Kylie, indicated they were in communication with Trump’s team. Both Amy and Kylie Kremer did not respond to requests for comment on the record. Chris Barron, a spokesperson for the Kremers, called Rolling Stone to insist elements of this reporting are untrue.
“You are printing things that are 100 percent factually untrue that we can prove are not true,” Barron said. “You are printing things that are absolutely, factually untrue and, beyond being factually untrue, for anybody who knows Amy are like hilariously preposterous.” ¤ Barron repeatedly declined to answer specific questions about which aspects of the story he wanted to dispute.
The texts reviewed by Rolling Stone reveal that on December 13, 2020, Kremer texted the group to say she was “still waiting to hear from the WH on the photo op with the bus.” On January 1, before the Ellipse rally was publicly announced, Kylie sent a message to another group chat that said she was still working on the permits and “just FYI – we still can’t tweet out about the ellipse.” ¤ “We are following POTUS’ lead,” Kylie wrote, using an abbreviation for the president.
Two days later, on January 3, March For Trump activist Dustin Stockton texted one of the team’s groups to ask who was “handling” rally credentials for VIPs. “It’s a combination of us and WH,” Kylie replied. ¤ Stockton’s fiancee, Jennifer Lawrence, had a similar question when she asked a chat group where media credential requests for the Ellipse rally were going after being submitted on the group’s website. ¤ “To campaign,” Kylie responded in an apparent reference to Trump’s re-election team. “They are handling all.” …
As the big rally approached, the group chats grew even more excited. On the morning of January 5, Kremer texted the organizers and declared “we are about to be part of a pivotal and historic moment in our nation’s history.” ¤ “Thank you for taking this journey with Women For America First. I love you all and am grateful for each of you,” Kremer wrote, adding, “Let’s go save the Republic!”
Kremer and Women For America First weren’t the only ones involved in planning events to protest the election result. Another group, Stop the Steal, which was led by far right activist Ali Alexander, held its own rallies around the country and planned a “Wild Protest” outside the Capitol on January 6. Two sources who were involved in the Ellipse rally planning previously told Rolling Stone they had concerns Alexander’s event could turn violent due to his apparent ties to militia groups and its location directly outside the Capitol. Those sources claimed Alexander initially agreed he would not hold the “Wild Protest” and would allow the Ellipse rally to be the only major pro-Trump event in D.C. on January 6.
The March For Trump group chat conversations hint at some of the tensions between Kremer’s group and the “Wild Protest” planners. On the 6th, the group chats indicate Kremer’s group had a dispute with Alexander over VIP seats at the Ellipse rally. …
On Dec. 31, as the members of the group realized the “Wild Protest” seemed to be moving forward, Kylie posted a series of angry messages accusing the people who were riding the bus of focusing on irrelevant issues and not sufficiently appreciating the work being done to plan the Ellipse event. Kylie dismissed the “Wild Protest” as “all the people who aren’t invited or POTUS won’t be associated with.”
“How do yall not get it? Seriously. Everyone needs to get off that damn bus because you are all going crazy focused on things that don’t matter.”¤ A volunteer responded that the group’s supporters were uneasy about a lack of guidance since the Ellipse rally plans had not yet been tweeted. Kylie replied with a pair of messages noting how rare it is for events to take place on the Ellipse. She added that she was working with colleagues and “Team Trump” to get the event squared away.
“I am very frustrated and feel like you guys have NO IDEA the hoops we have been jumping through 24-7 lately. Google events at the Ellipse. Send me pictures that you can find of anything other than the Christmas tree light or menorah lighting that are official WH events. THEY DONT HAPPEN,” Kylie wrote. “Y’all this has got to stop. The back and forth. If anyone doesn’t like what … team trump and I are doing then you don’t have to come to January 6th.” … …
There was plenty of drinking on Jan. 6 at Kremer’s Willard suite, according to multiple sources. The text messages include a menu for a dinner for the organizers on the night before the rally. Menu options included a “Willard Burger” with truffle aioli, red wine braised Angus short rib Beef Bourguignon, steak frites, and a salmon filet with aged balsamic. Based on Kremer’s text about the charcuterie plate, she chose options from the same menu for the organizers on the evening of Jan. 6. The options in the Willard suite also included champagne that Kremer’s guests were drinking just as her organization issued a press release denouncing the violence and calling the group “saddened and disappointed.”
On the morning after January 6, the group chats show some of the Ellipse rally organizers wanted to hold a press conference or make a statement denouncing the violence. Shortly before noon, Kremer replied that she felt her initial Women For America First statement was sufficient.
“I don’t think it is wise for us to talk to the press or have a press conference. Our statement yesterday was strong enough and we need to leave it at that,” Kremer wrote to the group chat on January 7. “Nothing god will come from us talking to CBS or any other mainstream media outlet. I hope you guys understand and agree.”
NYT: Two Fox News Contributors Quit in Protest of Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 Special http://nyti.ms/3FBCX6V “Their departures also mark the end of a lingering hope … that the channel would at some point return to a pre-Trump reality”
// Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, stars of a brand of conservatism that has fallen out of fashion, decide they’ve had enough.
In some ways, their departures should not be surprising: It’s simply part of the new right’s mopping up operation in the corners of conservative institutions that still house pockets of resistance to Donald J. Trump’s control of the Republican Party. Mr. Goldberg, a former National Review writer, and Mr. Hayes, a former Weekly Standard writer, were stars of the pre-Trump conservative movement. They clearly staked out their positions in 2019 when they founded The Dispatch, an online publication that they described as “a place that thoughtful readers can come for conservative, fact-based news and commentary.” It now has nearly 30,000 paying subscribers.
Their departures also mark the end of a lingering hope among some at Fox News — strange as this is for outsiders to understand — that the channel would at some point return to a pre-Trump reality that was also often hyperpartisan, but that kept some distance from Republican officials. Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, recently deplored Trumpism while acting as though — as Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien noted — he didn’t run the company.
The reality of Fox and similar institutions is that many of their leaders feel that the tight bond between Mr. Trump and their audiences or constituents leaves them little choice but to go along, whatever they believe. Fox employees often speak of this in terms of “respecting the audience.” And in a polarized age, the greatest opportunities for ratings, money and attention, as politicians and media outlets left and right have demonstrated, are on the extreme edges of American politics.
Mr. Carlson became the network’s most-watched prime-time host by playing explicitly to that fringe, and “Patriot Purge” — through insinuations and imagery — explored an alternate history of Jan. 6 in which the violence was a “false flag” and the consequence has been the persecution of conservatives.
Mr. Goldberg said that he and Mr. Hayes stayed on at Fox News as long they did because of a sense from conversations at Fox that, after Mr. Trump’s defeat, the network would try to recover some of its independence and, as he put it, “right the ship.”
“Patriot Purge” was “a sign that people have made peace with this direction of things, and there is no plan, at least, that anyone made me aware of for a course correction,” Mr. Goldberg said. ¤ “Now, righting the ship is an academic question,” he continued. “The ‘Patriot Purge’ thing meant: OK, we hit the iceberg now, and I can’t do the rationalizations anymore.”
They now find themselves in a group of Americans who think the threat that Mr. Trump poses to America’s democratic system outweighs many other political differences. Mr. Hayes said that he was particularly concerned about Fox lending support to the idea “that there’s a domestic war on terror and it’s coming for half of the country,” he said. “That’s not true.” Particularly disturbing in “Patriot Purge,” he added, “was the imagery of waterboarding and suggestions that half the country is going to be subject to this kind of treatment, that’s the same kind of treatment that the federal government used when it went after Al Qaeda.”
Mr. Carlson “pumped that stuff out into society, and all you need is one person out of every 50,000 people who watch it to believe it’s literally the story about what happened, that it’s true in all of its particulars and all of its insinuations. And that’s truly dangerous in a way that the usual hyperbole that you get on a lot of cable news isn’t.”
Mr. Hayes said he’d been particularly disturbed recently when a man at a conference of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA asked its leader, “When do we get to use the guns?” ¤ “That’s a scary moment,” Mr. Hayes said. “And I think we’d do well to have people who, at the very least, are not putting stuff out that would encourage that kind of thing.”
For his part, Mr. Goldberg said he has been thinking about William F. Buckley, the late founder of National Review, who saw as part of his mission “imposing seriousness on conservative arguments” and purging some extreme fringe groups, including the John Birch Society, from the right.
Now, their views have put them outside the current Republican mainstream, or at least outside what mainstream right-wing institutions and politicians are willing to say out loud. But while in recent years both appeared occasionally on the evening show “Special Report” and on “Fox News Sunday,” which the network classifies as news, it’s been years since they were welcome on Fox’s prime time, and Mr. Goldberg clashed bitterly with the prime-time host Sean Hannity in 2016. (Mr. Hayes and Mr. Goldberg emailed their readers Sunday to announce their departure.)
Despite the former contributors’ hopes, Fox’s programming has hewed to Mr. Trump’s line, as have its personnel moves. The network, for instance, fired the veteran political editor who accurately projected Mr. Biden’s victory in the key state of Arizona on election night, and has hired the former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Mr. Hayes and Mr. Goldberg are the first members of Fox’s payroll to resign over “Patriot Purge,” but others have signaled their unhappiness. Geraldo Rivera, a Fox News correspondent since 2001, captured the difficulty of internal dissent at the network when he voiced cautious criticism of Mr. Carlson and “Patriot Purge” to my colleague Michael Grynbaum. “I worry that — and I’m probably going to get in trouble for this — but I’m wondering how much is done to provoke, rather than illuminate,” he said.
🐣 RT @starsandstripes That intelligence has been conveyed to some NATO members over the past week to back up U.S. concerns about Putin’s possible intentions and an increasingly frantic diplomatic effort to deter him from any incursion.
⋙ Stars&Stripes: US intel shows Russian plans for potential Ukraine invasion http://bit.ly/3DIFWd2
⭕ 20 Nov 2021
🐣 RT @duty2warn Donald Trump LOST the House, Presidency AND Senate. Suspended by Twitter and FB. PGA bumped his clubs. Banks cut ties. Charity shut down. Declared bankruptcy 6 times. Corporate America steers clear. Company and CFO indicted. Even lost fake audits! If Trump’s not a loser, WHO IS?
⋙ 🐣 RT @duty2warn Booed at the World Series. Laughed at at the UN. His “University” settled lawsuits and shuttered. Inherited almost $1B, has less than that now. Countless loan defaults. A lifetime of secrets and lies. Desperately trying to avoid total humiliation. Should be a little late for that
🧵 RT @SteveSchmidtSES An 18 year old vigilante killer has become a cultural icon for the MAGA right. A Holocaust denier Congressman denounced by his family has been embraced by all but two of his GOP colleagues for his murderous fantasies about a Member of Congress. A tide of extremism has risen from 📌 https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1462088021512130563?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @SteveSchmidtSES the ashes of a failed American coup. The extremism in our country is growing and metastasizing. Its danger should not be underestimated. It cannot be ignored and wished away. The old boundaries have collapsed and they will not return. The American people will have to decide if
⋙ 🐣 RT @SteveSchmidtSES we are ready to abandon the American experiment and bury the dream of a just society built on the noble idea that at long last we can be a nation of equality and justice for all people, that life liberty and the pursuit of happiness applies to all Americans. Perspective can
⋙ 🐣 RT @SteveSchmidtSES be forged by many factors from experience to geography, but I think time is its most powerful shaper. What will this moment and the next years look like a generation from now? Will what happens next seem perfectly obvious in retrospect? What strikes me is how much more extreme
⋙ 🐣 RT @SteveSchmidtSES our broken politics has gotten since the Trump Coup and there is an absolute black hole of nothingness where there should be focus and passion around defending American democracy and a birthright of freedom that remains the envy of people all over the world. Desmond Tutu was
⋙ 🐣 RT @SteveSchmidtSES Once asked whether evil was more powerful than good. He said no but quipped that it was better organized. It seems a prescient comment in this moment of American radicalism. The question is how far the American people will let this all go. Democracy won’t be lost in America
⋙ 🐣 RT @SteveSchmidtSES by force, invasion or coup. It will be lost in elections at the hands of the American people who will decide the fate of the gift given us all through sacrifices by women and men of all races, creeds and faith that beggar imagination. The American people will decide until the
⋙ 🐣 RT @SteveSchmidtSES power to do so is given away to a faction who thereafter will make the decisions for us all and the first one they will make is that the debate between us is over.
⭕ 19 Nov 2021
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote NEW: Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler is calling on @TheJusticeDept to review the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings for potential federal charges.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepJerryNadler This heartbreaking verdict is a miscarriage of justice and sets a dangerous precedent which justifies federal review by DOJ. Justice cannot tolerate armed persons crossing state lines looking for trouble while people engage in First Amendment-protected protest. https://twitter.com/RepJerryNadler/status/1461775482496724998?s=20
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump There is no justice in America and we need to stop pretending otherwise.
🐣 RT @NoelCasterComedy Behind even celebrity teenage shooter there’s a selfless shooter mom, taking him to gun ranges, staying up late to drive him across state lines to regional protests. It takes a village to raise a murderer.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom This is completely true and everyone cheering the verdict knows it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TimOBrien If a black guy walked into Kenosha from out of town with an assault rifle and killed two people while severely wounding another we would have had a very different verdict.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Kyle Rittenhouse acquitted on all counts in Kenosha shootings http://wapo.st/30PWEJg
🐣 RT @ACLU No one should be targeted, threatened, or attacked for exercising our First Amendment right to protest. It is our right to protest and demand justice. ¤ We’ll be watching to ensure no one — including law enforcement — interferes with that right.
🐣 Dems don’t want ruckus over miscarriage of justice to get in the way of messaging on infrastructure and BBB. ¤ Being confronted by gun-toting randos is an infringement on the right to protest. This should be a federal Civil Rights case.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom I felt that way about OJ. And many other trials. But “respect the verdict” means “this trial is done, accept the outcome peacefully, and if you don’t like it, start changing laws.”
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Daddy_Boy51 You can’t “respect” a verdict that is not based on reality or the law. I am very afraid this is the next step down the slippery slope of Old West justice. This just made our country incrementally more dangerous.
⋙ 🐣 I think of Rodney King when the DOJ took it up as a civil rights case ~ and won. The right to protest is a civil right. This verdict puts a target on the back of every protester and will encourage vigilantism.
⭕ 18 Nov 2021
WaPo, Max Boot: Even if the Steele dossier is discredited, there’s plenty of evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia http://wapo.st/3FzLp6N
The Steele dossier is a sideshow. Like many raw intelligence reports, it was full of uncorroborated information — a lot of which doesn’t check out. But the Steele dossier did not launch the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, and discrediting it does not undermine the evidence that the Kremlin helped Trump win the election with his campaign’s eager encouragement and cooperation. You can debate whether this constituted “collusion,” a word with no legal definition. You can’t deny that there was extensive collaboration — at least not without resorting to bald-faced lies.
⭕ 17 Nov 2021
MotherJones, David Corn: New Revelations Emerge on How Donald Trump Killed 400,000 (or More) Americans http://bit.ly/3oGOo6e “The right went nuts over Benghazi, in which four Americans tragically died, yet it evinces no concern over the needless deaths of 400,000”
// We keep learning more about Trump’s deadly mishandling of the pandemic.
The congressional January 6 investigation has been drawing great attention lately, particularly as it has triggered the federal indictment of Steve Bannon for defying its subpoena, fired off other subpoenas at Mark Meadows and assorted Trumpers, and sought to obtain Trump White House records related to the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol. At the same time, a different congressional investigation, with much less notice, has been pursuing another profound betrayal committed by Donald Trump and his crew: the lethal mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis.
x On Friday, the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which is chaired by Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), released interviews and documents revealing how senior Trump officials tried to block government health officials from informing the public about the seriousness of COVID-19. On February 25, 2020, Nancy Messonnier, a senior CDC health expert, warned in a news briefing that the virus’s spread in the United States was inevitable. That enraged Trump, who was trying to downplay the coronavirus threat. The new material shows that the Trump administration tried to shut her up. And Anne Schuchat, a top CDC official, told the committee that Trump officials scrambled to hold a briefing hours after Messonnier’s warning, though “there was nothing new to report.”
The story gets worse: Between March 9 and May 29 of last year, the CDC held no press briefings. In testimony to the committee, Kate Galatas, a CDC communications official, said the White House repeatedly thwarted the agency’s attempts to schedule such briefings, including one in April that would have emphasized the need to wear masks to contain the virus’s spread.
And worse: Dr. Deborah Birx, who was the White House COVID-19 task force coordinator, told the committee that Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist (not an infectious disease specialist) who was advising Trump on COVID, leaned on the CDC to alter its guidelines on testing to recommend that only symptomatic people be tested. (This would have yielded lower numbers of confirmed cases.) Government scientists, worried about asymptomatic people spreading the disease, thought it was important for symptomatic and asymptomatic people to get tested. Atlas’ pressure, though, led to CDC guidance in August 2020 on testing that was less vigorous. This revised recommendation, Birx told the committee, “resulted in less testing and…less aggressive testing of those without symptoms that I believed were the primary reason for the early community spread.” A month later, the CDC reinstituted the more expansive testing directive. It was released over “objections from senior White House personnel,” according to Birx.
As researchers from UCLA noted in March 2021, the United States could have avoided 400,000 COVID deaths if the Trump administration had implemented a more effective health strategy that included mask mandates, social distancing, and robust testing guidelines. Birx made a similar statement at that time.
We’ve long known that Trump did the opposite of what public health experts advised. More concerned with his own standing in the polls than with the health and safety of the citizenry, Trump dismissed or minimized the threat and sent a mixed message on masks, social distancing, and testing. The new revelations from the committee underscore his immense negligence and dereliction of duty that led to the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands.
In a world of endless Trump outrages, this particular atrocity deserves more…well, outrage. The right went nuts over Benghazi, in which four Americans tragically died, yet it evinces no concern over the needless deaths of 400,000. Is this number just too large to absorb? In a 1932 essay, German journalist and satirist Kurt Tucholsky quoted a fictional diplomat referring to the horrors of war: “The war? I cannot find it to be so bad! The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!” (No, apparently, Stalin did not say this.)
Moreover, it’s dumbfounding that killing 400,000 through ineptitude is not a disqualification for political leadership. Trump remains the GOP’s 2024 frontrunner, and party leaders continue to genuflect before him. Meanwhile, decrying Mr. Potato Head and Big Bird and fulminating over Dr. Seuss books have been far more important priorities for Republicans.
It’s also puzzling that the nation is not more focused on learning what went wrong during this horrific crisis. The work of the coronavirus subcommittee is not breathlessly monitored by the media. The material it just released did not make the front pages, as far as I can tell. And a search indicates the New York Times did not cover it. …
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch Please take a moment to watch @AOC’s impassioned speech on the House floor about Paul Gosar’s threats of violence against her and the disgraceful Republican response. 💽 https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1461059686757662720?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Biden administration to buy Pfizer antiviral pills for 10 million people, hoping to transform pandemic http://wapo.st/3DrvLtr
// Pfizer, meanwhile, asks regulators to authorize the pills and agrees to allow them to be made and sold for less in poor countries.
WaPo: ‘QAnon shaman’ sentenced to 41 months for role in Capitol riot http://wapo.st/3cmtfZr “You didn’t slug anybody,” U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth told Jacob Chansley, “but what you did here was actually obstruct the functioning of the whole government.”
✅ WaPo, Glenn Kessler: The Steele dossier: A guide to the latest allegations http://wapo.st/3DpLk4R “[T]he dossier has [largely] been a side show to the main event — clear evidence of the Russian govt’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election on the side of Donald Trump”
To a large extent, the dossier has been a side show to the main event — clear evidence of the Russian government’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election on the side of Donald Trump. A bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 confirmed the initial intelligence community finding.
Moreover, the FBI opened its investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government not because of the dossier, but because of a tip from an Australian diplomat that a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had disclosed that Russia had obtained damaging information on Hillary Clinton. “This information provided the FBI with an articulable factual basis that, if true, reasonably indicated activity constituting either a federal crime or a threat to national security, or both, may have occurred or may be occurring,” concluded a 2019 Justice Department inspector general report.
The report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III also largely ignored the dossier. He could not find evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin, but he concluded the campaign was opportunistic about apparent assistance from Russia.
For instance, when given a chance to obtain “dirt” on Clinton from a person they were told represented the Russian government, top campaign aides, including Donald Trump Jr., eagerly gathered to collect it — though it turned out to be nothing of importance.
Mueller’s investigation, moreover, determined that the hacking of the Democratic National Committee was directed by the Kremlin in an effort to help Trump’s campaign — further evidence of Russia’s covert backing of Trump.
But the Steele dossier has loomed large in the public imagination, in part because of media coverage of salacious elements, such as an alleged incident involving Trump and sex workers in a Moscow hotel room. Then-FBI Director James B. Comey on Jan. 7, 2017, privately briefed Trump on the Moscow hotel reference in the dossier, a discussion that quickly leaked.
… The fact that the dossier’s funding was traced to the Clinton campaign — and that Steele had actively pitched the findings to news reporters — gave Trump and his defenders an opening to try to discredit the Russia-related investigations as partisan-inspired witch hunts.
The Danchenko indictment has further bolstered the perception, especially on the right, that the dossier was a smear campaign orchestrated by Trump’s opponents. The indictment alleges that a source for Danchenko was a longtime political operative who was a supporter of Clinton and that another source, who had no role [Sergei Millian], was falsely identified by Danchenko.
Igor Danchenko: … Analysis: With immunity, Danchenko would have every incentive to answer truthfully. In his FBI interviews, he appeared relatively open about his reporting methods and his sources. Some, including in the FBI, have theorized that Steele’s methods were so sloppy that Russian disinformation could have infected into the final product. The indictment raises questions about whether some sources were too close to the Democrats or would benefit from a Clinton victory.
Charles Dolan Jr.: … Analysis: Dolan’s involvement as a possible source for the dossier makes the document appear even more partisan. Dolan was a longtime Clinton supporter — and the Clinton campaign was underwriting the project to which he allegedly contributed. The fact that Danchenko allegedly played down Dolan’s role is suspicious, given the other Clinton connections surrounding Steele’s efforts. But the indictment is vague about whether Dolan played a substantial role in the dossier, especially because the only charge in the indictment that refers to Dolan concerns the gossip about Manafort’s firing — which was relatively accurate, given it drew from news accounts.
Sergei Millian: … Analysis: With the removal of Millian as source for the dossier, much of the material must be discarded as highly suspect. The inspector general report noted how important a certain sub-source — supposedly Millian — was to many of the reports: “The reports describe this sub-source in varying ways: Report 80 (‘Source D, a close associate of TRUMP ….’); Report 95 (‘Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP ….’); Report 97 (‘a Russian emigre figure close to the Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald TRUMP’s campaign team ….’); and Report 102 (‘[A]n ethnic Russian associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP …’).” ¤ Indeed, “Source E” supposedly described the “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin — which the indictment says was the underpinning of the court-approved wiretaps of Page.
⭕ 16 Nov 2021
💽 MSNBC, Hayes Brown: Jenna Ellis’ memo on stealing the 2020 election holds a lesson for Democrats http://on.msnbc.com/
// Every version of Trump’s election plot was as dangerous as it was nonsensical.
🐣 RT @solomonfreek13 Food for thought… https://twitter.com/solomonfreek13/status/1460684375423602692?s=20/photo/1
⋙ Criminal indictments by admin:
0 Obama
1 Ford
1 Carter
1 GHW Bush
2 Clinton
16 GW Bush
26 Reagan
76 Nixon
215 Trump
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Monmouth poll:
73% of Americans approve of having the Jan. 6 select committee look into whether members of Congress played a role in the riot
67% approve of the committee looking into whether Trump played a role
Monmouth poll:
73% of Americans approve of having the Jan. 6 select committee look into whether members of Congress played a role in the riot
67% approve of the committee looking into whether Trump played a role
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 16, 2021
⭕ 15 Nov 2021
💙❤️📔 AspenInstitute: Commission on Information Disorder [pdf] http://bit.ly/3HO86WE 80p
// See under 11/23 WaPo editorial; Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises. When bad information becomes as prevalent, persuasive, and persistent as good information, it creates a chain reaction of harm.
🐣 RT @willsommer Hundreds of QAnon supporters are back in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza awaiting JFK Jr’s return and singing “We Are the World.” https://twitter.com/willsommer/status/1460454073291972608?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @inscribajournal
There comes a time
When you’ve read too many blogs.
When the world gets turned upside down.There are people lying
And it’s time to lend our dough to Don,
The greatest scam of all.We can’t go on
Pretending day by day
That someone will ever change our minds. /1 [ … ]Oh, there’s a choice we’re making
We’re believing all his lies.
It’s true we’re getting used by Don, you and me. 3/3
NYT, Bill Grueskin: The Steele Dossier Indicted the Media http://nyti.ms/3qJfRHg “[A]sked by the Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple about two years ago how reporters should have approached an unverified rumor from the dossier … he responded, ‘By not publishing.’”
WaPo, Max Boot: A newly disclosed memo reveals Trump’s plot to turn the military into his personal goon squad http://wapo.st/30lymX8
That evidence comes courtesy of ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, who has unearthed a memorandum from Johnny McEntee, Trump’s director of presidential personnel, listing 14 reasons for ousting Esper. That document was dated Oct. 19, 2020. Three weeks later Esper was fired by a Trump tweet.
The very premise of McEntee’s memo was both sinister and ludicrous — a 30-year-old of no professional or intellectual distinction, whose path to power was carrying Trump’s bags, was making the case for getting rid of a senior Cabinet officer for insufficient loyalty to the president. This revealing and chilling document deserves to be read not as a historical curiosity but as a terrible portent of what could be in store if Trump wins another term. He appears determined to turn the military into his personal goon squad.
[ List ]
Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker recounted in their book “I Alone Can Fix It” Milley’s well-grounded worries after the election about Trump’s mounting a coup. “They may try, but they’re not going to f—ing succeed,” the general reportedly told a friend. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.”
Well, the next time around, Trump would want to ensure that the “guys with guns” are on his side. If he wins a second term, Trump’s next defense secretary (Johnny McEntee perhaps?) would almost certainly be somebody more devoted to him than to the Constitution. For anyone concerned about the future of U.S. democracy, that should be a cause of considerable alarm at a time when Trump and Biden are running almost neck and neck in polling matchups.
💙 TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: Autocracy Is Winning http://bit.ly/3CbNJyA
// If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.
⭕ 14 Nov 2021
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote We now have THREE coup memos: John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, & John McEntee. Mark Meadows knew about all of them. Pair these with the Clark letters to the states trump intended to rob of their electoral votes, & we have a clear violation of 18 U.S. Code § 2384 – Seditious conspiracy Text Block: https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1459993233694474241?s=20/photo/1
ABCNews: Memo from Trump attorney outlined how Pence could overturn election, says new book http://abcn.ws/3nfs30o
// ABC News’ Jonathan Karl covers the story in his new book on Trump’s presidency.
In a memo not made public until now, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed to Vice President Mike Pence’s top aide, on New Year’s Eve, a detailed plan for undoing President Joe Biden’s election victory, ABC News’ Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl reports.
The memo, written by former President Donald Trump’s campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis, is reported for the first time in Karl’s upcoming book, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show” — demonstrating how Pence was under even more pressure than previously known to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Ellis, in the memo, outlined a multi-step strategy: On Jan. 6, the day Congress was to certify the 2020 election results, Pence was to send back the electoral votes from six battleground states that Trump falsely claimed he had won. ¤ The memo said that Pence would give the states a deadline of “7pm eastern standard time on January 15th” to send back a new set of votes, according to Karl. ¤ Then, Ellis wrote, if any state legislature missed that deadline, “no electoral votes can be opened and counted from that state.”
Such a scenario would leave neither Biden nor Trump with a majority of votes, Ellis wrote, which would mean “Congress shall vote by state delegation” — which, Ellis said, would in turn lead to Trump being declared the winner due to Republicans controlling the majority of state delegations with 26.
The day after Meadows sent Ellis’ memo to Pence’s aide, on Jan. 1, Trump aide John McEntee sent another memo to Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, titled, “Jefferson used his position as VP to win.” ¤ Although McEntee’s memo was historically incorrect, Karl says, his message was clear: Jefferson took advantage of his position, and Pence must do the same.
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Distinguished person of the week: Trump is still not a king http://wapo.st/3C9qhSE “For reminding us of Congress’s power to investigate [Jan. 6] & of Trump’s status as a lowly former president w/o the powers of … office, we can say well done, Judge Chutkan”
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued a 39-page opinion on Tuesday rejecting former president Donald Trump’s attempt to block the Jan. 6 House select committee’s demand for hundreds of documents relating to the violent insurrection that Trump incited.
Chutkan’s factual recounting was a helpful reminder that Trump deliberately unleashed his supporters in an effort to overturn the election:
On January 6, Plaintiff spoke at the rally at the Ellipse, during which he (1) repeated claims, rejected by numerous courts, that the election was “rigged” and “stolen”; (2) urged then Vice President [Mike] Pence, who was preparing to convene Congress to tally the electoral votes, “to do the right thing” by rejecting certain states’ electors and declining to certify the election for President Joseph R. Biden; and (3) told protesters to “walk down to the Capitol” to “give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country,” “we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and “you’ll never take back our country with weakness.”
In a rebuke to Trump’s consistently inflated view of presidential power and delusion that these powers are his personally, Chutkan held, “Plaintiff does not acknowledge the deference owed to the incumbent President’s judgment. His position that he may override the express will of the executive branch appears to be premised on the notion that his executive power ‘exists in perpetuity.’ . . . But Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.”
In responding to challenges regarding the constitutionality of the National Records Act and of Congress’s right to investigate, the court found multiple legislative purposes for the document request. The most serious that Chutkan listed was enacting legislation to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars anyone involved with an insurrection of rebellion from running for public office — including anyone who “gave ‘aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.’ ” That warning should remind Trump and his accessories of the legal peril they may be facing.
Chutkan also underscored reforms to prevent future coups that Congress may want — or must — address, such as “imposing structural reforms on executive branch agencies to prevent their abuse for antidemocratic ends, amending the Electoral Count Act, and reallocating resources and modifying processes for intelligence sharing by federal agencies charged with detecting, and interdicting, foreign and domestic threats to the security and integrity of our electoral processes.” Such reforms would certainly be forthcoming, were if not for Republicans’ resistance to any protection of our democracy that might prevent future abuse of power by their cult leaders.
The opinion is tightly reasoned. Moreover, it is one likely to be looked upon favorably even by a right-wing Supreme Court. In applying the test from the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. Mazars, which rebuffed Trump’s claim of absolute privilege, the judge reminds the high court that its own ruling affirmed the powers of Congress to investigate as part of its legislative functions.
Trump predictably appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which temporarily stayed the ruling to allow an accelerated briefing and hearing schedule. The former president is likely to lose there as well.
For reminding us of Congress’s power to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection and of Trump’s status as a lowly former president without the powers of the office, we can say well done, Judge Chutkan.
⭕ 13 Nov 2021
🐣 RT @tribelaw Bannon should be indicted again, this time for criminal sedition. He can serve his 20 years under 18 USC 2384 and his term for contempt of Congress concurrently.
⋙ 🐣 RT @UROCKlive1 He knew.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @RexChapman Please never forget Steve Bannon on January 5th, 2021… 💽 https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1459314849524109318?s=20/photo/1
// clip from Bannon‘s podcast ⇈
WaPo Editorial: Fresh reporting on Jan. 6 is a powerful rebuke to those minimizing events of that terrible day http://wapo.st/2YK6fAz
One hundred and eighty-seven minutes. That is the length of time between when President Donald Trump called on his followers to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, as Congress was convening to certify the results of the presidential election he had lost, and when he belatedly and begrudgingly released a video telling them to go home. Those harrowing 187 minutes — during which the nation’s commander in chief sat back and watched television coverage of his supporters attacking the Capitol, even as his advisers, allies, elder daughter and besieged lawmakers begged him to intervene — were chronicled with troubling new detail in a Post investigation. The fresh reporting is a powerful rebuke to those who have sought to minimize, distort or forget the events of that terrible day.
Thanks to the work of a team of more than 75 Post journalists who interviewed more than 230 people and examined thousands of pages of court documents and internal law enforcement reports, along with hundred of videos, photographs and audio recordings, we now have the fullest understanding to date of what was going on not just on Jan. 6 but also in the days leading up to the assault and its aftermath.
Among the findings: A cascade of warnings — including explicit threats targeting Congress — was ignored by law enforcement. Some Pentagon leaders feared Mr. Trump might misuse the National Guard to remain in power and placed guardrails on deployment that may have hampered response to the insurrection. Efforts to strong-arm Vice President Mike Pence into using his ceremonial role to reject the results of the presidential election continued even after the assault on the Capitol when the shaken Congress reconvened.
New details about the pressure brought to bear on Mr. Pence make his steadfastness all the more admirable. Unfortunately, the former vice president has tarnished the record of his Jan. 6 courage with subsequent toadying to Mr. Trump, including criticizing the media for what he called overplaying the significance of Jan. 6. Mr. Pence is not alone in bending under Mr. Trump’s tightening grip on the Republican Party; as was reported in the third part of the series, nearly a third of the 390 Republicans around the country who have expressed interest in running for statewide office this cycle have supported a partisan audit of the 2020 vote, played down Jan. 6 or directly questioned the victory of President Biden.
Those continuing efforts to undermine elections and the peaceful transfer of power are why The Post’s investigation, albeit rigorous and thorough, must not be the last word. As the Post team itself noted, a number of critical questions remain. How seriously did Mr. Trump or his allies inside the government consider using emergency powers to remain in office? How did rioters know what unsecured windows would give them entry into the Capitol? Who built those gallows on the West Front of the building? And what else did Mr. Trump say or do during those horrific 187 minutes?
The special House committee investigating Jan. 6 has powers that reporters lack. It can compel testimony and subpoena documents to address the still unanswered questions — and assure that nothing like Jan. 6 will happen again.
⭕ 12 Nov 2021
Carnegie, Rumer & Weiss (2021): Ukraine: Putin’s Unfinished Business http://bit.ly/3xfD3Qz “[T]he annexation of Crimea and the undeclared war in eastern Ukraine have only reinforced the Ukrainian people’s resolve to leave Russia’s orbit and to seek closer ties to the West”
// 11/12/2021
Politico, Erin Banco: Emails reveal new details of Trump White House interference in CDC Covid planning http://politi.co/3c7QVRp
// The documents released by a congressional committee lay out a timeline for how the Trump White House began to downplay the dangers posed by Covid-19.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has conducted interviews over the last several months about how former President Donald Trump and his closest confidantes, including former White House adviser Scott Atlas and son-in-law Jared Kushner, tried to steer the course of the federal response, sidestepping the interagency process.
The emails and transcripts detail how in the early days of 2020 Trump and his allies in the White House blocked media briefings and interviews with CDC officials, attempted to alter public safety guidance normally cleared by the agency and instructed agency officials to destroy evidence that might be construed as political interference.
The documents further underscore how Trump appointees tried to undermine the work of scientists and career staff at the CDC to control the administration’s messaging on the spread of the virus and the dangers of transmission and infection.
Several top former Trump officials, including Deborah Birx, the former White House Covid-19 task force coordinator, have answered committee questions. Former National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Nancy Messonnier and former CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat also appeared for questioning. Both stepped down from their posts at the CDC in the spring.
The documents released by the committee — and the corresponding interviews with witnesses — lay out a timeline for how the Trump White House began to downplay the dangers posed by Covid-19. Several former high-level Trump officials who worked on the administration’s response have said publicly after the fact that they did not want to panic the American public.
But scientists at the CDC, well aware that the virus was transmitting at a high rate and could infect easily, stepped in early to speak to the American people directly in an attempt to warn the public about what was coming.
In a press conference in February 2020, Messonnier told reporters that she expected community spread within the U.S. and that the disruptions to everyday life could be “severe.” It was one of the first blunt assessments from a high-level CDC official about what was in store for the U.S. ¤ That warning frustrated Trump, according to documents released by the congressional committee Friday.
“I believed that my remarks were accurate based on the information we had at the time,” Messonnier told the committee in her interview. “I heard that the President was unhappy with the telebriefing.”
Following Messonnier’s comments in the Feb. 25 briefing, the leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services called yet another press conference.
“The impression that I was given was that the reaction to the morning briefing was quite volatile and having another briefing — you know, later I think I got the impression that having another briefing might get — you know, there was nothing new to report, but get additional voices out there talking about that situation,” Schuchat told the committee in her testimony.
From that point, the White House took the lead on the federal response and controlling all communications and messaging about the virus, denying CDC requests to hold its own briefings.
“We would submit a request to the others to do a briefing and it was declined, and then — or we didn’t get approval to be able to do one,” Schuchat said, referring to specific requests she received from the media for an interview. Schuchat said the White House also denied several agency telebriefings in the spring of 2020 that would have allowed CDC scientists to explain emerging evidence about how the virus moved and infected different populations.
As CDC scientists continued to try and push out their field reporting on Covid-19, White House officials attempted to morph messaging and at times downplay the significance of the spread of the virus.
Christine Casey, one of the leaders of the CDC team that publishes weekly scientific reports, also known as Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, told the House committee that at one point in August 2020 she received instructions to delete an email reflecting political interference.
Casey said Paul Alexander, the former temporary senior policy adviser to the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS, instructed her to stop publishing the weekly reports, insinuating her team was trying to make Trump look bad in public.
After conversations with leadership at the CDC, including then-Director Robert Redfield, Michael Iademarco, one of the CDC’s leaders overseeing epidemiology and laboratory services, told Casey to delete the email.
“I believe he said that the director [Redfield] said to delete the email and that anyone else who had received it, you know, should do as well,” Casey said in her testimony.
Schuchat told the committee that the interference in the CDC’s scientific process went even further and affected the agency’s public health guidance from the beginning of the pandemic.
In one instance, Schuchat said there was a directive in March 2020 to the White House to suspend the introduction of certain persons from countries where a communicable disease exists. Martin Cetron, the director for the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the CDC, refused to sign the order.
“His view was that the facts on the ground didn’t call for this from a public health reason and that the decision wasn’t being made based on criteria for quarantine. It may have been initiated for other purposes,” Schuchat said. “ I don’t think he was comfortable using his authority to do that because it didn’t meet his careful review of what the criteria are.” ¤ Redfield eventually signed the order despite Cetron’s opposition.
On several instances, Schuchat said Alexander tried to change the wording of the MMWR, adding that it took “active effort” from career CDC staff to preserve the integrity of the scientific reports. …
Birx, then the White House Covid-19 task force coordinator, told the House committee in her testimony that Atlas, a radiologist and White House adviser who frequently disagreed with the CDC, attempted to alter the agency’s testing guidance.
He pressed the agency to rewrite its guidelines to underscore that only symptomatic individuals needed to get tested. His argument, at the time, was that the U.S. only needed to worry about those individuals who had Covid-19 and were experiencing symptoms such as fever and coughing because those were the people who could more easily spread the virus. But scientists through the administration argued that asymptomatic individuals could still spread Covid-19 even if they did not exhibit symptoms and it was important to track both categories.
The wording in the testing guidelines was eventually tweaked to say: “You do not necessarily need a test unless you are a vulnerable individual or your healthcare provider or state or local public health officials recommend you take one.”
“This document resulted in less testing and less — less aggressive testing of those without symptoms that I believed were the primary reason for the early community spread,” Birx said, adding that the change in the guidance was not based on science.
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BEANS: I’m willing to bet Bannon won’t cooperate or cut a deal for the minimum sentence in exchange for truthful testimony. I think he will fight it and risk prison, become a martyr, and fundraise off calling himself a Solzhenitsyn-style political prisoner.
NYT: Menace Enters the Republican Mainstream http://nyti.ms/3Hg2Smd “Such views, routinely expressed in warlike or revolutionary terms, are often intertwined with white racial resentments and evangelical Christian religious fervor”
// Threats of violence have become commonplace among a significant part of the party, as historians and those who study democracy warn of a dark shift in American politics.
🔆 This❗️⋙ DOJ: Stephen K. Bannon Indicted for Contempt of Congress http://bit.ly/31YkxPe “Bannon, 67, is charged with one contempt count involving his refusal to appear for a deposition and another involving his refusal to produce documents, despite a subpoena”
// Two Charges Filed for Failing to Honor House Subpoena From Select Committee Investigating Jan. 6 Capitol Breach
⋙ DOJ: Indictment [pdf] http://bit.ly/3CidfCw 9p
⋙ 2 U.S. Code § 192 – Refusal of witness to testify or produce papers: “Every person who having been summoned as a witness by the authority of either House of Congress to give testimony or to produce papers upon any matter under inquiry before either House, or any joint committee established by a joint or concurrent resolution of the two Houses of Congress, or any committee of either House of Congress, willfully makes default, or who, having appeared, refuses to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of not more than $1,000 nor less than $100 and imprisonment in a common jail for not less than one month nor more than twelve months.
(R.S. § 102; June 22, 1938, ch. 594, 52 Stat. 942.)”
🐣 RT @jonlemire WASHINGTON (AP) — Ex-Trump aide Steve Bannon indicted on contempt of Congress charges after defying Jan. 6 committee subpoena.
WaPo: Trump says it was ‘common sense’ for Jan. 6 rioters to chant ‘Hang Mike Pence!’ http://wapo.st/3qsVgXE “Audio of Trump’s comments to ABC News’s Jonathan Karl were published Friday by Axios in advance of a forthcoming book by Karl.” 1/2
⋙ “Trump … took issue with Pence for not intervening to change the results as he presided over the count of electoral college votes by Congress. The count was … interrupted after rioters breached the Capitol and Pence was whisked out of the chamber amid threats on his life.” 2/2
⋙ “In the interview, Trump made clear that he wanted Pence to invalidate the electoral college votes of five states in which Joe Biden had prevailed.”
WaPo: The Washington Post corrects, removes parts of two stories regarding the Steele dossier http://wapo.st/3nbm2BF
The newspaper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said The Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story. It had identified businessman Sergei Millian as “Source D,” the unnamed figure who passed on the most salacious allegation in the dossier to its principal author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
The Post’s reassessment follows the indictment on Nov. 4 of Igor Danchenko, a Russian American analyst and researcher who helped Steele compile the dossier. Danchenko was arrested as part of an investigation conducted by attorney John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Trump’s attorney general William P. Barr to probe the origins and handling of the FBI’s inquiry into Trump’s alleged Russian connections.
WaPo: Backlash to school books centering on race, sex and LGBTQ people turns into conservative rallying cry http://wapo.st/3F9nCKA
Objections to books are nothing new, but they seem to have intensified over the past year, according to advocates of free access — with isolated complaints giving way to more concerted efforts that quickly spread to other areas, often propelled by social media. Caldwell-Stone from ALA traced an apparent rise in challenges to political outrage over topics such as LGBTQ sexuality and “critical race theory” — a college-level academic framework that examines systemic racism in America but has become a catchall for conservative concerns about the way schools discuss race.
Citing fears that teachers are laying guilt on White children, some states have passed laws banning classes from broaching the idea that anyone should feel “discomfort” or “anguish” on account of their race or sex. Republican leaders have also sought to cut funding for schools that teach the New York Times’ 1619 Project, and they have advocated “patriotic education” instead of what they call an excessive focus on the United States’ past and present wrongs.
⭕ 11 Nov 2021
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: A sobering, new report shows how much work is needed to protect democracy http://wapo.st/3wLhPYG
Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that has done yeoman’s work in litigating against the lawless Trump administration, devising software tools to enhance election integrity and battling election disinformation, is out with a comprehensive report of the status of democracy. It makes for a sobering read.
If nothing else, the report highlights that the danger of election subversion and the ensuing constitutional crisis is immediate and real. Republicans have pushed more than 200 bills around the country that would enable Republican legislatures to dislodge neutral election officials, challenge and overturn results and undermine confidence in election outcomes. For other elections they do not win, expect Republicans to try to delegitimize the results.
The effort to prevent delegitimization of elections also requires the debunking and challenging of phony elections “audits,” such as the one conducted in Maricopa County, Ariz. (which turned out to confirm President Biden’s victory). These are the preseason warm-ups to anticipated GOP efforts in 2022 and 2024 to sabotage vote tabulation and certification.
It is worth noting that such efforts must also include fixes to the Electoral Count Act to prevent a possible Republican House majority in January 2025 from accomplishing what the MAGA rioters could not: Overthrowing the will of voters by refusing to certify electoral college votes.
To combat the near-term threat, Protect Democracy also insists on accountability for attempted intimidation and manipulation of election officials in 2020 through civil and criminal litigation. The report warns that “if there is no accountability for past abuses, they will only repeat themselves more dangerously.”
As essential as the short- and intermediate-term reforms may be, a more fundamental threat looms. Protect Democracy calls this the “structural and cultural factors that inflate the political power and appeal of authoritarianism.” The “socio-cultural drivers” of a mass movement seeking to challenge the foundations of a multiracial democracy demand solutions well beyond the political realm.
This entails confronting the White evangelical crusade to prioritize White power and Christian ideology over democracy. Right-wing pseudo-intellectuals, unabashed champions of nativism in right-wing media and cynical Republican politicians have heightened racial resentment and undermined the building blocks of democracy. In many instances, however, they are merely racing to catch up with the mob.
It is worth noting that such efforts must also include fixes to the Electoral Count Act to prevent a possible Republican House majority in January 2025 from accomplishing what the MAGA rioters could not: Overthrowing the will of voters by refusing to certify electoral college votes.
To combat the near-term threat, Protect Democracy also insists on accountability for attempted intimidation and manipulation of election officials in 2020 through civil and criminal litigation. The report warns that “if there is no accountability for past abuses, they will only repeat themselves more dangerously.”
The prevalence of conspiracy theories, flight from science and fear of marginalization point to a greater crisis in rural, White and evangelical communities. White evangelicals’ Faustian bargain with Trump and his movement meant that these communities sacrificed their religious virtues and principles for power and the false sense of security that a ruthless warrior could push back the tide of secularism and racial diversification. As evangelical conservative and pro-democracy advocate David A. French writes, “[T]he pursuit of Christian power led to prominent Christian voices endorsing nation-cracking litigation and revolutionary efforts to overturn a lawful election — the Christian ‘deal’ looks bad indeed. When push came to shove, all too often the pursuit of justice yielded to the pursuit of power.”
Reinvigoration of democratic values, inculcation of tolerance, renewed respect for diversity and acceptance of science must come from authentic voices with credibility in those communities. The rest of Americans must recognize that excusing the plague of racist authoritarianism and unhinged — sometimes violent — rhetoric as the result of “economic dislocation” or “lack of respect from elites” misses the mark and infantilizes millions of Americans.
These Americans need to decide if they believe in the American creed or simply want to impose their will on a nation in which they no longer represent a majority. The answer to that fundamental question will in large part determine the fate of our democratic experiment.
🐣 RT @tribelaw This temporary injunction was accompanied by an ultrafast DC Circuit argument set for Nov 30. The panel will certainly affirm Judge Chutkan’s order demanding that Trump’s documents be turned over to the Jan 6 Committee, and SCOTUS will agree.
⋙ WaPo: Appeals court temporarily bars release of Trump White House records to House Jan. 6 committee http://wapo.st/3wFQ9V5
A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked the imminent release of records of President Donald Trump’s White House calls and activities related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack after a lower court found that President Biden can waive his predecessor’s claim to executive privilege.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit granted a temporary injunction while it considers Trump’s request to hold off any release pending appeal, and fast-tracked oral arguments for a hearing Nov. 30.
🔄 💙 ❤️ 🔆 This❗️⋙ Newsweek, William Arkin: ‘We Are On the Way to a Right-wing Coup,’ the CIA Director Privately Warned http://bit.ly/3ktbDQ2 //➔ Part of a day-by-day recounting of what took place beginning Nov 3, 2020
// Daily Series of Post-Election Events
⭕ 10 Nov 2021
NBCNews: Domestic extremists pushing violence against Congress, school and health officials, DHS bulletin says http://nbcnews.to/3C7nJ7i
// A new DHS anti-terror bulletin also noted how both foreign Islamic terrorists and domestic extremists want to exploit the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.
NYT: Swift Ruling Tests Trump’s Tactic of Running Out the Clock http://nyti.ms/3n5K2pQ
// The former president has leveraged the slow judicial process in the past to thwart congressional oversight, but the Jan. 6 case may be different.
WaPo: N.J. man sentenced to 41 months for assaulting officer, stiffest punishment yet in Jan. 6 cases http://wapo.st/309cWfK
// Scott Fairlamb is the first person sentenced for assaulting a police officer in the Capitol attack.
⭕ 9 Nov 2021
🧵 RT @sethabramson The far right disinformation campaign on the Steele dossier is as aggressive a disinformation campaign as America has ever seen. ¤ The indictments they cite don’t say what they say they do; the dossier doesn’t say what they say it does; they’re rewriting our history in scary ways. 📌 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1458227627236511745?s=20
WaPo: Jan. 6 committee subpoenas more Trump aides, including Miller, McEnany and McEntee http://wapo.st/3DhFanr
WaPo: Trump White House records can be turned over to House Jan. 6 investigative committee, judge rules http://wapo.st/3C1CHMj
The decision by U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan clears the way for the release of government records requested by Congress beginning Friday. Attorneys for former president Donald Trump immediately appealed and moved to bar release of the documents by the National Archives pending a ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The House panel and the Justice Department “contend that discovering and coming to terms with the causes underlying the January 6 attack is a matter of unsurpassed public importance because such information relates to our core democratic institutions and the public’s confidence in them,” Chutkan wrote in a 39-page opinion. “The court agrees.”
[From Opinion:] “Plaintiff does not acknowledge the deference owed to the incumbent President’s judgment. His position that he may override the express will of the executive branch appears to be premised on the notion that his executive power “exists in perpetuity.” Hearing Tr. at 19:21-22. But Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President. He retains the right to assert that his records are privileged, but the incumbent President “is not constitutionally obliged to honor” that assertion. Public Citizen v. Burk, 843 F.2d 1473, 1479 (D.C. Cir. 1988).4”
⭕ 8 Nov 2021
WaPo: Can Biden’s nuts-and-bolts infrastructure pitch overcome cultural divides? http://wapo.st/3H0SE9n
// The president’s sales push on infrastructure will test whether his strategy of delivering tangible benefits still resonates in a polarized political environment where cultural issues are powerful
WaPo: Capitol rioter Evan Neumann applies for asylum in Belarus, local media says http://wapo.st/3DdRUeN
Evan Neumann, who appears to have sat down for an interview with Belarusian state television in a segment titled “Goodbye, America,” is wanted in the United States on charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct on the Capitol grounds, as well as for assaulting, resisting and obstructing law enforcement during civil disorder.
Both Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and his close ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin, have frequently referenced the Capitol riot, calling the prosecution of those involved an example of “double standards” by the United States because it frequently criticizes crackdowns on anti-government protests abroad.
◕ NYT: U.S. Covid Deaths Get Even Redder http://nyti.ms/3mWfx5F ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1457887369877667840?s=20/photo/1
// The partisan gap in Covid’s death toll has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.
💙 TheBulwark, Christian Vanderbrouk: Notes on an Authoritarian Conspiracy: Inside the Claremont Institute’s “79 Days to Inauguration” Report http://bit.ly/2YtQPjN
// Claremont’s post-election war game provides a window into the group’s ambitions.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: House Jan. 6 committee issues subpoenas to 6 top Trump advisers, including pair involved in Willard hotel ‘command center’ http://wapo.st/3o8ecIh
Those subpoenaed to provide testimony and documents include scholar John Eastman, who outlined a legal strategy in early January to delay or deny Joe Biden the presidency, and former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who led efforts to investigate voting fraud in key states. Both were present at the Willard during the first week in January.
The list also includes three members of the Trump reelection campaign: campaign manager Bill Stepien; Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign; and Angela McCallum, the national executive assistant to Trump’s campaign. The committee also issued a subpoena for Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
⭕ 7 Nov 2021
🐣 RT @thedailybeast Rep. Liz Cheney went on Fox News Sunday and took an apparent swipe at Tucker Carlson, claiming that anyone who spreads “false flag” conspiracies about the Jan. 6 insurrection is “un-American” and “dangerous.”
⋙ DailyBeast: Liz Cheney to Fox News: ‘Un-American’ to Call Jan. 6 a ‘False Flag’ http://bit.ly/3qlQD1o
// While not naming Tucker Carlson explicitly, Cheney’s comments on Fox News definitely appeared to reference the Fox star’s recent docu-series sowing doubt about Jan. 6.
WaPo: Defying Trump, Rick Scott backs McConnell and Murkowski, tiptoes around false claims about election fraud http://wapo.st/3kbRWMw
// The interview was typical of the balancing act Scott has tried to maintain as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the group that works to elect Republicans to the Senate
⭕ 6 Nov 2021
WaPo: A spin doctor with ties to Russia allegedly fed the Steele dossier before fighting to discredit it http://wapo.st/3omQsR5 “The dossier was tangential to the official inquiry led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III but nonetheless captured public imagination”
// Charles Dolan Jr., a PR executive who cut his teeth in Democratic politics, provided anti-Trump information, according to the special counsel probing the Russia investigation
⭕ 5 Nov 2021
🐣 RT @SpeakerPelosi Tonight, I proudly signed the historic Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework and sent it to @POTUS to be signed into law. This bill delivers a once-in-a-century investment in our infrastructure, creates good-paying jobs and takes a crucial step to #BuildBackBetter For The People. https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1456852294444765184?s=20/photo/1-2
⋙ 🐣 RT @wandaransom Happy Infrastructure Week! 💽 https://twitter.com/wandaransom/status/1456852808926474242?s=20/photo/1
// video by MeidasTouch: promises NOT kept by Trump admin
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Congress approves $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, sending measure to Biden for enactment http://wapo.st/3EPhCX9
// To secure passage, moderates and liberals agreed to act soon to adopt the rest of President Biden’s economic agenda
⭕ 4 Nov 2021
WaPo: U.S. judge appears set to reject Trump bid to block records requested by Jan. 6 committee http://wapo.st/3kaA84p
TheGuardian: Russian source for Steele’s Trump dossier arrested by US authorities http://bit.ly/3wgBHmi
// Five-page indictment released by justice department accuses analyst Igor Danchenko of lying to FBI
🧵 RT @SethAbramson (THREAD) I’m going to itemize every factual inaccuracy in this NYT article—while telling you in advance that none of them will be fixed. I wrote a NYT bestseller on the subject these men have written a story on, so I know *exactly* what needs correcting.
📌https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1456299800735870976?s=20
⋙⋙ NYT: Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier http://nyti.ms/3EMEdDP
// Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was indicted as part of the Durham investigation.
⋙ 🐣 RT @medit8now Did you see @petestrzok on Maddow @SethAbramson?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @medit8now Pete Strzok on @maddow: The people Durham indicted are peripheral to Mueller cases. Today’s indictment seems to be a dog whistle to Trump’s conspiracy theories. The subtle 1-sided portrayal of the facts isn’t unintentional & seeks to lay out a false narrative to what Mueller did
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote The interviews during which the Steele source “lied” to the FBI took place a YEAR after the trump-Russia probe was opened, but Durham wants you to believe his lies have to do with the origin of crossfire hurricane.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DiogenesLamp0 Durham has been investigating for 3 and a half years and all he found were process crimes unrelated to Trump’s collusion. Meanwhile, Trump still colluded with Russia. His campaign manager gave 75 pgs of campaign data to a Russian spy.
WaPo: Igor Danchenko arrested, charged with lying to FBI about information in Steele dossier http://wapo.st/3k3UEDK “[T]he 39-page indictment unveiled Thursday paints a more detailed picture of claims that were allegedly built on exaggerations, rumors and outright lies”
Politico: Committee interviews Jan. 6 rioter who witnessed state GOP contacts with Trump allies http://politi.co/3whpGNi
// Investigators are trying to connect the dots between protesters who broke into the Capitol and whether they coordinated with Republican officials.
🐣 RT @gavinmuellerphd am I correct that CRT as the shambolic-but-nevertheless-consolidated emblem of BLM backlash was midwifed through the debate on the 1619 Project?
⭕ 3 Nov 2021
⭕ 2 Nov 2021
WaPo, Greg Sargent: Glenn Youngkin’s repulsive final push reveals a dark truth for Democrats http://wapo.st/3wgY76Y
⭕ 1 Nov 2021
⭕ 31 Oct 2021
🐣 RT @FrankFigliuzzi Flynn as a continuing domestic terror threat -GOP candidate: Michael Flynn trying to run extortion plot on U.S. officials to reinstall Trump | http://Salon.com
⋙ Salon, Brett Bachman: GOP candidate claims Michael Flynn hoped to blackmail U.S. officials into pro-Trump “audits” http://bit.ly/3EsBrTS
// Pennsylvania Senate candidate Everett Stern made the bombshell accusation in a press conference Saturday
🧵RT @MuellerSheWrote THREAD: There were major clues that dropped this weekend indicating DoJ is prepping to pursue a Bannon indictment for criminal contempt of congress that the MSM isn’t talking about. 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1454911842556399618?s=20
WaPo: Key Findings of the Report http://wapo.st/3qhlhsV
President Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy began in the spring of 2020, when he issued a flurry of preemptive attacks on the integrity of the country’s voting systems. The doubts he cultivated ultimately led to a rampage inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob came within seconds of encountering Vice President Mike Pence, trapped lawmakers and vandalized the home of Congress in the worst desecration of the complex since British forces burned it in 1814. Five people died in the Jan. 6 attack or in the immediate aftermath, and 140 police officers were assaulted.
The consequences of that day are still coming into focus, but what is already clear is that the insurrection was not a spontaneous act nor an isolated event. It was a battle in a broader war over the truth and over the future of American democracy.
Since then, the forces behind the attack remain potent and growing. Trump emerged emboldened, fortifying his hold on the Republican Party, sustaining his election-fraud lie and driving demands for more restrictive voting laws and investigations of the 2020 results, even though they have been repeatedly affirmed by ballot reviews and the courts. A deep distrust in the voting process has spread across the country, shaking the foundation on which the American experiment was built — the shared belief that the nation’s leaders are freely and fairly elected.
BEFORE THE ATTACK
Law enforcement officials did not respond with urgency to a cascade of warnings about violence on Jan. 6
● Alerts were raised by local officials, FBI informants, social media companies, former national security officials, researchers, lawmakers and tipsters.
● The FBI received numerous warnings about Jan. 6 but felt many of the threatening statements were “aspirational” and could not be pursued. In one tip on Dec. 20, a caller told the bureau that ● Trump supporters were making plans online for violence against lawmakers in Washington, including a threat against Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). The agency concluded the information did not merit further investigation and closed the case within 48 hours.
● One of the biggest efforts to come out of Sept. 11, 2001 — a national network of multi-agency intelligence centers — spotted a flood of Jan. 6 warnings, but federal agencies did not show much interest in its information.
● The FBI limited its own understanding of how extremists were mobilizing when it switched over its social media monitoring service on the last weekend of 2020.Pentagon leaders had acute fears about widespread violence, and some feared Trump could misuse the National Guard to remain in power
● Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy was left rattled by Trump’s firing of senior Pentagon officials just after the election and sought to put guardrails on deployment of the National Guard.
● Then-acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller did not believe Trump would misuse the military but worried that far-right extremists could bait soldiers into “a Boston Massacre-type situation.” Their fears contributed to a fateful decision to keep soldiers away from the Capitol on Jan. 6.The Capitol Police was disorganized and unprepared
● The U.S. Capitol Police had been tracking threatening social media posts for weeks but was hampered by poor communication and planning.
● The department’s new head of intelligence concluded on Jan. 3 that Trump supporters had grown desperate to overturn the election and “Congress itself” would be the target. But then-Chief Steven Sund did not have that information when he initiated a last-minute request to bring in National Guard soldiers, one that was swiftly rejected.Trump’s election lies radicalized his supporters in real time
● As the president exerted pressure on state officials, the Justice Department and his vice president to overturn the results, his public attacks on the vote mobilized his supporters to immediately plot violent acts — discussions that researchers watched unfold online.DURING THE ATTACK
Escalating danger signs were in full view hours before the Capitol attack but did not trigger a stepped-up security response
● Hundreds of Trump supporters clashed with police at the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial on the morning of Jan. 6, some with shields and gas masks, presaging the violence to come.
● D.C. homeland security employees spotted piles of backpacks left by rallygoers outside the area where the president would speak — a phenomenon the agency had warned a week earlier could be a sign of concealed weapons.Trump had direct warnings of the risks but stood by for 187 minutes before telling his supporters to go home
● For more than three hours, the president resisted entreaties from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, other Republican lawmakers and numerous White House advisers to urge the mob to disperse, a delay that contributed to harrowing acts of violence.His allies pressured Pence to reject the election results even after the Capitol siege
● John C. Eastman, an attorney advising Trump, emailed Pence’s lawyer as a shaken Congress was reconvening to argue that the vice president should still reject electors from Arizona and other states.
● Earlier in the day, while the vice president, his family and aides were hiding from the rioters, Eastman emailed Pence’s lawyer to blame the violence on Pence’s refusal to block certification of Biden’s victory.The FBI was forced to improvise a plan to help take back control of the Capitol
● After the breach, the bureau deployed three tactical teams that were positioned nearby, but they were small, specialized teams and did not bring overwhelming manpower.
● As the riot escalated, acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen scrambled to keep up with the deluge of calls from senior government officials and desperate lawmakers.
● Senior Justice Department officials were so uncertain of what was occurring based on chaotic television images that Rosen’s top deputy, Richard Donoghue, went to the Capitol in person to coordinate with lawmakers and law enforcement agencies.AFTER THE ATTACK
Republican efforts to undermine the 2020 election restarted immediately after the Capitol attack
● Eight days after the violence, state Republicans privately discussed their intention to force a review of ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz., setting in motion a chaotic process that further sowed doubt in the results and a wave of similar partisan investigations in other states.False election claims by Trump that spurred the Capitol attack have become a driving force in the Republican Party
● Nearly a third of the 390 Republicans around the country who have expressed interest in running for statewide office this cycle have publicly supported a partisan audit of the 2020 vote, downplayed the Jan. 6 attack or directly questioned Biden’s victory.
● They include 10 candidates running for secretary of state, a position with sway over elections in many states.Trump’s attacks have led to escalating threats of violence
● Election officials in at least 17 states have collectively received hundreds of threats to their personal safety or their lives since Jan. 6, with a concentration in the six states where Trump has focused his attacks on the election results.
● Ominous emails and calls have spiked immediately after the former president and his allies raised new claims.First responders are struggling with deep trauma
● Those who tried to protect the Capitol are contending with serious physical injuries, nightmares and intense anxiety. “Normal is gone,” said one Capitol Police commander.
⇈ ⇊
🔄💙 🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: RED FLAGS: BEFORE, DURING, AFTER http://wapo.st/3bpliSW “For the first time, from coast to coast, the centers were blinking red. The hour, date and location of concern was the same: 1 p.m., the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6.”
// book length book-length; As Trump propelled his supporters to Washington, law enforcementagencies failed to heed mounting warnings about violence on Jan. 6.
WaPo: Russian troop movements near Ukraine border prompt concern in U.S., Europe http://wapo.st/3GH1vgi
BostonGlobe, Timothy Snyder (11/11/2020‼️): Trump’s big election lie pushes America toward autocracy http://bit.ly/3boygAg “A coup is under way, and the number of participants is not shrinking but growing”
// Clinging to power by claiming you are the victim of internal enemies is a very dangerous tactic. Don’t underestimate where this can go. “A coup is under way, and the number of participants is not shrinking but growing”
⭕ 30 Oct 2021
🐣 RT @RepRaskin It’s now clear: Trump’s henchmen used the violent siege of the Capitol to turn up the heat on Pence to complete their political coup in the electoral college. And then Eastman blamed the violent “siege” of the Capitol on Pence’s refusal to succumb to their plan.
⋙ 🧵 RT @jdawsey1 As Pence fled for life, Trump lawyer John Eastman told Pence’s lawyer in email that VP caused “siege.” He later pushed Pence’s team to not certify, even after riot. And Pence lawyer drafted op-Ed calling for him to be disciplined by bar. Our latest: 📌https://twitter.com/jdawsey1/status/1454275258614169611
// 10/29/2021; article below
WaPo: Trump seeking to block hundreds of pages of documents from Jan. 6 committee, court filing shows http://wapo.st/3w35IpG
⭕ 29 Oct 2021
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: During Jan. 6 riot, Trump attorney John Eastman told Pence team the vice president’s inaction caused attack on Capitol http://wapo.st/3bpbRTC
As Vice President Mike Pence hid from a marauding mob during the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, an attorney for President Donald Trump emailed a top Pence aide to say that Pence had caused the violence by refusing to block certification of Trump’s election loss.
The attorney, John C. Eastman, also continued to press for Pence to act even after Trump’s supporters had trampled through the Capitol — an attack the Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had described as a “siege” in their email exchange.
“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman wrote to Jacob, referring to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
Eastman sent the email as Pence, who had been presiding in the Senate, was under guard with Jacob and other advisers in a secure area. Rioters were tearing through the Capitol complex, some of them calling for Pence to be executed.
Jacob’s draft article, Eastman’s emails and accounts of other previously undisclosed actions by Eastman offer new insight into the mind-sets of figures at the center of an episode that pushed American democracy to the brink. They show that Eastman’s efforts to persuade Pence to block Trump’s defeat were more extensive than has been reported previously, and that the Pence team was subjected to what Jacob at the time called “a barrage of bankrupt legal theories.”
In the days before the attack, Eastman was working to salvage Trump’s presidency out of a “command center” in rooms at the Willard hotel near the White House, alongside such top Trump allies as Rudolph W. Giuliani.
Jacob wrote in his draft article that Eastman and Giuliani were part of a “cadre of outside lawyers” who had “spun a web of lies and disinformation” in an attempt to pressure Pence to betray his oath of office and the Constitution. …
That evening, Eastman told Jacob in another email that Pence should still not certify the results, according to Eastman and one of the people familiar with the emails. That email from Eastman came after the rioters had been cleared from the Capitol and Pence had returned to the chair to preside over the proceedings and vowed to continue.
🧵 RT @BBooTop The covert communications btwn Russian Alpha Bank servers, Spectrum Health & the Trump Org are real. Tonight, Rachel Maddow read a letter to Garland from a lawyer of one of the computer scientists confirming that the data is real. Durham knew but targeted the ppl who exposed it. 📌 https://twitter.com/BBopTop/status/1454257693070352389?s=20
🧵 RT @stellahaley20 Rachel Maddow reports that Durham and Barr intentionally ignored emails that prove Trump was in direct communication with the Russian Alpha Bank, A covert Communication channel existed during the 2016 campaign that Barr & Durham knew was real but that they covered up! BOOMERANG! 📌 https://twitter.com/StellaHaley20/status/1454262331496599563?s=20
NBCNews: GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an outspoken Trump critic, will not seek re-election http://nbcnews.to/3Cvnu74 He basically is being redistricted out of his seat in Illinois but will be able to focus on the Jan 6 investigation
// While Kinzinger was a vocal opponent of Trump and his governing style, the GOP congressman voted along party lines and on most issues that the former president supported.
⭕ 28 Oct 202
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Beware those peddling fear and rage. Fear is easy to sell. It’s addictive, but it leads to despair & apathy. Hope in the face of reality is hard. It takes work and courage. But as @RepAdamSchiff says: we don’t have the luxury of despair. I will not give up on us. I’m here to work
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote To be clear, I do not think everything is fine. Hope wouldn’t take courage if everything were fine. I think we’re probably in some of the darkest times in our history. But fear and apathy aren’t the way out, and they never will be.
⭕ 27 Oct 2021
Salon, Alan Blotcky: Donald Trump’s “slow-motion coup” is becoming a runaway train http://bit.ly/3pTfpWD
// Trump and his sycophants are working on many fronts to subvert democracy — America’s turning point is here and now
//➔ 🐣 RT @lawindsor Join us! https://twitter.com/lawindsor/status/1453496116457078788?s=20
// Lauren Windsor ⇊ ; undercover investigative journalist
⋙ Executive Director of @AFVhq Creator/EP of political reporting web-show http://TheUndercurrent.tv Support our journalism: http://americanfamilyvoices.org/donate
⭕ 26 Oct 2021
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: The world needs to cut its emissions seven times as fast to hit climate goals, U.N. report finds http://wapo.st/3EbbuZ4 ¤ 🚨@Sen_JoeManchin 🚨
// ‘We’re just so far off track,’ says one co-author, noting that vague long-term promises and insufficient short-term plans overshadow signs of progress
WaPo: The hotel where Trump allies plotted to overturn the election has a wild and sometimes violent history http://wapo.st/3vM6kj4 The Willard “more justly could be called the center of Washington than either the Capitol or the White House … ” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
⭕ 25 Oct 2021
WaPo: God, Trump and the Closed-Door World of a Major Conservative Group http://wapo.st/3jP1v40
// What internal recordings and documents reveal about the Council for National Policy — and the future of the Republican Party
TheGuardian: How a secretive conservative group influenced ‘populist’ Trump’s tax cuts http://bit.ly/316gaBn “The cuts have been blamed for widening inequality, and worsening deficits, with a large amount of the savings going to stock buybacks”
// Recordings from a 2019 panel discussion of the Council for National Policy reveal tax cuts were sparked by personal conversations
🐣 RT @richsignorelli By now, Trump should be an indicted criminal, under strict supervision by courts, detained at home, enforced by electronic monitoring, subject to gag orders prohibiting him from further harming our democracy. Instead, this deranged & dangerous career criminal continues his harm.
SCOTUSblog, Mary Ziegler: Supreme speed: The court puts abortion on the rocket docket http://bit.ly/3jEmxC9
… Last week, the court took up two challenges to S.B. 8. One, brought by abortion providers, asked the justices to weigh in on “whether a state can insulate from federal-court review a law that prohibits the exercise of a constitutional right” by delegating enforcement to private citizens.
The court also granted a separate petition from the Justice Department. The United States, which until now had never brought a challenge to a state abortion restriction, argued that S.B. 8 interferes with its sovereign interest in ensuring that states recognize federal constitutional rights. DOJ also argued that the law raises preemption concerns by threatening the work of federal agencies, employees, and contractors who might offer abortion services. …
What seems clear is that the justices are taking S.B. 8 seriously now. Respect for the gravity of the issue had long been the hallmark of the court’s abortion jurisprudence, which recognized the dignity of life in the womb and the importance of pregnant women’s interests in equality and autonomy. In the court’s response to S.B. 8, that respect was nowhere to be found. The court’s indifference was even more breathtaking because of what S.B. 8 represents — other states could easily use a similar scheme to frustrate the exercise of everything from the right to bear arms to religious liberty.
Many dismissed the justices’ promises to be above politics, and with reason. In its first iteration at the high court, the S.B. 8 litigation suggested not only that politics influenced the outcome but that the justices treated abortion, an issue of great concern to many Americans, with a mixture of contempt and nonchalance. The court’s rocket-docket response to last week’s developments might change the narrative. It was clear for decades that Americans on either side of the abortion issue treated the fate of Roe as a matter of grave concern. Now, it seems, the Supreme Court may once again agree.
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote Stockton is one of the people that can confirm Kremer warned the White House via @MarkMeadows about the unpermitted March to the capitol by Stop the Steal. Ellipse rally organizers weren’t expecting a march to the capitol. Then trump announced one on the ellipse. He knew. 📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1452738758583984130?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @woodruffbets NEW: Dustin Stockton is answering questions from the 1/6 committee today, per two sources. ¤ Story TK
⋙⋙⋙ Politico: Jan. 6 investigators privately question Bannon associate http://politi.co/3men0Nh
// The panel investigating the Capitol attack brought in a conservative activist linked to Steve Bannon’s We Build The Wall effort.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Source: ¤ ProPublica: New Details Suggest Senior Trump Aides Knew Jan. 6 Rally Could Get Chaotic http://bit.ly/3hdx7Oz
// 6/25/2021; Text messages and interviews show that Stop the Steal leaders fooled the Capitol police and welcomed racists to increase their crowd sizes, while White House officials worked to both contain and appease them.
WaPo: Nevertheless, Warren’s wealth tax idea persisted http://wapo.st/3mlzzGF “It would tax financial gains on all tradable assets annually, even if they have not been sold.” //➔ Acc to Thomas Picketty, this is the only way to halt skyrocketing inequality w/o depression or war
🐣 RT @cwebbonline This. 100% THIS 👇
Sen. King: “If you take the states that those 41 senators represent, add up all the population together, you get 24% of the American people. So the situation we’re in now is that 24% of the American people have an effective veto.”
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, RachelMaddow: Continued Republican abuse of filibuster begins to change minds on reform in Senate http://on.msnbc.com/3jB0rAD
// Senator Angus King, who had previous voiced opposition to getting rid of the Senate filibuster rule, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Republican abuse of the rule to block everything without even any debate, even on matters critical to the health of democracy in the United States, is changing his perspective on reforming the filibuster.
⭕ 24 Oct 2021
🐣 RT @DavidJollyFL 🚨 Rolling Stone out with a huge story, reporting tonight that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning the violent Jan. 6 events, that Meadows had an opportunity to prevent it, and that Gosar dangled ‘blanket pardons’.
🐣 RT @stuartpstevens [Romney’s campaign manager] What everyone needs to grasp is that elements throughout the Republican Party were involved in 1/6th : Trump, WH staff, Senators and Members of Congress, their staffs, major donors, the Republican AG’s Association. It was a coordinated, desperate attempt to end democracy.
🔆 This❗️⋙ RollingStone, Hunter Walker: Jan. 6 Protest Organizers Say They Participated in ‘Dozens’ of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff http://bit.ly/3jv4heA “It’s clear that a lot of bad actors set out to cause chaos. … They made us all look like shit”
// Two sources are communicating with House investigators and detailed a stunning series of allegations to Rolling Stone, including a promise of a “blanket pardon” from the Oval Office
As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.
Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence.
The two sources, both of whom have been granted anonymity due to the ongoing investigation, describe participating in “dozens” of planning briefings ahead of that day when Trump supporters broke into the Capitol … “I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically,” the organizer says. “I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another or their staffs.”
… Some members of the audience at the Ellipse began walking the mile and a half to the Capitol as Trump gave his speech. The barricades were stormed minutes before the former president concluded his remarks.
Along with Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas). ¤ “We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back,” says the organizer.
The organizer claims the pair received “several assurances” about the “blanket pardon” from Gosar. ¤ “I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” Gosar said, according to the organizer.
Both Brooks and Cawthorn spoke with Trump at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. In his speech at that event, Brooks, who was reportedly wearing body armor, declared, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” Gosar, Greene, and Boebert were all billed as speakers at the “Wild Protest,” which also took place on Jan. 6 at the Capitol. ¤ … Ali Alexander, who helped organize the “Wild Protest,” declared in a since-deleted livestream broadcast that Gosar, Brooks, and Biggs helped him formulate the strategy for that event.
“I was the person who came up with the Jan. 6 idea with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks, and Congressman Andy Biggs,” Alexander said at the time. “We four schemed up on putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting so that — who we couldn’t lobby — we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body hearing our loud roar from outside.”
Alexander led Stop the Steal, which was one of the main groups promoting efforts to dispute Trump’s loss. In December, he organized a Stop the Steal event in Phoenix, where Gosar was one the main speakers. At that demonstration, Alexander referred to Gosar as “my captain” and declared “one of the other heroes has been Congressman Andy Biggs.”
“The reason I’m talking to the committee and the reason it’s so important is that — despite Republicans refusing to participate … this commission’s all we got as far as being able to uncover the truth about what happened at the Capitol that day,” the organizer says. “It’s clear that a lot of bad actors set out to cause chaos. … They made us all look like shit.” ¤ And Trump, they admit, was one of those bad actors. …
“The breaking point for me [on Jan. 6 was when] Trump starts talking about walking to the Capitol,” the organizer says. “I was like. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ ” ¤ “I do kind of feel abandoned by Trump,” says the planner. “I’m actually pretty pissed about it and I’m pissed at him.”
According to both sources, members of Trump’s administration and former members of his campaign team were involved in the planning. Both describe Katrina Pierson, who worked for Trump’s campaign in 2016 and 2020, as a key liaison between the organizers of protests against the election and the White House. ¤ “Katrina was like our go-to girl,” the organizer says. “She was like our primary advocate.” ¤ Pierson spoke at the Ellipse rally on Jan. 6. …
Both sources also describe Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as someone who played a major role in the conversations surrounding the protests on Jan. 6. Among other things, they both say concerns were raised to Meadows about Alexander’s protest at the Capitol and the potential that it could spark violence.
A separate third source, who has also communicated with the committee and was involved in the Ellipse rally, says Kylie Kremer, one of the key organizers at that event, boasted that she was going to meet with Meadows at the White House ahead of the rally.
Both the organizer and the planner say Alexander initially agreed he would not hold his “Wild Protest” at the Capitol and that the Ellipse would be the only major demonstration. When Alexander seemed to be ignoring that arrangement, both claim worries were brought to Meadows. ¤ “Despite making a deal … they plowed forward with their own thing at the Capitol on Jan. 6 anyway,” the organizer says of Alexander and his allies. “We ended up escalating that to everybody we could, including Meadows.” …
“We had also been coordinating with some of our congressional contacts on, like, what would be presented after the individual objections, and our expectation was that that was the day the storm was going to arrive,” the organizer says, adding, “It was supposed to be the best evidence that they had been secretly gathering. … Everyone was going to stay at the Ellipse throughout the congressional thing.” ¤ … “The Capitol was never in play,” insists the planner.”
“A whole host of people let this go a totally different way,” the senior Republican staffer says. “They fucked it up for a lot of people who were planning to present evidence on the House floor. We were pissed off at everything that happened .”
The two sources claim there were early concerns about Alexander’s event. They had seen him with members of the paramilitary groups 1st Amendment Praetorian (1AP) and the Oath Keepers in his entourage at prior pro-Trump rallies. Alexander was filmed with a reputed member of 1AP at his side at a November Stop the Steal event that took place in Georgia. The two sources also claim to have been concerned about drawing people to the area directly adjacent to the Capitol on Jan. 6, given the anger among Trump supporters about the electoral certification that was underway that day. ¤ “They knew that they weren’t there to sing “Kumbaya” and, like, put up a peace sign,” the planner says. “These frickin’ people were angry.”
⭕ 23 Oct 2021
WaPo: Ahead of Jan. 6, Willard hotel in downtown D.C. was a Trump team ‘command center’ for effort to deny Biden the presidency http://wapo.st/3pvB1YF
They called it the “command center,” a set of rooms and suites in the posh Willard hotel a block from the White House where some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal lieutenants were working day and night with one goal in mind: overturning the results of the 2020 election.
The Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse and the ensuing attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob would draw the world’s attention to the quest to physically block Congress from affirming Joe Biden’s victory. But the activities at the Willard that week add to an emerging picture of a less visible effort, mapped out in memos by a conservative pro-Trump legal scholar and pursued by a team of presidential advisers and lawyers seeking to pull off what they claim was a legal strategy to reinstate Trump for a second term.
They were led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon was an occasional presence as the effort’s senior political adviser. Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik was there as an investigator. Also present was John Eastman, the scholar, who outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
They sought to make the case to Pence and ramp up pressure on him to take actions on Jan. 6 that Eastman suggested were within his powers, three people familiar with the operation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Their activities included finding and publicizing alleged evidence of fraud, urging members of state legislatures to challenge Biden’s victory and calling on the Trump-supporting public to press Republican officials in key states.
The effort underscores the extent to which Trump and a handful of true believers were working until the last possible moment to subvert the will of the voters, seeking to pressure Pence to delay or even block certification of the election, leveraging any possible constitutional loophole to test the boundaries of American democracy.
“I firmly believed then, as I believe now, that the vice president — as president of the Senate — had the constitutional power to send the issue back to the states for 10 days to investigate the widespread fraud and report back well in advance of Inauguration Day, January 20th,” one of those present, senior campaign aide and former White House special assistant Boris Epshteyn, told The Washington Post. “Our efforts were focused on conveying that message.”
In May, Eastman indicated that he was at the hotel with Giuliani on the morning of Jan. 6. “We had a war room at the at the Willard . . . kind of coordinating all of the communications,” he told talk show host Peter Boyles, comments first reported in the newsletter Proof.
Also present was One America News reporter Christina Bobb, a lawyer by training who was volunteering for the campaign at the time, according to people familiar with the operation. Bobb declined to comment.
The three people familiar with the operation described intense work in the days and hours leading up to and even extending beyond 1 p.m. on Jan 6, when Congress convened for the counting of electoral votes.
In those first days in January, from the command center, Trump allies were calling members of Republican-dominated legislatures in swing states that Eastman had spotlighted in his memos, including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, encouraging them to convene special sessions to investigate fraud and to reassign electoral college votes from Biden to Trump, two of the people familiar with the operation said.
On Jan. 2, Trump, Giuliani and Eastman spoke to 300 state legislators via a conference call meant to arm them with purported evidence of fraud and galvanize them to take action to “decertify” their election results. “You are the real power,” Trump told the state lawmakers, according to a Washington Examiner report. “You’re the ones that are going to make the decision.”
A participant on the call, Michigan state Sen. Ed McBroom (R), recalled listening as Trump, Giuliani, Eastman and others described the power state legislators have over the certification of electors. “I didn’t need any convincing about our plenary powers,” McBroom told The Post. “I was listening to hear whether they had any evidence to substantiate claims” of significant voter fraud that could change the results in Michigan. The callers did not provide additional information, he said, and he did not support a delay in the electoral vote count.
But others appear to have been persuaded. Three days after the call, dozens of lawmakers from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin wrote to Pence. They asked that he delay certification of Biden’s victory for 10 days to allow “our respective bodies to meet, investigate, and as a body vote on certification or decertification of the election.”
Also on Jan. 2, Eastman, Giuliani and Epshteyn appeared on Bannon’s podcast to make the case directly to Bannon’s pro-Trump listeners. They discussed what Bannon called that day’s “all-hands meeting with state . . . legislators that the Trump campaign and also others are putting on.” The comments were first highlighted by Proof.
They argued that state lawmakers were legally bound to reexamine their election results. “It’s the duty of these legislatures to fix this, this egregious conduct, and make sure that we’re not putting in the White House some guy that didn’t get elected,” Eastman said. He contended that Congress could itself decide on Jan. 6 to select Trump electors in contested states, but that “it would certainly be helped immensely if the legislatures in the states looked at what happened in their own states and weigh in.”
Eastman was not the first or the only person in Trump’s sphere to argue that Pence was empowered to block or delay certification of Biden’s victory. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn — and Trump himself — suggested as much on Dec. 23, retweeting a post about the possibility of invoking “the Pence card.”
But after other efforts failed, as Jan. 6 neared, the Eastman strategy came into bloom. Eastman, a Federalist Society member, law professor and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had the conservative legal credentials to burnish the argument.
Eastman’s first memo, only two pages long, described a six-point plan by which Pence could effectively commandeer the electoral counting process and enable Trump to win. The memo was first revealed last month in the book “Peril,” by Washington Post writers Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. ¤ Eastman has said it was a “preliminary draft” of a more complete and nuanced memo that outlined multiple possible outcomes following the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. The ideas in the memos were the basis for a discussion of options Pence had with Eastman and Trump in the Oval Office on Jan. 4, he has said.
Eastman has more recently distanced himself from the memos, telling the National Review on Friday that the options he outlined did not represent his advice. He said he wrote the memos at the request of “somebody in the legal team” whose name he could not recall.
When the violence erupted a short time later, forcing Congress into recess, some of the most ardent Trump supporters saw an opportunity. ¤ “Congress is adjourned. Send the elector choice back to the legislatures,” Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona GOP, tweeted at 3:30 p.m., more than half an hour after insurrectionists in tactical gear made their way to the floor of the Senate. ¤ Ward did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Epshteyn told The Post, “In line with President Trump’s position and message, the Trump legal team immediately made it clear that any and all violence is not acceptable.” At 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 6, shortly after the Capitol was breached, Epshteyn tweeted: “To all those protesting, please stay PEACEFUL and respect the LAW.”
After the violence began, Trump used his Twitter account to ask his supporters to “Stay peaceful,” but notably did not tell them to go home until 4:17 p.m., when he tweeted a video of himself addressing the Capitol rioters. “I know your pain. I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you, you’re very special.”
While the lawyers at the Willard were focused on promoting the legal strategy Eastman outlined, Kerik helped head up efforts to sift through allegations of election fraud. Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations, led a team of people who provided Kerik with analyses of state data, which purported to show fraudulent voting, according to two of the people familiar with activities at the Willard.
Waldron was working closely with Russell Ramsland, a Texas Republican who had been spreading election-fraud conspiracy theories for months before the election and submitted sworn affidavits to multiple post-election lawsuits claiming fraud, The Post has previously reported. Ramsland was present in one of the Willard rooms on the evening of Jan. 6, according to photographs posted to Instagram that circulated widely after the congressional committee’s mention of the “war room.” ¤ Waldron and Ramsland did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Kerik said he had been working alongside Giuliani since Nov. 5, two days after the election, and that they continued until Jan. 19. “I believed until Inauguration Day that something could be done — that’s why the fight was still going on,” Kerik told The Post. “There were a lot of people who thought on the 6th that it was over, but I didn’t believe that because the evidence seemed so overwhelming to me.”
Kerik and Giuliani set up shop in Washington in early November at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, according to Kerik, and in the third week in December moved to the Willard, closer to the White House. The Willard attracted many pro-Trump figures around that time, including “Stop the Steal” provocateur Roger Stone. Stone was not part of the Giuliani team at the Willard and did not participate in the team’s efforts, according to the three people with knowledge of the matter.
On Jan. 8, Kerik billed the Trump campaign for $66,371.54 in travel expenses, including $55,295 on rooms for legal team members at the Willard from Dec. 18 to Jan. 8, according to Kerik and documents reviewed by The Post. The legal team members referenced in the documents include Kerik, Giuliani and Eastman.
Documents also show that Kerik paid for rooms for William Ligon, a Georgia state senator who had chaired two hearings in Atlanta at which Giuliani aired false claims of election fraud, and Preston Haliburton, an Atlanta attorney who had represented a Coffee County Republican leader who claimed to be a whistleblower with evidence about Dominion voting machines. ¤ Ligon and Haliburton did not respond to messages seeking comment. ¤ The RNC has previously said that it did not pay the legal bills because neither Giuliani nor Kerik were hired by or represented the organization.
Eastman stayed at the Willard from Jan. 3 until after breakfast on Jan. 8, according to records showing that the hotel charged $1,407 for his lodging and meals during that time. ¤ His arrival at the Willard came on the same day that Trump convened an Oval Office meeting to discuss replacing then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey B. Clark, a Justice Department official friendly with Eastman who proposed that the department encourage investigation of Trump’s election fraud claims in Georgia and other states. The three-hour meeting with Trump ended after Rosen, other department officials and White House counsel Pat Cipollone threatened to resign if Clark were appointed. ¤ Clark has been subpoenaed by the House panel investigating Jan. 6 and is required to appear for questioning at the end of next week. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Although Clark’s proposal was rebuffed, those working in the Willard command center continued to push the idea that Pence could intervene on Jan. 6 itself. Other legal scholars disagreed.
Two experts — former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig and former Justice Department official John Yoo, both known as stalwart conservatives — advised Pence’s staff that there was no basis for the vice president to intervene in the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6.
“I advised that there was no factual basis for Mike Pence to intervene and overturn the results of the election,” said Yoo, who now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley. “There are certain limited situations where I thought the Vice President does have a role, for example in the event that a state sends two different electoral results. . . . But none of those were present here.”Luttig, a former federal appellate judge well known to Trump and for whom Eastman had clerked early in his career, told Pence’s staff on Jan. 4 that the analysis Eastman offered in his first memo was “incorrect.” Luttig said subsequently that Eastman’s advice was wrong “at every turn,” including his suggestion that the vice president could delay the electoral vote count. ¤ Kerik initially sought reimbursement from the Republican National Committee, but said he was told the party would not foot the bills. The bills were eventually submitted to the Trump campaign, which agreed to pay them. ¤ Kerik told The Post he was “furious” with the RNC because it collected tens of millions of dollars in support of Trump’s legal battle, “yet didn’t spend a dime on [Giuliani’s] legal team or their expenses.”
⭕ 22 Oct 2021
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Inside Facebook, Jan. 6 violence fueled anger, regret over missed warning signs http://wapo.st/3E6oTRX omg
// A trove of internal documents turned over to the SEC provides new details of the social media platform’s role in fomenting the storming of the U.S. Capitol
On Jan. 6, Facebook staffers expressed their horror in internal messages as they watched thousands of Trump supporters shouting “stop the steal” and bearing the symbols of QAnon — a violent ideology that had spread widely on Facebook before an eventual crackdown — thronged the U.S. Capitol. Many bashed their way inside and battled to halt the constitutionally mandated certification of President Biden’s election victory.
… [T]housands of pages of internal company documents disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission by the whistleblower Frances Haugen offer important new evidence of Facebook’s role in the events. This story is based on those documents, as well on others independently obtained by The Washington Post, and on interviews with current and former Facebook employees. The documents include outraged posts on Workplace, an internal message system.
A company after-action report concluded that in the weeks after the election, Facebook did not act forcefully enough against the Stop the Steal movement that was pushed by Trump’s political allies, even as its presence exploded across the platform. ¤ The documents also provide ample support that the company’s internal research over several years had identified ways to diminish the spread of political polarization, conspiracy theories and incitements to violence but that in many instances, executives had declined to implement those steps.
The documents and interviews with former employees make clear that Facebook has deep, highly precise knowledge about how its users are affected by what appears on its sites. Facebook relentlessly measures an astonishing array of data points, including the frequency, reach and sources of falsehoods and hateful content and often implements measures to suppress both.
WaPo: Giuliani associate Lev Parnas convicted in campaign finance fraud case http://wapo.st/3m6c9Vl That was fast
// Parnas, a Florida business executive who played a role in the activities in Ukraine that led to then-president Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, was convicted Friday.
Lev Parnas, a Florida businessman who is an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s, was found guilty on Friday of using funds from a foreign investor to try to influence political candidates through campaign donations.
It took the federal jury in U.S. District Court in Manhattan less than a day to find that Parnas committed fraud through donations to several state and federal candidates that were bankrolled by a Russian financier. Parnas was also found guilty on counts related to a $325,000 donation in 2018 to a joint fundraising committee that supported then-President Donald Trump.
Prosecutors told the jury that the illegal fundraising efforts documented in text messages and other trial evidence gave Parnas access to elected officials and candidates. They showed photos of Parnas with Trump and Giuliani, who was the president’s personal lawyer, schmoozing at high-end political fundraisers.
While Parnas’s trial did not directly relate to Giuliani or Trump, the guilty verdict still provides a legal coda to a precarious moment in Trump’s presidency: his first impeachment trial. Parnas, a Ukrainian native, was recruited to help Giuliani seek damaging information on Joe Biden and his son Hunter prior to the 2020 election. Trump was accused of threatening to withhold badly needed aid to Ukraine if officials there did not announce a criminal investigation into the Bidens.
One donation at issue in the trial was $10,000 in Fruman’s name that went to Adam Laxalt, the former attorney general in Nevada, who had ties to Trump and filed lawsuits on his behalf to try to overturn the election results in his state.
⭕ 21 Oct 2021
🐣 RT @RepLizCheney Listen to Steve Bannon talking about #January6th. The American people deserve to hear his testimony. 💽 https://twitter.com/RepLizCheney/status/1451229856407113733?s=20/photo/1
NYT: House Finds Bannon in Contempt for Defying Jan. 6 Inquiry Subpoena http://nyti.ms/3B4Z6YL
// The vote came after a bitterly partisan debate over the Capitol attack and as Republicans sought to deflect questions about Donald J. Trump’s role in the violence.
⭕ 20 Oct 2021
NYT: Adam Schiff: What He Saw at the Trump Revolution http://nyti.ms/3ncuJL1
⭕ 19 Oct 2021
NBCNews: Rock or relic? Diver finds 900-year-old sword thought to belong to Crusader knight http://nbcnews.to/3AYXZd1
// Haifa sword; The artifact was found in an area thought to have been used as a temporary anchorage as early as the Late Bronze Age.
The sword, which has been preserved in perfect condition, is a beautiful and rare find and evidently belonged to a Crusader knight,” Nir Distelfeld, inspector for the Israel Antiquities Authority’s robbery prevention unit, said in the statement. ¤ “It is exciting to encounter such a personal object, taking you 900 years back in time to a different era, with knights, armor and swords.”
The discoveries also show that the area served as a small, temporary anchorage for ships seeking shelter as early as the Late Bronze Age, 4,000 years ago, according to Sharvit, of the marine archaeology unit. ¤ “The recent discovery of the sword suggests that the natural cove was also used in the Crusader period, some 900 years ago,” Sharvit added.
Katzin received a certificate of appreciation for good citizenship for reporting the sword to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which said the sword would be displayed to the public once it had been cleaned and researched.
The Holy Land has been a religious and historical hotspot for millennia, and Israeli archaeologists and members of the public often report rare and ancient discoveries. ¤ In March, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced that a new set of Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient fragments of biblical texts dating back almost 2,000 years, had been found in an Israeli desert. It was the first such discovery in 60 years.
🐣 RT @Acyn “Mr. Bannon’s and Mr. Trump’s privilege arguments do however appear to reveal one thing. They suggest that President Trump was personally involved in the planning and execution of January 6th” 💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1450611114929115141?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: FBI searches D.C., NYC homes connected to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska http://wapo.st/3B05ost
NYT: House Panel Recommends Contempt Charge Against Bannon http://nyti.ms/2Z7Phvu
// The committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot said the former White House counselor had “multiple roles relevant to this investigation.”
In a report recommending the House find Mr. Bannon in contempt, the committee repeatedly cited comments he made on his radio show on Jan. 5 — when Mr. Bannon promised “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow” — as evidence that “he had some foreknowledge about extreme events that would occur the next day.”
Investigators wrote that Mr. Bannon appeared to “have had multiple roles relevant to this investigation,” including in constructing the “Stop the Steal” public relations effort to spread the lies of a fraudulent election that motivated the attack, and participating in events from a ‘‘war room” organized at a Washington, D.C., hotel with other allies of Mr. Trump who were seeking to overturn the election.
The group included members of the Trump campaign’s legal team, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and John C. Eastman; and prominent proponents of false election fraud claims, including Russell Ramsland Jr. and Boris Epshteyn; as well as Trump ally Roger J. Stone Jr., who left the hotel with members of the Oath Keepers militia group acting as bodyguards, the committee wrote.
“It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen,” Mr. Bannon told his audience on Jan. 5. “It’s going to be extraordinarily different. And all I can say is: Strap in.”
During the Tuesday committee meeting, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice chairwoman, directed a comment to her Republican colleagues, warning them that following Mr. Trump’s lies was a prescription for “national self-destruction.”
“Almost all of you know in your hearts that what happened on Jan. 6 was profoundly wrong,” she said. “You know that there is no evidence of widespread election fraud sufficient to overturn the election; you know that the Dominion voting machines were not corrupted by a foreign power. You know those claims are false.”
⭕ 18 Oct 2021
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump files lawsuit to block release of documents to Jan. 6 committee, challenging Biden decision.
🐣 RT @RepRaskin The idea that ‘executive privilege’ would shield a private citizen from turning over evidence about a violent insurrection against the govt because he knows a twice-impeached former president is farcical and insulting. Bannon has no right to defy a subpoena. Get with it, Steve.
🧵 RT @BarbMcQuade THREAD. If a subpoena means anything, the Jan 6 Committee should refer Bannon to DOJ for prosecution for refusing to comply with their subpoena. Here’s why. 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/BarbMcQuade/status/1450207198936711170?s=20
⭕ 17 Oct 2021
🧵 RT @Teri_ Kanefield Pretty much what I’ve been struggling to explain on Twitter for a long time. ¤ Why Republicans are breaking laws. Why “fighting like Republicans” is a terrible idea. ¤ Why, even though democratic institutions are imperfect, we have to support them. ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/Teri_Kanefield/status/1449917528633872386?s=20
🧵 RT @jennycohn1 “”Before organizing Jan 6 buses, “Scavo organized the bus that transported some protesters from Scranton to Lancaster County on Dec. 30. The group included members of an off-shoot of the [Moonie] Unification Church…” 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jennycohn1/status/1449631345643118592?s=20
⋙⋙ LancasterOnline: Latest Pennsylvanian charged in Capitol attack led election protests in Lancaster County http://bit.ly/3FUEbuU
// 3/26/2021
⋙ 🐣 RT @jennycohn1 “The trip was organized after Scavo and others listened to a podcast in which Stephen Bannon,.., encouraged listeners in swing states like Pennsylvania to pressure their lawmakers to decertify the presidential election results, Scavo told LNP | LancasterOnline at the time.” 2/
⭕ 16 Oct 2021
⭕ 15 Oct 2021
WaPo: Capitol Police officer charged with obstruction, accused of warning Jan. 6 riot suspect to remove Facebook posts http://wapo.st/3AKPr9y
WaPo: Biden says Justice Department should prosecute those who refuse Jan. 6 committee’s subpoenas http://wapo.st/3DK2QjY
⭕ 14 Oct 2021
TheAtlantic, Henry Olsen: McConnell can’t avoid it. He must directly refute Trump’s election fraud claims. http://bit.ly/3padTPo ain’t gonna happen
NewYorker, Susan Glasser: The Trump Presidency Is Still an Active Crime Scene http://bit.ly/3j6FJIx Of all the books Glasser mentions, Fiona Hill’s and Adam Schiff’s are highlighted (she also mentions she and husband Peter Baker are working on one)
// It’s hard to consign the Trump years to the history books when we remain in the middle of the crisis that it sparked.
… There were so many books seeking to explain Trump and his times that the book critic of the Washington Post wrote his own book about all of the books. Trump’s fired executive assistant—ousted because she claimed, at a boozy dinner with reporters, that the President had said nasty things about his daughter Tiffany—wrote a book. Trump’s first two press secretaries wrote books. First Lady Melania Trump’s former best friend wrote a book. Trump’s third national-security adviser, John Bolton, wrote an explosive book with direct-from-the-Situation-Room allegations of Presidential malfeasance that might have turned the tide in Trump’s first impeachment trial had Bolton actually testified in it. And none of those even covered the epic, Presidency-ending year of 2020.
Dozens of books have now been published or are in the works which address the covid pandemic, the 2020 Presidential election, and the violent final days of Trump’s tenure. The history of the Trump Presidency that I am writing with my husband, Peter Baker, of the Times, already has eighty-nine books in its bibliography; many are excellent reported works by journalists, in addition to the first-person recollections, such as they are, by those who worked with and for Trump. This month, Stephanie Grisham became the third former Trump Administration press secretary to publish her account. Grisham, who has the distinction of being the only White House press secretary never to actually hold a press briefing, has written a tell-all that includes such details as the President calling her from Air Force One to discuss his genitalia. Still to come are promised memoirs by former Vice-President Mike Pence, former Attorney General William Barr, and the former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, among others. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is writing an account of his Middle East peacemaking efforts. A book from the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, “The Chief’s Chief,” is due out in December; Trump promoted it the other day as “an incredible Christmas present” that will explain how his Administration “did things that no other administration even thought they could do.”
Trump, of course, meant this as a bragging point, not as an ironic commentary on all the norm-busting and lawbreaking that occurred during his four years in office. “Remember,” he said in the statement, “there has never been an administration like ours.” In that, he’s right. The rapidly accumulating pile of books on the history of the Trump Administration is different in a crucial respect: they are not helping to explain the past so much as they are attempting to explain a present and very much ongoing crisis. Meadows, for example, is a crucial witness in the investigation by the House select committee into the events of January 6th. The panel subpoenaed him and several other Trump advisers to give testimony and hand over documents, with a deadline of Thursday. Not one has done so, setting the stage for a new and potentially protracted series of court battles. The panel announced on Thursday that it will seek to hold Steve Bannon, Trump’s fired White House strategist (the two later reconciled), in criminal contempt; it said that it is still negotiating with Meadows and the former Pentagon official Kash Patel. How many months or years will we have to wait to find out what they and others knew, and did, as a pro-Trump mob tried to stop Congress from certifying Trump’s defeat?
The bottom line is that the story of the Trump Presidency still has important unanswered questions that the forthcoming pile of books cannot answer. And they have an urgency about them that unanswered questions about past Administrations usually don’t, given the ongoing threat to our democracy: Trump is not only preparing to run again but is determined to mold the G.O.P. into a single-issue Party, the ideology of which consists solely of disputing the legitimacy of the election that turned him out of office. The Trump Presidency is not yet, alas, simply a matter for booksellers and book writers; it’s an active crime scene.
Several of the more interesting new books come from participants in one of Congress’s earlier efforts to investigate and hold Trump accountable—his first impeachment, in 2019, for withholding several hundred million dollars in security assistance to Ukraine to force its President to conduct politically motivated investigations of Joe Biden and the 2016 election. Two of the trial’s witnesses, Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill, recently released memoirs that cover their roles in Trump’s National Security Council—which led them to unexpected public fame, given that Trump tried to stop their testimony. Hill’s book, “There Is Nothing for You Here,” is one of the most compelling to emerge from inside the Trump White House. She observes, at first hand, how Trump’s “autocrat envy” led not only to open admiration of anti-democratic figures such as Vladimir Putin and Victor Orbán but to Trump’s adoption of their anti-democratic agenda inside America.
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the lead impeachment manager, Adam Schiff, released his contribution to the Trump bookshelf this week, “Midnight in Washington,” the title of which comes from one of the many eloquent speeches that Schiff made during the first impeachment trial. In the proceedings, he presciently warned that a failure to convict and remove Trump from office would result in even worse abuses. His book ends with a new warning embedded in the subtitle: “How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.” The Washington Post, in its review, called it a “500-page closing statement on an era that has not yet closed.”
Schiff’s book is a valuable part of the historical record in part because it details how Democrats pursued impeachment—why they ruled out a broader set of charges, for example, and how they had to quickly investigate the Ukraine matter on their own, something that traditionally would have been handled by an independent prosecutor. But the main takeaway from the book, and the entire experience of the past few years, is that Congress, with one chamber controlled by Democrats and the other by Republicans who were unified in Trump’s defense, is not set up to investigate a rogue President like Trump—a disconcerting fact, considering the challenges still posed by the ongoing Trump crisis.
Throughout his Presidency, Trump and his aides flouted congressional subpoenas and demands for information; he is once again instructing them to do so with the January 6th investigation, even though he is out of office and it is unclear if any executive privilege would still apply. Schiff, a former federal prosecutor, is now a member of the January 6th select committee. The test, once again, he told me, is whether and how Congress can find a way of “enforcing the rule of law” and its own subpoenas. It is a great crisis, he said, if “a coequal branch of government cannot get the information it needs, both to legislate and to keep an Administration from becoming corrupt.” This is no wonky procedural matter but a test of American democracy’s ability to self-correct. The true history of the Trump Administration can’t be written without it.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Bannon 1/5/21: “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow. And all I can say is: Strap in. You have made this happen, and tomorrow it’s game day.” ¤ Bannon today: “But muh executive privilege.”
⁉️ 🐣 RT @AaronBlake “I’m not into golden showers,” Trump told the crowd. “You know the great thing, our great first lady–‘That one,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe that one.’ ”
⋙ WaPo: Trump asserts his dominance inside GOP, pushing Republicans to embrace his false claims of fraud http://wapo.st/2YJAh73
At the NRSC conference in Palm Beach … the former president focused on re-litigating grievances he has retained since leaving office. ¤ He called Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) “maniacs” and described his presidency as a fight for survival.
“It was all phony s—, okay. All phony stuff,” he said of the Democratic impeachment efforts and the investigation of his ties to Russia. ¤ Unprompted, he brought up an unsubstantiated claim he had interactions with prostitutes in Moscow before he ran for president. ¤ “I’m not into golden showers,” he told the crowd. “You know the great thing, our great first lady — ‘That one,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe that one.’ ”
After extensively praising Chinese President Xi Jinping for his intellect and touting his good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he also returned to his long-standing hatred of windmills, referencing a new plan by the Biden administration to expand the number of offshore wind turbines. ¤ “It’s so sad when you see that they are approving these windmills — worst form of energy, the most expensive,” he said. “You talk about carbon emissions, well they are making them. More goes into the air than if you ran something for 30 years.” ¤ When operating properly, wind turbines do not create carbon emissions as a result of electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman Inherent contempt is not currently an option for congressional subpoena enforcement because there is no existing process that would meet constitutional due process standards. Both houses should create task forces to examine the issue and propose a constitutional process for it.
DailyBeast, Matt Lewis: Trump Tells GOP: Back My Big Lie or I’ll Burn the Party Down http://bit.ly/3aFcVCk “Nice elections you got there. Be a shame if something happened to them”
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Nope. Stay home! Don’t show up until the “real” audits by MAGA patriots show that Donald Trump won with 99.9% of the vote!
⋙ 🐣 RT @govchristie For years I have worked with thousands of Republicans across this country to make sure people turned out & voted. Given what President Biden and the Democrats are trying to do to this country, Republicans will and must vote in big numbers in ‘22 & ‘24-no matter what anyone says.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance AG Jeff Sessions rush to fire McCabe late night, over a weekend, just before he would have been retirement/benefits eligible, in order to to assuage Trump has been called out for the abuse of power it was.
🐣 RT @NPRPolitics #BREAKING: The Justice Department has agreed to restore full law enforcement benefits for former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired by the Trump administration hours before his retirement in 2018.
⋙ NPR: Fired FBI official Andrew McCabe wins retirement benefits and back pay in settlement http://n.pr/3BEE5VI
WaPo: Jan. 6 committee will move to hold former Trump aide Bannon in criminal contempt for not complying with subpoena http://wapo.st/3p4BoJQ
🐣 RT @MilesTaylor I have to admit, this will make our strategy of defeating pro-Trump extremists a lot easier. Will discuss later this morning on @Morning_Joe.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jonkarl Trump is now calling on Republicans not to vote — declaring “Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24” if his election fraud hoax is not “solved” first. He helped Republicans lose two Georgia Senate seats in January. Now he seems ready to try it again in the midterms. https://twitter.com/MilesTaylorUSA/status/1448593645897195522?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 13 Oct 2021
🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “The referrals from the committee could come instantaneously. Once the deadline has passed, they are not in compliance with their subpoenas and the referrals should go to DOJ… The dept. can conduct a very quick investigation” – @matthewamiller w/ @NicolleDWallace 💽 https://twitter.com/DeadlineWH/status/1448413305018765315?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @joshtpm Can someone ask @GlennYoungkin why he allowed a celebration of the Jan 6 insurrection at his campaign event tonight?
🚫 Donald Trump Off-The-Rails (Statements) 9/13/2021 http://bit.ly/3oYwKg7
// What a strangely designed website
1. COVID is raging out of control, our supply chains are crashing with little product in our stores, we were humiliated in Afghanistan, our Border is a complete disaster, gas prices and inflation are zooming upward—how’s Biden doing? Do you miss me yet?
~~~~~~~~~~
2. Big rally in Michigan yesterday, unbelievable spirit and knowledge of what went on with respect to voting and vote counting in the 2020 Presidential Election. Detroit, considered for many years to be one of the most corrupt places in the United States for elections (and many other things!), had large-scale irregularities so much so that two officials, at great risk to themselves and their families, refused to certify the results, and were sadly threatened. Wasn’t it a fact that aside from other things, there were far more votes than voters? Even the RINOs on the Senate Committee found 289,866 absentee ballots that were sent to people who never requested them, “something that would be illegal.” Why did they viciously kick out the Republican poll watchers? Seventy percent of Detroit’s mail-in ballot counting boards didn’t match, it was a total mess. Why won’t they give respected professionals and representatives at yesterday’s rally the right to do a Forensic Audit of Wayne County (Detroit) and Macomb County? That includes the RINOs in the State Senate and House who for, whatever reason, do nothing but obstruct instead of seeking the truth. Hopefully, each one of these cowardly RINOs, whose names will be identified and forthcoming, will be primaried, with my Complete and Total Endorsement, in the upcoming election. Congratulations on the great rally yesterday!
~~~~~~~~~~
3. Why isn’t the January 6th Unselect Committee of partisan hacks studying the massive Presidential Election Fraud, which took place on November 3rd and was the reason that hundreds of thousands of people went to Washington to protest on January 6th? Look at the numbers now being reported on the fraud, which we now call the “Really Big Lie.” You cannot study January 6th without studying the reason it happened, November 3rd. But the Democrats don’t want to do that because they know what took place on Election Day in the Swing States, and beyond. If we had an honest media this Election would have been overturned many months ago, but our media is almost as corrupt as our political system!
~~~~~~~~~~
4. If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.
WhiteHouse[.]gov: Second Letter from Dana A. Remus, Counsel to the President, to David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, dated October 8, 2021 http://bit.ly/3aCuYJq
… President maintains his conclusion that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified as to any of the documents provided to the White House on September 8, 2021. Accordingly, President Biden does not uphold the former President’s assertion of privilege. ¤ The President instructs you, in accord with Section 4(b) of Executive Order 13489, to provide the pages identified as privileged by the former President to the Select Committee.
📋 WaPo: Judge calls for Justice Dept. civil rights probe into D.C. jail’s treatment of Jan. 6 detainees http://wapo.st/3vhM6xt “As of Sept. 2, about 37 Capitol riot defendants were jailed in Washington, a small fraction of the roughly 700 defendants held pending trial and 400 in federal custody.”
WaPo: Trump calls in to rally hosted by Bannon for Virginia GOP candidates http://wapo.st/3lAW6Pc
MotherJones: Evidence of Armed Trump Extremists Continues to Emerge in January 6 Cases http://bit.ly/30pqwvI
// An Oath Keeper faces gun charges, a defendant reportedly said a Proud Boys leader carried a gun at the Capitol, and more.
WaPo: Georgia judge dismisses lawsuit alleging voter fraud in 2020 presidential election http://wapo.st/3iVkjOv
Robb Pitts, chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, welcomed the decision, describing it as “a win for democracy.” ¤ “This lawsuit was the result of the Big Lie, which is nothing more than a meritless conspiracy theory being spread by people who simply cannot accept that their side lost,” Pitts said in a statement. “Its defeat here today should echo throughout the nation.”
WaPo, Aaron Blake: How close were we to an actual stolen election — stolen by Trump? http://wapo.st/2YJxmv5
The picture of Donald Trump’s scheme to get the Justice Department to help him overturn the 2020 election has been significantly filled out in recent weeks. First came the disclosure that conservative lawyer John Eastman had authored a memo outlining the steps by which this would take place on Jan. 6. Then came a major report from the Senate Judiciary Committee detailing Trump’s pressure campaign to get the Justice Department to lay a predicate for that Jan. 6 plot.
So just how close did we come to an actual stolen election — stolen by Trump? ¤ One thing has become pretty clear in recent weeks: This plot was foiled in large part because the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence opted not to go along with it. But what if they had? Or what if Trump had followed through on firing acting attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen and replacing him with the Justice Department official who was willing to do his bidding, Jeffrey Clark?
First, here’s what we know: The idea was pretty clear. Courts had routinely rejected Trump’s claims of fraud or misdeeds in states’ administration of their elections, so he and the White House turned to the Justice Department to legitimize the claims so Congress might have a reason to overturn the election on Jan. 6.
They barraged top Justice Department officials with wild claims they wanted investigated. And while that was taking place, Clark cooked up a draft letter stating that the Justice Department had “significant concerns” about the election results in Georgia, where Joe Biden was declared the winner. The letter would call on the state to convene a special legislative session to consider the matter. Clark also wanted to push for similar things in other states won by Biden.
Clark’s effort was rejected out of hand. And as Justice Department officials continued to resist, Trump and Clark floated the idea that Trump would replace Rosen with Clark just ahead of Jan. 6. Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue, testified that there was a connection between installing Clark and getting his letter out. But Rosen and Donoghue held fast, threatened mass Justice Department resignations, and Trump backed down, complaining that the whole thing wasn’t going to work anyway.
Turning Point No. 1: The Justice Department refuses to legitimize Trump’s claims
There is no reason to believe that Rosen and Donoghue ever truly considered releasing Clark’s letter, but what if the pressure had got to them? What if they had offered even a watered-down version — similar to what many administration officials had done in the name of pacifying Trump?
Or maybe Rosen and Donoghue would have continued to resist, and Trump would have pushed forward with firing Rosen and installing Clark. There would have been mass resignations at the Justice Department — triggering another Saturday Night Massacre-esque controversy — but at least the letter would have gone out.
Turning Point No. 2: Pence refuses to use his ceremonial role to reject certain states’ electors
Pence’s refusal to go along with Trump’s entreaties and the ideas later detailed in Eastman’s memo made him, in the eyes of some Trump administration critics, somewhat of an unlikely hero of Jan. 6. ¤ But we’ve since learned that Pence agonized over this decision more than we previously knew. “You don’t know the position I’m in,” he told former vice president Dan Quayle …
This is where Eastman’s memo comes in. The idea was not to get Pence to overturn the election himself — that’s the straw-man defense used by Eastman’s employer this week — but rather to declare the outcome in doubt and kick the decision to the House. ¤ We won’t dwell too much on the details of the Eastman memo here, but basically Pence was to set aside certain states’ electors and maybe try to declare Trump the winner of a majority of a smaller amount of electoral votes. At that point, Democrats would predictably cry foul, and Pence would cite the constitutional process of the House deciding an election in which no candidate has a majority of electors, with one vote per delegation.
Turning Point No. 3: What the House would have done
Despite Eastman’s breezy assertion, there is a real question about whether even a House vote in which the GOP controlled more delegations would have gone according to plan. ¤ Let’s break down the numbers. After members were sworn in to the new Congress on Jan. 3, the GOP had a majority in 26 of 50 delegations, while Democrats had a majority in 20. The other four were tied.
But some of those delegations were close calls. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) was one of the earliest members to criticize Trump’s fraud claims, as far back as November, and as the only member in Wyoming’s delegation, she would have controlled her state’s one vote. Eight other GOP-majority delegations would no longer have had a majority if even one Republican chose Biden. And the four tied states included Michigan, where Republican congressmen Fred Upton and Peter Meijer wound up supporting Trump’s impeachment, with Upton also criticizing Trump’s fraud claims in November. ¤ The process requires the winner to get a majority of states, not just the most states.
Turning Point No. 4: The alternate-elector problem
One thing hasn’t been dwelt upon enough in all of this. And that’s that even Eastman’s plan relied upon something come Jan. 6 that the Trump team didn’t have: alternate slates of pro-Trump electors in the states at issue.
Eastman in recent interviews explaining himself emphasized that the plot would have been “foolish” without those state legislatures designating alternate electors. That’s certainly convenient for him to say now, as he’s downplaying just how brazen the plot was. But it does reinforce how many pieces needed to fall into place for the plot to work.
We’ll never know how close we came to that being truly tested. But as we continue to sort through what became of Jan. 6, it’s worth taking stock of what a few more pieces falling into place might have meant — and the pressure points in our democracy they reveal.
Alternet: Jan. 6 committee issues a scathing subpoena to a Trump official implicated in plot to overturn the election http://bit.ly/3mM5aA6
⋙ ≣ Letter [pdf] http://bit.ly/3AzCqQ5 2p
🔆 This❗️⋙ DemocracyDocket, Marc Elias: How the GOP Will Try To Subvert Our Elections http://bit.ly/3BAreE1 “We are one, maybe two, elections away from a constitutional crisis”
WaPo: Jan. 6 committee preparing to aggressively enforce subpoenas, targets former Trump DOJ official http://wapo.st/3lClG6k The committee is seeking records and testimony from Jeffrey Clark, author of the ‘6-step plan’ to delay certification of the 2020 election
The committee said it is seeking records and testimony from Jeffrey Clark, a Trump-era Justice Department official who sought to deploy department resources to support President Donald Trump’s false claims of massive voting fraud in the 2020 election.
“The Select Committee needs to understand all the details about efforts inside the previous administration to delay the certification of the 2020 election and amplify misinformation about the election results,” committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a statement. “We need to understand Mr. Clark’s role in these efforts at the Justice Department and learn who was involved across the administration. The Select Committee expects Mr. Clark to cooperate fully with our investigation.”
🐣 RT @duty2warn (1/2) Today, we saw Trump’s desperation ratchet to a level we’ve not seen since January. He released multiple memos. In one, he attacked every GOP elected official in Michigan. In another, he suggested unless election fraud is exposed, Republicans WILL NOT VOTE in 2022 or 2024.
⋙ 🐣 RT @duty2warn (2/2) When Trump ratchets to new levels of rage and desperation, his malignancy and narcissism dominate. You have to look for triggers. Today you had an abrupt dismissal of the last election case in Georgia, you had Rosen testify, Clark get subpoenaed, and maybe – something else.
🐣 RT @Fraude_101 This is Trump is pulling rank. Republicans have to get behind his Big Lie or he pulls the rug from under their feet.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jonkarl Trump is now calling on Republicans not to vote — declaring “Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24” if his election fraud hoax is not “solved” first. He helped Republicans lose two Georgia Senate seats in January. Now he seems ready to try it again in the midterms. https://twitter.com/jonkarl/status/1448393517424943112?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @mareelias Trump is taunting McConnell and McCarthy to promote the Big Lie even more. He knows that his threat will result in more voter suppression, bogus audits and efforts to subvert the 2022 election. ¤ This is very serious and dangerous.
⋙❗🐣 RT @sahilkapur Trump just threatened to have Republican voters stay home in 2022 and 2024 unless the party is able to “solve” (by which he seems to mean overturn) the result of the last presidential election, which he lost. https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1448386456406347786?s=20/photo/1.
🐣 RT @kpolantz My latest: The circle of lawyers available to help Donald Trump and his advisers to respond to the House’s Jan 6. investigation is getting smaller. ¤ 4 big names have turned him down. His current team: disjointed and without a central coordinator
⋙ CNN: Top conservative lawyers steer clear of Trump’s latest legal fight http://cnn.it/3DA8kxJ
⭕ 12 Oct 2021
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: A step-by-step guide to heading off the next coup attempt http://wapo.st/3iV7iEu
⭕ 11 Oct 2021
CNN, Zachary Wolf: Here’s why you should be worried about US democracy right now http://cnn.it/3Avv9k8
🔆 This❗️⋙ RawStory/Salon, Chauncey Devega: ‘Beyond our current worst nightmares’: Mental health experts warn about the likely effects of a Trump comeback http://bit.ly/3BulAmO We must face the nightmare scenario with open eyes
Donald Trump’s presidency and the destructive forces it unleashed are a mental health emergency — as well as a public health emergency in general. Trump may no longer be president, but his fascist political movement and the political party he controls continues to cause harm.
Trumpism is both a political cult and a manifestation of collective narcissism. Tens of millions of his followers now live in an alternate reality sustained by the Big Lie, an upside-down world in which Donald Trump is still the “real” president of the United States. Many of Trump’s followers believe that he should be returned to power by any means available, including terrorism and other political violence.
The Trump regime and Republican policies more generally have literally caused trauma — physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual — for millions of Americans, including of course the deaths of at least 700,000 people from the coronavirus pandemic.In a recent essay, author and pastor John Pavlovitz addresses this:
“[F]or the first time in America’s history the latent ugliness in people was revealed and validated and celebrated by a sitting president — it was officially normalized. And what we’re experiencing now; this staggering, insensitive posturing in the face of so many people’s suffering, is the late-ripening fruit of something that has been set into the bedrock of half our nation. It is the malicious entitlement that MAGA was designed to nurture from the beginning….
“This quickly metastasizing moral cancer is something we’ve never experienced on this level in our lifetimes and it’s something we’re going to have to reckon with regardless of the political outcomes of the next four years. If the former president somehow takes that office again, these stories will surely grow exponentially more violent and more commonplace, but either way, the ugliness is here now.
“The Trump Effect on America, is that once reasonable, rational human beings whose prejudices, fears, and phobias were all bound by some baseline decorum and common courtesy that kept them from intentionally harming others — have been empowered to revel in the worst of themselves. They believe cruelty is their birthright.”
As early as 2015, many mental health experts began to warn that a Trump presidency would be disastrous for America and the world. They were correct in nearly all of their predictions.
It is likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2024. (In fact, the only unknown variable is whether he will actually decide to run.) Contrary to the naïve thinking of those Americans who believed Trump might magically go away, as president or otherwise he will be a fixture in American life for the foreseeable future.
What will happen to the American people’s collective mental and emotional health if Donald Trump runs for president again — or if he is elected? What kind of damage would Trump inflict on America and the world in a second term? And how do we explain why so many Americans — both ordinary citizens and members of the political and media classes — continue to be “surprised” by the torrent of revelations about Trump’s mental pathologies and his antisocial, anti-democratic behavior?
I recently asked several leading mental health experts — all of whom I have previously interviewed for Salon — to offer their warnings and predictions.
Dr. Lance Dodes is a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute:
The latest revelations about Trump confirm what we have known for years. Stephanie Grisham, his former press secretary, says, “The truth was that pretty much everyone eventually wore out their welcome with the president.” This points to Trump’s inability to comprehend or value other people; he can only use them while they serve his endless need to aggrandize himself, then discard them when they do not.
Grisham says, “When I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras, I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.” Here, she finally sees that Trump is not “crazy like a fox” but is truly a severely disordered person, in poor control and a danger to others. In Bob Woodward’s book, as reported in the Guardian [and elsewhere], on Trump’s way out of office, he drops F-bombs, “spewing expletives” and screaming at cabinet colleagues: “I don’t care a fuck. You’re all fucked up. You’re all fucked.”
This is an example of his paranoia, in which he denies responsibility for his multiple failures and losses, projecting these to others whom he condemns as worthless. Each of these revelations points to one or another aspect of Trump’s delusional sociopathy: his absence of a conscience, incapacity to care about or empathize with others, projection of blame to others (paranoia) and his psychotic distortion of reality in order to maintain his belief that he has a godlike superiority.
Trump’s primitive emotional state make him an enormous danger to democracy, which he cannot abide. As a consequence, if he were to again become president, the end of democracy in this country would become a realistic possibility.Dr. Justin Frank is a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center. He is the author of “Bush on the Couch” and “Obama on the Couch.” His most recent book is “Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President”:
Trump once had an internal conflict between being a builder and a destroyer. No longer is it a conflict; he is a destroyer, plain and simple. Unconsciously, his destructive force was originally directed against his tyrannical and punitive father, displaced onto investors, the media, banks, etc. But his ultimate displacement has been on the founding fathers of America’s democratic experiment.
He attacks basic institutions, from the CIA to the FBI to Congress itself. And since November 2020, he has put our entire electoral process in his crosshairs. If he were nominated and elected in 2024 — accounting for skewed results, in the event that right-wing voter suppression tactics are successful — it would mean that more Americans than ever embrace authoritarianism, and that would deliver the deepest blow to our democratic process in our history.
Psychologically, people yearn for strong leadership. However, they fail to understand that sorrow is the vitamin of growth, of strength. President Biden has been strengthened over his lifetime by facing sorrow and loss. Trump denies loss by triumphing over it with powerful defensive grandiosity. A leader who breaks things is also admired, interestingly, by adoring followers. They admire his ability to say and do things they themselves could never say or do in public. Trump fills that need perfectly.
The other major effect of a Trump victory in 2024 would be the likely apathy and despair felt by those who fought against him.
Elizabeth Mika is a psychotherapist and contributor to the 2017 bestseller “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”:
The “revelations” really just confirm what we have known about Trump for years, long before he was elected. People with his character defect, malignant narcissism, are sadly predictable: They are driven by insatiable drives for adulation and power, and an unceasing desire for revenge on those who may interfere (or be perceived as interfering) with the realization of those drives.
It is really too bad that our media, broadly speaking, has remained in the dark about Trump’s well-defined character pathology. Therefore, many journalists, mostly among the mainstream news media, continue to be shocked by these “revelations” as if unable and/or unwilling to finally arrive at an understanding of Trump’s disordered character.
If Trump runs and wins in 2024, we will see an accelerated continuation of our demise. Every negative trend we are experiencing now will be augmented, especially our polarization, inequality and violence.
As of now, 21 million Americans believe that Trump, whose presidency was stolen from him, should be restored by violent force — and they are ready to make it happen.
Dr. David Reiss is a psychiatrist, expert in mental fitness evaluations and contributor to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”:
I am totally unsurprised. But vindication does not soothe the national tragedy or my personal frustration and even bitterness (which are of much less significance) at having been ignored by those who had power to intervene.
No one could have predicted Trump’s specific actions while in office or now: His specific behaviors are inherently unpredictable. But the nature of his behaviors, the irrationality of his behaviors, the immaturity of his behaviors and the dangers brought about those behaviors were all quite predictable and in fact, were predicted.
You asked: What do I think will happen to America if Trump runs for office and wins in 2024? In my opinion, the even more frightening question is this: “What would it mean had happened to the American people and American society if Trump were returned to office in 2024?”
It would mean there had been: 1) a complete breakdown of rationality within the social order; 2) the destruction of our democratic system of elections and government; or 3) that something so horrible had transpired that all hope was lost and, due to fear and desperation, totalitarianism or fascism had been embraced.
As to what would happen afterward, it would depend upon who was actually “pulling the strings” of the totalitarian/fascist regime for which Trump was the figurehead. Trump himself, at age 78 certainly would not actually be in command. I cannot begin to predict the exact manner or type of dystopia that would be enacted. I can predict that it would be beyond our current worst nightmares.
Dr. John Gartner is a psychologist, psychoanalyst and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and the founder of Duty to Warn. He was also a contributor to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”:
Democracy would be dead, and the coup complete. All future “elections” would be Putin-style shams, where the electorate never actually has the power to remove the Republicans from power.
We could expect criminal prosecutions against Democratic leaders, the press and anyone who opposed the regime. Experts of all types would be persecuted. “Patriots” would be encouraged to expose, punish and marginalize citizens at all levels of society who are not MAGA. Fox would become de facto state-TV propaganda. Only loyal “party members” would be allowed to work in government.
Hate crimes would skyrocket. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants would be incarcerated in concentration camps.
Thousands of ordinary citizens would join cells of an “underground resistance,” which would become progressively more violent. This “terrorism” would be used to justify martial law and heavy surveillance. Millions would flee to Canada and Europe.
Internationally, the U.S. would become a Russian puppet state. NATO and our international alliances would crumble. The economy would contract. Global warming would spiral out of control. And we might well stumble into war.
Dr. Seth D. Norrholm is a translational neuroscientist and one of the world’s leading experts on PTSD and fear. He is currently scientific director at the Neuroscience Center for Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma (NeuroCAST) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at Wayne State University School of Medicine:
The revelations that are merging from various sources who had access to the Trump White House are not at all surprising. As I and others have commented on for years now, no matter how you label or classify the former president’s behavior (malignantly narcissistic, sociopathic, psychopathic, abusive), there is an underlying thread of immaturity. This immaturity plays itself out as an inability to regulate emotion, a behavioral profile typically seen in children and adolescents. It is therefore not surprising to hear about the former president’s uncontrollable rage and the allegation that he had a handler specifically tasked with soothing him like a toddler. I expect similar stories to continue to come out.
What happens if the former president runs for office again in 2024 – and possibly wins? This would be a complete failure of several social, political, governmental, ethical and professional “guardrails.”
From the perspective of the former president as an abuser, a future Trump candidacy and potential presidency would be a psychological slap in the face to all of his victims from the past six years. I’ve often used the analogy of an abusive relationship when it comes to the former president and his approach to governing. If the watering-down of the Mueller investigation and the acquittal following evidence-heavy impeachment proceedings was akin to the arrest and subsequent release of a criminally abusive spouse, a return to office would indicate zero accountability for, and an acceptance of, physical and emotional abuse from our leadership; a trend that has been gathering steam for some time now.
Considering the former president incited an attack on his own country and has continued to push the Big Lie undermining our electoral process, our democracy (already on life support) would suffer likely irreversible damage if this is further ignored and already eroded norms are obliterated beyond repair.
Moreover, considering that more than 700,000 Americans have died from a pandemic that could have been better controlled, which the former president downplayed to protect his political future, allowing a return to the campaign trail and potentially the White House would frankly forgive an accessory to negligent homicide on an unprecedented scale.
Taken together, the nation and the world would be presented with the psychologically untenable position of having to accept the worst that humanity has to offer, according to almost all of the “standards” established by modern society, as its leader once again.
🐣 RT @LannyDavis “A study by Media Matters showed that ABC, NBC, and CBS all chose not even to mention the [Eastman] memo [for Trump to implement a coup]. They reach more than 20 million Americans.”—Heather Cox Richardson. ¤ I ask news directors of all 3 networks and their nightly anchors – Why?
⋙ 🐣 RT @cuzkristoff Here’s his follow up which is worse!
⋙ SacBee: John Eastman: Here’s the advice I actually gave Vice President Pence on the 2020 election http://bit.ly/3lsFCsh
// 10/7/2021
I have been debating constitutional law with Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and Bee contributor, for over 20 years.
We disagreed on almost every issue, but always with civility. One thing I hoped we shared from our respective Catholic and Jewish faith traditions is the biblical command that one “shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Judging from his recent scurrilous attack on me http://bit.ly/3mIWACi, we do not share even that.
The memo on which Chemerinsky relied for his accusation that I tried to “overthrow the government” and “stage a coup” was a preliminary and incomplete one, a draft of a more complete memo that outlined all the scenarios that had become topics of discussion following the November 2020 election. The Washington Post and other media organizations had access to the complete memo http://cnn.it/3v2xbqM, but they focused on the preliminary version to advance their “coup” narrative.
Neither version of the memo reflects the advice I gave to then-Vice President Mike Pence (though, to be precise, the final scenario laid out in the complete memo does).
The issue is whether the 12th Amendment https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxii gives the vice president any authority to determine the validity of electoral votes.
In 1796, Vice President John Adams made such a determination regarding contested electoral votes from Vermont, confirming his own election as president. In 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson did the same with improper electoral votes from Georgia, throwing that election to the House, where Jefferson eventually prevailed. Richard Nixon did the same thing in 1960, accepting from Hawaii the subsequently certified John Kennedy electors rather than the initially certified Nixon electors.
These precedents, and several scholarly articles written after the 2000 election, served as the basis for some of the scenarios discussed in my memo.
But as the New York Times confirmed through thorough investigation and reporting on this critical issue, I did not advise Pence to exercise such authority. Indeed, responding to a direct question from the vice president during a meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 4, I noted that even if he had that authority, it would be foolish to exercise it in the absence of certifications of alternate Trump electors from the contested states’ legislatures.
Here’s how the Times accurately portrayed that exchange, apparently citing one of the two Pence aides also in attendance:
“Mr. Eastman said that Mr. Pence then turned to him and asked, ‘Do you think I have such power?’
“Mr. Eastman said he told Mr. Pence that he might have the power, but that it would be foolish for him to exercise it until state legislatures certified a new set of electors for Mr. Trump — something that had not happened.
“A person close to Mr. Pence, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the Oval Office conversation, said that Mr. Eastman acknowledged that the vice president most likely did not have that power, at which point Mr. Pence turned to Mr. Trump and said, ‘Did you hear that, Mr. President?’”
So what did I actually advise? As The Times quoted me as saying, “What we asked him (Pence) to do was delay the proceedings at the request of these state legislatures so they could look into the matter.”
Hardly an attempt to “overthrow the government” or “stage a coup.”
WaPo, Michael Gerson: The Trump nightmare looms again http://wapo.st/3FvUA8S “Every new tranche of information released about Trump’s behavior following the 2020 election … reveals a serious and concerted attempt to overthrow America’s legitimate incoming government.
// The most likely scenario in 2025 is catastrophic: Trump back in the White House and Republicans in charge of the House and Senate.
It is increasingly evident that the nightmare prospect of American politics — unified Republican control of the federal government in the hands of a reelected, empowered Donald Trump in 2025 — is also the likely outcome. ¤ Why this is a nightmare should be clear enough. Every new tranche of information released about Trump’s behavior following the 2020 election — most recently an interim report from the Senate Judiciary Committee — reveals a serious and concerted attempt to overthrow America’s legitimate incoming government.
At roughly the same time that Trump was gathering and unleashing his goons to intimidate members of Congress on Jan. 6, he was pressuring Justice Department leaders to provide legal cover for his effort to prevent certification of the election. When they refused, Trump conspired with a lower-level loyalist to take over the department and run it according to the president’s dictates. Under the threat of mass resignations, Trump eventually backed off.
… The thing that matters most is this: The current front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination would have broken the constitutional order if he could have broken the constitutional order. ¤ Meanwhile, it is clear that this same lawless, reckless man has a perfectly realistic path back to power. The GOP is a garbage scow of the corrupt, the seditious and their enablers, yet the short- and medium-term political currents are in its favor.
This is not simply a problem of the Biden administration’s messaging. It reflects deeper political challenges, recently and vividly described by Ezra Klein and David Shor. In my woefully condensed version of Klein’s column based on his interviews with the data analyst: American voters are increasingly polarized by education (which is really a proxy for complex issues of class and race). Whites with a college education have lurched Democratic. Whites without a college education have lurched Republican.
This presents Democrats with disadvantages. Significantly more voters lack a college education than have one. And voters with a college education tend to be located in urban areas, which centralizes and thus diminishes their influence. Both the electoral college and the constitutional method of Senate representation reward those who control wide open spaces.
What does this mean in practice? It means Democrats need to significantly outperform Republicans in national matchups to obtain even mediocre results in presidential and Senate races. It means that Democrats, to remain competitive, need to win in places they don’t currently win, draw from groups they don’t currently draw and speak in cultural dialects they don’t currently speak.
This analysis has sparked a predictable intramural debate. Some Democratic activists want the party to relentlessly pound its support for popular policies while de-emphasizing its association with divisive issues (such as immigration and climate change). Others discount the possibility that policy messaging can change many minds, putting their faith instead in stoking Democratic enthusiasm.
Klein’s main complaint, however, is that few Democratic lawmakers at the national level — who mostly live among like-minded, college-educated, liberal peers — are paying attention to the urgency of the task. This type of shift in electoral focus would likely involve major ideological and strategic adjustments. But who in the national debate among Democrats over budget priorities has demonstrated the slightest interest in these matters?
This is a national, not just a Democratic, emergency. Trump has strengthened his identification with the seditious forces he unleashed on Jan. 6. He has embraced ever more absurd and malicious conspiracy theories. He has shown even less stability, humanity, responsibility and restraint. And his support among Republicans has grown. Trump and his strongest supporters are in a feedback loop of radicalization.
If Trump returns to the presidency, many of the past constraints on his power would be purposely loosed. Many of the professionals and patriots who opposed him in his final days would have been weeded out long before. There is no reason Trump would not try to solidify personal power over military and federal law enforcement units to employ as a bully’s club in times of civil disorder. There is no reason he would refrain from using federal resources to harass political opponents, undermine freedom of the press and change the outcome of elections. These are previously stated goals.
What attitudes and actions does this require of us? Any reaction must begin with a sober recognition. Catastrophe is in the front room. The weather forecast includes the apocalypse.
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: The media are finally waking up to the ‘rolling coup.’ We must take the side of democracy. http://wapo.st/3FFPAOW While cable news outlets like CNN and MSNBC have raised the alarm, the primetime news that most people watch have been lacking
WaPo, Toomas Hendrik Ilves: Why the West has itself to blame for Russian corruption http://wapo.st/3ABg2pg “We have become partners in crime, colluding with the enemies of liberty, of our Enlightenment heritage of rule of law and human rights”
// Toomas Hendrik Ilves is the former president of Estonia
The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been hounded, persecuted, beaten, poisoned and jailed for standing up to a thuggish autocracy that is well on its way to classic totalitarian rule. His crime? Peacefully using his fundamental human right of freedom of expression to challenge a regime held together by stormtroopers, violence and murder.
Navalny’s story is not a new one. In the decade before the collapse of communism, we saw this tale unfold over and over again. Joseph Brodsky, Natan Sharansky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and hundreds of others were persecuted for their beliefs by that real-life Mordor, the U.S.S.R.
There is a difference, however. Back in those days, we in the West at least had the moral clarity to stand up to the thugs, and to raise these issues with our governments, in our parliaments, in all possible international forums.
Paradoxically, it helped that our foes were ideologically anti-capitalist. Commissars and Politburo members could hardly buy villas on the Riviera, ski chateaus in St. Moritz, Switzerland, or apartments in a skyscraper owned by a U.S. president. They did not dock their 470-foot yachts in Saint-Tropez, France, or Piraeus, Greece. On our side, taking money from totalitarians counted as bribery or as espionage — bringing severe criminal penalties and social disgrace.
Today, the liberal democratic West has abandoned that one-time clarity. We have become partners in crime, colluding with the enemies of liberty, of our Enlightenment heritage of rule of law and human rights. We are the unindicted co-conspirators of our own demise and the destruction of Russia, collapsing under the weight of its corruption and thievery.
That stench swirls from our own corrupt politicians and political parties, from our naive and greedy governments, and even the most prestigious, centuries-old universities. It swirls from businesses who prize profit over justice, truth and freedom. It swirls from bankers, lawyers and accountants who launder money and reputations. The revelations of the Pandora Papers, like the other tales of financial skulduggery that have come before, once again demonstrate that we ourselves are systematically complicit in the thievery and corruption that plague so many societies.
It is this corruption, our corruption, that aids, abets and sustains, indeed nourishes the murderous looting of the Kremlin’s boyars and their minions, as well as other odious regimes around the globe.
Where there is no rule of law, where the autocrat can steal or take away anyone’s property, his overriding fear is that someone will do to him what he has done to enrich himself. Thus, the despot’s only recourse is ship his money to a place that enjoys the benefits of a well-established legal system, be it London or Dubai, New York or Tallinn, Estonia — anywhere there are secure legal protections for those earn their wealth through work, rather than through theft or pumping it out of land that belongs to the population, which is just a more indirect form of theft.
This rule of law has made us prosperous. We know the state cannot illegally take away our property. But it also allows authoritarian regimes to maintain their stolen treasure and persecute people such as Navalny, as well countless others. If we genuinely care about freedom, therefore, it is time to change our own laws.
There is much we can do. We must impose transparency on anonymous shell companies. We must impose visa bans on corrupt officials who aim to benefit from our institutions (and the spies who aim to undermine them). The United Kingdom’s unexplained wealth orders, which unfortunately are not widely or strictly applied, should be copied and rigorously enforced across our rule-of-law-based West.
We should honor Navalny not only because he exposes the grotesque thievery and destruction of human rights in Russia. He also holds a mirror up to our own complicity in his persecution and in the backwardness and poverty of Russia. It is time we did something about it.
NYT, Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman: We Are Republicans With a Plea: Elect Democrats in 2022 http://nyti.ms/3mKCGXh
// Mr. Taylor served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership. Ms. Whitman was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.
After Donald Trump’s defeat, there was a measure of hope among Republicans who opposed him that control of the G.O.P. would be up for grabs, and that conservative pragmatists could take back the party. But it’s become obvious that political extremists maintain a viselike grip on the national G.O.P., the state parties and the process for fielding and championing House and Senate candidates in next year’s elections.
Rational Republicans are losing the G.O.P. civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democratic Party.
Earlier this year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps by forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, G.O.P. leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.
Breaking away from the G.O.P. and starting a new center-right party may prove in time to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.
So for now, the best hope for the rational remnants of the G.O.P. is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year — including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.
It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.
Even still, we don’t take this position lightly. Many of us have spent years battling the left over government’s role in society, and we will continue to have disagreements on fundamental issues like infrastructure spending, taxes and national security. Similarly, some Democrats will be wary of any pact with the political right.
But we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate the leaders of the G.O.P. — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.
In addition to these leaders, this week we are coming together around a political idea — the Renew America Movement — and will release a slate of nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates we will support in 2022.
These “renewers” must be protected and elected if we want to restore a common-sense coalition in Washington. But merely holding the line will be insufficient. To defeat the extremist insurgency in our political system and pressure the Republican Party to reform, voters and candidates must be willing to form nontraditional alliances.
For disaffected Republicans, this means an openness to backing centrist Democrats. It will be difficult for lifelong G.O.P. members to do this — akin to rooting for the other team out of fear that your own is ruining the sport entirely — but democracy is not a game, which is why when push comes to shove, patriotic conservatives should put country over party.
One of those races is in Pennsylvania, where a bevy of pro-Trump candidates are vying to replace the outgoing Republican senator, Pat Toomey. The only prominent moderate in the G.O.P. primary, Craig Snyder, recently bowed out, and if no one takes his place, it will increase the urgency for Republican voters to stand behind a Democrat, such as centrist Representative Conor Lamb, who is running for the seat.
For Democrats, this similarly means being open to conceding that there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledging that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.
Utah is a prime example, where the best hope of defeating Senator Mike Lee, a Republican who defended Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede the election, is not a Democrat but an independent and former Republican, Evan McMullin, a member of our group, who announced last week that he was entering the race.
We need more candidates like him prepared to challenge politicians who have sought to subvert our Constitution from the comfort of their “safe seats” in Congress, and we are encouraged to note that additional independent-minded leaders are considering entering the fray in places like Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina, targeting seats that Trumpist Republicans think are secure.
More broadly, this experiment in “coalition campaigning” — uniting concerned conservatives and patriotic progressives — could remake American politics and serve as an antidote to hyper-partisanship and federal gridlock. ¤ To work, it will require trust-building between both camps, especially while fighting side-by-side in the toughest races around the country by learning to collaborate on voter outreach, sharing sensitive polling data, and synchronizing campaign messaging.
A compact between the center-right and the left may seem like an unnatural fit, but in the battle for the soul of America’s political system, we cannot retreat to our ideological corners.
A great deal depends on our willingness to consider new paths of political reform. From the halls of Congress to our own communities, the fate of our Republic might well rest on forming alliances with those we least expected.
⭕ 10 Oct 2021
TheGuardian: A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracy http://bit.ly/2YBi3EG
Forty years on, after Donald Trump entered the White House mining what Adam Schiff calls “a dangerous vein of autocratic thought” in the Republican party, the then little-known California Democrat did more than anyone else to unravel and excoriate the high crimes of a charlatan destined to be the only president twice impeached.
His work as a federal prosecutor who got the conviction of the first FBI agent accused of spying for Russia was crucial to his understanding of how thoroughly Trump was manipulated by the Russians. He understood that Michael Cohen’s efforts during the campaign to close a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow would make Trump vulnerable to blackmail if his lawyer’s calls had been recorded. And he was astonished when he realized that that kind of kompromat wouldn’t even be necessary.
When Trump “did become president, there would be no need for the Kremlin to blackmail him into betraying America’s interests”, Schiff writes. “To a remarkable degree, he would prove more than willing to do that on his own.”
There’s lots more in the book, from Schiff’s unsuccessful effort to convince New York Times editors to remind readers the emails they were publishing to undermine Hillary Clinton had been stolen by the Russians for that very purpose, to Schiff’s revelation that if he had known how poorly Robert Mueller would perform as a witness after he completed his stint as special counsel, he would not have demanded his testimony.
“I haven’t said this before this book,” he told the Guardian. “That was one of the difficult sections of the book to write because I have such reverence for Mueller. I wanted to be respectful but accurate.”
Eureka Moment.
On the page, Schiff records an airport exchange with a Republican stranger, who said: “You can tell me – there’s nothing to this ‘collusion stuff’, is there?” ¤ It is a conversation which should put that question permanently to rest.Schiff said: “What if I was to tell you that we had evidence in black and white that the Russians approached the Clinton campaign and offered dirt on Donald Trump, then met secretly with Chelsea Clinton, John Podesta and Robby Mook in the Brooklyn headquarters of the campaign … then Hillary lied about it to cover it up. Would you call that collusion?
“Now what If I also told you that after the election, former national security adviser Susan Rice secretly talked with the Russian ambassador in an effort to undermine US sanctions on Russia after they interfered to help Hillary win. Would you call that collusion?”
The Republican was convinced: “You know, I probably would.”For Schiff, it was a “eureka moment”. ¤ “Now,” he thought, “if I can only speak to a couple hundred million people.” ¤ Schiff’s book should convince a few million more that everything he said about Trump was true – and that the country was exceptionally lucky to have him ready and willing to defend the tattered concept of “truth”.
Salon: “Absolutely false”: Fox News brutally fact checks Mike Pence after he whitewashes the Capitol riot http://bit.ly/3BwpwUe
// “Saying ‘one day in January’ is kind of like calling 9/11 one day in September,” said Fox News’ Howard Kurtz
🐣 📋 RT @michaelkruse “If you draw a district that’s safe, the party no longer cares about recruiting a broadly appealing candidate,” says @Redistrict. “This is a vicious cycle in that the decline of competitive seats leads to a more extreme and dysfunctional Congress.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @michaelkruse “There are really only about three dozen truly competitive seats anyway and partisans have realized in these polarized times the best way to flip a district is to gerrymander it after the Census,” says @davedaley3. “Now partisans are coming back for more.”
⋙⋙ WaPo: The imminent impact of redistricting: sharper partisan elbows, less compromise by both sides in the House https://wapo.st/3v0iggT
WaPo, EJ Dionne: Biden needs a reboot. Fighting for democracy is the key. http://wapo.st/3v1HBXW “Biden must insist that Republicans can’t have it both ways on Trump’s election subversion. They are either for it or against it”
… [T]he other unavoidable fight before us: the battle for democracy itself. Protecting democracy requires both the more socially effective government Biden champions and strenuous resistance to Trump’s democracy-wrecking efforts.
This certainly means adopting the voting reforms endorsed by Sen. Joe Manchin III, which will require bypassing the filibuster the West Virginia Democrat regularly extols. And Biden must insist that Republicans can’t have it both ways on Trump’s election subversion. They are either for it or against it. Those who quietly tell reporters they bemoan what Trump is doing should be called upon to say so out loud, forcefully, and act accordingly.
By recognizing that rallying the nation behind the cause of democracy is now his most important task, Biden would do more than reboot his presidency and give his party a fighting chance in 2022. He’d be doing what he was elected to do.
EmptyWheel, Marcy Wheeler: FBI Searches the Home of the Guy Who Said, “I want to see thousands of normies burn that city to ash” on January 6 http://bit.ly/3FxNgtC
⭕ 9 Oct 2021
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Trump will try to overthrow the election in 2024. He’s now laying the groundwork in plain sight. It will be the end of our Constitutional democracy if he succeeds. Only a massive voter turnout for local, state, and Federal elections can protect us.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jimsciutto Sadly, he’s right.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @billmaher 💽 My dark prediction for the 2024 U.S. presidential election. https://twitter.com/billmaher/status/1446700866778456066?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman There is no possible executive privilege claim regarding Bannon, who was not a government employee. ¤ Any lawyer who files a document in court claiming such a privilege should immediately be referred to the state bar disciplinary committee.
🧵 ⇈ ⇊ RT @atrupar Trump is sprinkling the big lie throughout his rally speech in Des Moines, Iowa. His specific claim tonight is that Democrats “used Covid in order to cheat and rig,” even though red states use mail voting and there’s no evidence of election fraud in 2020. 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1447006949665611781?s=20
WaPo Editorial: Without these changes, U.S. democracy will remain vulnerable to Trump and other bad actors http://wapo.st/30dy30w Trump “was trying to hold on to power against the wishes of the American people… Anyone seeking to play down that fact today is complicit”
“One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.” These, according to a new Senate Judiciary Committee report, were the words of President Donald Trump, pressuring the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, to upend a free-and-fair vote. Three days after Mr. Trump uttered them, a mob he had inflamed with lies ransacked the Capitol as lawmakers met to count duly cast electoral votes.
The Senate report details how Mr. Trump tried persistently to enlist the Justice Department in his scheme to overturn the 2020 election results. His pressure campaign, after Attorney General William P. Barr resigned in December, featured calls and meetings with Mr. Rosen and other top Justice Department staff. It continued as Mr. Trump sent them a preposterous petition he wanted them to file with the Supreme Court asking the justices to void Joe Biden’s victory. It reached its zenith in a cockamamie plot to force Mr. Rosen to pressure state governments to cook the results or be replaced by Jeffrey Clark, a lower-ranking Justice official who would go along with the scheme.
Mr. Trump failed because Mr. Rosen and other officials in key positions refused to cooperate and threatened to resign. But they could not stop Mr. Trump from forcing the resignation of the U.S. attorney in Atlanta and replacing him with a lawyer the then-president thought would pursue the fraud investigations he wanted to see.
Senate Republicans played down these revelations, arguing that, following the Russia investigation, it was reasonable for Mr. Trump to mistrust the Justice Department and the FBI. But, leaving aside the fact that the Russia probe was a well-founded and legitimate counterintelligence investigation, Mr. Trump, in this case, was not exercising reasonable skepticism; he was trying to hold on to power against the wishes of the American people, based on widely debunked mistruths about the 2020 vote. Anyone seeking to play down that fact today is complicit in his plot to undermine U.S. democracy.
⭕ 8 Oct 2021
🐣 RT @RepLizCheney This is not true. 1/6 Committee is making significant progress and we will enforce subpoenas. Committee statement coming soon.
⋙ RT 🧵 @TheRickWilson 1/ I have some bad news. After multiple calls I have some extremely grim news. ¤ As of now 1/6 commission is dead already, and will not enforce the subpoenas. ¤ Trump wins. ¤ The 1/6 terror plot will go unexamined and unpunished. ¤ To say I’m livid is putting it mildly. 📌 https://twitter.com/RepLizCheney/status/1446530469936472069?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson ¤ 2/ This is staffed wrong, led wrong, and a gutless exercise to get back to talking about infrastructure. ¤ They’re not taking the risk seriously, they’re not taking the data before them seriously, and they’re eager to run out the clock. ¤ Livid.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson 3/ I’m told that the whole plan is to bring in academics to examine the information from that day, when it should be a LE/IC style counterterrorism investigation. ¤ The leadership has already decided to slow roll it and write a tsk tsk memo at the end.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson 4/ “They’re afraid of 1A implications.” The FUCK? ¤ How about being afraid of a mob coming to fucking kill you? ¤ Democrats, never tell me
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson 5/ Stay locked in your bubble that the modern GOP won’t have a mob of Bannon’s terrorists burn you to the ground and piss on the ashes. ¤ An unpunished coup is a training exercise. ¤ End.
💙 ⏳ WaPo, Philip Bump: The hollowness of the ‘but it didn’t work’ defense of Trump’s attempt to retain power http://wapo.st/3oM23uw “His was a spaghetti-at-the-wall presidency; his was a spaghetti-at-the-wall coup”
// Entire
Distilled to its essence, the United States held an election last year in which it elected a new president who took office on Jan. 20. This sequence of events has happened dozens of times before. It is how power is and always has been transferred in our nearly 250-year-old republic.
But, of course, this is not the entire story. The period between the election and that inauguration was an unusually turbulent one, in which the incumbent president flailed against his loss, welcoming the assistance of various allies and deploying myriad tactics in his effort to prevent Joe Biden from assuming his elected position.
That effort peaked on Jan. 6 but began hours after polls closed. Early in the morning of Nov. 4, President Donald Trump spoke to the media from the White House, appearing beside large screens emblazoned with his campaign logo — itself an abuse of his position. He pushed for states to stop counting legally cast votes, a continuation of his deliberate months-long effort to raise doubts about the validity of mail-in ballots. He followed up this demand with tweets — “STOP THE COUNT!” — encouragement to his supporters, some armed, who protested outside vote-counting centers in close states or who interrupted the count by insisting that they had a right to observe the process.
Each time a benchmark toward the finalization of Trump’s loss approached, tensions rose. Prior to the Nov. 7 determination that Biden would carry enough states to win the electoral college, Trump and his allies filed legal challenges aimed at halting the count. When the races had been called, Trump and his allies sought to disrupt the certification of results. In Michigan, this nearly worked, with Republican (and at least one overtly pro-Trump) members of the election board in Wayne County initially refusing to finalize vote totals from Detroit. After relenting under public pressure, the board members confirmed the vote totals though later (after speaking with Trump) they tried to rescind that decision.
The next benchmark was Dec. 14, when presidential electors met and cast ballots. State legislators began holding hearings to elevate the unfounded claims of fraud, inviting Trump allies and lawyers to offer testimony, rarely under oath. By this point, Trump’s serious legal challenges had mostly evaporated, leaving just wild conspiracy theories about international vote-rigging and nonsense about vote-dumps.
In some states, electors who would have voted for Trump had he won did so anyway on Dec. 14, hoping to produce alternate slates of electors for Congress to consider. Again, though, Trump came closer than people might recognize: one conservative justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court was the deciding vote in rejecting Trump’s effort to throw out a number of votes from Democratic strongholds in that state.
It was also on Dec. 14 that Trump announced that Attorney General William P. Barr would be leaving his administration, soon after Barr acknowledged publicly that Trump’s fraud claims were meritless. That helped launch the most dangerous phase of Trump’s effort, the one that culminated in the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6.
Trump entertained the idea of replacing acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen with a Justice Department official who eagerly echoed Trump’s false fraud claims, Jeffrey Clark. Clark had a plan for the department to inform Georgia that its results were suspect (they weren’t) and to encourage the state legislature to reconvene to consider whether to submit an alternate slate of electors. The intent was to establish a pattern that could be repeated in other states.
Ultimately, faced with the threat of a mass desertion of senior staff that would reveal the intent of his plan (as The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake reported on Thursday), Trump backed down.
This was only one of several aspects of his last-ditch attempt to hold power, though. He also tried to simply cajole states into rejecting vote results, as he did in calling Georgia’s secretary of state and asking him to “find” votes. The most visible component of Trump’s plan, of course, was to encourage his supporters to come to Washington on that day, where there would be a “wild” rally in support of his presidency and in defense of his ongoing claims of electoral fraud. This meant thousands of angry Trump supporters milling around the National Mall, hundreds of whom later beat back law enforcement to storm the Capitol and block the electoral-vote counting.
The component that’s spurred the most discussion in recent weeks was Trump’s elevation of an assertion from a right-wing lawyer named John Eastman in which Vice President Mike Pence, overseeing the counting, could simply declare that Trump had won. The idea was that Pence could ignore the law that establishes the vote-counting process by deeming it to be unconstitutional.
Eastman wrote two versions of a memo explaining how, in his estimation, this might work. The first was glib and reportedly met with skepticism from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) when it was presented to him. The second was lengthier, seeking to present this idea as one of several paths forward for the vote-counting. Republican officials eager to appeal to Trump’s base, like Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), announced their intentions to object to the counting of votes, helping set the stage for the sorts of conflict that would give Pence more space to ignore submitted votes or to throw the election results back to the states, if he chose to do so. He did not make that choice.
That he didn’t and that Trump gave up on replacing Rosen and that the physical violence at the Capitol didn’t derail the electoral-vote counting for long have all been elevated as reasons to shrug at Trump’s efforts. He tried all these things and they didn’t work, this line of argument goes, so why should we be concerned about their working in the future? The threat that existed was overstated and has largely passed.
This argument has two critical flaws, though. The first is that it misunderstands Trump’s intent. The second is that it underestimates the assistance he received.
Imagine what would have happened if Pence had gone along with Eastman’s plan. In his memo, Eastman games out what happens next: Pence throws out some votes and Trump wins or it goes to the House where Trump likely wins thanks to the established tiebreaking process (each state gets one vote, determined by its collective delegation).
But all of this is ludicrous to consider in the abstract. The immediate effect of any effort by Pence to subvert the process would have been instantaneous outrage from Democrats in the chamber and in the streets. Eastman waves this off in his initial memo as partisan “howls,” but it’s obvious that such an overt attempt to undercut the will of the electorate would face enormous opprobrium and outcry. We simply can’t say what would happen, any more than we could have accurately predicted what followed when Florida was a toss-up in 2000. At least then, there was real uncertainty about the winner of a close race. Here, there was no such uncertainty, meaning far more likelihood of extreme reactions.
What Trump was trying to do from Nov. 3 to Jan. 6 was slapdash and ad hoc. But it was all directed in the same way: throw as much nonsense as possible in Biden’s path to the presidency. That his pre-Jan. 6 effort included Eastman’s memo and calling Georgia and replacing Rosen and encouraging a rally is a sign of an incoherent strategy except that it was wide-ranging. This is what he always did, saying or doing whatever he thought might convince people to do what he wanted. His was a spaghetti-at-the-wall presidency; his was a spaghetti-at-the-wall coup.
We can use the loaded analogy of the American Revolution itself. The colonists engaged British regulars on Lexington Green, losing quickly and decisively. Then, as the Brits marched forward, the colonists shot at them from the woods, an unfair and unexpected attack on the British army. But it worked. That’s why the analogy is loaded, of course; Trump’s guerrilla effort didn’t succeed. It was nonetheless similar, an asymmetric attack on American institutions that failed in part because there were still enough people in place to keep it from working.
And this is why it’s important not to underestimate the breadth of support Trump’s effort enjoyed. Legislators in multiple states eagerly endorsed and bolstered his claims prior to the inauguration — and afterward, as we’ve seen in Arizona. State legislators held those hearings and signed letters demanding action in Washington on Trump’s behalf. Attorneys general from a number of Republican-run states signed on to an at-times laughable legal effort to challenge his loss at the Supreme Court. The majority of the House Republican caucus voted to object to the ballots submitted by several states. His efforts came down to a handful of people — Pence, the judge in Wisconsin, the capitulation of those board members in Wayne County, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger — who stood in his way.
All of that was before the months-long post-inauguration effort to rationalize and bolster Trump’s efforts. States have changed voting laws and increased the power of political partisans to evaluate the results of elections. Prominent Republicans like Pence and Raffensperger have been targeted for ouster or criticism. There has been an effort to populate positions within the Republican Party and in election-organizing bodies with people sympathetic to Trump’s claims of fraud. One of the Wayne County officials had publicly endorsed Trump’s claims before the election, in case you’re wondering what effect that might have.
The violence on Jan. 6, once anathema to Republicans, has become increasingly dismissed as overstated by members of Trump’s party. That violence has been downplayed and rationalized, the perpetrators described as political prisoners. Most Republicans continue to incorrectly think that Biden was elected illegitimately, smoothing the runway for future challenges to election results.
Ad hoc efforts can become formal ones. The colonists banded together to form the Continental Army, equipped and trained.
It is certainly true that, in 2024, Mike Pence will not be the person overseeing the counting of electoral votes. It is true that at that point Trump will not be in a position to fire the head of the Justice Department anyway. But it is also true that there will be enormous pressure on officials in various states both to constrain how voting is conducted and how those votes are counted and certified from a fervent Republican base looking to preemptively stop the fraud that it incorrectly believes happened in 2020. It may be the case that Vice President Harris is forced to consider whether to accept electoral votes submitted from a state in which legislators have dubiously decided that the Republican, perhaps even Trump himself, won.
It didn’t work in 2020, no. Happily. But guerrilla efforts are strengthened by probing defenses. You learn where the opponent is weak and where it’s strong. Maybe that involved a sloppy effort to throw things at the wall. But if you learned where the wall was weak, it was worth it.
WaPo, Carlos Lozada: Adam Schiff points to a second insurrection — by members of Congress themselves http://wapo.st/3oLHcYn
// In his memoir, MIDNIGHT IN WASHINGTON: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could (10/12), the House Intelligence Committee chair argues America barely passed Trump’s “stress test” of American democracy
🐣 RT @SecBlinken .@POTUS has made official the U.S. commitment to resettle up to 125k refugees, demonstrating that the United States will continue to lead in providing refuge to those fleeing persecution so they can start new lives in safety.
Law&Crime: A Desperate Play for Time’: Lawyers Dismiss Steve Bannon’s ‘Nonsense’ Refusal to Comply With Congressional Subpoena http://bit.ly/2Yvuyll
⭕ 7 Oct 2021
‼️ 🐣 RT @glennkirshner Just look at Trump’s statement from the newly released Senate Judiciary report, “Subverting Justice: How the Former President & His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election.” For gosh sakes, indict him already! The criminal conduct is beyond dispute. And #JusticeMatters https://twitter.com/glennkirschner2/status/1446104578089496583?s=20/photo/1
// It says: “According to testimony Rosen gave to the Committee, Trump opened the meeting by saying ‘One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.’” …
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Obstruction of justice.
⋙ Politico: Trump tells 4 former aides to defy Jan. 6 committee’s subpoena http://politi.co/3Dzkbw5
// The House panel probing the Capitol attack had demanded documents and testimony from the former president’s former aides by Thursday.
🖼 WaPo Mag: What Wyoming Really Thinks of Liz Cheney http://wapo.st/3aml3r0
// photo essay; I traveled 2,100 miles across the state to figure out if she is doomed — and to glimpse the future of the Republican Party.
💙 🧵 RT @maricopacounty BREAKING: @maricopavote responds to faulty assumptions & inaccurate claims made by Cyber Ninjas and other Senate contractors re: the Nov. election. Major claims are debunked. ¤ Key points: ⬇️ 📌 https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/1446210850142896148?s=20
🐣 RT @RepAdamSchiff The former president is still trying to stonewall subpoenas. ¤ But this time, we have a Justice Department devoted to the rule of law. ¤ This time, lawbreaking witnesses must weigh the prospect of criminal prosecution. ¤ Americans deserve answers. We will make sure they get them. https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/1446207086556295173?s=20
🐣 RT @AndrewFeinberg Former President calls on @SenateGOP to vote for crashing the economy to own the libs. Text Block: https://twitter.com/AndrewFeinberg/status/1446248580939923460?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @Teri_Kanefield Reading the Senate Report now on Trump’s months-long attempts to subvert the election: CNN: http://cnn.it/3Fr8MAc
The attempts involve repeated abuses of presidential power and violations of “longstanding policies” intended to prevent a president from weaponizing the DOJ. ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/Teri_Kanefield/status/1446115941440364555?s=20
WaPo: House Jan. 6 committee issues subpoenas for more ‘Stop the Steal’ rally organizers, including Ali Alexander http://wapo.st/2YvtQVa Alexander claimed he had help from Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Mo Brooks (Ala.) and Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.).
WaPo, Greg Sargent: Bernie Sanders erupts at Joe Manchin, and a deeper dispute is revealed http://wapo.st/3oFHcZM Sanders’ beef is over Manchin’s disparagement of an “entitlement society.” Here’s Sanders on Rachel @Maddow’s Show: Text Block: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1446206838882570241?s=20/photo/1
“I believe all Americans are entitled as human beings to health care. I believe people are entitled to quality education regardless of their income. I believe that people are entitled to affordable housing. I don’t believe that two people are entitled to own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of American society. ~ Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT)
🔆 This❗️⋙ SenateJudiciaryComm: Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election http://bit.ly/3Bk7tQU
⋙ 📔 Report [pdf]: http://bit.ly/3uYVndO Core Report: 43p; w attachments: 394p
● FINDING 1: President Trump repeatedly asked DOJ leadership to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to assist his efforts to overturn the election results.
● FINDING 2: White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asked Acting Attorney General Rosen to initiate election fraud investigations on multiple occasions, violating longstanding restrictions on White House-DOJ communications about specific law- enforcement matters.
Between December 29 and January 1, Meadows asked Rosen to have DOJ:
~ Investigate various discredited claims of election fraud in Georgia that the Trump campaign was simultaneously advancing in a lawsuit that the Georgia Supreme Court had refused to hear on an expedited basis;
~ Investigate false claims of “signature match anomalies” in Fulton County, Georgia, even though Republican state elections officials had made clear “there has been no evidence presented of any issues with the signature matching process.”5
~ Investigate a theory known as “Italygate,” which was promoted by an ally of the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and which held that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and an Italian IT contractor used military satellites to manipulate voting machines and change Trump votes to Biden votes. Meadows also asked DOJ to meet with Giuliani on Italygate and other election fraud claims.
~ Investigate a series of claims of election fraud in New Mexico that had been widely refuted and in some cases rejected by the courts, including a claim that Dominion Voting Systems machines caused late-night “vote dumps” for Democratic candidates.● FINDING 3: After personally meeting with Trump, Jeffrey Bossert Clark pushed Rosen and Donoghue to assist Trump’s election subversion scheme—and told Rosen he would decline Trump’s potential offer to install him as Acting Attorney General if Rosen agreed to aid that scheme.
● FINDING 4: Trump allies with links to the “Stop the Steal” movement and the January 6 insurrection participated in the pressure campaign against DOJ.
In addition to Trump White House officials, including the President himself, outside Trump allies with ties to the “Stop the Steal” movement and the January 6 insurrection also pressured DOJ to help overturn the election results. They included:
~ U.S. Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, who led the objection to counting Pennsylvania’s electoral votes on the House floor in the hours immediately following the January 6 insurrection. Perry has acknowledged introducing Clark to Trump, and documents and testimony confirm that he directly communicated with Donoghue about his false Pennsylvania election fraud claims.
~ Doug Mastriano, a Republican State Senator from Pennsylvania who participated in Rudy Giuliani’s so-called election fraud “hearings,” spent thousands of dollars from his campaign account to bus people to the January 6 “Save America Rally,” and was present on the Capitol grounds as the insurrection unfolded. Documents show that, like Perry, Mastriano directly communicated with Donoghue about his false election fraud claims.
~ Cleta Mitchell, a Trump campaign legal adviser, early proponent of Trump’s false stolen election claims, and participant the January 2, 2021 call where Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.” Mitchell emailed Meadows a copy of Trump’s lawsuit against Raffensperger and offered to send DOJ 1,800 pages of supporting exhibits; Meadows sent the materials to Rosen, asking DOJ to investigate.FINDING 5: Trump forced the resignation of U.S. Attorney Byung Jin (“BJay”) Pak, whom he believed was not doing enough to address false claims of election fraud in Georgia. Trump then went outside the line of succession when naming an Acting U.S. Attorney, bypassing First Assistant U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine and instead appointing Bobby Christine because he believed Christine would “do something” about his election fraud claims.
FINDING 6: By pursuing false claims of election fraud before votes were certified, DOJ deviated from longstanding practice meant to avoid inserting DOJ itself as an issue in the election.
The Committee’s investigation to date underscores how Trump’s efforts to use DOJ as a means to overturn the election results was part of his interrelated efforts to retain the presidency by any means necessary. As has been well-documented by other sources, Trump’s efforts to lay the foundation of the “Big Lie” preceded the general election by several months; Attorney General Barr inserted DOJ into that initial effort through various public remarks and actions prior to November 3, 2020 that cast doubt on voting by mail procedures implemented to facilitate exercise of the franchise during the worst public health crisis in a century.
Concurrent with Trump’s post-election attempts to weaponize DOJ, Trump also reportedly engaged in a separate and equally aggressive pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to set aside the electoral votes of contested states. This “back-up plan,” as it were, culminated on January 4— one day after Clark’s final attempt to wrest control of DOJ from Rosen, and again in the Oval Office—when Trump and outside attorney John Eastman attempted to convince Pence that he could circumvent the certification through a procedural loophole in the Electoral Count Act.7 All of these efforts, in turn, created the disinformation ecosystem necessary for Trump to incite almost 1,000 Americans to breach the Capitol in a violent attempt to subvert democracy by stopping the certification of a free and fair election.
⭕ 6 Oct 2021
💽 MSNBC, LastWord: Fiona Hill on American democracy: ‘Everything we have taken for granted is up for question’ http://on.msnbc.com/
//: Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council Russia expert under Donald Trump and an impeachment witness against Donald Trump, tells Lawrence O’Donnell that “the United States has started to converge in a rather terrifying manner to the Russia of the present.”
18 U.S. Code § 2384 – Seditious conspiracy
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
[Emphasis added](June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 808; July 24, 1956, ch. 678, § 1, 70 Stat. 623; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(N), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Senate Report Cites New Details of Trump Pressure on Justice Dept. Over Election http://nyti.ms/3iFqmGO //➔ rhymes with “seditious conspiracy”
// A Senate panel fleshed out how Donald Trump pursued his plan to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to pursue unfounded reports of fraud.
Players:
● Jeffrey A. Rosen, acting attorney general for Mr. Trump’s last month in office
● Richard P. Donoghue, acting deputy attorney general
● Byung J. Pak, until early January was U.S. attorney in Atlanta
● Bobby L. Christine, Trump’s preference to replace Pak
● Pat A. Cipollone, White House counsel
● Patrick F. Philbin, top deputy to the White House counsel
● Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania
Even by the standards of President Donald J. Trump, it was an extraordinary Oval Office showdown. On the agenda was Mr. Trump’s desire to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to carry out his demands for more aggressive investigations into his unfounded claims of election fraud.
On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Mr. Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. According to others at the meeting, Mr. Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Mr. Trump acted on his plan.
Mr. Trump’s proposed plan, Mr. Cipollone argued, would be a “murder-suicide pact,” one participant recalled. Only near the end of the nearly three-hour meeting did Mr. Trump relent and agree to drop his threat.
Mr. Cipollone’s stand that night is among the new details contained in a lengthy interim report prepared by the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to do his bidding in the chaotic final weeks of his presidency.
The report draws on documents, emails and testimony from three top Justice Department officials, including the acting attorney general for Mr. Trump’s last month in office, Jeffrey A. Rosen; the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, and Byung J. Pak, who until early January was U.S. attorney in Atlanta. It provides the most complete account yet of Mr. Trump’s efforts to push the department to validate election fraud claims that had been disproved by the F.B.I. and state investigators.
The interim report, expected to be released publicly this week, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off a series of events during a period when Mr. Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command.
“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”
Mr. Durbin said that he believes the former president, who remains a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”
But, drawing in particular on interviews with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue, both of whom were at the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, it brings to light new details that underscore the intensity and relentlessness with which Mr. Trump pursued his goal of upending the election, and the role that key government officials played in his efforts. ●●●
The report is not the Senate Judiciary Committee’s final word on the pressure campaign that was waged between Dec. 14, when Attorney General William P. Barr announced his resignation, and Jan. 6, when throngs of Mr. Trump’s supporters fought to block certification of the election.
The panel is still waiting for the National Archives to furnish documents, calendar appointments and communications involving the White House that concern efforts to subvert the election. It asked the National Archives, which stores correspondence and documents generated by previous presidential administrations, for the records this spring.
It is also waiting to see whether Mr. Clark will sit for an interview and help provide missing details about what was happening inside the White House during the Trump administration’s final weeks. Additionally, the committee has asked the Washington D.C. Bar Association to open a disciplinary investigation into Mr. Clark based on its findings.
The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Mr. Barr weakened the department’s decades-long strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from impacting the election outcome
On Dec. 1, just two weeks before saying he would step down, Mr. Barr said that the Justice Department had found no evidence of voter fraud widespread enough to change the fact that Mr. Biden had won the presidency.
The report underscored how Mr. Trump kept coming back to unsubstantiated accounts of election fraud and demanding that the Justice Department jump on them.
Soon after the completion of the Oval Office meeting on the night of Jan. 3, the committee’s report said, Mr. Trump reached out to Mr. Donoghue, asking him to look into reports that the Department of Homeland Security had taken possession of a truck full of shredded ballots outside of Atlanta. ¤ The report turned out to be false.
↥ ↧
NYT (Jan/Aug 2021): Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General http://nyti.ms/3v1VtkZ ⋘ originally published 1/22/2021; updated 8/11/2021
// Trying to find another avenue to push his baseless election claims, Donald Trump considered installing a loyalist.
TheGuardian: Top Trump aides set to defy subpoenas in Capitol attack investigation http://bit.ly/3uQdUc7
// Source says Meadows, Bannon and others will move to undercut House select committee inquiry – under instructions from Trump
🐣 RT @Phil_Mattingly Bipartisan group of 6 former SecDefs send letter to Hill urging debt ceiling action, warning of “catastrophic consequences for the Defense Department, our military families, and our position of leadership in the world.” ¤ Signed by Panetta, Mattis, Cohen, Perry, Carter & Hagel https://twitter.com/Phil_Mattingly/status/1445759623378522115?s=20/photo/1-2
🐣 RT @Steve_Vladeck #BREAKING: In United States v. Texas (challenging the constitutionality of #SB8), Judge Pitman has issued a preliminary injunction temporarily barring enforcement of the controversial six-week #abortion ban by “the State” — *including* judges and clerks: [JustSecurity:] http://bit.ly/2YpjE0P
🐣 RT @TaylorPopielarz
A real statement from former Pres. Trump:
“…the real insurrection happened on November 3rd, the Presidential Election, not on January 6th—which was a day of protesting the Fake Election results.”
Reminder:
– People died and were hurt on Jan. 6
– The election was free and fair
A real statement from former Pres. Trump:
"…the real insurrection happened on November 3rd, the Presidential Election, not on January 6th—which was a day of protesting the Fake Election results."
Reminder:
– People died and were hurt on Jan. 6
– The election was free and fair pic.twitter.com/YbvPQhwfvl— Taylor Popielarz (@TaylorPopielarz) October 6, 2021
⭕ 5 Oct 2021
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Garland said yesterday he can’t comment on “pending investigations” when asked about trump and the insurrection. He didn’t say he couldn’t “confirm or deny” the existence of an investigation. I may be reading too much into it, but he’s pretty deliberate with words.
⭕ 4 Oct 2021
PhysicsWorld: Coming soon to a field near you http://bit.ly/3a4vejY
//8/4/2021; Serious studies of crop circles have long been hampered by conspiracy theories and the secretive nature of circle-makers – plus scientists’ reluctance to engage with a “fringe” topic. But, as Richard Taylor argues, discovering how circle artists create their most complex patterns could have implications for biophysics
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump Amendment 14, Sec. 3 ¤ No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President . . . who, having previously taken an oath . . . to support the Constitution of the U.S., shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.
BuzzfeedNews: A Judge Sent A Capitol Rioter To Prison, Rejecting The Government’s Lighter Recommendation http://bit.ly/3mm0EIt
// “There have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government, beyond sitting at home,” Judge Tanya Chutkan said.
🐣 RT @JaxAlemany News: Group files complaint with California bar association against John Eastman, lawyer who advised Trump on election challenges. From @thamburger & me:
⋙ WaPo: Group files complaint with California bar association against John Eastman, lawyer who advised Trump on election challenges http://wapo.st/3l9XYyf
WaPo, Greg Sargent: The revelations about Mike Pence’s role in Jan. 6 keep getting worse http://wapo.st/3isHBen “The structural weaknesses exposed by this episode are a looming danger for the republic” – Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD), member Jan 6 select committee
⭕ 3 Oct 2021
⭕ 2 Oct 2021
WaPo: Key findings from the Pandora Papers investigation https://wapo.st/3D5EG32
🐣 RT @gregpmiller An alleged affair with Putin.
A child born with no father listed. A shell company in Monaco.
A $4-million apartment. ¤ Amazing story w/ @PaulSonne @ICIJorg
⋙ WaPo: Putin’s Monte Carlo mystery, secret money and swanky real estate https://wapo.st/3Ff5m3i
There is little about the humble background of Svetlana Krivonogikh to indicate that she had the means to acquire property overlooking this playground for the world’s elite. The Russian woman reportedly grew up in a crowded communal apartment in St. Petersburg, and held jobs that included cleaning a neighborhood shop.
But previously undisclosed financial records combined with local tax documents show that Krivonogikh, 46, became the owner of the apartment in Monaco through an offshore company created just weeks after she gave birth to a girl. The child was born at a time when, according to a Russian media report last year, she was in a secret, years-long relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
WaPo: Pandora Papers reveal secret offshore financial system for global elites http://wapo.st/3mq5bK1 “The Post is publishing eight articles, as well as video and audio pieces, based on material in the Pandora trove” (Tax the rich and make it stick. This should help)
// Trove of secret files details opaque financial universe where global elite shield riches from taxes, probes and accountability
The revelations include more than $100 million spent by King Abdullah II of Jordan on luxury homes in Malibu, Calif., and other locations; millions of dollars in property and cash secretly owned by the leaders of the Czech Republic, Kenya, Ecuador and other countries; and a waterfront home in Monaco acquired by a Russian woman who gained considerable wealth after she reportedly had a child with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The files provide substantial new evidence, for example, that South Dakota now rivals notoriously opaque jurisdictions in Europe and the Caribbean in financial secrecy. Tens of millions of dollars from outside the United States are now sheltered by trust companies in Sioux Falls, some of it tied to people and companies accused of human rights abuses and other wrongdoing.
The details are contained in more than 11.9 million financial records that were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and examined by The Post and other partner news organizations. The files include private emails, secret spreadsheets, clandestine contracts and other records that unlock otherwise impenetrable financial schemes and identify the individuals behind them.
The trove, dubbed the Pandora Papers, exceeds the dimensions of the leak that was at the center of the Panama Papers investigation five years ago. That data was drawn from a single law firm, but the new material encompasses records from 14 separate financial-services entities operating in countries and territories including Switzerland, Singapore, Cyprus, Belize and the British Virgin Islands.
The files detail more than 29,000 offshore accounts, more than double the number identified in the Panama Papers. Among the account owners are more than 130 people listed as billionaires by Forbes magazine and more than 330 public officials in more than 90 countries and territories, twice the number found in the Panama documents.
As a result, the Pandora Papers allow for the most comprehensive accounting to date of a parallel financial universe whose corrosive effects can span generations — draining significant sums from government treasuries, worsening wealth disparities, and shielding the riches of those who cheat and steal while impeding authorities and victims in their efforts to find or recover hidden assets.
“The offshore financial system is a problem that should concern every law-abiding person around the world,” said Sherine Ebadi, a former FBI officer who served as lead agent on dozens of financial-crimes cases. ¤ Ebadi pointed to the role that offshore accounts and asset-shielding trusts play in drug trafficking, ransomware attacks, arms trading and other crimes. “These systems don’t just allow tax cheats to avoid paying their fair share. They undermine the fabric of a good society,” said Ebadi, now an associate managing director at Kroll, a corporate investigations and consulting firm.
The Post is publishing eight articles, as well as video and audio pieces, based on material in the Pandora trove. Stories being published today focus on revelations about Abdullah and Putin. Stories tomorrow will more closely explore U.S. aspects of this system, including the harm caused by U.S. tax havens and how Americans accused of wrongdoing can escape financial consequences by using offshore entities. In subsequent days, stories will examine the looting of Asian artifacts, survey the hidden wealth of billionaires who appear in the files, and trace the impact of U.S. sanctions on Russian oligarchs.
These are part of a global package of stories based on the Pandora Papers — a project involving 150 news organizations in 117 countries and territories. The package includes reports by the BBC and the Guardian that reveal new details about foreign donors contributing millions to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party. The ICIJ has collaborated with foreign partners on stories about a scandal-plagued Catholic order in Mexico, millions of dollars held offshore by members of Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government, as well as the secret holdings of leaders from Europe to Latin America.
🐣 🖼 🌎 RT @Mill226 Map of which Republican got the highest % of the vote in each county, 1972-2020 Presidential Elections. Nixon (green) set records in 1972 thru much of the South, Reagan (blue) with strength in the West, & Trump in 2020 (orange) in many rural areas despite a much lower national %: https://twitter.com/Mill226/status/1347638318758989827?s=20/photo/1
// 1/8/2021; awesome map
🐣 RT @tribelaw “The two teamed up in an Oval Office meeting to pressure Mr. Pence to intervene to help Mr. Trump remain in power by delaying the Jan. 6 certification of Biden’s victory.” Teamed up? Legally, that’s a conspiracy. A seditious conspiracy at that.18 USC 2384
⋙ NYT, Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman: The Lawyer Behind the Memo on How Trump Could Stay in Office http://nyti.ms/3oufMWI “‘I won’t be cowed by public opposition to it,’ Mr. Eastman said”
// John Eastman was a little-known but respected conservative lawyer. Then he became influential with Donald Trump — and counseled him on how to retain power after losing the election.
🐣 RT @brianklaas Anytime someone tries to say it’s “both sides,” show them this video. This guy advised President Trump. He’s saying 9/11 involved missiles being fired at the World Trade Centers and the images we all saw of the planes were just CGI. It’s deranged lunacy. A presidential advisor.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AccountableGOP Lin Wood says that the planes that hit the twin towers and the Pentagon on 9/11 were fake CGI. https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1444130224493445124?s=20/photo/1
🐣 🌎 CNBC (2020): Democratic counties represent 70% of U.S. GDP, 2020 election shows http://cnb.cx/3A7H9rH Analysis by the Brookings Institute (11/10/2020) ● /photo/1
// 11/10/2020; economy
⭕ 1 Oct 2021
NYT, Paul Krugman: Biden Should Ignore the Debt Limit and Mint a $1 Trillion Coin http://nyti.ms/3D3ukRg Or “Biden could simply declare that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that the validity of federal debt may not be questioned, renders the debt ceiling moot”
… U.S. politics aren’t what they once were. The Republican Party has become both radical and ruthless; let’s not forget that most G.O.P. legislators refused to certify President Biden’s election. And while this radicalized party cheerfully authorizes trillions in borrowing whenever it holds the White House, it weaponizes the debt limit whenever a Democrat is president.
During the Obama years, Republicans used the debt limit for blackmail, refusing to raise it unless President Barack Obama agreed to spending cuts — spending cuts the G.O.P. wouldn’t have been able to get passed through the normal legislative process, despite having partial control of Congress.
What’s happening now is even worse. Democrats control both houses of Congress, but Republicans are using the filibuster to block an increase in the debt ceiling with only weeks to go before we hit a wall and default on payments — and they aren’t even making specific demands. They simply don’t want to share any responsibility for governing. “There is no chance Republicans will help lift Democrats’ credit limit so they can immediately steamroller through a socialist binge that will hurt families and help China,” declared Mitch McConnell. If that sounds to you like meaningless word salad, that’s because it is. …
Look, the reason we’re in this situation is that Republicans have learned a terrible truth: Voters don’t know or care about process; they only react to how things are going. The G.O.P. believes that it can benefit from outright, naked sabotage; Democrats shouldn’t worry about undoing that sabotage through whatever tricks they can deploy.
WaPo, Aaron Blake: Pro-Trump conspiracy theorists increasingly face legal consequences http://wapo.st/3oqkpkx
// Whether it will change things for a movement built on misinformation is another matter entirely.
Politico: Thompson: Jan. 6 panel will issue ‘criminal referrals’ for subpoena defiers http://politi.co/39ZTfsk
// Thompson’s threat to issue criminal referrals to recalcitrant witnesses underscores the select committee’s resolve to seek quick answers from people inside former President Donald Trump’s orbit.
WaPo, Benjamin Ginsberg: Don’t be afraid of the election audits http://wapo.st/3orOXTg “As a Republican election lawyer who has participated in more than 30 post-election recounts, contests and audits, I am extremely confident: They won’t find anything”
// Rest of title: “— they may be our only ticket out of this mess”
// From Twitter subtitle: “Trump’s “big lie” undermines democracy and will hurt Republicans more than Democrats”
🐣 RT @PoliticsWolf After California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a bill making universal mail voting permanent, this cartogram shows that 1/5 of Americans now live in vote-by-mail states. All of those states except Vermont are in the western U.S., where 83% of people are now residents of VBM states https://twitter.com/PoliticsWolf/status/1443975365840441349?s=20/photo/1
// Actually, it’s more, if you count no-excuse states; the only difference is whether ballots are sent out automatically vs you have to request one
💙 🐣 RT 📋 @brianklaas The original estimates from that infamous Imperial College study was that there would be 2.2 million US deaths from Covid if no action was taken and no precautions or adjustments made. Republicans said it was alarmist hyperbole. Seems like it was actually a pretty good estimate.
⋙ 🐣 RT 📋 @kylegriffin1 NBC News: There are now more than 700,000 total deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. since the start of the pandemic. @NBCNews
🧵 RT @tomiahonen Trump General Ledger Thread 1/ ¤ In criminal case of Allen Weisselberg we knew that Weisselberg kept double bookkeeping for Trump. That is the ultimate evidence against any fraudulent accountant. Allen will lose his trial. It is game over
Now we learned about Trump General Ledger 📌 https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1443836242593001507?s=20
⭕ 30 Sep 2021
MotherJones: Trump Extremists Brought Numerous Guns on January 6, Evidence Shows http://bit.ly/3A3hCjx
// Rioters at the Capitol carried concealed pistols, allegedly stockpiled weapons nearby, and called for overthrowing the US government.
🐣 RT @JillWineBanks This is dynamite reporting on use if misleading quotes by Trump special Counsel Durham in indictment of Sussman. It is even weaker now than I originally thought. Questions remain about connections between Trump server and Russian Alpha Bank.
⋙ NYT: Trump Server Mystery Produces Fresh Conflict http://nyti.ms/2Wx4UMb
// A recent indictment suggested that researchers who found strange internet links between a Russian bank and the Trump Organization did not really believe their own work. They are pushing back.
WaPo, Margaret Sullivan: A Trump lawyer wrote an instruction manual for a coup. Why haven’t you seen it on the news? http://wapo.st/2WoOrJU
🖼 Dems right about now … https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1443478362383691781?s=20/photo/1
(Painting by Albert Pinkham Ryder, Jonah (detail), Smithsonian Museum of American Art)
⭕ 29 Sep 2021
💙 NewYorker, Andrea Bernstein: Donald Trump Still Faces a Reckoning in New York http://bit.ly/3B4lBh5
// Court documents and interviews indicate that the Manhattan District Attorney is accumulating evidence of pervasive tax fraud.
TheGuardian: Trump plans to sue to keep White House records on Capitol attack secret http://bit.ly/3imvDTA
// Legal strategy could delay and possibly stymie efforts by House select committee into Capitol attacks to see key documents
As president, Biden retains the final authority over whether to assert the protection for specific documents, meaning that he can instruct the White House counsel, Dana Remus, to allow their release even over Trump’s objections after an additional 60 days has passed.
The former president, however, can then file lawsuits to block their release – a legal strategy that Trump and his advisers are preparing to pursue insofar as it could tie up the records in court for months and stymie evidence-gathering by the select committee.
It was not immediately clear how Trump would approach such legal challenges, and whether it would, for instance, involve individual suits against the release of specific records.
AtlantaSentinel (2014): How Culture and Geography Divided the United States http://bit.ly/3urHQLf //➔ This could have been written yesterday; based in part on the 1989 book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer
// 4/25/2014; The cultural heritage of America’s settlers and the nation’s diverse geography shaped its political divides.
CtrPublicIntegrity, Wendell Potter (2015): Elimination of the ‘public option’ threw consumers to the insurance wolves http://bit.ly/3DdApeb “Big firms & their campaign cash found a friend in Joe Lieberman” //➔ One senator killed one of the most popular provisions of Obamacare
// 2/26/2015
🐣 RT @Acyn Psaki on Infrastructure Vote: It’s like an episode of a TV show. Maybe The West Wing if something good happens, maybe VEEP if not
⭕ 28 Sep 2021
🐣 RT @tribelaw This repeats much we’ve already heard, but it can’t be said too often: We are at the brink of losing our democracy. Imperfect though it is, it sure beats one-man rule, which is what the Trumpsters seek to install and are busy setting up for 2024.
⋙ WaPo: As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a ‘worst-case scenario’ for the country http://wapo.st/3AUatDg “If you look at how democracies get in trouble in other places, it’s how executives once in office abuse their office” ~ Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard
WaPo: Woman who said she wanted to shoot Pelosi in the ‘brain’ pleads guilty to misdemeanor http://wapo.st/3igUYhu Judge Emmet G. Sullivan is one of several judges “who have publicly questioned whether participants in the Capitol assault are being treated too leniently”
A woman who said as she left the U.S. Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6 that she had hoped to murder House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pleaded guilty Tuesday to a misdemeanor charge. ¤ “I would like to accept my responsibility for what I did, for my part in January 6,” Dawn Bancroft, 59, of suburban Philadelphia said in federal court in Washington as she admitted to illegally demonstrating.
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan questioned why Bancroft was not being asked to take more responsibility, given the comment she admits making in a video as she left the building during the storming of the Capitol: “We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the friggin’ brain, but we didn’t find her.” ¤ Calling those words “horrible” and “clearly troubling,” Sullivan asked prosecutors why Bancroft was not charged with threatening a government official, which is a felony.
Noting that on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, former president George W. Bush had compared the danger of “violent extremists at home” to international terrorism, the judge said, “I agree with him.”
Sullivan, a federal judge since 1991, was appointed to the district court in 1994. He is one of several members of the bench who have publicly questioned whether participants in the Capitol assault are being treated too leniently by the Justice Department. ¤ “You disgraced this country in the eyes of the world, and my inclination would be to lock you up. But the government is not asking for me to lock you up,” Judge Reggie B. Walton told another misdemeanor defendant on Friday. “Because it was an attack on our government . . . to see someone trying to destroy the Capitol of our country, and to see what you did is very, very troubling.”
🐣 📊 KaiserFamFdn: Adults who have had at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine:
All 72%, Dems 90%, GOP 58% ➔ on @Maddow
⭕ 27 Sep 2021
🐣 RT @MSNBC ‘They concluded, across the board, there was zero evidence to support this’: Bob Woodward explains what happened when the Trump Admin. looked into baseless claims of a stolen election
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, TheBeatWithAri: MAGA insiders admit Trump was lying in new book http://on.msnbc.com/3uy7U7G
// As Americans learn more of Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy and the dangers these attacks present for future elections, iconic journalist Bob Woodward joins MSNBC’s Ari Melber to discuss the situation and his latest book “Peril,” which details new revelations about Trump’s “big lie.”
🧵 RT @SteveSchmidtSES Below is the difference between a Million, a Billion and a Trillion. It is helpful to understand when thinking about the 7 trillion of debt Trump and the GOP ran up on the National credit card that the entire GOP Senate just voted to default on. 1 million seconds is 11 days from 📌https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1442664125893513219?s=20
WaPo (2018): ‘It’s insanity!’: How the ‘Brooks Brothers Riot’ killed the 2000 recount in Miami http://wapo.st/3AOjmOI
// 11/15/2018; tag: Roger Stone; Eighteen years after a chaotic recount, debate still rages over whether the antics went too far.
⭕ 26 Sep 2021
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum the details of the coup plot become clearer
🔆 This❗️⋙ 🧵 RT @RonFilipkowski This new interview by [Sydney] Powell is interesting. It suggests that the purpose of the insurrection was to DELAY the electoral college certification to give Alito time to intervene on this legal challenge. But, Powell says they didn’t anticipate Pelosi reconvening Congress that day. 💽 📌 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1441958869442260994?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski Interviewer take on Powell: “That insurrection might have played to her advantage by delaying the final resolution of the election. But Nancy Pelosi one-upped her by reconvening Congress and finishing the tally in the middle of the night. The next day, Alito dismissed the case.” 💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1442113732952293379?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @JayCee86137684 Giuliani voicemail message addressed to Tuberville at approx 7pmsaying that wanted to discuss how congress leaders were “trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Rep friends, to try to just slow it down so we can get these legislatures to get more information to you.”
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @JayCee86137684 “And I know they’re reconvening at 8 tonight, but it … the only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow—ideally until the end of tomorrow,” he added.
⋙⋙⋙ TheHill (1/7/2021): Giuliani calls wrong senator in last-ditch effort to delay certification of Biden’s win http://bit.ly/3obBG0I
💙 Politico Mag, Jack Stanton: What If 2020 Was Just a Rehearsal? http://politi.co/2Y5SzPP
// American democracy is in the midst of a waking nightmare, says Rick Hasen. And Democrats aren’t taking it seriously enough.
📊 NBCNews: As abortion debate heats up, perceptions of Supreme Court change http://nbcnews.to/3itFYNF https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1442281117705326593?s=20/photo/1
// A part of the GOP may strongly favor overturning Roe, but data suggest that if it actually attained its goal, political backlash could be immense.
// Roe v Wade: Overturn/Let It Stand: Overall: 28/65%; Republ: 40/58%; Democ: 17/77%
WaPo: Democrats outside D.C. worry party will blow its chance of enacting historic agenda — a failure with grave political consequences http://wapo.st/3kI2rI8
WaPo, EJ Dionne: Democrats: Political suicide is not a strategy http://wapo.st/3i9BkEc “What would not be okay: for Democrats to walk away from the best opportunity they have had in at least two generations to repair and reconstruct our nation’s social contract”
💙 🧵 ◕ RT @DrEricDing MISCALCULATION BY GOP—As an epidemiologist, I think Republicans might be killing off their voter base faster than they think. The #COVID19 death rate since June 30 in counties where Trump got >90% of the vote are 9.5x higher than where he got <10%—pretty strong. HT @charles_gaba 📌 https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1442089484011687937?s=20/photo/1 ⭕ 25 Sep 2021 ✅ WSJ Editorial: Trump Loses Arizona—Again http://on.wsj.com/3m5aPRm //➔ WSJ did it’s own fact-checks — one of the best I’ve seen — and concludes: “The GOP should quit chasing [Trump] down rabbit holes” // He still cries ‘fraud’ even after the audit he demanded found none. WaPo, EJ Dionne: Democrats: Political suicide is not a strategy http://wapo.st/3i9BkEc “What would not be okay: for Democrats to walk away from the best opportunity they have had in at least two generations to repair and reconstruct our nation’s social contract” WaPo: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep their identities secret http://wapo.st/3AMJx8z // The colossal hack of Epik, an Internet-services company popular with the far right, has been called the “mother of all data lodes” for extremism researchers. Some of those named in the data have already lost their jobs. Newsweek: Trump Committed 'Multiple Crimes' With Georgia Election Interference, Brookings Suggests http://bit.ly/3zGWjnU Including “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud; … conspiracy to commit election fraud; criminal solicitation; and state RICO violations" // Legal experts believe Trump faces "substantial risk" of state charges due to him pressuring Georgia Republicans to block Biden's win.
“We conclude that Trump’s post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes,” said the report released Friday by the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C.“These charges potentially include criminal solicitation to commit election fraud; intentional interference with performance of election duties; conspiracy to commit election fraud; criminal solicitation; and state RICO violations,” the legal analysis explained.
“Our view is anchored by a close reading of the relevant portions of Georgia’s legal code, an unpacking of the extant case law defining the stated crimes, and a searching examination of the main likely defenses,” the report authors explained.
“He knows in his heart that he lost the election,” Raffensperger told the Washington Examiner in a Friday interview. ¤ “He’s continued to promote the Big Lie, and then he’s also fundraising off this issue…” the GOP official lamented.
🧵 RT @atrupar “Most people would say they were doing one hell of a job, don’t you think?” — Trump on Border Patrol agents who were photographed using horse reins to threaten Haitian migrants 💽 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1441911469906481153?s=20/photo/1
// Trump rally in Georgia
⭕ 24 Sep 2021
🐣 RT @SecretaryHobbs The presentations we have heard today lack both expertise and overall understanding of election administration. Their conclusions are not only inaccurate, but dangerous. My statement on the Senate’s partisan ballot review of Maricopa County’s 2020 general election: Text Block: https://twitter.com/SecretaryHobbs/status/1441523368579125250?s=20/photo/1
💽 MSNBC, Maddow: Schmidt: Republicans are driving chaos, promising order with easy scapegoats http://on.msnbc.com/3o3avoY
// Steve Schmidt, political consultant, talks with Rachel Maddow about the ominous radicalization of the Republican Party as it turns against democracy and is swept up in an autocratic movement beholden to Donald Trump.
🐣 RT @ KyungLahACNN House Oversight Cmte “requests” Cyber Ninja’s Doug Logan to testify. Letter reads: “As a result of your obstruction, your participation in a Committee hearing is necessary for the Committee to advance the investigation of the questionable audit your company performed” #azaudit Text Block [letter]: https://twitter.com/KyungLahCNN/status/1441395241102180358?s=20/photo/1
🐣 📋 ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1441632413667450880?s=20/photo/1
// OccupyDemocrats: Neil DeGrasse Tyson: ‘Every 10 days in the US, 8000 (unvaccinated) Republican voters are dying of COVID-19. That’s FIVE TIMES the rate for Democrats’
🐣 RT @kyledcheney PSAKI says Biden has decided he will NOT invoke executive privilege on Trump’s behalf to shield any of his White House records from the Jan. 6 committee.
💙🐣 ✅ RT @ maricopacounty NEW: Here’s round two of our #FactCheck on several of the claims Cyber Ninjas identified as the most serious in their report: 🧵 https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/1441490472430489615?s=20
💙🐣 ✅ RT @maricopacounty NEW: After a preliminary review of the draft #azaudit report, we can provide a #FactCheck on several of the claims Cyber Ninjas identified as the most serious in their report: 🧵 https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/1441470629538983945?s=20
💙🐣 ✅ RT @maricopacounty A thread about election audits ahead of the Senate hearing today: 🧵 https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/1441408943650050059?s=20
// Cyber Ninjas fraudit
CNN: Draft report from partisan Arizona review confirms Biden defeated Trump in Maricopa County last November http://cnn.it/3zF5kxJ
// thorough
⭕ 23 Sep 2021
TheAtlantic, Adam Serwer (9/23): Trump’s Plans for a Coup Are Now Public http://bit.ly/3icdbNb
// Some of the plots to overturn the election happened in secret. But don’t forget the ones that unfolded in the open.
WaPo, Robert Kagan: Our constitutional crisis is already here http://wapo.st/3CIw960
// “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.” — James Madison
🔆 More❗️⋙ CitizenFreePress: Maricopa Audit — Draft Report has been leaked… http://bit.ly/3lU8wR6 Draft claims:❗“KEY RESULT — More than 55,000 potentially illegal ballots” (they question the topline). Here’s the link to the draft (still being finalized): http://bit.ly/3o1jHKn
● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1441371906901487616?s=20/photo/1
🔆 This❗️⋙ AZCentral: Arizona audit draft report confirms Biden beat Trump http://bit.ly/3ENfcZZ //➔ THIS ISN’T OVER: The top line results appear LATE in the report. Cyber Ninjas use most of the report to question the legitimacy of large batches of votes, “raising bogus concerns”
Benny White, a prominent Pima County elections consultant, also provided a line-by-line analysis of a draft report he received. It had no connection with the county.
The presidential and Senate results from the recount were found in the third volume of the draft. The first volume, the executive summary, focuses on pointing out concerns Cyber Ninjas and its subcontractors have with the county’s election, raising questions about whether there was election fraud and further casting doubt on the integrity of the process.
Election consultants from across the country warned before the release of the results to be skeptical of the findings because they say the methods were sloppy, insecure, lacked bipartisan oversight and were unlikely to produce accurate results.
Those who obtained copies of the draft report were already dissecting it.
White said the Senate is raising bogus concerns in a way that will shift focus from the fact that the audit found Trump lost the election by numbers that closely matched the county’s.
I’m outraged at what the Senate has done, what it is doing here,” he said Thursday. “They have not involved any election officials in this audit. They have not involved any county officials.”
White is part of a three-man team dubbed “The Audit Guys,” who have analyzed election and voting processes nationwide. He said that his team is preparing a rebuttal to the report that will demonstrate section by section how the Cyber Ninjas got it wrong.
“The Ninjas don’t understand Arizona’s voting laws,” he said. “They don’t understand the structure of voting systems.”
He called out the draft report’s failure to provide specific breakdowns of the count in the report, including key voting elements such as boxes, batches and precinct information that would allow experts to burrow into the data.
“We’ve demonstrated in the past that if they produce those counts, we are going to destroy those reports,” he said. “They have wasted $6-$7 million and months of people’s time on something that is just not credible.”
One of the most significant problems is the Cyber Ninjas’ reliance on a commercial database to verify voters. White said. He called the methodology sloppy and said experts who do this for a living instead would use data directly from the County Recorder’s Office, not data from a third party.
White disputes Senate President Karen Fann’s claim that she launched the audit to improve election integrity. He said the draft report went out of its way to ensure findings would raise doubts about the process when the counts didn’t show fraud.
“It was a conspiracy to keep Donald Trump in power by extraconstitutional means,” he said.
Sellers said he suspects the supervisors will be “accused once again of not cooperating, failing to fill holes in the knowledge of the Senate’s chosen contractor.”
“How could we cooperate with an inquiry that was led by people who have no idea how to run any election, let alone one in the second-largest voting district in the United States?” he said. “The Board approved the election plan, we hired and supported our election experts, and they produced a well-run and accurate election in accordance with Arizona law.”
🐣 RT @maricopacounty Chairman @jacksellers on #azaudit draft: “This means the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters. That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise.” Full statement below: Text Block: https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/1441247867268599810?s=20/photo/1
// “But I’m sure it won’t be”
WaPo: House Jan. 6 committee issues subpoenas for Trump aides and advisers, including Meadows and Scavino http://wapo.st/3zAjjER
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has issued subpoenas to two top Trump White House officials, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, as well as to Kash Patel, who was serving as chief of staff to the acting defense secretary that day. An additional subpoena targets longtime Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon. … ¤ Along with asking Meadows, Scavino, Patel and Bannon to hand over records, the committee is instructing the four men to appear for depositions in mid-October.
Trump issued a lengthy statement that said he would fight the subpoenas by invoking executive privilege. In the statement, he also made the type of false claims about the 2020 election that were embraced by the mob of his supporters as they ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 and engaged in violent clashes with the police.
“Hopefully the Unselect Committee will be calling witnesses on the Rigged Presidential Election of 2020, which is the primary reason that hundreds of thousands of people went to Washington, D.C. in the first place,” he said.
On the day of the attack, Meadows and Scavino were firsthand witnesses to the president’s state of mind and hopes for his speech on the Ellipse, where he urged thousands of protesters to go up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and to “fight like hell” for their country. After violence broke out at the Capitol and police shot a rioter, Meadows, working with Scavino and with help from Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, repeatedly tried to get Trump to issue a public message to tell his supporters to stop their protest and leave the Capitol grounds. These details were first reported in the book “I Alone Can Fix It” by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.
In a letter accompanying the subpoena to Meadows, the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), writes that the panel has obtained “credible evidence” of Meadows’s involvement within “the scope of the select committee’s inquiry.” The letter cites several examples of Meadows’s communication and proximity to the former president leading up to and on the day of the insurrection.
Thompson also notes that Justice Department documents reveal that Meadows “directly communicated with the highest officials at the Department of Justice requesting investigations into election fraud matters in several states” and made contact with “several state officials to encourage investigation of allegations of election fraud.”
Thompson wrote to Scavino that “it appears you were with or in the vicinity of former president Trump on January 6 and are a witness to his activities that day. You may also have material relevant to his video taping and tweeting messages on Jan 6.” The letter cites reports in a new book, “Peril,” by Washington Post writers Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, that Scavino was also with Trump on Jan. 5 “when he and others were considering how to convince Members of Congress not to certify the election for Joe Biden.”
In its letter to Bannon, the select committee writes that the longtime activist and adviser has “information relevant to understanding important activities that led to and informed the events at the Capitol” on Jan. 6.
“For example, you have been identified as present at the Willard Hotel on January 5, 2021, during an effort to persuade Members of Congress to block the certification of the election the next day, and in relation to other activities on January 6,” Thompson writes. “You are also described as communicating with then-President Trump on December 30, 2020, and potentially other occasions, urging him to plan for and focus his efforts on January 6.”
Patel, a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), worked in White House national security positions under Trump before transferring to the Pentagon. When the panel requested documents from the Pentagon in August, it mentioned Patel specifically. The committee requested “documents and communications concerning possible attempts by President Donald Trump to remain in office after January 20, 2021.” The panel also asked for communications about martial law.
On Thursday, the committee subpoenaed Patel for “all documents and communications to, from, or referring to Patel, relating to civil unrest, violence, or attacks at the U.S. Capitol; challenging, overturning, or questioning the validity of the 2020 election results; or the counting of the electoral college vote on January 6, 2021.”
🐣 RT @RWPUSA The White House needs to release ALL information it has about what happened in the White House on January 6. No more of this “executive privilege” nonsense. Insurrection is not a presidential privilege.
⋙ CNN: White House moving to release information on Trump to congressional investigators http://cnn.it/39ylQVv
🧵 RT @maricopacounty BREAKING: The #azaudit draft report from Cyber Ninjas confirms the county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win. 📌 https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/1441228176600952839?s=20
🐣 RT @tribelaw Even if DOJ decides to spare Trump, the gang that plotted the coup, probably Eastman & Bannon & Giuliani & Powell & Flynn & McCarthy & Donald Jr., all need to be held criminally accountable. Without them to prop him up, Trump will be an impotent sore loser.
⭕ 22 Sep 2021
WaPo, Philip Bump: Somehow, we’re still learning the depths of Trump’s dishonesty http://wapo.st/3zxlPf3
Of all of the things that might crystallize a sense of despair about the ruthless effectiveness of Donald Trump’s habitual dishonesty, I wouldn’t have expected it to be a legalistic six-page memo about the boundaries of the U.S. Constitution.
This week, following reporting from the newly published book “Peril,” by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, we learned new details about the conversations that were unfolding in the White House in the days before the counting of electoral votes at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. We’ve learned the extent to which Trump’s insistences about the election having been stolen were predicated on information that his team and his allies knew were unfounded. We’ve learned from the aforementioned memo that Trump seized upon a fringe opinion about constitutionality as a rationale to pressure his vice president into doing something that he couldn’t do and shouldn’t have done even if he could. We’ve learned more, in other words, about just how shoddy Trump’s claim to a second term was — a claim that has held a tight grip on his base well after it expended all of its usefulness for keeping him in office.
There is largely no point in trying to rationally rebut an irrational or emotional belief. But I hold the irrational belief that it can’t hurt, and I will not be rationalized out of it. So let’s walk through what we know about why Trump’s claims are false and were known to be false when he offered them. …
We know now that even Trump allies asked for proof that his claims about fraud were warranted. In “Peril,” Woodward and Costa describe a meeting in the White House between Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a former Trump foe who became one of the president’s most stalwart defenders. Giuliani made sweeping claims about fraud, and Graham demanded he prove them. Giuliani assured Graham he’d provide the direct evidence of specific fraudulent votes.
A few days later, Giuliani provided Graham a memo that the senator’s team began to review, the book reports. The claims of dead people voting in Georgia were found to consist mostly or entirely of people who voted legally but died before the election itself. A slew of other numbers making claims about illegal votes were unsupported by specifics and ones for which Graham’s team couldn’t figure out any provenance. Some of the figures came from an employee of the Trump-obsequious One America News. Another claimed that there were more than 11,000 “overvotes” in Arizona — though that overstated the number of such votes in the presidential race by a factor of 100.
This was the genesis of Graham’s much-reported disparagement of the evidence as being “third-grade” level. Yet these claims about dead voters, surplus votes and other things still pepper discussions of what occurred in 2020. Yes, the media has repeatedly shown these things to be unsubstantiated (should you choose to seek out that reporting), but so did a Republican Trump ally. Because they are unsubstantiated. Or, more accurately, they’re simply noncredible, given the multiple internal and external reviews of the vote in contested states and the utter lack of reason to think that anything suspect happened.
Nor was it just Trump. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump’s campaign had prepared an internal memo in November undercutting various extreme claims about electronic voting in the election. Yet Trump’s attorneys and the president himself were undeterred, nonetheless presenting these wild assertions of an international conspiracy to throw the election as valid and credible. They were neither. No evidence has emerged to suggest that there was any nonaccidental problem with votes cast on voting machines. What’s more, there’s never even been a credible argument made for why or how vote totals might somehow be routed overseas for manipulation.
Again, all of this happened before Jan. 6. Trump put his allies in a difficult position, stoking false claims and demanding action. Many of those allies — Graham included — clearly wanted to be able to encourage Republican voters by supporting Trump but he also wanted to not expose himself by embracing obviously dubious information. Some found a middle ground: insisting that their objections to the election were rooted in technical debates over the way votes were cast. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) made such claims a feature of their pre-Jan. 6 objections to the counting of electoral votes.
The culmination of this argument, though, came in that six-page memo. It was a lengthier version of a two-page memo written by a legal expert named John Eastman, a document presented to a bemused Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) who was “shocked” when he read it, according to Woodward and Costa. After all, the two-page memo simply stated that Vice President Mike Pence could ignore established precedent for counting electoral votes and try to declare certain electoral-vote tallies unacceptable out-of-hand, essentially pushing the finalization of the election to a legal decision from the courts.
In the lengthier memo, published in full this week, Eastman takes a slightly less aggressive tack. It begins by delineating various ways in which “state election laws were altered or dispensed with altogether in key swing states and/or cities and counties.” In essence, he’s arguing that Pence would be warranted in throwing out the results in some states not because people cast illegal votes but because states allowed people to vote in ways they shouldn’t have. It’s an argument for throwing out the demonstrated will of the people based on the way they were told to express that will. (A court in Pennsylvania, hearing such a claim before Jan. 6, had rejected the idea that votes cast using a process that shouldn’t have been authorized should stand, calling a rejection of them an “extreme and untenable” remedy.)
Even here, though, Eastman oversteps. For example, why should bringing “[p]ortable ‘polling places’ targeted to heavily democrat” areas be considered a rationale for rejecting the results of those votes? Or: “[f]ederal court reduced Arizona’s 29-day-before-election registration requirement”? Because a federal court changed a rule, no votes from Arizona should count? It’s quite simply a rejection of the will of the voters for no reason other than that Eastman didn’t like how they voted.
The memo also falls victim to a logical flaw that we see repeatedly in fraud allegations: Because Eastman identified a way in which he thinks fraud might have been committed, we should assume it has been committed. It’s like finding a crowbar in someone’s garage and assuming they are part of a burglary ring. Not a fair assumption. A better crime-fighting technique would be to identify actual jimmied locks on actual houses and then trying to figure out who did it and how. That’s what Graham wanted, and he was simply told that there might be thousands of houses somewhere that had been broken into.
There was no rampant fraud, but that didn’t deter Eastman. He, like so many others, expressed the same false belief that animated everything else after the election. His memo operates from the assumption that there had been “outright fraud (both traditional ballot stuffing, and electronic manipulation of voting tabulation machines),” claims that remain untrue. But that was the foundation of his delineation of the laws that he found unacceptable (though many had been validated by courts) and, therefore, for having Pence simply ignore the election results. It all, once again, flowed from false claims about fraud.
People still say that fraud occurred. Most Republicans, in fact, say it did. Trump is still hammering on it, nailing new planks on his sunken ship. Those looking for his endorsement in 2022 are amplifying such claims, jockeying to be the loudest voice to earn Trump’s approval. People such as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — who has himself been repeatedly shown to have no actual evidence of fraud — continue to nonetheless claim that something illegal occurred. (He’s moved on to falsely alleging massive fraud in red states, somewhat missing the point.) In Lindell’s case, he insists that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear his evidence and somehow overturn the election. He’d predicted that would happen in August; the timeline now is November.
The story of the Trump presidency, a story still being fleshed out, is one of a cadre of yes-men facing off against realists. Then and now, Trump used the power of his large, loud and credulous base to tip the scales in his favor, forcing the Grahams, Pences and Rep. Liz Cheneys (R-Wyo.) to consider the costs of going not just against him but against all of those supporters as well. Trump’s dishonesty helped create a political army that he used bluntly.
There’s a scene recounted in “Peril” that speaks to this. On Jan. 5, Pence spoke to Trump in the Oval Office and told him that he would not deploy Eastman’s strategy of rejecting the results of the election. Woodward and Costa describe what happened next.
“Once Pence left, Trump opened a door near the Resolute Desk. A rush of cold air blasted the room. The temperature was around 31 degrees Fahrenheit outside, with the wind making it feel even colder,” they write. “Trump stood there, still, and listened. Through the din of police sirens and the whir of a city, he could hear his people. They sounded joyful. He breathed in the cold air and smiled.” ¤ Those supporters, at least, were doing what he wanted.
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Democrats are seeking to restrain the executive branch. Will Republicans really oppose them? http://wapo.st/3lJl5Pa //➔ sure they will; they are getting everything ready for the next GOP presidency, which will happen if Dems don’t get their act together
🐣 RT @SwainForSenate 🚨President Trump Statement: Text Block:👇 https://twitter.com/SwainForSenate/status/1440862768437993473?s=20/photo/1
// Tim Swain is running for SC Senate; this is Trump’s rant against Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee for telling Pence there were no grounds for aborting the counting of electoral votes, as described in Woodward/Costa’s book Peril
NYT, Peter Coy: It’s Not Really a ‘$3.5 Trillion’ Bill http://nyti.ms/3EMMUPs “[I]f Donald Trump’s signature legislative achievement, the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017, had been measured the same way as Biden’s plan…, it would have been called a $5.5 trillion package”
🐣 RT @BillKristol “Of the 15 Republican candidates for secretary of state in 5 battleground states — AZ, GQ [GA?], WI, MI, NV–10 have declared the 2020 election stolen or called for results to be invalidated or further investigated. Only 2 of the 9 interviewed said Biden won.”
🔆 This❗️⋙ Reuters: Special Report: Backers of Trump’s false fraud claims seek to control next elections http://reut.rs/3o3hpKP
// Democrats and nonpartisan election experts say it appears that Trump allies – having been foiled in their attempt to reverse Biden’s victory – are now trying to make it easier to overturn future results.
RawStory/Warroom: BUSTED: Steve Bannon admits he helped plot Jan. 6 Trump rally to ‘Kill Biden presidency in the crib’ http://bit.ly/3AEcJyw
Conservative broadcaster Steve Bannon admitted on Wednesday that he had plotted with President Donald Trump to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib” ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
During his Warroom broadcast, Bannon played clips of journalist Robert Costa and Bob Woodward explaining how events unfolded prior to the Jan. 6 riot.
“You look at January 5th, we discovered that Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, was there at the Willard Hotel blocks from the White House with Rudy Giuliani, having an almost war-room-type meeting with other Trump allies the eve before the January 6th insurrection,” Costa recently explained to MSNBC. “And Bannon had actually been in close touch with President Trump for days before January 6th. Based on our reporting, he privately told President Trump to have a reckoning on January 6th. And he said to the president, it’s time to kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”
Bannon seemed proud to confirm that the conversation had taken place. ¤ “Yeah, because his legitimacy,” Bannon said of Biden. “42% of the American people think that Biden did not win the presidency legitimately.”
◕ 📋 WaPo (2020): Trickle-down’ tax cuts make the rich richer but are of no value to overall economy, study finds http://wapo.st/2ZbRQgc The rich got richer but “they had no effect on economic growth or employment.” ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1440617314903150597?s=20/photo/1
// 12/23/2020; Data spanning 50 years and 18 countries shows lowering rates for the wealthy increases inequality
[T]he tax cuts succeeded at putting more money in the pockets of the rich. The share of national income flowing to the top 1 percent increased by about 0.8 percentage points. (For comparison, in the United States the bottom 10 percent of earners capture only 1.8 percent of the country’s income).
But they had no effect on economic growth or employment. Though those quantities fluctuated slightly after the major tax cuts that were studied, the effect was statistically indistinguishable from zero. The “rocket fuel” so often promised by supporters of these tax cuts? It fizzles out time and time again.
“In the last decade, especially with the pioneering work of Thomas Piketty and his co-authors, there has been a growing consensus that tax cuts for the rich lead to higher income inequality,” Hope and Limberg said. Piketty, a French economist, wrote “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” a book on the growth of inequality in rich nations.
Given the evidence, why are such targeted tax cuts perennially popular among policymakers, especially Republicans? The authors point to one major reason — the power of wealthy individuals and corporations to set policy agendas through lobbying and campaign contributions.
⭕ 21 Sep 2021
ForensicNews, Scott Stedman: Decorated Russian Naval Veteran Funneled Thousands to Trump, RNC http://bit.ly/3ltjb6a
// @ScottMStedman
Esquire, Charles Pierce: It Shouldn’t Be This Easy to Overthrow the American Republic http://bit.ly/39BxJtH
// CNN got hold of a Trump lawyer’s memo that describes a precise six-point plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
🧵 RT @stevanzetti [Steve Monacelli] Here’s a thread of some of the things Joseph A. Camp has sent me since breaking the Epik hack. 📌 https://twitter.com/stevanzetti/status/1440410039798304776?s=20
🐣 I switch to Erin Burnett. on CNN during Joy’s show. It’s called “White woman is a better journalist syndrome”
🐣 RT @ConsWahoo Do other plaintiffs cite their former jobs when bringing suit?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ZoeTillman Here is Donald Trump’s new breach of contract/tortious interference lawsuit against Mary Trump and the New York Times: [pdf] http://bit.ly/3zvt4Ec 27p
HT @maxwelltani DailyBeast: Trump Sues NYT and Niece—Who Calls Him ‘F*cking Loser’ http://bit.ly/3hV2K0s
// The ex-president claims there was an “insidious plot to obtain confidential and highly-sensitive records.”
⋙ 🐣 “cannot be understated” ~ as pointed out by @maddow
⋙ 🐣 “The defendants’ actions were motivated by a personal vendetta and their desire to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall and were further intended to advance their political agenda” ~ sounds familiar
🧵 RT @brianklaas 1. I’ve devoted much of my career to understanding authoritarianism and the breakdown of democracy. And I’m growing increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for American democracy, because of one simple question: what could slow down the GOP march toward authoritarianism? 📌 https://twitter.com/brianklaas/status/1440345037141778447?s=20
🐣 RT @NotHoodlum Remember when the world laughed in his face? 💽 https://twitter.com/NotHoodlum/status/1440430348488245255?s=20/photo/1
// Trump at the United Nations
WaPo: Al Franken has a new comedy tour. His targets? Former Senate colleagues. http://wapo.st/2XxRIH8 “The Only Former U.S. Senator Currently on Tour Tour”
// Also: “Did he slam former president Donald Trump? Indeed, but not nearly as much as Cruz or the minority leader: ‘Mitch McConnell has systematically ruined the Senate.’”
🐣 RT @AdamKinzinger ‘The Party is already lost. And victory meant two more years trapped in a hellscape of crazified school board meetings, Trump rallies, My Pillow Guy insanity, Newsmax and Fox News hits, and a caucus run by Kevin McCarthy, a man without any principle….”
⋙ Politico Mag, Charlie Sykes: Why Sane Republicans Are Purging Themselves http://politi.co/3CArlzv
// It looks like they’re giving up, but for politicians like Anthony Gonzalez, a party run by Trump is not worth fighting for.
DailyBeast: Donald Trump Sues New York Times and His Niece Over Tax Story http://bit.ly/39reJ1i “He is a f***ing loser” ~ Mary Trump
// The ex-president claims there was an “insidious plot to obtain confidential and highly-sensitive records.”
Esquire, Charles Pierce: It Shouldn’t Be This Easy to Overthrow the American Republic http://bit.ly/39BxJtH
// CNN got hold of a Trump lawyer’s memo that describes a precise six-point plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
🐣 RT @RBReich Just wanted to remind you that Republicans added $7 trillion to the national debt under the former guy, which is most of the debt now requiring a higher debt ceiling.
🐣 RT @Amy_Siskind I worry how numb we have become to our near brush with authoritarianism – when it is revealed that there was a memo with a 6 step plan for a coup, and it doesn’t even get top of the hour news coverage – let alone consequences for all involved. We are in danger of a repeat folks!
WaPo: Huge hack reveals embarrassing details of who’s behind Proud Boys and other far-right websites http://wapo.st/3u1nrwt
// Researchers say it will allow them to gain important new insights into how extremists operate online
Epik long has been the favorite Internet company of the far-right, providing domain services to QAnon theorists, Proud Boys and other instigators of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — allowing them to broadcast hateful messages from behind a veil of anonymity.
But that veil abruptly vanished last week when a huge breach by the hacker group Anonymous dumped into public view more than 150 gigabytes of previously private data — including user names, passwords and other identifying information of Epik’s customers.
Extremism researchers and political opponents have treated the leak as a Rosetta Stone to the far-right, helping them to decode who has been doing what with whom over several years. Initial revelations have spilled out steadily across Twitter since news of the hack broke last week, often under the hashtag #epikfail, but those studying the material say they will need months and perhaps years to dig through all of it.
Online records show those sites have included 8chan, which was dropped by its providers after hosting the manifesto of a gunman who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; Gab, which was dropped for hosting the antisemitic rants of a gunman who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Parler, which was dropped due to lax moderation related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
[Epik founder Robert] Monster has defended his work as critical to keeping the Internet uncensored and free, aligning himself with conservative critics who argue that leading technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and YouTube have gone too far in policing content they deem inappropriate.
//➔ “The company played such a major role in keeping far-right terrorist cesspools alive,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism. “Without Epik, many extremist communities — from QAnon and white nationalists to accelerationist neo-Nazis — would have had far less oxygen to spread harm, whether that be building toward the Jan. 6 Capitol riots or sowing the misinformation and conspiracy theories chipping away at democracy.”
A Twitter account, @epikfailsnippet, that is posting unverified revelations from the leaked data, included a thread purporting to expose administrators of the Proud Boys sites.
Technology news site the Daily Dot reported that Ali Alexander, a conservative political activist who played a key role in spreading false voter fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, took steps after the Jan. 6 siege to obscure his ownership of more than 100 domains registered to Epik. Nearly half reportedly used variations of the “Stop the Steal” slogan pushed by Alexander and others. Alexander did not reply to requests for comment from the Daily Dot or, on Tuesday, from The Post.
Extremism researchers urge careful fact-checking to protect credibility, but the data remains tantalizing for its potential to unmask extremists in public-facing jobs.
Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit whistleblower group, said some researchers call the Epik hack “the Panama Papers of hate groups,” a comparison to the leak of more than 11 million documents that exposed a rogue offshore finance industry. And, like the Panama Papers, scouring the files is labor intensive, with payoffs that could be months away.
“A lot of research begins with naming names,” Best said. “There’s a lot of optimism and feeling of being overwhelmed, and people knowing they’re in for the long haul with some of this data.”
🐣 RT @SahilKapur NEWS: House votes 220-211 on a bill to fund the government through 12/3/2021, extend the debt ceiling to 12/2022, and provide funding for disaster relief and to assist Afghan evacuees. ¤ A straight party line vote. All Republicans vote no.
🚫 WaPo: U.S. careens toward shutdown, financial crisis amid stalemate in Congress http://wapo.st/2ZazsnU
// Democrats have tied an increase in the debt ceiling with a bill that funds the government into December, setting off a war with Republicans, who refuse to raise the cap out of opposition to President Biden’s agenda — even if it means grinding the country to a halt.
⋙ WaPo: U.S. default this fall would cost 6 million jobs, wipe out $15 trillion in wealth, study says http://wapo.st/2XLKGyY
// GOP signals refusal to help Democrats raise debt ceiling, in opposition to President Biden’s spending plans
// too alarmist to RT
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows http://nyti.ms/3lJiaWB “The release of the documents was only the latest legal trouble for Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell, both of whom have been sued directly by Dominion for defamation”
// Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.
Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.
But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening. ¤ By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.
The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.
The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.
Even at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.
It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.
“The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame” Mr. Coomer, “apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories.”
But at the time that the internal report was prepared, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell were both “active supervisors,” as he put it in his deposition, in the Trump campaign’s broader plan to challenge the election results — an effort that eventually included more than 60 failed lawsuits filed across the country. While Ms. Powell soon went her own way in claiming that Dominion had conspired to steal the election, Mr. Giuliani continued working closely with Mr. Trump and his campaign, ultimately changing strategies and seeking to persuade state legislatures to overturn the popular vote.
NYT: In his U.N. debut, Biden calls for global unity against common threats. http://nyti.ms/3hOEVr9 “Biden called for a new era of global unity against the coronavirus, emerging technological threats and the expanding influence of autocratic nations”
⋙ 🐣 RT @JohnFeehery Australia?
⋙⋙ 🐣 Australia dumped a bad deal for a good one, after warning the French they were unhappy with the technology and schedule slippages. The French are acting out – and not for the first time. ¤ Biden gave a great speech.
❗WaPo: Biden, at U.N., calls for unity in addressing the pandemic and climate change http://wapo.st/3tYyQgt //➔ barely covers his speech at all; most is just the usual beltway litany of gripes; can’t they remember what it was like to have a would-be tyrant as president?
Challenges that require a united response include “ending this pandemic, addressing the climate crisis, managing shifts in global power dynamics, shaping the role of the world on vital issues like trade, cyber and emerging technologies and facing the threat of terrorism as it stands today,” Biden said.
WaPo, Catherine Rampell: Once again, Democrats must be the grown-ups and keep Republicans from causing a global catastrophe http://wapo.st/2VXxHcy
⭕ 20 Sep 2021
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 A lawyer for Trump Org. CFO Allen Weisselberg revealed in open court that prosecutors have found more evidence and that more indictments are expected.
⋙ DailyBeast: Trump Org Prosecutors Find New Evidence—in a Basement http://bit.ly/3hV8XJE
// A lawyer for Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg revealed in open court that prosecutors have found more evidence and that more indictments are expected.
🧵 RT @gabriel_zucman Fun fact: an annual 0.3% wealth tax on the top 10% — similar to the one that exists in Switzerland — would fund the entire $3.5 trillion bill 📌 https://twitter.com/gabriel_zucman/status/1440100208730279940?s=20
⋙ 🐣 ◕ RT @gabriel_zucman Using he Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts:
● The top 10% owns $90 trillion (of which $41.5 is owned by the top 1%) = 400% of GDP
● So if well enforced the tax would raise ~1.2% of GDP (~like in Switzerland) — which is $3.5t over 10 years https://twitter.com/gabriel_zucman/status/1440102976366862336?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 📋 BoardofGovsFED: Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 http://bit.ly/3ArVRuU
⋙ 🐣 RT @gabriel_zucman If, as if likely, there was some tax avoidance/evasion then you need to increase the rate a bit: ¤ With 15% avoidance/evasion, you need to increase the rate to 0.35% to generate 1.2% of GDP in revenue ¤ (Or if you keep 0.3% you only get $3 trillion — still decent)
⋙ 🐣 RT @gabriel_zucman With this small tax, Elon Musk would pay about $600 million this year — making it impossible for billionaires to pay ~0 tax anymore
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @gabriel_zucman (9/18) The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, paid $8,410 in income tax in 2018. 📌 https://twitter.com/gabriel_zucman/status/1439296433807499267?s=20/photo/1
// 9/18/2021
🐣 RT @FrankFigliuzzi Here we go: Longtime GOP operatives charged with funneling Russian national’s money to Trump, RNC
⋙ Politico: Longtime GOP operatives charged with funneling Russian national’s money to Trump, RNC http://politi.co/3CAyQ9N
// Jesse Benton and Doug Wead pleaded not guilty to six felony charges, including facilitating a campaign contribution by a foreign national.
The grand jury indictment alleges that Benton and Wead worked together to accept $100,000 from an unidentified Russian national in order to get the foreigner a meeting with then-candidate Trump at a fundraiser in Philadelphia on Sept. 22, 2016. … … The indictment suggests that Benton and Wead hoped to make money from the scheme and did — taking $100,000 from the Russian, but paying only $25,000 to Trump Victory, a joint venture between the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.
NYT: Democrats to Pair Spending Bill With Raising Debt Ceiling, Pressuring G.O.P. http://nyti.ms/3kxDIGB McConnell and moderate Republicans voted for the $900B pandemic relief bill but now are refusing to pay for it, despite voting for $1.9Tr in Trump tax cuts for the rich
// The approach essentially dares Republicans to follow through on their threats to oppose increasing the debt limit, by coupling it with urgently needed federal spending.
🐣 RT @BillKristol As of a few months ago (and still?), John Eastman, the author of the White House six-point plan for overturning the election, was chair of the Federalism & Separation of Powers Practice Group of @FedSoc. Any statement by them about one of their leading lights plotting usurpation?
⋙⋙ 🚫🐣 RT @APMC1985 I mean they hosted this event, don’t see why they’d have a problem with Eastman. Text Block: https://twitter.com/APMC1985/status/1440113732873453577?s=20/photo/1
// Flyer: “The Originalist Case for Insurrection” [authentic?]
⋙ 🐣 RT @BillKristol I don’t follow as many Republicans and conservatives on this website as I once did. But I assume if I did follow them, I’d see them all expressing horror at the Trump White House usurpation plan, and insisting the GOP and conservatives cut all ties with those associated with it.
🐣 RT @marceelias If he sent this, he should be disbarred.
⋙ 🧵 RT @UrbanAchievr This is the six-point plan advanced by Trump lawyer John Eastman for VP Pence to overturn the election on January 6th.Text Block: 📌https://twitter.com/UrbanAchievr/status/1440062663967461387?s=20/photo/1
🔆 This❗️⋙ CNN: Memo shows Trump lawyer’s six-step plan for Pence to overturn the election http://cnn.it/3nNTjDT
⋙ Memo: CNN: [pdf] http://cnn.it/3hR1YBL p2
The scheme put forward by controversial lawyer John Eastman was outlined in a two-page memo obtained by the authors for “Peril,” and which was subsequently obtained by CNN. The memo, which has not previously been made public, provides new detail showing how Trump and his team tried to persuade Pence to subvert the Constitution and throw out the election results on January 6.
The effort to sway Pence was just one of several behind-the-scenes attempts that Trump’s team undertook ahead of January 6 in a desperate bid to overturn the 2020 election loss, after dozens of lawsuits were thrown out of the courts. “Peril,” which will be released Tuesday, details how Eastman’s memo was sent to GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and how Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani tried to convince fellow Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina of election fraud. But both Lee and Graham scoffed at the arguments and found they had no merit.
You might as well make your case to Queen Elizabeth II. Congress can’t do this. You’re wasting your time,” Lee said to Trump’s lawyers trying to overturn the results in Georgia, according to the book.
The Eastman memo laid out a six-step plan for Pence to overturn the election for Trump, which included throwing out the results in seven states because they allegedly had competing electors. In fact, no state had actually put forward an alternate slate of electors — there were merely Trump allies claiming without any authority to be electors.
“You really need to listen to John. He’s a respected constitutional scholar. Hear him out,” Trump said to Pence at that meeting, Woodward and Costa write in “Peril.”
In the memo, Eastman went so far as to suggest Pence should take action without warning.
“The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission — either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court,” Eastman wrote. “The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.”
In the end, Pence didn’t go along with Eastman’s scheme, concluding that the Constitution did not give him any power beyond counting the Electoral College votes. He did his own consultations before January 6, according to the book, reaching out to former Vice President Dan Quayle and the Senate parliamentarian, who were both clear in telling him he had no authority beyond counting the votes.
When Pence refused to intervene, Trump turned on his vice president, attacking him on Twitter even as the insurrection at the Capitol was unfolding on January 6.
The memo could be of interest to the House select committee now investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which recently requested documents from the National Archives that specifically included communications involving Eastman.
“It shows intent, a sophisticated plan, a blueprint to illegally and unconstitutionally overturn and steal the election” by Trump and his team based on false and misleading information and legal arguments, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN.
Eastman spoke at the January 6 rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. He retired from his position as a professor at Chapman University a week after January 6, which occurred amid protests from faculty at the Southern California university over his participation in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
Eastman told the Washington Post that his memo merely “explored all options that had been proposed.” CNN has contacted Eastman for comment through the Claremont Institute, where he is a senior fellow.
As part of the efforts of Trump’s team to convince Congress not to certify the election, the Eastman memo was given to Lee, one of the Senate’s top Republican constitutional authors. At the same time, Giuliani sent multiple memos to Graham trying to convince him that the claims of election fraud coming from Trump’s team were legitimate.
The memos show how even some of Trump’s closest allies balked at the measures Trump’s team was taking behind the scenes to try to overturn his loss to Biden. But while Lee and Graham heard out the cases from Trump’s lawyers, they soundly rejected their claims, Woodard and Costa write.
Lee was shocked by the claims the memo was making, since no state had considered, let alone put forward, any alternate slates of electors. “Lee’s head was spinning,” the authors write. “No such procedure existed in the Constitution, any law or past practice. Eastman had apparently drawn it out of thin air.”
Lee also dismissed the Trump team’s arguments that it had a case to overturn the election results in Georgia, saying they had to be made in court.
🐣 📊 Monmouth Poll: Public Pans Texas Abortion Law http://bit.ly/3lOa13s (9/9-13/2021)
// Most say leave Roe v. Wade as is
62/31% say leave Roe v Wade as it is
70/22% disapprove of Texas law
Abortion should be:
● Always Legal 33%
● Legal w Limitations 29%
● Illegal w Exceptions 24%
● Always Illegal 11%
🐣 RT @JakeTapper CNN: More than 675,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the United States, surpassing the country’s estimated death toll from the 1918 flu pandemic.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SethroM31 The population of the US was 100 million in 1918. Meaning per capita COVID is still only 1/3 as deadly.
🐣 The number of Deaths Per Day from COVID-19 has almost DOUBLED in less than a month.
From: 1,010 a day for the week ending 8/21
To: 1,968 a day for the week ending 9/18
Source: IHME ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1439817798050623491?s=20/photo/1
// 🖼 photo from Nature of close-up of coronavirus (electron microscopic)
⭕ 19 Sep 2021
WaPo, EJ Dionne: Anthony Gonzalez gets what Democrats need to know http://wapo.st/2XDUNWo “[L]ast week could well mark … a turning point in how Democrats, including Biden, approach the next phase of political combat”
// President Biden, call Anthony Gonzalez.
One of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 riot, Gonzalez called the former president “a cancer for the country.” He told the New York Times he did not want any part of a 2022 GOP that will “make Trump the center of fund-raising efforts,” adding that “most of my political energy will be spent” preventing Trump from being president again.
For all of Biden’s honorable efforts to pull the nation together, and his earlier habit of downplaying the radical nature of today’s Republicanism, our politics remain as dangerously abnormal as Gonzalez warns.
For at least two more elections — next year’s midterms and the 2024 presidential contest — the central issue before voters will be whether to reward or punish the GOP’s extremism and, particularly in the case of the House Republican leadership, the party’s embrace of Trump.
This is not an abstract question. In the here and now, Republican-controlled states have embraced voter suppression and election subversion, justified in the name of doubts sown by Trump’s preposterously false claims about the 2020 election outcome.
With some honorable exceptions, Republican governors in the party’s strongholds have blocked sensible actions to prevent tens of thousands of deaths from the spread of covid-19.
Gonzalez’s decision in combination with the outcome of the California recall, the continuing deadly spread of the delta variant and the introduction of the Freedom to Vote Act in the Senate could well mark last week as a turning point in how Democrats, including Biden, approach the next phase of political combat.
It begins by accepting that calls for unity of purpose will, for some time, continue to fall on deaf Republican ears. Biden signaled on Thursday that he accepts the new terms of the struggle. He said some Republican governors were playing “the worst kind of politics” by opposing his vaccination and testing mandates, singling out Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas.
“The governors of Florida and Texas,” Biden said, “are doing everything they can to undermine the lifesaving requirements that I proposed.”
This is fertile ground. Large majorities of Democrats and independents and a significant minority of Republicans support Biden’s vaccine mandates. A poll released in Florida last week found the state’s voters unhappy with DeSantis’s virus policies and preferring Biden to DeSantis in a hypothetical presidential matchup.
And the defeat of the recall effort against California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) by a nearly 2-to-1 margin demonstrated the power of a campaign waged in favor of tough action to curb the virus — and against Trump and Republican extremism.
But the case for confronting Trumpist zealotry is moral, not just political. Our democracy will be in peril as long as the vast majority of Republican leaders refuse to join Gonzalez in battling what he rightly sees as a growing cancer in their party. And Democrats will be complicit if they act as if business-as-usual remains possible.
🐣 RT @leahmcelrath In the past year and a half:
● More Americans have died from COVID-19 than total military deaths on both sides in the Civil War.
● Five times as many as US military deaths in WWI.
● 200,000 more than US military deaths in WWII.
● Ten times as many as US military deaths in Vietnam.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ryanjreilly Quite stunning to see the COVID death toll represented like this. 💽 https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1439749388843327495?s=20/photo/1
// white flags on the Mall
🐣 RT @IlhanMN Big News: Mask and vaccine mandates are supported my a sizable majority according to this Fox News Poll, sorry Fox.
**Also the poll indicates 56% of voters support an infrastructure bill that has spending to address climate change, health care, and childcare. ¤ Let’s pass it https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1439716003651391488?s=20/photo/1
// 📊 FoxNews Poll (9/12-15/2021, registered voters)
Favor/Oppose
67/31 Teachers/Students wear masks
66/31 Workers/Customers wear masks
61/36 Teachers be vaccinated
58/40 All govt employees be vaccinated
56/41 Biz 100+ employees vaxed/tested
🐣 RT @kikiallus Could these nano-drones be utilized to vaccinate the anti-vaxxers? https://twitter.com/kikiallus/status/1439756002895622146?s=20/photo/1
// flying insect drones
⋙ 🐣 Now there’s an idea!
NYT: Merkel’s Children: Living Legacies Called Angela, Angie and Sometimes Merkel http://nyti.ms/2VSqdre
// For some refugee families who traveled to Germany during the migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016, gratitude for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome them comes via a namesake.
WaPo Editorial: If Republicans can’t get behind an issue as fundamental as voting, Democrats must push through their bill http://wapo.st/39mWgCK
⭕ 18 Sep 2021
WaPo: ‘Justice for J6’ rally starts and ends with small crowds and tight security http://wapo.st/3tWfgBx “Capitol Police said Saturday afternoon that between 400 and 450 people had been observed … . But many of them were journalists and other bystanders”
NYT Editorial: Joe Manchin Got the Voting Bill He Wanted. Time to Pass It. http://nyti.ms/3CoplKC
🐣 RT @DerpaDe54172274 #JusticeforJ6 #TraitorParade
💙 🌀 https://twitter.com/DerpaDe54172274/status/1439260249203122186?s=20/photo/1
// people running into a hole lemmings to the sea
⭕ 17 Sep 2021
RawStory/TexasTrib, Kate Mcgee: Emergency contraception funds sent to Texas by Biden admin following GOP’s near-total abortion ban http://bit.ly/2XojzcK $ sent to Every Body Texas, distributor for fed Title X program which provides family planning services for low income people
WaPo Editorial: John Durham’s zombie Russia investigation produces an iffy indictment. Is this all there is? http://wapo.st/2Xmovih “So far here are no indications he has uncovered anything suggesting an illegitimate government plot to subvert the 2016 Trump campaign”
🐣 RT @MSNBC Gen. McCaffrey on fmr. President Trump: “If we were looking at a third world country, we would have said ‘this guy is going to conduct a coup against his constitution'”
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, DeadlineWH: Gen. McCaffrey: If we looked at US from the outside, we’d think Trump was going to ‘conduct a coup’ http://on.msnbc.com/3zi5P0q
// Retired National Security Council member General Barry McCaffrey and Atlantic contributing writer Tom Nichols dissect the inner workings inside the Trump White House and why the military was extremely concerned that Trump was a “threat to the republic”
⭕ 16 Sep 2021
NYT: ‘It’s Always Going to Haunt Me’: How the Capitol Riot Changed Lives http://nyti.ms/3nFBdDS
🐣 ◕ 📋 RT @TheDailyEdge Biden has created 7.5 million more jobs in 8 months than Trump created in 4 years. https://twitter.com/TheDailyEdge/status/1438683781423157248?s=20/photo/1
// Trump -3M, Biden +4.5M
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance A few legal issues of note: the statute requires the gov’t to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Sussman knew the statement was false & made it with an improper purpose, that the statement was actually false & that it was “material.” Can’t convict without all of that. And 1/2
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @CBS_Herridge #Durham NEW: Indictment “..on Sept. 19, 2016, Sussman, a lawyer at a large international law firm, met with the FBI General Counsel at FBI HQ… Sussman had requested the meeting to provide the GC with certain data files + “white papers” that allegedly demonstrated a covert… 📌 https://twitter.com/CBS_Herridge/status/1438605566356692992?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Bad facts make bad law & that has happened with this statute in the past, 1st courts added a materiality requirement & more recently that defendant knew lying to agents was a crime. Given inconsistent treatment of Sussman & Mike Flynn, lots of risk on appeal to the gov’t. [2/2]
⋙⋙ 🐣 … but just enough for Trumpists to claim that the entire Russia investigation was based on data planted by the Clinton campaign; damage already done, doesn’t matter how it plays out in the courts; unfortunate
WaPo: Roger Stone served ‘a big, big stack of papers’ from Capitol riot lawsuit during radio interview http://wapo.st/3CfgWcr “‘This is a big, big stack of papers, which is good, because we’re out of toilet paper,’ he said, as the radio hosts laughed.”
🧵 RT @jimsciutto Note this: Milley’s communications with China were not unusual. As I reported in Aug 2020, Trump’s advisers warned Iran and North Korea over fears he would start a war. See here: 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1438487506555744258?s=20
⋙⋙ CNN (2020): Trump advisers hesitated to give military options and warned adversaries over fears he might start a war http://cnn.it/3gEP8nw
// 8/6/2020
⋙ 🐣 RT @jimsciutto 2/From “The Madman Theory”: “We used to only think of Kim Jong Un as unpredictable. Now we had Trump as unpredictable,” Joseph Yun, who served as President Trump’s special representative for North Korea policy until 2018, told me. “And I would communicate that.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @jimsciutto 3/And on Iran: “We told allies that we did not know what the President would be willing to do against Iran,” Mick Mulroy, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East until 2019, recalled. “It was possible he could make a decision that would lead to an escalation..”
⋙ 🐣 RT @jimsciutto 4/ “…of the conflict, and that escalation could lead to war, so they needed to relay that to Iran so they realized not even his staff knew what would happen if they attacked another oil facility, for instance.”
WaPo: Roger Stone served ‘a big, big stack of papers’ from Capitol riot lawsuit during radio interview http://wapo.st/3CfgWcr “‘This is a big, big stack of papers, which is good, because we’re out of toilet paper,’ he said, as the radio hosts laughed.”
🧵 RT @jimsciutto Note this: Milley’s communications with China were not unusual. As I reported in Aug 2020, Trump’s advisers warned Iran and North Korea over fears he would start a war. See here: 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1438487506555744258?s=20
⋙⋙ CNN (2020): Trump advisers hesitated to give military options and warned adversaries over fears he might start a war http://cnn.it/3gEP8nw
// 8/6/2020
⋙ 🐣 RT @jimsciutto 2/From “The Madman Theory”: “We used to only think of Kim Jong Un as unpredictable. Now we had Trump as unpredictable,” Joseph Yun, who served as President Trump’s special representative for North Korea policy until 2018, told me. “And I would communicate that.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @jimsciutto 3/And on Iran: “We told allies that we did not know what the President would be willing to do against Iran,” Mick Mulroy, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East until 2019, recalled. “It was possible he could make a decision that would lead to an escalation..”
⋙ 🐣 RT @jimsciutto 4/ “…of the conflict, and that escalation could lead to war, so they needed to relay that to Iran so they realized not even his staff knew what would happen if they attacked another oil facility, for instance.”
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 At least seven conservative radio hosts and high-profile anti-mask and anti-vaccine advocates have died from COVID-19 in recent weeks.
⋙ BusinessInsider: At least seven conservative radio hosts and high-profile anti-mask and anti-vaccine advocates have died from COVID-19 in recent weeks http://bit.ly/3EorszW
// Misinformation around the COVID-19 and vaccines remains widespread as cases are rising in the US, especially in states like Florida and Texas.
⭕ 15 Sep 2021
WaPo: Second alleged Oath Keeper in largest Capitol riot conspiracy case pleads guilty and will cooperate http://wapo.st/3kcVD4T “Jason Dolan, 45, of Wellington FL, admitted Wednesday to two federal counts of conspiracy and aiding and abetting the obstruction of Congress”
Slate, Mary Harris: Bannon’s Counterrevolution by Podcast http://bit.ly/3zaS83m “Bannon has started promoting a novel idea, encouraging his listeners to flood the very lowest levels of the Republican party”
// The former Trump strategist’s ridiculously popular podcast could influence the 2024 election.
🐣 RT @duty2warn Here, fyi, is a statement on the Milley revelations (per the Woodward book) by John Bolton. Text Block: https://twitter.com/duty2warn/status/1438237241759846401?s=20/photo/1
// Statement in support
WaPo: Biden says he has ‘great confidence’ in Milley after book reveals top general, fearing Trump, conferred with China to avert war http://wapo.st/3lqnYEp
Law&Crime: Federal Judge Denies Trump’s Request to Further Delay E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuit Pending Appeal http://bit.ly/2XuDQxx
NYT, Thomas Edsall: Abortion Has Never Been Just About Abortion http://nyti.ms/2XiypBu “There is a persistent association between abortion views and ethnoracial exclusion” ~ Bart Bonikowski, professor of sociology at NYU
🧵 RT @kyledcheney A 40-year friend of a Capitol Police officer reported the officer for disclosing the secure location he evacuated lawmakers to on Jan. 6. ¤ The friend believed the officer was aligned with the rioters, per USCP discipline reports obtained by McClatchy. Text Block: 📌 https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1438122188280893443?s=20/photo/1
// Source: MiamiHerald: http://hrld.us/3tWgVr3
⭕ 14 Sep 2021
CNN, Chris Cillizza: How Dan Quayle saved democracy. Yes, really. http://cnn.it/3AknIwY
Quayle served as a sort-of sounding board for Vice President Mike Pence in the final days of the administration as President Donald Trump leaned hard on him to overturn the 2020 presidential election. ¤ The back-and-forth is documented in “Peril,” a soon-to-be released book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.Here’s the key bit:
“Over and over, Pence asked if there was anything he could do.
“‘Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away,’ Quayle told him.
“Pence pressed again.
“‘You don’t know the position I’m in,’ he said, according to the authors.
“‘I do know the position you’re in,’ Quayle responded. ‘I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That’s all you do. You have no power.'”If you think I’m exaggerating about the role Quayle played, consider how things might have gone had he taken a different tact with Pence, telling him to do what Trump asked.
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Newsom Survives California Recall Vote and Will Remain Governor http://nyti.ms/3tLbv1J
🐣 RT @digby A majority of Californians said that they aren’t going to put up with this anti-Democratic BS from Republicans. Let’s hope the national Dems take heed and motivate their voters the same way the “No on Recall” campaign did. It is potent. ¤ Newsom’s speech hits those notes.
🐣 Perfect victory speech! Congrats California and Gov @GavinNewsom
DailyBeast: Trump Calls Allies to Demand Gen. Mark Milley Be ‘Arrested’ for ‘Treason’ http://bit.ly/396zLlk ¤ “[A]t an August rally in Alabama, the former president publicly blasted Milley, saying ‘This guy doesn’t have what it takes.’” ¤ Apparently, he does.
// The former president hit the phones, and then went on his former press secretary’s Newsmax show to make the case himself.
🐣 RT @POTUS The sacred right to vote is under attack across the country — and we need to take urgent action to protect it. I strongly support The Freedom to Vote Act and thank the eight Senators who came together to draft it. ¤ Let’s get this passed.
🐣 RT @marceelias “The reality is that there will either be a law passed only with Democratic votes or we will not have any voting rights legislation. We cannot afford to sacrifice our free and fair elections because of Republican intransigence.”
⋙ DemocracyDocket, Marc Elias: On Voting Rights, There Are No Moderates in the GOP http://bit.ly/3nwld7d
🐣 RT @BarackObama The Freedom to Vote Act just introduced in the Senate would strengthen our democracy by making it easier for people to vote and harder for politicians and special interests to drown out the voices of ordinary Americans. I support it, and every Senator should do the same.
🐣 RT @EricHolder Republican attempts to suppress the vote, the voice of the people, and subvert our democracy have only worsened. The #FreedomToVoteAct is our best chance at stopping them and preserving our democracy ¤ The Senate has a moral obligation to act now. Reform the filibuster.
CNN: Democrats cut deal with Manchin to get party behind long-shot voting overhaul bill http://cnn.it/3tDpVkA
🐣 RT @DanRather The Rule of Trump: No matter how bad you think it is. It’s worse. Much worse. As in a dumpster fire inside of a nuclear reactor worse.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Top general was so fearful Trump might spark war that he made secret calls to his Chinese counterpart, new book says http://wapo.st/3k94CUM //➔ So Dan Quayle ~ Mr “Potatoe” ~ saved the Republic? I’ll take it
// ‘Peril,’ by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, reveals that Gen. Mark A. Milley called his Chinese counterpart before the election and after Jan. 6 in a bid to avert armed conflict.
Twice in the final months of the Trump administration, the country’s top military officer was so fearful that the president’s actions might spark a war with China that he moved urgently to avert armed conflict.
In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa.
One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election that unseated President Donald Trump, and the other on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol siege carried out by his supporters in a quest to cancel the vote.
The first call was prompted by Milley’s review of intelligence suggesting the Chinese believed the United States was preparing to attack. That belief, the authors write, was based on tensions over military exercises in the South China Sea, and deepened by Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward China.
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley told him. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
Li took the chairman at his word, the authors write in the book, “Peril,” which is set to be released next week.
In the second call, placed to address Chinese fears about the events of Jan. 6, Li wasn’t as easily assuaged, even after Milley promised him, “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”
Li remained rattled, and Milley, who did not relay the conversation to Trump, according to the book, understood why. The chairman, 62 at the time and chosen by Trump in 2018, believed the president had suffered a mental decline after the election, the authors write, a view he communicated to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a phone call on Jan. 8. He agreed with her evaluation that Trump was unstable, according to a call transcript obtained by the authors.
Believing that China could lash out if it felt at risk from an unpredictable and vengeful American president, Milley took action. The same day, he called the admiral overseeing the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the military unit responsible for Asia and the Pacific region, and recommended postponing the military exercises, according to the book. The admiral complied.
Milley also summoned senior officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, saying the president alone could give the order — but, crucially, that he, Milley, also had to be involved. Looking each in the eye, Milley asked the officers to affirm that they had understood, the authors write, in what he considered an “oath.”
The chairman knew that he was “pulling a Schlesinger,” the authors write, resorting to measures resembling the ones taken in August 1974 by James R. Schlesinger, the defense secretary at the time. Schlesinger told military officials to check with him and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs before carrying out orders from President Richard M. Nixon, who was facing impeachment at the time.
Though Milley went furthest in seeking to stave off a national security crisis, his alarm was shared throughout the highest ranks of the administration, the authors reveal. CIA Director Gina Haspel, for instance, reportedly told Milley, “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.”
The book also provides new reporting on President Biden’s campaign — waged to unseat a man he told a top adviser “isn’t really an American president” — and his early struggle to govern. During a March 5 phone call to discuss Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, his first major legislative undertaking, the president reportedly told Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va), “if you don’t come along, you’re really f—ing me.” The measure ultimately cleared the Senate through an elaborate sequencing of amendments designed to satisfy the centrist Democrat.
The president’s frustration with Manchin is matched only by his debt to House Majority Whip Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, whose endorsement before that state’s primary propelled Biden to the nomination and gave rise to promises about how he would govern.
When Clyburn offered his endorsement in February 2020, it came with conditions, according to the book. One was that Biden would commit to naming a Black woman to the Supreme Court, if given the opportunity. During a debate two days later, Clyburn went backstage during a break to urge Biden to reveal his intentions for the Supreme Court that night. Biden issued the pledge in his final answer, and the congressman endorsed him the next day.
“Peril,” the authors say, is based on interviews with more than 200 people, conducted on the condition they not be named as sources. Exact quotations or conclusions are drawn from the participant in the described event, a colleague with direct knowledge or relevant documents, according to an author’s note. Trump and Biden declined to be interviewed.
On Afghanistan, the book examines how Biden’s experience as vice president shaped his approach to the withdrawal. Convinced that President Barack Obama had been manipulated by his own commanders, Biden vowed privately in 2009, “The military doesn’t f— around with me.”
“Peril” also documents how Biden’s top advisers spent the spring weighing, but ultimately rejecting, alternatives to a full withdrawal. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin returned from a NATO meeting in March envisioning ways to extend the mission, including through a “gated” withdrawal seeking diplomatic leverage. But they came to see that meaningful leverage would require a more expansive commitment, and instead came back around to a full exit.
Milley, for his part, took what the authors describe as a deferential approach to Biden on Afghanistan, in contrast to his earlier efforts to constrain Trump. The book reveals recent remarks the chairman delivered to the Joint Chiefs in which he said, “Here’s a couple of rules of the road here that we’re going to follow. One is you never, ever ever box in a president of the United States. You always give him decision space.” Referring to Biden, he said, “You’re dealing with a seasoned politician here who has been in Washington, D.C., 50 years, whatever it is.”
His decision just months earlier to place himself between Trump and potential war was triggered by several important events — a phone call, a photo op and a refusal to rule out war with another adversary, Iran.
Milley’s resolve was deepened by the events of June 1, 2020, when he felt Trump had used him as part of a photo op in his walk across Lafayette Square during protests that began after the killing of George Floyd. The chairman came to see his role as ensuring that, “We’re not going to turn our guns on the American people and we’re not going to have a ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario overseas,” the authors quote him saying privately.
Trump’s posture, not just to China but also to Iran, tested that promise. In discussions about Iran’s nuclear program, Trump declined to rule out striking the country, at times even displaying curiosity about the prospect, according to the book. Haspel was so alarmed after a meeting in November that she called Milley to say, “This is a highly dangerous situation. We are going to lash out for his ego?”
Trump’s fragile ego drove many decisions by the nation’s leaders, from lawmakers to the vice president, according to the book. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was so worried that a call from President-elect Biden would send Trump into a fury that the then-Majority Leader used a backchannel to fend off Biden. He asked Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, formerly the No. 2 Senate Republican, to ask Sen. Christopher A. Coons, the Democrat of Delaware and close Biden ally, to tell Biden not to call him.
So intent was Pence on being Trump’s loyal second-in-command — and potential successor — that he asked confidants if there were ways he could accede to Trump’s demands and avoid certifying the results of the election on Jan. 6. In late December, the authors reveal, Pence called Dan Quayle, a former vice president and fellow Indiana Republican, for advice.
Quayle was adamant, according to the authors. “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away,” he said.
But Pence pressed him, the authors write, asking if there were any grounds to pause the certification because of ongoing legal challenges. Quayle was unmoved, and Pence ultimately agreed, according to the book.
When Pence said he planned to certify the results, the president lashed out. In the Oval Office on Jan. 5, the authors write, Pence told Trump he could not thwart the process, that his role was simply to “open the envelopes.”
“I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this,” Trump replied, according to the book, later telling his vice president, “You’ve betrayed us. I made you. You were nothing.”
Within days, Trump was out of office, his governing power reduced to nothing. But if stability had returned to Washington, Milley feared it would be short-lived, the authors write.
The general saw parallels between Jan. 6 and the 1905 Russian Revolution, which set off unrest throughout the Russian Empire and, though it failed, helped create the conditions for the October Revolution of 1917, in which the Bolsheviks executed a successful coup that set up the world’s first communist state. Vladimir Lenin, who led the revolution, called 1905 a “dress rehearsal.”
A similar logic could apply with Jan. 6, Milley thought as he wrestled with the meaning of that day, telling senior staff: “What you might have seen was a precursor to something far worse down the road.”
🐣 RT @nytimesbusiness George Soros’s Open Society Foundations have embarked on a painful restructuring to refocus on the fight against rising authoritarianism.
⋙ NYT: George Soros Is Making Changes at His Foundation While He Still Can http://nyti.ms/3kbiCxv The changes are a move back to the foundation’s roots in fighting authoritarianism and away from funding the cacophany of identity -isms within democracies
// The result is a painful restructuring to focus on the fight against rising authoritarianism around the world.
The left-leaning foundation — started by the billionaire investor George Soros and today the second-largest private charitable foundation in the United States — was beginning a transformation, as officials there refer to their restructuring plan. So, the email said, “the nature of many partnerships will shift.”
Grant recipients in public health said they were stunned to be told during a global pandemic that they would be losing funding. Others supporting refugees were similarly surprised given the worldwide needs of the refugee population and the fact that Mr. Soros himself was a refugee from communism.
For years, Mr. Soros watched the world march in fits and starts toward the vision of open, pluralistic democracy that he has embraced since he was a young Hungarian Holocaust survivor studying philosophy.
The changes at the Open Society Foundations are a painful but necessary adjustment, its leaders say, because that march has halted. Now, with its founder in his 90s, the foundation — and the world — confronts rising authoritarianism and deeply divided civil societies. In the United States, that means that Mr. Soros’s work on progressive causes has made him a target of right-wing conspiracy theories.
And in 2018, in his native Hungary, Open Society was forced to close its office under intense pressure from the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a onetime recipient of a grant from the group.
“From a high-water mark in the early 2000s, we’ve really seen a recession of democracy and human rights,” Mark Malloch-Brown, the president of the foundation, said in an interview. “We’ve been a little bit peacetime generals at a time where, actually, we’re in a war again.”
The plan is to concentrate bigger philanthropic bets at the global level. The restructuring will give more power to the regional offices, in places like Africa and Latin America, including $75 million in additional funding.
None of this was quite what people expected when the news emerged in 2017 that Mr. Soros had transferred $18 billion of his fortune to the Open Society Foundations, making it the second-largest private charitable foundation by resources in the United States after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Mr. Gaspard left last year and is now the president of the Center for American Progress in Washington. He was replaced by Mr. Malloch-Brown, who was already on the board and had a close relationship with Mr. Soros dating back more than three decades.
The transformation comes at a delicate moment for large philanthropies. Debates over diversity and inclusion have grown louder and more pointed, as have discussions about how much deference should be shown to billionaire donors over the disposition of donated money. After all, they receive what amounts to a public subsidy for that money in the form of tax breaks.
Many left-leaning, progressive staff members have questioned privately why Mr. Soros’s son, who is just 35, should be his successor as chairman. At the same time, the replacement of Mr. Gaspard, who is Black, with an older white man who is a member of Britain’s House of Lords, struck some employees as out of touch with the times.
Leaders on the regional level say the changes will give more independence and authority to the staff members where the work is being performed.
⭕ 13 Sep 2021
WaPo, Dana Milbank: George W. Bush reminds us that Republicans once believed in democracy http://wapo.st/3hvrADY “In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson forecast that the young nation would ‘unite in common efforts for common good.’” That’s what Trump broke.
In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson forecast that the young nation would “unite in common efforts for the common good” after the bitter election of 1800.
“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” he said in the new Senate chamber. “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”
Americans have, at our best, upheld that creed over two centuries. We are all republicans. We are all democrats.
George W. Bush reminded us of those sacred ties in his magnificent speech Saturday contrasting the warm courage of national unity after the 9/11 attacks with the domestic terrorism Donald Trump has unleashed. …
On cue spoke the Malign Force himself. Trump, rejecting invitations to attend 9/11 memorials with other former presidents, used the solemn anniversary to stoke resentment. “We won the election,” he told firefighters in New York. “The election was rigged.” He lashed out at President Biden — “surrender,” “disgrace,” “total embarrassment” — and Democrats: “They only do bad stuff. You wonder whether or not they love our country.”
Even Fox News cut away, as the anchor noted that Trump was “claiming that the election was rigged, which it was not. It has been proven in court multiple times.” …
“At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith. That is the nation I know,” Bush said Saturday. “At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know,” he continued.
This America, Bush said, “is the truest version of ourselves. It is what we have been — and what we can be again.”
Embracing Muslims? Welcoming immigrants? This is the antithesis of Trump’s Republican Party. Bush, the only Republican to win the presidential popular vote in 32 years, has no place in that party. Neither does Dick Cheney, nor Liz Cheney — nor anybody else who still believes that being a Republican also means being a democrat.
WaPo: With big tax push, Democrats aim to tackle enormous gains of top 1 percent http://wapo.st/396Ha4q
// The package is a central component of their $3.5 trillion economic package, but they can’t proceed unless almost all Democrats coalesce.
WaPo: Trump takes aim at George W. Bush, saying he shouldn’t ‘lecture’ about threat of domestic terrorism http://wapo.st/3Eeu0Re
⭕ 12 Sep 2021
Newsweek: Pro-Trump Rally Expecting 10,000 Attendees Sees Only a Few Hundred Show Up: Report http://bit.ly/3EtFekW
The event’s description explained: ¤ “The Biggest Patriot Rally Of The Year – A True Reunion Of We, The People, combining the biggest names in the conservative patriot movement including Gen. Flynn, Lin Wood, Candace Owens, Mike Lindell, and many others along w/top notch Christian & Country Music Entertainment! Simply put: This will be THE ‘Event Of The Year’ for American Patriots!” …
Local channel WFIE 14 News sent a team to shoot video at the event on Friday but was later asked to leave, according to a report broadcast by the NBC News affiliate. The news channel reported that promoters had expected a crowd of about 10,000 people but less than 300 were in attendance from what their journalists saw. Event organizers reportedly refused to speak to WFIE about the rally.
WaPo, EJ Dionne: A make-or-break moment for our democracy http://wapo.st/3tF7yeX “Failing to enact Democrats’ social policy plan would be a big problem. Failing to protect democratic rule would be catastrophic.”
⭕ 11 Sep 2021 😪✈️🏙💥✈️🏙💥 20 ✈️🏛💥✈️🏘💥😪
💙 💽 ≣ BushCenter: Remarks by President George W. Bush at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania http://bit.ly/3htA2U3
// Video and ranscript of remarks from September 11, 2021 commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11
// tags: Bush speech 9/11/2021 Shanksville PA
Thank you very much. Laura and I are honored to be with you. Madam Vice President, Vice President Cheney. Governor Wolf, Secretary Haaland, and distinguished guests:
Twenty years ago, we all found – in different ways, in different places, but all at the same moment – that our lives would be changed forever. The world was loud with carnage and sirens, and then quiet with missing voices that would never be heard again. These lives remain precious to our country, and infinitely precious to many of you. Today we remember your loss, we share your sorrow, and we honor the men and women you have loved so long and so well.
For those too young to recall that clear September day, it is hard to describe the mix of feelings we experienced. There was horror at the scale – there was horror at the scale of destruction, and awe at the bravery and kindness that rose to meet it. There was shock at the audacity – audacity of evil – and gratitude for the heroism and decency that opposed it. In the sacrifice of the first responders, in the mutual aid of strangers, in the solidarity of grief and grace, the actions of an enemy revealed the spirit of a people. And we were proud of our wounded nation.
In these memories, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 must always have an honored place. Here the intended targets became the instruments of rescue. And many who are now alive owe a vast, unconscious debt to the defiance displayed in the skies above this field.
It would be a mistake to idealize the experience of those terrible events. All that many people could initially see was the brute randomness of death. All that many could feel was unearned suffering. All that many could hear was God’s terrible silence. There are many who still struggle with a lonely pain that cuts deep within.
In those fateful hours, we learned other lessons as well. We saw that Americans were vulnerable, but not fragile – that they possess a core of strength that survives the worst that life can bring. We learned that bravery is more common than we imagined, emerging with sudden splendor in the face of death. We vividly felt how every hour with our loved ones was a temporary and holy gift. And we found that even the longest days end.
Many of us have tried to make spiritual sense of these events. There is no simple explanation for the mix of providence and human will that sets the direction of our lives. But comfort can come from a different sort of knowledge. After wandering long and lost in the dark, many have found they were actually walking, step by step, toward grace.
As a nation, our adjustments have been profound. Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal. The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability. And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.
After 9/11, millions of brave Americans stepped forward and volunteered to serve in the Armed Forces. The military measures taken over the last 20 years to pursue dangers at their source have led to debate. But one thing is certain: We owe an assurance to all who have fought our nation’s most recent battles. Let me speak directly to veterans and people in uniform: The cause you pursued at the call of duty is the noblest America has to offer. You have shielded your fellow citizens from danger. You have defended the beliefs of your country and advanced the rights of the downtrodden. You have been the face of hope and mercy in dark places. You have been a force for good in the world. Nothing that has followed – nothing – can tarnish your honor or diminish your accomplishments. To you, and to the honored dead, our country is forever grateful.
In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks, I was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people. When it comes to the unity of America, those days seem distant from our own. A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.
I come without explanations or solutions. I can only tell you what I have seen.
On America’s day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor’s hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know.
At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith. That is the nation I know.
At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know.
At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action. That is the nation I know.
This is not mere nostalgia; it is the truest version of ourselves. It is what we have been – and what we can be again.
Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans, on a routine flight, to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all.
The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.
These Americans were brave, strong, and united in ways that shocked the terrorists – but should not surprise any of us. This is the nation we know. And whenever we need hope and inspiration, we can look to the skies and remember.
God bless.
🧵 RT @ Photos from 9/11. We were very close. My roommate took each of these photos. Horrific day beyond words. #NeverForget /1 📌 https://twitter.com/DonLew87/status/1436729393804632067?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @FrankFigliuzzi More facts please. Breaking on a Saturday? Capitol Police discipline 6 officers for conduct related to Jan 6. United States Capitol Police
⋙ USCP: USCP’s January 6 Internal Investigations http://bit.ly/3ljHOkw
// Capitol Police
In 20 of the cases, no wrongdoing was found. ¤ Violations were sustained and disciplinary action was recommended in six cases;
● Three for conduct unbecoming
● One for failure to comply with directives
● One for improper remarks
● One for improper dissemination of informationAnother case about an official who is accused of unsatisfactory performance and conduct unbecoming is still pending. The administrative investigation started after a criminal investigation, in which charges were not filed. ¤ The Department is committed to accountability when officers fail to meet the standards governed by USCP policies and the Congressional Community’s expectations.
The six sustained cases should not diminish the heroic efforts of the United States Capitol Police officers. ¤ On January 6, the bravery and courage exhibited by the vast majority of our employees was inspiring.
Politico, Garrett Graf (2016): ‘We’re the Only Plane in the Sky’ http://politi.co/3z4RbJZ
// 9/9/2016; book excerpt; Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance But seriously, why are we debating whether Biden’s vaccine mandates are constitutional? All he has to do is enforce them using private citizen vigilantes who get a bounty for turning in the unvaxxed & according to SCOTUS, the courts’ hands are tied. https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1436780559984889857?s=20
🐣 RT @Potus We never forget. ¤ We never forget the children who have grown up without parents. Parents who have suffered without children. Husbands and wives who had to find a way forward without their partners. Brothers, sisters, loved ones. ¤ Jill and I hold you close in our hearts.
🐣 RT @tribelaw This clearly meritorious DOJ complaint is brilliantly crafted and should withstand the strongest defenses Texas and its agents, including the private vigilantes the State sought to deputize through SB-8, can possibly mount against it. Great job by the AG. http://bit.ly/3hn7NX8
Reuters: George W. Bush calls out threat of domestic terrorism on 9/11 anniversary http://reut.rs/3lhDB0F “We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come, not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within”
SHANKSVILLE, Pa., Sept 11 (Reuters) – On the 20th anniversary of the deadliest attack on U.S. soil, George W. Bush, who was U.S. president at the time, warned of a new danger coming from within the country.
“We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come, not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within,” Bush said on Saturday at the 9/11 memorial site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania during a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.
“There is little cultural overlaps between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home … they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
Bush, recalling the unity of the American people after the attacks, appealed for a return to that spirit amid growing political division in the country.
“When it comes to unity of America, those days seem distant from our own,” he said. “Malign force seems at work in our common life … so much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment.”
“In the sacrifice of the first responders, in the mutual aid of strangers, in the solidarity of grief and grace, the actions of an enemy revealed the spirit of a people,” Bush said, describing the country’s reaction. “We were proud of our wounded nation.”
Speaking about U.S. veterans who served in Afghanistan, Bush said “you have been a force for good in the world and nothing that has followed can tarnish your honor.”
Reuters: George W. Bush calls out threat of domestic terrorism on 9/11 anniversary http://reut.rs/3lhDB0F “We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come, not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within”
SHANKSVILLE, Pa., Sept 11 (Reuters) – On the 20th anniversary of the deadliest attack on U.S. soil, George W. Bush, who was U.S. president at the time, warned of a new danger coming from within the country.
“We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come, not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within,” Bush said on Saturday at the 9/11 memorial site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania during a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.
“There is little cultural overlaps between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home … they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
Bush, recalling the unity of the American people after the attacks, appealed for a return to that spirit amid growing political division in the country.
“When it comes to unity of America, those days seem distant from our own,” he said. “Malign force seems at work in our common life … so much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment.”
“In the sacrifice of the first responders, in the mutual aid of strangers, in the solidarity of grief and grace, the actions of an enemy revealed the spirit of a people,” Bush said, describing the country’s reaction. “We were proud of our wounded nation.”
Speaking about U.S. veterans who served in Afghanistan, Bush said “you have been a force for good in the world and nothing that has followed can tarnish your honor.”
🐣 RT @NBCNews FULL SPEECH: Former President George W. Bush speaks at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on the 20th anniversary on 9/11. https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1436706817250320388?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @dcexaminer https://twitter.com/dcexaminer/status/1436568335949484042?s=20
⋙ 🐣 Is requiring kids to be vaccinated before pre-school “authoritarian”? ¤ It‘s not authoritarian. It’s public health. ¤ My husband is immunocompromised. HIS freedom is severely compromised by stubborn jerks who won’t get vaccinated.
🐣 On 9/12/2001, a Royal Saudi 747 took off from the small Rochester MN airport, reportedly carrying an unknown number of Middle Easterners. My husband, an administrator at Mayo Clinic told me this. I knew doctors who had to rent a car to get back from DC due to the air shutdown
⋙ 🐣 RT @prahme I remember hearing about that plane
⋙⋙ 🐣 We used to have a large number of people from Saudi & UAE who came here each summer, even invested in the community. I miss them. There was talk about opening a clinic in the UAE. After 9/11 that changed of course. We still have many MDs from South Asia and the Middle East.
⋙⋙ 🐣 I read that Bush had allowed members of Bin Laden’s family to leave the US, but I don’t know if they were among those evacuated from Rochester.
🐣 Watching the replay of NBC news the night of 9/11/2001, they showed some Palestinians celebrating (in Palestine); guessing this is what tfg “remembered” as happening in the US. (NBC also showed Arafat expressing horror and support for US)
◕ TheConversation: COVID-19 hospitalizations of U.S. adults disproportionately among the unvaccinated http://bit.ly/3km6iut ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1438497066574024709?s=20/photo/1
// COVID-19 Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network
Source: 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic – a retrospective in 7 charts
⭕ 10 Sep 2021
🐣 ◕ RT @CohoKelly A pretty massive gap in COVID case rates has opened up between counties that voted for Trump last Nov and those that voted for Biden. It’s the largest such gap of the pandemic thus far. Right now, counties Trump carried by 10 or more points have over 2x higher case rates https://twitter.com/CohoKelly/status/1436515303324848132?s=20/photo/1
NYT Editorial: Biden Is Right: Vaccine Refusal ‘Has Cost All of Us’ http://nyti.ms/3hnn0HA “As incursions on bodily autonomy go, this is pretty mild stuff. No one, the Times columnist David Brooks wrote in May, is being asked to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima”
As Americans contemplate the prospect of a second winter trapped in the grip of Covid-19, remember that it didn’t need to be this way. Vaccines were developed in record time, and have proved to be both incredibly safe and stunningly effective. Nearly two-thirds of eligible Americans have accepted these facts and done their part by getting fully vaccinated.
Yet tens of millions more have not, allowing the more contagious Delta variant to sweep across the country, where it is now killing more than 1,500 people in the United States daily. Right now, the list of the very sick and the dead is made up almost entirely of the unvaccinated. But as long as the virus continues to spread widely, it can and will evolve in ways that put everyone at risk.
Faced with this avoidable catastrophe, President Biden is right to order tighter vaccine rules, which he did for roughly two-thirds of the nation’s work force on Thursday. “We’ve been patient,” Mr. Biden told vaccine holdouts. “But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”
The president moved to require all executive branch employees, federal contractors and millions of health care workers to be vaccinated. Workers at private businesses with 100 or more employees will have to either get vaccinated or take a weekly Covid test. Any business covered by the order must offer its employees paid time off to get their shots or recover from any side effects.
As incursions on bodily autonomy go, this is pretty mild stuff. No one, the Times columnist David Brooks wrote in May, is being asked to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima.
📋 WaPo: Ohio submits updated hate-crime figures to FBI that would make 2020 U.S. tally highest since 2001 http://wapo.st/3Eboqz4
The state of Ohio said it has sent an updated tally of hate crimes to the FBI that would dramatically increase the nationwide total for 2020 to 8,305, the most since 2001 and third-highest since the federal government began tracking such data nearly three decades ago.
The FBI issued its annual hate crimes report Aug. 30 and said it had tallied 7,759 incidents. But Ohio reported just 34 bias crimes, less than 10 percent of the previous year, which state officials now attribute to a technical glitch.
The state’s new figures show that 580 hate crimes were reported last year, according to Bret Crow, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Public Safety, representing a 41 percent increase over 2019.
The data would mean that the number of hate crimes across the country spiked by nearly 14 percent in 2020, with the increase driven largely by more attacks on people who are Black or Asian. In Ohio, crimes targeting Black people rose from 92 in 2019 to 129 last year, while attacks targeting Asians held roughly the same at 10, one fewer than the previous year.
🐣 RT @SecBlinken An additional two U.S. citizens and 11 Lawful Permanent Residents departed Afghanistan today overland, while another 19 U.S. citizens traveled out on Qatar Airways. We continue to work to uphold our commitment to assist departures for those to whom we have a special commitment.
NYT, Kevin Williamson: The Trump Coup Is Still Raging http://nyti.ms/3ntqX1g “When it comes to a coup, you’re either in or you’re out. The Republican Party is leaning pretty strongly toward in.” (Mr Williamson is the roving correspondent for National Review)
// Kevin D. Williamson is the roving correspondent for National Review and the author of “Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the “Real America.”
What happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not a coup attempt. It was half of a coup attempt — the less important half.
The more important part of the coup attempt — like legal wrangling in states and the attempts to sabotage the House commission’s investigation of Jan. 6 — is still going strong. These are not separate and discrete episodes but parts of a unitary phenomenon that, in just about any other country, would be characterized as a failed coup d’état.
The attempted coup’s foot soldiers have dug themselves in at state legislatures. For example, last week in Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini introduced a draft of legislation that would require an audit of the 2020 general election in the state’s largest (typically Democratic-heavy) counties, suggesting without basis that it may show that these areas cheated to inflate Joe Biden’s vote count. ¤ … The obviously political object is to legitimize the 2020 coup attempt in order to soften the ground for the next one — and there will be a next one.
In the broad strategy, the frenzied mobs were meant to inspire terror — and obedience among Republicans — while Rudy Giuliani and his co-conspirators tried to get the election nullified on some risible legal pretext or another. Republicans needed both pieces — neither the mob violence nor an inconclusive legal ruling would have been sufficient on its own to keep Mr. Trump in power.
True to form, Mr. Trump was able to supply the mob but not the procedural victory. His coup attempt was frustrated in no small part by a thin gray line of bureaucratic fortitude — Republican officials at the state and local levels who had the grit to resist intense pressure from the president and do their jobs.
Current efforts like the one in Florida are intended to terrorize them into compliance today or, short of that, to push such officials into retirement so that they can be replaced with more pliant partisans. The lonely little band of Republican officials who stopped the 2020 coup is going to be smaller and lonelier the next time around.
That’s why the Great Satan for the Republican Party right now is not Mr. Biden but Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of a small number of Republicans willing to speak honestly about Jan. 6 and to support the investigation into it — and willing to contradict powerful people like Kevin McCarthy of California, who has falsely (and preposterously) claimed that the F.B.I. has cleared Mr. Trump of any involvement in Jan. 6.
The emerging Republican orthodoxy on Jan. 6 is created by pure political engineering, with most party leaders either minimizing, halfheartedly defending or wholeheartedly celebrating the coup, depending on their audience and ambitions. Pragmatic party leaders like Mitch McConnell, and others like him who were never passionately united with Mr. Trump but need his voters, are hoping that the memory of the riot gets swept away by the ugly news from Afghanistan and the usual hurly-burly. But other Republicans have praised the rioters: Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina insisted that those who have been jailed are “political prisoners” and warned that “bloodshed” might follow another “stolen” election. The middle-ground Republican consensus is that the sacking of the Capitol was at worst the unfortunate escalation of a well-intentioned protest involving legitimate electoral grievances.
The authors of the coup attempt remain embedded in the Republican Party and in the conservative movement. Some are officeholders, like Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene of Georgia, while others continue profitable associations with institutions ranging from the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a right-leaning public-interest litigation group, to Fox News and other media outfits.
The Trump administration was grotesque in its cruelty and incompetence. But without the coup attempt, it might have been possible to work out a modus vivendi between anti-Trump conservatives and Mr. Trump’s right-wing nationalist-populists. Conservatives were not happy with Mr. Trump’s histrionics, but many were reasonably satisfied with all those Federalist Society judges and his signature on Paul Ryan’s tax bill. Trump supporters, who were interested almost exclusively in theater, enjoyed four years of Twitter-enabled catharsis even as the administration did very little on key issues like trade and immigration.
In the normal course of democratic politics, people who disagree about one issue can work together when they agree about another. We can fight over taxes or trade policy. ¤ But there isn’t really any middle ground on overthrowing the government. And that is what Mr. Trump and his allies were up to in 2020, through both violent and nonviolent means — and continue to be up to today.
When it comes to a coup, you’re either in or you’re out. The Republican Party is leaning pretty strongly toward in. That is going to leave at least some conservatives out — and, in all likelihood, permanently out.
⭕ 9 Sep 2021
MotherJones: FBI Seizes Oath Keeper Lawyer’s Phone in “Seditious Conspiracy” Investigation http://bit.ly/391KAoI
// The move suggests an expansion of the January 6 case against members of the militia network.
Kellye SoRelle, the Oath Keepers’ general counsel, tweeted Wednesday that the FBI had seized her phone. The action would seem unusual, since SoRelle is a lawyer who says she has provided advice to defendants facing prosecution or investigation due to their actions on January 6. “[T]hey have all my clients and my comms,” she commented in a message to Mother Jones. “[It’s] unethical as shit on their part.”
SoRelle is close to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who has not been charged with crimes related to the siege of Congress, but who remains a subject of investigation and was with Sorelle on January 6 in Washington. Prosecutors have charged 17 Oath Keeper members with conspiring to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory; Rhodes is not named, but is identifiable as “PERSON ONE” in court documents detailing his extensive online and phone communications with Oath Keeper members ahead of and during the siege of Congress. FBI agents seized Rhodes’ phone in May as part of their investigation. Rhodes had stated previously that he believes he may “go to jail” over the events of January 6, but he denies wrongdoing and has accused prosecutors of trying to build a false case against him and fellow Oath Keepers.
[A]ccording to the search warrant, an image of which SoRelle provided to Mother Jones, the phone seizure is about suspected crimes connected to January 6. The warrant says the search is related to potential violations of nine criminal statutes: Those include crimes with which many people who entered the Capitol have been charged, from destruction of government property to trespassing and obstruction of Congress. The agents are also seeking evidence of false statements and obstruction of justice, including destruction of evidence, the warrant says.
Notably, the warrant also lists “seditious conspiracy” among the suspected crimes.
Last March, the acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Michael Sherwin, said during an interview on 60 Minutes that he believed federal investigators had found evidence that would likely allow the government to file sedition charges against some January 6 defendants. “I personally believe the evidence is trending towards that, and probably meets those elements,” said Sherwin, who has since retired from the Justice Department. Sherwin’s comments, which were not authorized by Justice Department leaders, drew a rebuke from a federal judge and a review by DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have charged no one with sedition. The reference to such charges in the SoRelle warrant, which is dated August 30, does not mean anyone will face sedition charges. But it does indicate officially that FBI agents are actively investigating that possible crime.
😅 RT @ConorLambPA I guess Trump & Robert E. Lee both know how it feels to suffer a humiliating defeat at the hands of pro-democracy forces in Pennsylvania. https://twitter.com/ConorLambPA/status/1435742722808287238?s=20
🐣 RT @CBS President Biden says the U.S. is “in the tough stretch” of the pandemic “and it could last for a while.” ¤ He blames the Delta variant, unvaccinated Americans and “elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against COVID-19,” which he says is “totally unacceptable” 💽 https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1436074491726155786?s=20/photo/1
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Biden unveils sweeping new vaccine mandates http://wapo.st/3lesLbZ “Biden expresse[d] frustration over the unvaccinated, says ‘a distinct minority’ is keeping the U.S. from overcoming the coronavirus”
NYT: The Justice Dept. sues Texas over its new restrictive abortion law. http://nyti.ms/38TQHLR “It is settled constitutional law that ‘a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability,’” the lawsuit said.
🐣 RT @LawrenceGostin Biden’s best speech. My take
* Biden’s plan to vaccinate fed workforce, contractors, & businesses is bold, audacious, & unprecedented
* Biden has full legal power
* @OSHA_DOL can set safety rules, incl #COVIDVaccines
* Soon vaccines will be the norm for virtually every worker
Reuters: New Biden plan could mandate COVID shots or tests for two-thirds of U.S. workers http://reut.rs/3BTVMAr “The new measures … would apply to about two-thirds of all U.S. employees, those who work for businesses with more than 100 workers”
WSJ: Taliban to Allow 200 Americans, Other Foreigners to Fly Out of Kabul http://on.wsj.com/3tp8Af8
// No Afghans without foreign citizenship are expected to be allowed on the flight to Qatar
⭕ 8 Sep 2021
💙 WaPo, Greg Sargent: What should the Jan. 6 probe examine? A veteran Sept. 11 investigator weighs in. http://wapo.st/3IKzAwS “I talked to Richard Ben-Veniste, a veteran D.C. lawyer who served on the 9/11 Commission”
🐣 RT @sgurman NEW: The Biden administration is preparing to sue Texas as soon as Thursday over a new law banning most abortions, an action that would set off a federal-state clash as the future of abortion rights becomes an ever-more-pressing question before the courts.
⋙ WSJ: Biden Administration Prepares to Sue Texas Over Abortion Law http://on.wsj.com/3jTrhUT
// Lawsuit challenging restrictions limiting procedure to first six weeks of pregnancy set to be filed in coming days
WaPo: Man accused of bringing molotov cocktails, five loaded firearms to Capitol on Jan. 6 to plead guilty http://wapo.st/3A1HHAk Earlier a judge cited evidence Lonnie Leroy Coffman of Falkville LA had potential plans to coordinate with others and was prepared for political violence
Lonnie Leroy Coffman of Falkville, Ala., was charged in a 17-count indictment with possessing some of the deadliest unregistered weapons and explosives found on the day of the pro-Trump riot that led to assaults on nearly 140 police officers, breached the Capitol and forced the evacuation of Congress.
FBI charging papers alleged that on Coffman’s person and in his truck, authorities found 11 homemade molotov-cocktail-type incendiary devices; a rifle, a shotgun, two 9mm pistols and a .22-caliber pistol, all loaded; as well as a crossbow, several machetes, a stun gun and smoke devices.
Prosecutors alleged that the 11 jars held substances made with gasoline and melted plastic foam to produce a dangerous “napalm-like” explosion of sticky, flammable liquid.
In ordering Coffman’s detention pending trial, a judge in May cited evidence that he had potential plans to coordinate with others and was prepared for political violence.
NYT, Thomas Edsall: One Thing We Can Agree On Is That We’re Becoming a Different Country http://nyti.ms/3ngkrec “Most college students believe efforts at diversity and inclusion ‘frequently’ (27%) or ‘occasionally’ (49%) come into conflict with free speech rights”
📋 NYT, Nate Cohn: Educational Differences Are Widening America’s Political Rift http://nyti.ms/3ngeBJS “[T]he growing power of liberal college graduates helps alienate working-class voters, leaving college graduates as an even larger share of the party” ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1435749530750918659?s=20/photo/1
// College graduates are now a firmly Democratic bloc, and they are shaping the party’s future. Those without degrees, by contrast, have flocked to Republicans. http://nyti.ms/
As they’ve grown in numbers, college graduates have instilled increasingly liberal cultural norms while gaining the power to nudge the Democratic Party to the left. Partly as a result, large portions of the party’s traditional working-class base have defected to the Republicans.
The changing demographic makeup of the Democrats has become a self-fulfilling dynamic, in which the growing power of liberal college graduates helps alienate working-class voters, leaving college graduates as an even larger share of the party.
President Biden won about 60 percent of college-educated voters in 2020, including an outright majority of white college graduates, helping him run up the score in affluent suburbs and putting him over the top in pivotal states.
This was a significant voting bloc: Overall, 41 percent of people who cast ballots last year were four-year college graduates, according to census estimates. By contrast, just 5 percent of voters in 1952 were college graduates, according to that year’s American National Elections Study.
Yet even as college graduates have surged in numbers and grown increasingly liberal, Democrats are no stronger than they were 10, 30 or even 50 years ago. Instead, rising Democratic strength among college graduates and voters of color has been counteracted by a nearly equal and opposite reaction among white voters without a degree.
WaPo: Florida judge rules against DeSantis again, allows schools to require masks http://wapo.st/2X1913d
⭕ 7 Sep 2021
WaPo: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signs law creating new voting restrictions as opponents sue http://wapo.st/2WYbaN4
WaPo (1/7/2021): Pentagon placed limits on D.C. Guard ahead of pro-Trump protests due to narrow mission http://wapo.st/2MKISAt The tick tock
WaPo: What the Sturgis rally shows us about the delta variant http://wapo.st/3DYXQbY More than 250,000 attended this year: since the rally began in early August, infection numbers have shot up more than 600 percent in South Dakota; nearby states have also seen increases
// South Dakota has high population immunity — and still saw a huge covid surge in August.
The annual Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota is America’s largest bike rally, a 10-day blowout, with attendance this year exceeding 250,000. It was also a serious pandemic stress test. ¤ The best data suggests that at least 75 percent of the entire South Dakota population has some degree of immunity against the virus: About half of South Dakotans have immunity because they’ve been infected by covid-19, and about half of the population has been vaccinated — some of whom have already had covid-19 when they got their shot, so there is some overlap between these two groups. South Dakota, despite its middling vaccination rates, probably has among the highest levels of population immunity in the nation
That’s what makes Sturgis an important test. If it had gone off without big spikes in covid cases, it would have provided strong evidence that this level of population immunity — around 75 percent — would allow us to get back to the way we did things in 2019. But unfortunately, that’s not what happened. In the weeks since the rally began in early August, infection numbers have shot up more than 600 percent in South Dakota. We can expect to see big increases in other states, too, since bikers returned home from the event. Last year, after Sturgis, we saw massive outbreaks across the Dakotas, Wyoming, Indiana, even Nevada. Much of the region was aflame because of Sturgis, probably causing thousands of deaths.
[W]e can look to other examples where high levels of vaccinations or other tools helped prevent a lot of illness and death. ¤ The first example is what happened in Provincetown, Mass., over the July 4 weekend. Provincetown unfortunately also led to a spike in cases — but the infection numbers peaked quickly, dwindled and were gone three weeks later. There were very few hospitalizations and no deaths. Why? Because most of the people in Provincetown were vaccinated. That may be an indicator that population immunity from vaccinations is better and more protective than immunity from infections.
⭕ 6 Sep 2021
⭕ 5 Sep 2021
🐣 RT @NornOrnstein I want to say that I am not canceling my subscription to the New York Times. It is still the paper of record, and a hugely important force. That is why its flaws, and its reporters and editors’ failure to recognize or respond to them, to show any introspection, is so infuriating
WaPo, Lawrence Tribe: What the Justice Department should do to stop the Texas abortion law http://wapo.st/3yTmY0o Sect 242 of the fed criminal code makes it a crime to deprive individuals “of any rights, privileges or immunities secured or protected by the Constituion or laws”
… Section 242 of the federal criminal code makes it a crime for those who, “under color of law,” willfully deprive individuals “of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
This statute — originally designed to go after the Ku Klux Klan — fits the Texas situation perfectly: The bounty seekers, entitled under the Texas law to collect penalties of at least $10,000, have been made, in effect, private attorneys general of Texas. They act “under color of state law,” and unless and until Roe v. Wade is overruled, they unmistakably intend to prevent the exercise of a constitutional right.
In addition, Section 241 of the federal criminal code makes it an even more serious crime for “two or more persons” to agree to “oppress, threaten, or intimidate” anyone “in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same.” This crime may be committed even by individuals not found to be acting “under color of law” but as purely private vigilantes, as long as they’re acting in concert with others.
⭕ 4 Sep 2021
📋 WaPo: Why America has 8.4 million unemployed when there are 10 million job openings http://wapo.st/3jGk4Yh
// The economy is undergoing massive changes. There’s a big mismatch at the moment between the jobs available and what workers want.
PewResearch: Key facts about Asian Americans, a diverse and growing population http://pewrsr.ch/3h1X9oy
// 4/29/2021
🚫 UrbanWire: Increasing Racial and Ethnic Diversity Will Drive Homeownership over the Next Two Decades http://urbn.is/3h5F0Gp
UrbanWire: Chart: How Household Composition Will Change in the Next Two Decades http://urbn.is/3h5F0Gp
// 4/19/2021; households not pop.; A Study of Texas, Georgia, California and Minnesota
🐣 Mitch McConnell will take a hatchet to the filibuster the first chance he has – and laugh at the Democrats for having been such wusses
⭕ 3 Sep 2021
WaPo, Kathleen Parker: The Supreme Court rides to Biden’s rescue http://wapo.st/2VhXtIj
President Biden’s personal hell month featured the devastation of Hurricane Ida, our country’s dreadful withdrawal from Afghanistan, mounting deaths from covid-19’s delta variant, overcrowded ICUs, a dragging economy, many schools opening and some nearly closing down, and uncontrollable fires out west.
What did I forget? The president has been bouncing all over the four Horses of the Apocalypse, a reluctant gladiator trying to rein in the ruin of his presidency when, suddenly, a double rainbow appears over the U.S. Supreme Court.
The high court’s 5-to-4 refusal to block a Texas law restricting abortion to no more than six weeks of gestation was an early Christmas gift to Biden and the Democratic Party. Thanks to cultural conservatives, pro-lifers and even former president Donald Trump, Republicans finally may have overstepped.
The court certainly ended Biden’s run of bad luck. Hell is the only way to describe what many Americans are experiencing across several states, especially in Louisiana, where power is gone, temperatures are high and moist, and mosquitoes are as hungry as the folks lined up for food. One could be forgiven for thinking the world was ending.
But leave it to the GOP to shift the focus from climate devastation and the Taliban takeover to abortion and a procedural ruling that doesn’t mean as much as has been conveyed. Not yet anyway. A much bigger fight — maybe the pivotal fight — in the abortion wars is coming up soon — Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. More on that in a minute.
Meanwhile, even as other Republican states plan to follow Texas, including Florida and South Dakota, the court was very clear that procedural issues wouldn’t allow it to consider the constitutionality of the Texas Heartbeat Act. The act prohibits a physician from performing an abortion “if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child or failed to perform a test to detect a fetal heartbeat.” …
Bottom line: Because there were no real defendants, there was no live case and no dispute to reckon over. So, the Texas law went into effect.
Here, a brief sidebar is warranted. Much has changed since 1973, when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. I was there. Back in the day, a woman had to wait at least six weeks to find out if she was pregnant, a process that had to involve a doctor or a lab. Today, in addition to an array of birth control options, women have access to inexpensive home pregnancy tests that can deliver results in seven to 10 days after ovulation — and before a missed period. Emergency contraception such as the “day-after pill” is also available for women who don’t want to wait for a home test.
Even so, and probably as a result, most Americans (59 percent) still think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center. Two generations of women who’ve always had reproductive choice can’t imagine living in a world that could force them to have babies they don’t want or are unprepared to raise. The 2017 cat-hat marches to demonstrate disapproval of Trump’s “grab’ em” remark will seem like marching band practice if the Supreme Court eventually finds the votes to end Roe.
Arguments will be held this fall in the earlier mentioned Dobbs case, which challenges the constitutionality of a Mississippi law banning abortions (with exceptions) after the 15th week of pregnancy. The Supreme Court decided in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 that abortions could be legally performed until fetal “viability,” or about 24 weeks. But that was, it is now easy to forget, 30 years ago.
Whatever happens, the next several weeks will most certainly be a wall-to-wall abortion freakout, giving Biden a minute or two to recover from an August that he’d probably like to forget. He is surely eager to dismount from his wild ride — and Democrats can climb out from beneath the covers.
Politico, Randall Balmer (2014): The Real Origins of the Religious Right http://politi.co/3tgeiQ8 As referred to on @TheReidOut
// 5/27/2014; They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.
One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.
Some of these anti-Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.
But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
WSJ Editorial: Texas’s Abortion Law Blunder http://on.wsj.com/3DJvXEW “The law sets an awful precedent that conservatives should hate”
// The Supreme Court was right not to interfere for now, but the statute won’t survive scrutiny on the merits.
⭕ 2 Sep 2021
🐣 RT @sullydish Offering citizens bounties to hunt down other citizens for “crimes” is pure evil. It is a form of illiberalism that’s truly poisonous.
🐣 RT @brianklaas Experts who warned about authoritarianism were called alarmists. Experts who warned about Covid were called alarmists. Experts who warned about the courts and abortion were called alarmists. Experts who warned about climate were called alarmists. Perhaps it’s actually alarming?
🐣 RT @OlgaNYC1211 This is the FRIGHTENING. Bannon is pushing his cult to take over local positions to reshape America’s elections and make GOP even more radical and dangerous. ¤ This is the direct result of criminal Bannon working as a foreign agent with zero accountability 🐣 RT @iarnsdorf BREAKING: We found 1000s of Trump supporters taking over local GOP positions — an unprecedented grassroots groundswell devoted to Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen & Republicans need to stop that from happening again
🔆 This❗️⋙ ProPublica: Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections http://bit.ly/3kQyEvC
// The stolen election myth inspired thousands of Trump supporters to take over the Republican Party at the local level, exerting more partisan influence on how elections are run.
⭕ 1 Sep 2021
NYT: Supreme Court, Breaking Silence, Won’t Block Texas Abortion Law http://nyti.ms/3yEH66f
// The law, which prohibits most abortions after six weeks and went into effect on Wednesday, was drafted by Texas lawmakers with the goal of frustrating efforts to challenge it in federal court.
🐣 But: “The Supremacy Clause … (Article VI, Clause 2), establishes that the Constitution, federal laws made pursuant to it, and treaties made under its authority, constitute the ’supreme Law of the Land’, and thus take priority over any conflicting state laws.”“@neal_katyal
🐣 RT @mjs_DC BREAKING: By a 5–4 vote, with Roberts joining the liberals, the Supreme Court REFUSES to block Texas’ six-week abortion ban. Opinions here:
⋙ 📔 SCOTUS: http://bit.ly/3yCHnGL
🐣 … RT @mjs_DC Sotomayor, dissenting: “In effect, the Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.” Text Block: https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1433282156617416704?s=20/photo/1
// Sotomayor’s dissent is seething
🐣 I try not to hold grudges, but I don’t think I can ever forgive progressives who voted third party in 2016 because ‘both sides are just as bad’
🧵 RT @neal_katyal The Court’s decision allowing the Texas law to go into effect claims it is not ruling on the merits, because it’s unclear whether any lawsuits will be brought to prevent abortion, etc. This is just weird. Everyone knows they will be brought, that’s why the clinics have stopped 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/neal_katyal/status/1433281776730914816?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @neal_katyal providing abortions. Justice Sotomayor calls it exactly right when she says it is the Ct burying its head in the sand. Chief Justice Roberts tellingly sides against Texas. And if this is the rationale, that Texas by enabling only private lawsuits 2/
⋙ 🐣 RT @neal_katyal means that cts are powerless because it’s unclear whether the law will ever be enforced by private parties, that’s dangerous for anyone who cares about constl rights. Take guns. States like NY can now create “private lawsuits” against people who carry firearms for any reason 3/
⋙ 🐣 RT @neal_katyal and say “oh it’s not clear it’ll ever be enforced, so cts you are powerless to do anything.” The list of possible ways this silliness can be used to deny people their constl rights is endless. This is a low, low moment. END
🐣 RT @AlannaVagianos BREAKING: SCOTUS declines to block extreme Texas abortion law in 5-4 ruling.
🔆 This❗️⋙ HuffPo: Supreme Court Declines To Block Extreme Texas Abortion Law In 5-4 Ruling http://bit.ly/3DxLpDU
// The ban on abortions after six weeks is the strictest in the nation. Critics have called a direct assault on Roe v. Wade.
🐣 RT @NBCPolitics President Biden and Ukrainian President Zelensky meet at the White House as Ukraine pushes for increased military aid in its war with Russia as well as entry into NATO.
⋙ NBCNews: Biden, Zelensky meet at White House amid Ukraine-Russia conflict http://nbcnews.to/3t9Rphf
// The Ukrainian president has been vocal about the U.S. decision not to intervene in the construction of a Russian natural-gas pipeline and about his desire to join NATO.
🧵 RT @ AshaRangappa_ A key feature of the TX abortion law is that it opens the door for people and orgs with deep pockets to file hundreds of frivolous lawsuits — so even doctors and providers who *comply* with the law can get financially ruined trying to defend meritless claims 1/ 📌https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1433120423365918720?s=20
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: With ban in effect, Texas abortion clinics will no longer terminate pregnancies after 6 weeks http://wapo.st/3DD3aSd
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok What a day for Texas. Republicans passed a sweeping voter suppression law, taking civil rights back half a century. And now their insane abortion ban, allowing vigilantes to intimidate, harass & bankrupt women & doctors, goes into effect.
⋙ CNN: Texas 6-week abortion ban takes effect after Supreme Court inaction http://cnn.it/3jtXy4S
// A controversial Texas law that bars abortions at six weeks went into effect early Wednesday morning after the Supreme Court and a federal appeals court failed to rule on pending emergency requests brought by abortion providers.
🔆 This❗️⋙ 🧵 ACLU: BREAKING: The Supreme Court has not responded to our emergency request to block Texas’ radical new 6-week abortion ban, SB8. The law now takes effect. ¤ Access to almost all abortion has just been cut off for millions of people. The impact will be immediate and devastating. 📌 https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1432935162304778242?s=20
⭕ 31 Aug 2021
VanityFair, Eric Lutz: Madison Cawthorn is Openly Talking About Civil War At This Point http://bit.ly/3jvCRp1
// The Trump acolyte warned of “bloodshed” and suggested he would “pick up arms” against Americans to defend the big lie.
🐣 RT @POTUS We must stay clearly focused on the fundamental national security interests of the United States. ¤ This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. ¤ It is about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.
// This is being called the “Biden Doctrine”
🐣 RT @duty2warn Republicans are really pushing the envelope when it comes to the Jan 6 phone records. They’re already at the stage of making illegal fascistic threats. Since they only care about power, we can surmise they believe that what’s in the phone records decimates their chance at power.
🐣 RT @duty2warn GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy has actually threatened telecom companies NOT to comply with the Jan. 6 Select Committee request for phone records. He even added: “A Republican majority will not forget.” This is more than obstruction. It’s extortion, vigilantism, criminal retaliation.
⋙ 🐣 RT @duty2warn Dems need to get behind an organized effort to bring McCarthy to task over this. It cannot stand. This committee cannot be cajoled, threatened, or undermined. Especially THIS committee. No weak ‘it was a joke’ or ‘that’s not what I meant’ can be allowed to stand, either.
🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT The foreign policy consensus loves military adventurism. The American people do not. And Joe Biden knows who he works for. ¤ Great speech, Mr. President.
⋙ 🐣 RT @lrozen Biden, in what I think were the most interesting lines in his remarks: ¤ This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It is about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @lrozen He is a realist, but a very multilateral/internationalist realist. It is not isolationist or populist/jingoistic.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @lrozen struck by the amount of american consensus I think there is for the fopo philosophy he lays out, even among a lot of Trump supporters; but the partisan atmospherics esp. post Benghazi are to try to demand a standard of execution that is impossible
🐣 RT @WalshFreedom “Since March, we reached out to Americans in Afghanistan 19 times, telling them to leave, warning them to leave, and offering to help them leave.”
🐣 RT @brianschatz Every President says they are against forever war, but only Joe Biden had the guts to end the longest war in American history.
🐣 I am so sick of how the media has battered Biden. My son served in Iraq. I cried when he signed up and worried every day. It’s time to end the forever wars.
🐣 RT @Lawrence Simply the smartest @ most honest speech by an American President about Afghanistan. ¤ No other president came close to the wisdom & honesty of this Biden speech.
MiamiHerald: Florida changed its COVID-19 data, creating an ‘artificial decline’ in recent deaths http://hrld.us/3Bs3EZB
WaPo, Roxanne Roberts: Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ speech shocked voters five years ago — but some feel it was prescient http://wapo.st/3mOSDO4 She said half of Trump supporters “feel abandoned & desperate”; the rest: “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic & Islamophobic“
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote I remember when my problem with republicans was that they wanted to defund social programs. Now they want people to eat horse dewormer, refuse vaccines, and violently attack democracy. Is it just me, or was the slide into a death cult rapid and ridiculous?
⭕ 30 Aug 2021
🔆 This❗️⋙ 🐣 RT @SecBrinken U.S. military flights have ended and our troops have departed Afghanistan. A new chapter of America’s engagement with Afghanistan has begun. It’s one in which we will lead with our diplomacy.
HartmannReport: These “New” Democracy-Hating, Religious-Cult-Qanon-Believing Right-Wingers are Nothing New http://bit.ly/3kTSWoj
// It’s probably beyond the power of human nature to prevent this from happening again, but we must not resign ourselves to another authoritarian movement now rising to power in America. Get active!
WaPo: Biden admin opens civil rights investigations over bans on school mask mandates http://wapo.st/3yuz0wI Investigations are of IA OK SC TN UT, arguing for protection of the most vulnerable, but not AR AZ FL TX where court action already prevents enforcement of bans
“You can’t ‘win over’ these folks anymore. They are too far over the bend to get brought back around by Hillbilly Elegies, FDA vaccine approvals, sympathetic profiles of voters in rust belt diners, or town halls with undecided voters.” — @WajahatAli
DailyBeast, Wajahat Ali: Don’t Negotiate With Trump’s Disease-Spreading Zombie Army http://bit.ly/3BpTkRX
// Welcome to the Upside Down. Democracy might not survive, but the ratings will be great.
🐣 RT @brhodes These are related, as self-interested authoritarian political movements funded by special interests, hostile to science, and invested in conspiracy theories are not going to deal with climate change.
⋙ 🐣 RT @brianklaas Looking at the news, it’s clear that there are two emergencies facing the United States – Republican attempts to create American authoritarianism and worsening climate change. ¤ Neither is being treated like an emergency. Both are.
🐣 RT @KateBerner46 “The herculean effort to extract thousands of Americans after the Taliban seized control of the country should not go unnoticed or unappreciated.”
⋙ WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: The State Department deserves more credit for its effort to evacuate Americans from Afghanistan http://wapo.st/38nysya
OpenSecrets: Trump’s political operation paid more than $4.3 million to Jan. 6 organizers but questions remain about the full extent of its involvement http://bit.ly/3Bt2Ljk
TheAtlantic, David Rothkopf: Biden Deserves Credit, Not Blame, for Afghanistan http://bit.ly/3Drjo0Z “[A]n American leader has done the hard thing, the right thing: set aside politics and put both America’s interests and values first”
// Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks.
In the days following the fall of Kabul earlier this month—an event that triggered a period of chaos, fear, and grief—critics castigated the Biden administration for its failure to properly coordinate the departure of the last Americans and allies from the country. The White House was indeed surprised by how quickly the Taliban took control, and those early days could have been handled better. But the critics argued that more planning both would have been able to stop the Taliban victory and might have made America’s departure somehow tidier, more like a win or perhaps even a draw. The chaos, many said, was symptomatic of a bigger error. They argued that the United States should stay in Afghanistan, that the cost of remaining was worth the benefits a small force might bring.
Former military officers and intelligence operatives, as well as commentators who had long been advocates of extending America’s presence in Afghanistan, railed against Biden’s artificial deadline. Some critics were former Bush-administration officials or supporters who had gotten the U.S. into the mess in the first place, setting us on the impossible path toward nation building and, effectively, a mission without a clear exit or metric for success. Some were Obama-administration officials or supporters who had doubled down on the investment of personnel in the country and later, when the futility of the war was clear, lacked the political courage to withdraw. Some were Trump-administration officials or supporters who had negotiated with and helped strengthen the Taliban with their concessions in the peace deal and then had punted the ultimate exit from the country to the next administration.
They all conveniently forgot that they were responsible for some of America’s biggest errors in this war and instead were incandescently self-righteous in their invective against the Biden administration. Never mind the fact that the Taliban had been gaining ground since it resumed its military campaign in 2004 and, according to U.S. estimates even four years ago, controlled or contested about a third of Afghanistan. Never mind that the previous administration’s deal with the Taliban included the release of 5,000 fighters from prison and favored an even earlier departure date than the one that Biden embraced. Never mind that Trump had drawn down U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500 during his last year in office and had failed to repatriate America’s equipment on the ground. Never mind the delay caused by Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller’s active obstruction of special visas for Afghans who helped us.
Never mind the facts. Never mind the losses. Never mind the lessons. Biden, they felt, was in the wrong.
Despite the criticism, Biden, who had argued unsuccessfully when he was Barack Obama’s vice president to seriously reduce America’s presence in Afghanistan, remained resolute. Rather than view the heartbreaking scenes in Afghanistan in a political light as his opponents did, Biden effectively said, “Politics be damned—we’re going to do what’s right” and ordered his team to stick with the deadline and find a way to make the best of the difficult situation in Kabul.
The Biden administration nimbly adapted its plans, ramping up the airlift and sending additional troops into the country to aid crisis teams and to enhance security. Around-the-clock flights came into and went out of Afghanistan. Giant cargo planes departed, a number of them packed with as many as 600 occupants. Senior administration officials convened regular meetings with U.S. allies to find destinations for those planes to land and places for the refugees to stay. The State Department tracked down Americans in the country, as well as Afghans who had worked with the U.S., to arrange their passage to the airport. The Special Immigrant Visa program that the Trump administration had slowed down was kicked into high gear. Despite years of fighting, the administration and the military spoke with the Taliban many times to coordinate passage of those seeking to depart to the airport, to mitigate risks as best as possible, to discuss their shared interest in meeting the August 31 deadline.
The process was relentless and imperfect and, as we all have seen in the most horrific way, not without huge risks for those staying behind to help. On August 26, a suicide bomber associated with ISIS-K killed more than 150 Afghans and 13 American service members who were gathered outside the airport. However, even that heinous act didn’t deter the military. In a 24-hour period from Thursday to Friday, 12,500 people were airlifted out of the country and the president recommitted to meeting the August 31 deadline. And he did so even as his critics again sought to capitalize on tragedy for their own political gain: Republicans called for the impeachment of Biden and of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Within hours of the attack at the airport, America struck back, killing two terrorists and injuring another with a missile launched from a drone. A separate drone strike targeted a vehicle full of explosives on Sunday. In doing so, Biden countered the argument that America might lack the intelligence or military resources we would need to defend ourselves against violent extremists now that our troops are leaving.
The very last chapter of America’s benighted stay in Afghanistan should be seen as one of accomplishment on the part of the military and its civilian leadership. Once again the courage and unique capabilities of the U.S. armed services have been made clear. And, in a stark change from recent years, an American leader has done the hard thing, the right thing: set aside politics and put both America’s interests and values first.
⭕ 29 Aug 2021
TheAtlantic, Robinson Meyer: We’re Hitting the Limits of Hurricane Preparedness http://bit.ly/2Ya6tjJ
// Cities simply don’t have enough time to run from a storm like Ida.
Seventy-four hours. ¤ That’s roughly how much time separated the moment that Tropical Depression Nine formed in the Caribbean from the moment that the storm, transformed into a ruthless Category 4 hurricane named Ida, made landfall at Port Fourchon, Louisiana. Even less time—perhaps 60 hours—separated the storm’s promotion to hurricane strength and the first arrival of tropical-storm winds in Louisiana, the latter of which marks the moment that any official evacuation must be nearly complete. That’s when drivers need to start getting off the roads, and when local services are shut down until the storm passes.
It wasn’t enough time. While Ida was a well predicted storm, 60 hours of warning was too short for New Orleans officials to issue a mandatory evacuation order in the days before it landed. The limits of the city’s highways mandate that the city must issue an evacuation order at least 72 hours before tropical-storm winds make landfall. Officials said last year that the pandemic means they may need 82 hours of warning, to account for the increased difficulty of moving and sheltering people.
EmptyWheel, Marcy Wheeler: How the FBI Missed Alleged January 6 Leader Joe Biggs http://bit.ly/3jrqk67 “Joe Biggs kicked off the riot on the West side of the building. … This is the guy a couple of FBI Agents in Daytona believed was a credible informant against Antifa”
Joe Biggs kicked off the riot on the West side of the building. ¤ Then he went over to the East side to join his former employer Alex Jones and a bunch of Oath Keepers, led by fellow Floridians, to lead a mob back into the Capitol. ¤ West side. Joe Biggs. East side. Joe Biggs. ¤ This is the guy a couple of FBI Agents in Daytona believed was a credible informant against Antifa.
🐣 RT @marceelias Texas is on the verge of enacting a sweeping voter suppression bill. ¤ Texas is on the verge of being sued minutes after enacting a sweeping voter suppression bill.
📋 NYT: The U.S. reaches 100,000 average daily Covid hospitalizations for the first time since winter’s peak. http://nyti.ms/3kEADmP
WaPo, EJ Dionne: Advancing democracy abroad requires defending it at home http://wapo.st/3ymBBZG “We now know, as we should have known all along, that the future is not inevitably democratic”
One positive result of our distemper is an outpouring of perceptive books about what ails democracy and what needs to be done to save it. Writers such as Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, Timothy Snyder, William Galston, Yascha Mounk, Edward Luce, Masha Gessen, Robert Kuttner and Anne Applebaum have offered thoughtful warnings and remedies.
🐣 Our perpetual national project seems to be cleaning up the messes of people denying the realities of disease transmission and climate change
🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs Great thread unveiling the structural & systemic forces that enable
disinfo across a range of issues over time. Doesn’t matter if it’s vax today, elections yesterday, or the next thing tmrw. Comes down to power, access, & money. Those with it will work to keep it at all costs.
❤ ⋙ 🧵 RT @michaelharriot This is a good point. ¤ When anti-vaxxers cite their freedoms, constitutional rights, and–the whitest thing of all–the Founding Fathers to rail against vaccine mandates, do they know what they’re talking about? ¤ What if I told you this happens EXACTLY every 100 years? ¤ A thread. 📌 https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/ 1432060194276659203?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @LibertyLumpia Mask and vaccine mandates are a threat to freedom. Our founding fathers are rolling in their graves.
🐣 RT @nils_gilman The conviction that the President could & should have foreseen everything & executed a perfect close to a lost war reflects the same sort of cognitive hubris & over-confident solutionism that led us into a multi-decade, inevitably doomed nation-building mission in the first place
🐣 RT @starsandstripes The United States has the capacity to evacuate the approximately 300 U.S. citizens remaining in Afghanistan who want to leave before President Joe Biden’s Tuesday deadline, senior Biden administration officials said.
⋙ Stars&Stripes/AP: White House: US has capacity to evacuate remaining Americans http://bit.ly/3BnyuTk
// The United States has the capacity to evacuate the approximately 300 U.S. citizens remaining in Afghanistan who want to leave before President Joe Biden’s Tuesday deadline, senior Biden administration officials said Sunday, as another U.S. drone strike against suspected Islamic State militants underscored the grave threat in the war’s final days.
⋙ 🐣 Everyone knows that if the Biden Admin and Armed Forces pull off such a Herculean feat, many on the right will be gnashing their teeth rather than celebrating ~ because that’s where we’re at as a country
🐣 RT @forwardarc “Perhaps no politician has taken the reins from Trump with more vigor & disastrous effects than @GovRonDeSantis , a man who thinks he could be the next Republican president. But to supplant the last leader of his party, he has to out-Trump Trump.”
⋙ NYT, Charles Blow: Ron DeSantis, How Many Covid Deaths Are Enough? http://nyti.ms/3Dtcp7D
RT @WHCOS [Klain] U.S., 97 other countries announce deal with Taliban to keep evacuating allies after Aug. 31
⋙⋙ AppleNews/Axios: U.S., 97 other countries announce deal with Taliban to keep evacuating allies after Aug. 31 https://apple.news/AQrzcWKoXQ8mzPQIXYAn40w
// The United States, along with 97 other countries, announced Sunday that they had reached an agreement with the Taliban to allow them to continue to get Afghan allies out of the country after the Aug….
apple.news
⋙ 🐣 RT @DrewDanzell Media pundits have called an emergency meeting. Have to pool and troubleshoot ideas on how to put a negative spin on this to make Biden administration look bad.
🧵 RT @jennycohn “All the anomalies & disparities [in the 2020 election] worked to the benefit of Republican[s] … (including Trump),” but it was Trump & his backers who claimed “fraud,” waving around sheets of “random & meaningless numbers.” By @JonathanSimon14 1/
📌 https://twitter.com/jennycohn1/status/1430921215510646788?s=20
⋙⋙ 💙 WhoWhatWhy[.]org, Jonathan Simon: The Real Steal: Electoral Forensics and the 2020 Election http://bit.ly/3mI7TvT
// 8/23/2021; Election expert says the 2020 election results may very well have been skewed. For the Republicans. He lays out his in-depth numerical analysis
⋙ 🐣 Eventually, with the Electoral College, Dems packed increasingly into urban areas, GOP gerrymandering, voter suppression, and no help from a skewed SCOTUS (thanks to two stolen seats), Democrats will effectively each count as “3/5th of a man”
😅 💽 RT @JGaffneyUSN #BringBackTrump ¤ To Music. ¤ Oh – how I miss him so.
To Music.
Oh – how I miss him so. pic.twitter.com/OBuJyEGitR
— Jonathan Gaffney 🇺🇸 (@JGaffneyUSN) August 29, 2021
// Trump retrospective video cringeworthy
🐣 RT @RepAdamSchiff Our fallen servicemembers have returned home. ¤ Their bravery helped evacuate over 100,000 people and saved countless lives. ¤ They were the best of us. And we will not forget them. ¤ May God give comfort to their families. https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/1432025319779807236?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @ @NBCNews Dignified transfer of US service members killed in Thursday’s attack on Kabul airport. 💽 https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1432024236923686918?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RichSignorelli In my dealings with others, Trump is a litmus test. If you still support this psychopath, nothing else about you really matters to me.
🧵 RT @JRubinBlogger any hope of depopulating a war-torn country, and ending the suffering there (including the dismal future for millions of women and girls) is not grounded in reality. It belongs with the magical thinking that we’d create a nation state in Afghanistan. 📌 https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1431981254895935494?s=20
⋙ WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Biden tells some hard truths few want to hear http://wapo.st/2Y1xUvT
// The war in Afghanistan has been one tragedy after another. Good riddance.
🐣 RT @BillKristol “The GOP base may be identifying less and less with Trump personally—inevitable after he left the presidency—but it is not identifying any less with the conspiracist and antidemocratic impulses that defined him…In fact, the opposite is happening.”
⋙ TheAtlantic, Peter Wehner: Trumpism Has Entered Its Final Form http://bit.ly/3gInMi5
// In today’s Republican Party, Trump is becoming what was once unthinkable—conventional, unexceptional, even something of an establishment figure.
⭕ 28 Aug 2021
NYT, Kori Schake: What Trump’s Disgraceful Deal With the Taliban Has Wrought http://nyti.ms/3kCHsoX Ms. Schake, a foreign policy expert under Bush, is director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute
⭕ 27 Aug 2021
WaPo, Philip Bump: Biden escalates his efforts to puncture the Fox News bubble http://wapo.st/3sYBSRp “Psaki and Biden are confident in their ability to handle Doocy’s questions and eager to reframe them”
😅 RT @DanRather Fewer syllables?
⋙ 🐣 RT @mattyglesias What was the precipitating event that led to the hydroxychloroquine/ivermectin switch?
🐣 RT @RepRaskin Good news: an Arizona judge has ruled that Cyber Ninjas, the Trump-aligned firm “auditing” the AZ election, must preserve all of its “audit” records. Cyber Ninjas must also comply with the @OversightDems request for crucial docs. We have had enough lies about the 2020 election.
⭕ 26 Aug 2021
NBCNews: Officer who shot Ashli Babbitt during Capitol riot breaks silence: ‘I saved countless lives’ http://nbcnews.to/3gIrfgN
// In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Lt. Michael Byrd said he opened fire only as a “last resort” after the rioters failed to comply with his commands.
🐣 RT @stengel The Trump agreement with the Taliban was a ticking time bomb that is exploding now.
WaPo: Twin bombings at Kabul airport kill 13 U.S. service members and dozens of Afghans http://wapo.st/2XWRoBT
WaPo: ‘Dead people were everywhere’: Carnage and chaos at Kabul airport http://wapo.st/3zma6k5
🐣 RT @jdassey1 Officer who shot Ashli Babbitt breaks silence for first time, says he only opened fire as a “last resort” and saved lives.
⋙ NBCNews: Officer who shot Ashli Babbitt during Capitol riot breaks silence: ‘I saved countless lives’ http://nbcnews.to/3DvPDMz
// In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Lt. Michael Byrd said he opened fire only as a “last resort” after the rioters failed to comply with his commands.
🧵 RT @MacFarlandNews [NBC] ALERT: Seven US Capitol Police officers file federal civil suit against Donald Trump, key Trump allies & high-profile Jan 6 defendants .. in connection with US Capitol Insurrection ¤ Citing series of Trump tweets/statements, alleging conspiracy, assault, battery, seeking damages 📌 https://twitter.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1430914949551955973?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DanRather What the world is seeing now in Afghanistan is what the world chose to ignore for far too long. War is hell. It always has been. And it always will be. Its currency is death, dismemberment, desperation, and fear. It doesn’t end in parades. It ends in caskets.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: U.S. service members killed in Kabul airport blasts, along with civilian casualties, Pentagon says http://wapo.st/2WrE3AO
⭕ 25 Aug 2021
🐣 RT @glennkirschner2 Sidney “The Kraken” Powell SANCTIONED: “This lawsuit represents a historic & profound abuse of the judicial process,” & “was never about fraud – it was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”
⋙ Politico: Federal judge imposes sanctions on Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and other pro-Trump lawyers http://politi.co/3mAL5y8
// The court found that the plaintiffs’ attorneys in the Michigan election fraud lawsuit filed it “in bad faith and for improper purpose.”
💙 🧵 RT @drothkopf The intellectual dishonesty that we have seen in critiques of Biden’s handling of the exit from Afghanistan has been spectacular. 📌 https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1430560949572878340?s=20
🧵 RT @ericgarland
Politico: Jan. 6 investigators include Trump White House in first document requests http://politi.co/3jh2aLx
// It’s the select panel’s first step to actually begin investigating the attack.
⋙ House[.]gov: Select Committee Issues Sweeping Demand for Executive Branch Records http://bit.ly/3DifUNY
// Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
WaPo: House panel investigating Jan. 6 attack seeks records from agencies on insurrection, Trump in first request for information http://wapo.st/3DsI9tE
⭕ 24 Aug 2021
⭕ 23 Aug 2021
EmptyWheel: Stop the Steal: Hints of the January 5 Rallies in the January 6 Riot Investigation http://bit.ly/3DgYXng “With the charges against Owen Shroyer, the government has now charged three people who had a speaking part in several rallies tied to Stop the Steal”
⭕ 22 Aug 2021
🐣 RT @marceelias I spent 28 years at @PerkinsCoieLLP. It is a amazing place with great lawyers. I am starting a new law firm @EliasLawGroup because our democracy is at risk and it is the most effective way for me to fight back. I look forward to working with Perkins in that effort as well.
⭕ 21 Aug 2021
NYT: Former Pence aide says Trump and Miller stymied Afghan refugee efforts. http://nyti.ms/37ZZ3Bc
A top homeland security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence accused the Trump administration of distorting the truth about Afghan refugees, writing on Twitter that the former president and Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser, sought to prevent the refugees from entering the United States.
In an interview, Olivia Troye recalled sitting in meetings where Mr. Miller demanded restrictions on refugees, including those from Afghanistan and Iraq. She said the reductions in the refugee program during the Trump years hollowed out the government’s ability to bring the interpreters and others to the United States.
“Now we are in this crisis and they are saying Trump would have evacuated them,” Ms. Troye said. “But he didn’t in four years. You don’t get to play revisionist history here. There are people who know what the situation is.”
President Donald J. Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed in recent days that his administration would have handled a withdrawal from Afghanistan better than President Biden, who he criticized for failing to evacuate Americans and Afghans who worked with the United States. Top conservative commentators, including Ben Domenech, have tweeted in support of Mr. Trump.
Ms. Troye rebutted those claims on Twitter and in an interview, claiming instead that Trump administration officials worked against bringing Afghan and Iraqi allies into the country by granting them a Special Immigrant Visa indicating they supported the American war effort.Mr. Miller “& his enablers across gov’t would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State,” she wrote on Twitter.
⭕ 20 Aug 2021
🐣 RT @NeuSummits [Eliz Neumann] I can vouch for @OliviaTroye’s characterization . Will add that we have proof of what Trump would have done – he abandoned our allies in the no-notice decision to withdraw from Syria. Kurds, Iraqi SIVs, P2s, NGOs were left scrambling and many died.
⋙ 🧵 RT @OiviaTroye There were cabinet mtgs about this during the Trump Admin where Stephen Miller would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan. He & his enablers across gov’t would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State.(1/7) 📌 https://twitter.com/OliviaTroye/status/1428740865665679361?s=20/photo/1
Reuters: Texas Supreme Court rejects Governor Abbott’s ban on school mask mandates – CNN http://reut.rs/3AX5oK5
⭕ 19 Aug 2021
NYT, Michael Crowley: Trump’s Deal With the Taliban Draws Fire From His Former Allies http://nyti.ms/3z7F5QS Critics include Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster and former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper
// The former president and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, are attacking President Biden over Afghanistan even as their own policy faces harsh criticism.
WaPo, Michael Gerson: Govs. DeSantis and Abbott, in denial and risking lives, have betrayed the public trust http://wapo.st/3miykbB
What was supposed to be a costless, largely symbolic political commitment has led DeSantis and Abbott to a particularly vivid moral choice. Should they allow local government and community institutions to save people from harm? Or should they actively prevent those measures to appease a radical faction of their party?
The decision, it seems, wasn’t close for them. There is no public evidence of inner turmoil. If they had defied the populist base of the Republican Party, their careers (and presidential prospects) would have been as good as over.
Now these governors have a problem, as does their party. ¤ The challenge for the governors is that public health is not the same as other issues. Their actions will lead, directly and predictably, to deaths in their states. This constitutes a betrayal of public trust so grave — a violation of moral responsibilities so depraved — that I am not sure there is a word for it. Selling the lives of your fellow citizens to a foreign power is treason. What is the proper description of selling the lives of your fellow citizens to a crazed political interest group?
These governors are attempting, of course, to take refuge in principle — the traditional right not to have cloth next to your face, or the sacred right to spread nasty infections to your neighbors. But such “rights” talk is misapplied in this context. The duty to protect public health during a pandemic is, by nature, an aggregate commitment. Success or failure is measured only in a total sum. Incompetence in this area is a fundamental miscarriage of governing. Knowingly taking actions that undermine public health is properly called sabotage, as surely as putting anthrax in the water supply. ¤ So maybe that’s the right word: saboteurs.
The problem for the Republican Party is that one of the central demands of a key interest group is now an act of sociopathic insanity. Some of the most basic measures of public health have suddenly become the political equivalent of gun confiscation. It’s as if the activist wing of the GOP decided that municipal trash pickup is a dangerous socialist experiment. Or chlorine in public pools is an antifa plot. There can be no absolute political right to undermine the health and safety of your community. Or else community has no meaning.
Public health can’t be reasonably understood in culture war terms. There are no winners and losers here — because all of us, together, either win or lose. This is one area — perhaps the primary area — where we are one people. But it also shows how sick souls can result in sick and dead bodies.
⭕ 18 Aug 2021
WaPo: Biden said U.S. officials lied about Afghanistan. It’s not clear whether they’ll be held to account. http://wapo.st/3iVoA4K
🐣 📊 RT @NumbersMuncher Axios/Ipsos poll: Overall 69% of Americans support mandatory masking in school, with 44% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats supporting. ¤ This is definitely another one of those ‘Twitter isn’t real life’ data points.
// n=1,041, 8/13-16/2021; Independents 67%
TheGuardian: Rightwing lobbies and dark money funders backing assaults on voting rights http://bit.ly/3ARXQs5 //➔ The usual suspects: ALEC, Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, State Policy Network, the Koch networks, the Bradley Foundation, various rw think tanks
// Election watchdogs say rightwing groups seek to enact voting restrictions in critical states, from Arizona to Pennsylvania – states that Republicans need to win back
The state lobbying efforts feature deep pocketed conservative bastions such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), Heritage Action, FreedomWorks and the State Policy Network, a loose-knit group of rightwing thinktanks, a number of which have received grants from the donor network led by the billionaire oilman Charles Koch and the Bradley Foundation. ¤ Other influential players pushing stricter voting laws include the Honest Elections Project and the Opportunity Solutions Project.
⭕ 17 Aug 2021
🐣 RT @JLownLaw Trump gave the Taliban everything they wanted before Biden even came into office — immediate allied withdrawal; the remaining to leave in 14 mos; release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners, incl. Mullah Baradar; & removal of sanctions. There was no leverage left.
⋙ Time: President Trump’s Disgraceful Peace Deal with the Taliban http://bit.ly/2W5noTk
// The Afghanistan peace plan will strengthen the Taliban and make America less safe.
WaPo, Charles Lane: Biden’s presidency — and U.S. foreign policy — now hinge on pulling off one of the greatest airlifts in history http://wapo.st/2VWcSOT
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Karma is a perfect bitch
She works her will from habit
For after he had banned all masks
She visited Gregg Abbott.
🐣 RT @JakeSullivan76 When I was asked about whether we’re going to get all Americans out of Afghanistan I said “that’s what we intend to do” and that’s exactly what we’ll do, and are accomplishing right now with HKIA re-opened and operational, thanks to the incredible work of our troops and diplomats
⭕ 16 Aug 2021
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch FLASHBACK: In February 2020, Donald Trump discussed how he empowered the Taliban to take over Afghanistan after America’s departure 💽 https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1427394730887811074?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @aahmady 1/The collapse of the Government in Afghanistan this past week was so swift and complete – it was disorienting and difficult to comprehend. ¤ This is how the events seemed to proceed from my perspective as Central Bank Governor. 📌 https://twitter.com/aahmady/status/1427265049668636674?s=20
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote Biden didn’t betray the Afghan government. They betrayed US. They took 20 years of $$ and training and made a deal with the Taliban instead of fighting for their people. If anyone betrayed the Afghan government, it was Trump when he made a deal with the Taliban.
🐣 RT @McFaul I’m no expert. But I find it strange that there was not even a little skirmish in taking Kabul. Maybe its not right to say that the Afghan army refused to fight. Maybe its more accurate to say that there was an agreement with the Taliban not to fight? Thoughts? further reading?
⋙ 🐣 RT @DocLT2 Maddow reported that many of the regional warlords established non-aggression pacts with the Taliban soon after Trump announced the withdrawal.
⋙ 🐣 RT @anne5634 I am now believing there was a lot to Trump’s “deal” with the Taliban that Biden was shut out of during the transition and beyond…Putin must be very pleased
NYT, Thomas Friedman: Biden Could Still Be Proved Right in Afghanistan http://nyti.ms/2XsPOHD “Maybe on the morning after the morning after, the Taliban will just order them all back under burqas and shut their schoolrooms. But maybe they will also encounter pushback”
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok Biden has more work to do re #Afghanistan. But don’t let the Orwellian gaslighting @GOP gasbags blame Biden for Trump & #Pompeo’s Taliban fiasco. They legitimized barbaric terrorists & demoralized Afghan govt, setting in motion its inevitable collapse. @LeaderMcConnell @GOPLeader
⋙ 🐣 RT @barubin Trump wanted to have a secret meeting with the Taliban at Camp David days before 9/11. 💽 https://twitter.com/PaulaChertok/status/1427388844911915009?s=20/photo/1
🐣 Success has many fathers, but failure has a bunch of people pointing fingers at one another. ~ Apologies to Tacitus
🐣 RT @Sulliview The Afghan debacle lasted two decades. The media spent two hours deciding who to blame. …My column on the winners-and-losers, hot-take punditry we’re seeing way too much of
⋙ WaPo: The Afghan debacle lasted two decades. The media spent two hours deciding whom to blame. http://wapo.st/3xRBNQy
🐣 💽 RT @Roshan_Rinaldi “I started the process,… all the troops are coming home! They [Biden] couldn’t stop the process. 21 years is enough. They [Biden] couldn’t stop the process, they [Biden] wanted to but couldn’t stop the process!” – Trump, 1 month ago https://twitter.com/Roshan_Rinaldi/status/1427360508450119687?s=20/photo/1
📊 Forbes (7/8/2021): The War In Afghanistan: A Polling Post-Mortem http://bit.ly/3g7T2Hb ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1427378701960876035?s=20/photo/1
Fifty-eight percent in an online April Economist/YouGov poll approved of the withdrawal plan, and 25% disapproved. Majorities of Democrats and independents support withdrawal, while Republicans are divided.
A May Quinnipiac poll of adults produced similar results: 62% approved of President Biden’s decision to withdraw all US troops, while 29% were opposed.
In the Economist/YouGov poll, people split evenly, 36% to 35%, about whether fighting the war there had been a mistake, while 29% said they didn’t know.
🐣 RT @toddyoung Nicole Wallace:
95% of Americans will agree with everything Biden just said.
95% of the media will not agree with what he said.
She’s 100% right.
🐣💽 RT @DRovera Afghan human beings cling to/run after a #USA Air Force plane leaving #Kabul airport with those lucky enough to have made it on board. Won’t retweet other, horrific, videos of human beings falling off the plane’s wings after it took off. #Afghanistan https://twitter.com/DRovera/status/1427229955386138625?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 15 Aug 2021
YahooNews: Muslim women are using Sharia to push for gender equality http://yhoo.it/3AU1dil “[I]n many parts of the world, Muslim women are reclaiming their rights by studying and sharing Quranic verses and prophetic teachings”
🧵 RT @tomiahonen Afghanistan Thread 1/ Afghanistan government is collapsing and the Taliban is taking over the country as USA pulls out. The Republicans are out in full force trying to hide from the blame & shame ¤ This is ALL their fault ¤ But it is not that simple. It is WORSE than that … 📌 https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1427026128229871628?s=20
// history afghanistan history
🐣 RT @leahmcelrath In 1994, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar helped found the Taliban.
In 2010, ISI and CIA forces captured and imprisoned him in Pakistan.
In 2018, Trump demanded his release http://bit.ly/3yRnnRH
In 2020, Trump spoke with him WaPo: http://wapo.st/3jZSgNn
Now he leads Afghanistan.
🐣 RT @HamidHaidari* #Braking: New Message of Ashraf Ghani: Today, I have made a hard choice to leave the country, If wouldn’t leave the country, Kabul would face with a destruction and big human disaster in this six million city.
// *Editor in Chief and Current Affairs @1tvnewsaf, Kabul
NYT: The Afghan government collapses as the president flees the country and the Taliban enter Kabul. http://nyti.ms/3CSPJgy
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote THREAD: In 2020, trump pressured the afghan government to release 5000 Taliban fighters including some that had murdered US and allied troops. 📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1426950474394083330?s=20
⋙ 🐣 … RT @MuellerSheWrote But the @ODNIgov should be looking into whether Putin, Trump, and the Afghan government coordinated the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. @SecPompeo knows. So does Kushner. /END
🐣 I read a lot of news, but personally, I don’t remember “the American people“ clamoring to exit Afgh, as many are claiming, some mumbling about “forever wars,” but otherwise ~ meh. People have been very exercised by a lot of things, but not so much that
🐣 RT @JonLemire KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — US Embassy in Kabul tells Americans to shelter in place, says airport reportedly taking fire.
🐣 RT @jonathanvswan New: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told senators on Sunday that a previous assessment of how soon terrorist groups will likely reconstitute in Afghanistan will speed up because of what’s happening there now…
⋙ Axios Scoop: Joint Chiefs Chairman moves up terrorist threat in Afghanistan http://bit.ly/3jVJKiw
🐣 RT @AVindman Brilliant thread.
⋙ 🐣 RT @UrielEpshtein As humans, we have a need for definitive beginnings and endings – in other words, clarity – Whether in our professional lives, our personal lives, or the broader geopolitical world. However, clarity is in short supply and the most successful among us learn to cope. 1/5
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @UrielEpshtein We learn that sometimes an uncertain and inconclusive status quo is better than a horrific alternative. In the case of Afghanistan, we made the wrong choice. Maintaining a 2.5-3.5k troop presence in the country indefinitely in order to defend a very imperfect status quo is 2/5
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @UrielEpshtein Unsatisfying and frustrating, but it would also have been the least bad option. The Biden admin prioritized finality and clarity in its decision to withdraw these troops over the terrifying real-world implications that withdrawal would have. Sometimes the unsatisfying 3/5
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @UrielEpshtein Decision is the right one. It may not give us closure, but closure does not, in and of itself, have value. It’s all about the impact our decisions will have down the line. The cost of staying would have been less than the strategic & human cost of leaving. 4/5
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @UrielEpshtein I weep for the future of Afghanistan. 5/5
🐣 RT @MichaelJMorell What is happening in Afghanistan is not the result of an intelligence failure. It is the result of numerous policy failures by multiple administrations. Of all the players over the years, the Intelligence Community by far has seen the situation in Afghanistan most accurately.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RichardEngel The failure to anticipate the rapid fall of afghan cities, including kabul, is a huge US intelligence failure. I know some US mil commanders anticipated it. They told me. Yet somehow their voices were not heard.
🐣 RT @brianklaas Completely agree. There’s no point in sugarcoating this. It’s a disaster. For Afghans, for US foreign policy, and it’s likely to create longer term consequences that we will come to regret in a big way.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AliVelshi Whatever your opinions are of why the U.S. was in Afghanistan & whether is should have been there, the rapid takeover of the country by the Taliban is a tragedy of epic proportions. You can not want U.S. troops there and/or support a pullout, and still appreciate how bad this is.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Taliban enters Kabul, leaving Afghan government on brink of collapse http://wapo.st/3iNQbox
⭕ 14 Aug 2021
⭕ 13 Aug 2021
CNN: US Capitol riot judges step up as the conscience of democracy while lawmakers squabble http://cnn.it/3sg105Z “Patriotism is loyalty to country, loyalty to the Constitution – not loyalty to a head of state. That is the tyranny we rejected on July 4th” ~ Judge Amy Berman Jackson
// A “disgrace to our country.” “The tyranny we rejected.” “An embarrassment to every American.”
WaPo: Family of D.C. officer who died by suicide after Capitol riot files lawsuit against alleged attacker http://wapo.st/37FmwHR “[A] report from a doctor who evaluated the case for Smith’s estate [said] a traumatic brain injury led the officer to take his own life”
💙 🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo, Ruth Marcus: The most dangerous Trump official you’ve never heard of needs to be heard from http://wapo.st/2VTGKLC //➔ This is the smoking gun. Memorize.Every.Name.
“People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in. People want me to replace DOJ leadership,” President Donald Trump told acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen on a Dec. 27, 2020, phone call — suggesting, with typical Trumpian subtlety, that Rosen might soon find himself out of a job if he didn’t comply with Trump’s demands to “tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election.”
The handwritten notes of the call, taken by the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, Richard P. Donoghue, and released recently by the House Oversight Committee, underscore the imperative of obtaining testimony from Clark about his efforts, in league with Trump, to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
No one who knew Jeffrey Bossert Clark — he was reported to be particularly insistent on having all three names on department filings in his role as assistant attorney general — took him for the kind of full-blown, conspiracy-chasing Trumpist who emerged in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The documents show Clark, among other things, demanding a classified intelligence briefing from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe about supposed evidence that a Dominion voting machine “accessed the Internet through a smart thermostat with a net connection trail leading back to China.”
On the other hand, no one took him for a potential attorney general of the United States.
Clark was an obscure attorney in private practice (at a major law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, but a non-equity partner not entitled to share in the firm’s profits) named to a relatively obscure position at the Justice Department, assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division; then, in the waning days of the administration, tasked to head the civil division as well. A graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown Law School, Clark was a conservative, yes, a member of the Federalist Society, but not, to all appearances, a die-hard Trump loyalist.
Then came the election, and with it, Clark’s remarkable new role as improbable presidential consigliere and energetic chaser-after of crackpot rumors of election fraud. Perhaps Clark, scouring the wildest reaches of the Internet, became a true believer in the losing cause of election fraud. Perhaps he was tempted by Trump’s dangling the attorney general job before him; ambition has a way of distorting judgment. Either way, he became, for a brief time, the most dangerous Trump administration official you never heard of.
Clark was connected with Trump through Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, opening a highly irregular backdoor channel for the president to go around more senior officials who were frustrating his efforts to use the Justice Department to contest the election results. Clark’s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. In January, when reports of his activities first surfaced, Clark said that “all my official communications were consistent with law.”
Clark’s involvement emerged in the Dec. 27 phone call between Rosen and Trump. The next day, he proposed sending an outlandish letter to Georgia officials asserting — incorrectly — that Justice had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states,” including Georgia, and urging a special legislative session. “I think we should get it out as soon as possible,” Clark urged Rosen and Donoghue. Responded Donoghue: “There is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this.”
On Jan. 1, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed Rosen about “allegations of signature match anomalies” in Fulton County, Ga. “Can you get Jeff Clark to engage on this issue immediately to determine if there is any truth to this allegation,” Meadows asked. Rosen to Donoghue: “Can you believe this? I am not going to respond.”
But Clark was off and running in pursuit of fraud. “I spoke to the source and am on with the guy who took the video right now,” Clark reported in a Jan. 2 email to Rosen under the subject line “Atlanta.”
All the while, Clark and Trump were discussing the plan to make him attorney general — foiled in part because Clark spilled the beans to Rosen, magnanimously offering him the chance to stay on as his No. 2. At which point Rosen secured an emergency Oval Office meeting Sunday, Jan 3, with Trump, Clark and other officials, and at which Trump was dissuaded from making the switch because of the mass resignations at Justice he was told would ensue.
People, this is not normal; it is not proper. The head of the civil division, acting or not, doesn’t jump on the phone to personally interview witnesses. He doesn’t do end runs around his boss — no less participate in a scheme to topple him — with the president.
Most pertinent, lawyers at the Justice Department have a single client: the United States. They represent the president in his role as president, not in his capacity as political candidate. The president has private counsel, lawyers paid by his campaign, not the taxpayers, to do that job. The Justice Department has a legitimate role in reviewing claims of election fraud, but it doesn’t exercise that authority at the express direction of an aggrieved candidate, even one who is the sitting president or that president’s underling.
All of which leads to the fundamental point: To understand how close the country came to having the election results overturned, to know whether this activity was merely bone-chilling or rises to the level of a criminal offense, it is important to secure Clark’s testimony — and it’s not entirely clear that’s going to happen. The Justice Department inspector general is looking into the goings-on at the department but may not be able to compel Clark’s testimony, and the same is true of the Senate Judiciary Committee, before which Rosen and Donoghue testified voluntarily. The House Oversight Committee, which has the documents, has ceded authority to the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, which has other matters piled on its plate.
The questions include: How did Clark connect with Perry, the congressman? Any other members of Congress? What conversations or meetings did Clark have with White House officials? When did he speak with the president, and what was said? Did the president give him any instructions about whether to tell Rosen about the conversations? (The Justice Department has waived any claims of executive privilege, so Clark cannot refuse to answer on these grounds.) What communications did he have on his private email, on his personal phone or through secure messaging systems? (These should be subpoenaed.) With whom did he discuss the allegations of election fraud — what Trump campaign lawyers or other representatives? How did he come to draft the letter to Georgia officials? Was this done on his government computer?
I could go on, but you get the point. Someone with subpoena power needs to get Jeffrey Clark under oath. The sooner the better.
🐣 RT @marceelias My team is suing to protect voting rights and ensure fair districts in 13 states.
Arizona
Arkansas
Florida
Georgia
Iowa
Kansas
Louisiana
Michigan
Montana
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Texas
Wisconsin
We are not done yet.
💙 NPR, Fresh Air (3/4/2021): Trump’s Deal To End War In Afghanistan Leaves Biden With ‘A Terrible Situation’ http://n.pr/2XhAtJW The original date set for US departure was May 1. According to Barry McCaffrey today on @DeadlineWH, Trump’s deal was “a joke”
WaPo, Aaron Blake: The spectacular implosion of Mike Lindell http://wapo.st/3xKa3wQ
Lindell has pushed many false, baseless and crazy theories about voter fraud, but the symposium was billed as focusing on one in particular: “irrefutable” proof that hackers backed by China stole the election for Joe Biden. Lindell had the data, and he was going to show it to you over 72 hours. What’s more, his website promised to give $5 million to anybody who could “prove that Mike’s cyber data … is not valid.”
Well, someone has stepped forward to debunk the data — or at least the claims Lindell is making about it. And it’s none other than the cyberexpert Lindell himself hired.
Josh Merritt, also known as “Spider” or “Spyder” and who was hired by Lindell for his “red team,” told the Washington Times on Wednesday at the symposium that, effectively, Lindell has sold his adherents a bill of goods. Lindell claimed that intercepted network data obtained by other hackers, also known as “packet captures,” could be unencrypted to reveal evidence of vote-switching by the Chinese-backed hackers.
But Merritt has now said that’s just not true. ¤ “So our team said we’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information,” Merritt said. And it apparently turns out it was not legitimate. …
Perhaps an equally damning revelation Wednesday came in something else Merritt said. He confirmed the source of the cyber-data as Dennis Montgomery. It has been suspected that Montgomery was the source, given graphics similar to the ones Lindell has used have appeared on Montgomery’s website, but Merritt confirmed it. ¤ Why is that important? Because Montgomery has, to put it kindly, a spotty history with this kind of thing. … Current and former intelligence officials told PBS in 2014 that it was one of the most elaborate and dangerous hoaxes in U.S. history.
Kirk Wiebe, a former National Security Agency analyst who has pushed claims of voter fraud, became alienated by Lindell not producing the goods — it turned out because he didn’t actually have them, the Washington Times reports:
He said the scrolling text was likely meant to resemble what the packet captures would look like in the data set but were not actual packet captures, which are vital to prove the claims.
Several cyber experts at the symposium became frustrated late into the first day with not being provided with packet captures.
Mr. Merritt and Mr. Wiebe said the missing packet captures could be a result of either the format the data was sent in or they were withheld by the source of the information, Dennis L. Montgomery. …
But the data Mr. Montgomery sent contains no packet captures and cannot be used to validate Mr. Lindell’s marquee theory, which he planned to unveil at the symposium, said the two experts [Wiebe and Merritt].
Adding insult to injury, those two experts would seem to be in line for a hefty payday — $5 million! — for revealing that Lindell’s data isn’t valid. But Merritt said the offer is no longer on the table.
Update: Lindell’s lawyer has now said that the $5 million offer, which still appears on Lindell’s website, has not been rescinded.
⭕ 12 Aug 2021
🐣 📋 RT @BrennanCenter 70.9% of white voters cast ballots compared with only 58.4% of nonwhite voters — a disparity that will worsen with new restrictive voting laws.
⋙ BrennanCenter: Large Racial Turnout Gap Persisted in 2020 Election http://bit.ly/2UhJ3Ya
// voters by race
TPM: Five Points On Mike Lindell’s Dumpster Fire ‘Cyber Symposium’ Election Fraud Event http://bit.ly/3xHSfTa //➔ Lindell needs an intervention
1. Lindell’s own experts say his numbers are bunk
2. The supposed data is from the ‘Hammer and Scorecard’ grifter
3. Lindell was reminded of the $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit he faces in the middle of the symposium
4. Out of options, Lindell mostly resorted to beefing with the media
5. Faced with failure, they’re blaming ‘radical folks’ trying to infiltrate the convention
🐣 🌎 RT @Redistrict It’s Census data day! Here’s @CookPolitical’s breakdown of which party controls the redistricting process where. Our current outlook: a GOP gain of 0-7 House seats from redistricting alone, w/ a high initial degree of uncertainty. https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1425807691621019654?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: A QAnon-obsessed father thought his kids would destroy the world, so he killed them with a spear gun, FBI says http://wapo.st/2VLzUrh The children were 2yr and 10mos old; “By killing them, he allegedly said, ‘he was saving the world from monsters’”
An FBI agent interviewed Coleman, and he confessed to killing his children, Bannon said in her affidavit. Coleman said he had been enlightened by QAnon and the Illuminati, both baseless theories that claim secret elites are maliciously controlling national and world affairs from the shadows. He had received visions and signs revealing his wife “possessed serpent DNA,” which she passed on to their children, according to the affidavit.
By killing them, he allegedly said, “he was saving the world from monsters.” ¤ “He knew it was wrong, but it was the only course of action that would save the world,” Bannon wrote in her affidavit.
WaPo: What Rosen told U.S. senators: Trump applied ‘persistent’ pressure to get Justice to discredit election http://wapo.st/3CJLbJC
⭕ 11 Aug 2021
💽 RawStory: ‘Terrible for our country!’ Mike Lindell throws seven-minute tantrum against judge who ruled against him in Dominion case http://bit.ly/3xA9CFD
WaPo: Republicans risk becoming face of delta surge as key GOP governors oppose anti-covid measures http://wapo.st/3iEgw8x
🐣 RT @RonFilipkowski MAGAs reporting from Lindell’s big reveal today seem like they are pretty bummed out that what was promised isn’t being delivered. “Lot of information, not a lot of evidence.. kind of a nothing-burger.” 💽 https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1425491724189765632?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @dutytowarn Science is factual. Math is immutable. Donald Trump is a criminal, gangster and fraud. Mike Flynn is a traitor. Mike Pence is pathetic. Fox News is NOT news. Putin is an enemy. Ashli Babbitt was a domestic terrorist. DeSantis is genocidal. Lindell is loco. DeJoy deserves deJail.
🐣 RT @normative You will be shocked to learn that PillowGuy’s “Absolute Proof” doesn’t exist, according to his own cybersecurity experts. The promised “pcaps” don’t exist; they had garbage data provided by a notorious serial scam artist. Who could have predicted?
⋙ WashTimes: Cyber expert says his team can’t prove Mike Lindell’s claims that China hacked election http://bit.ly/37BbPGa
// this is a rw publication (~btwn WashEx and NewsMax)
Newsweek: ‘This Is a Mistake’: Steve Bannon Slams Mike Lindell’s Symposium for Not Proving Voter Fraud http://bit.ly/3jQxuje
// “You’ve laid a theory of the case that is very powerful, but in laying that case out, you’ve got to bring the receipts,” Bannon said.
🐣 📊 RT @USA_Polling Net Favourabilities:
Obama: +10%
Biden: +4%
DeSantis: -2%
Harris: -4%
Lindell: -4%
AOC: -8%
Schumer: -13%
Trump: -14%
Graham: -15%
Pelosi: -17%
McCarthy: -20%
McConnell: -39%
Cuomo: -48%
YouGov/Economist / August 10, 2021 / n=1500 / Online http://bit.ly/3jKq2pX
🐣 RT @JanNWolfe Someone at Mike Lindell’s “cyber-symposium” just broke the news to him that Dominion’s lawsuit is going forward. The event is being streamed, so we’re seeing him get irate in real time. He’s ranting, calling it “the worst decision a judge has made in the history of this country.”
🐣 RT @cnnbrk Defamation lawsuits from Dominion Voting Systems against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and the right-wing lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani will move forward toward a trial, a federal judge ruled
⋙ CNN: Judge allows defamation lawsuits against Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and MyPillow CEO to go forward http://cnn.it/2VQcnWr
WSJ: McConnell Credits Biden for Infrastructure Breakthrough, Dismisses Trump Criticism http://on.wsj.com/3Ayt2fR “I think the president deserves a lot of credit for getting the Democrats open to reaching a bipartisan agreement on this bill” ~ McConnell
// But the Senate GOP leader doesn’t anticipate many more opportunities for bipartisan deals
NYT: Former U.S. attorney in Atlanta says Trump wanted to fire him for not backing election fraud claims. http://nyti.ms/2VP6KqU Byung J Pak told investigators Trump was unhappy Pak had investigated and not found evidence of voter fraud in Fulton County, Ga.
🐣 Trump has been trying to turn Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot as the mob tried to enter the chamber, into a martyr. ¤ Hitler did this with a man named Horst Wessel. A song was written in his honor which became the party anthem. ¤ #Insurrection ¤ #January6th
NBCNews: Feds warn of potential violence fueled by false election claims http://nbcnews.to/3s94vuQ
// DHS said it has seen an uptick in calls for violence sparked by groundless claims of fraud in the 2020 election and the alleged “reinstatement” of Trump.
🐣 My favorite moment of Mike Lindell’s #CyberSynposium was when their chief tech guy said the data from Ohio 2004-2005 was ‘gone,’ indicating to him that stealing elections wasn’t just done by Democrats (et tu, @KarlRove?) ¤ @BarbaraBoxer
⭕ 10 Aug 2021
RawStory/Salon, Chauncey Devega: Follow the money: It sure looks as if Jan. 6 was planned and funded by oligarchs in the shadows http://bit.ly/3iMHrPB
// Big Lie funders 💰
WaPo, Philip Bump: The con is winding down http://wapo.st/3xDOD4K Is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell the conman or the mark?
Lindell, who has claimed for months and months that he had definitive proof that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by China, pledged to release that information at a “cyber symposium” that is underway in South Dakota. According to Lindell, someone captured Internet traffic in the days after the election that shows how votes were shifted away from Donald Trump and to President Biden. Instead of simply presenting this evidence to the public, he withheld it, offering $5 million to anyone who can prove that the information isn’t legitimate.
[T]his seems very much like a guy who’s primed to believe fairly far-flung excuses for why bad things happen. The kind of guy who, when told that the data will be ready in a month, waits patiently for the month to pass. Maybe he’s something more sinister, engaged in an effort to willfully delude America, but observing him over time makes it seem more like he’s the mark than the hustler.
NYT: Biden Nominates Damian Williams as U.S. Attorney in Manhattan http://nyti.ms/3xG8Wyi “If confirmed, Damian Williams would be the first Black man to lead one of the most powerful prosecutor’s offices in the country” ~ the Southern District of New York (SDNY)
// The selection is part of a slate of nominations for top law enforcement posts in the country, including for three offices that tend to investigate the Justice Department’s most prominent cases.
WaPo Editorial: Putin is destroying what is left of Russian civil society http://wapo.st/3iCKMR7 A Moscow court has ruled that Alexei Navalny’s organizations are “extremist, … effectively criminaliz[ing] one of the country’s few remaining independent political movements.”
DailyBeast, Justin Baragona: MyPillow Guy Frantically Vows to ‘Stay Up Here’ for 72 Hours Straight: ‘There’s No Breaks!’ http://bit.ly/37CZLE8
// The pro-Trump pillow magnate’s latest event meant to provide evidence for his election lies has been nothing short of a total shitshow.
🐣 RT @dutytowarn Mike Lindell is talking nonstop for hours in a disorganized manic rant. “There’s no breaks! … You guys can go eat. That’s fine, but I ain’t eating! I’m staying up here for 72 hours…”
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar This Mike Lindell “Cyber Symposium” … might be the worst political event I’ve ever seen? He’s just ranting and raving endlessly 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1425140025700847620?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @IMBaaaaack4 I’m gonna say it. Mike Lindell’s symposium is a train wreck. Why the fuck wouldn’t he use notes? He’s just rambling like last time (when he introduced http://Frankspeech.com) and he can barely finish a sentence. I’m extremely disappointed. So much for that!
🧵 RT @ZTPetrizzo I’m in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s big event! So far, no evidence! 📌 https://twitter.com/ZTPetrizzo/status/1425126928630038529?s=20
🐣 RT @SecretaryPete The bill that passed the Senate today makes some of the most meaningful investments in infrastructure we’ve ever seen in this country. 💽 https://twitter.com/SecretaryPete/status/1425272288128143367?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, Greg Sargent: The rebellion against pro-Trump, anti-mask GOP governors is gaining steam http://wapo.st/3s6WM0k
WaPo: Texas judge clears way for San Antonio to mandate masks in blow to Gov. Greg Abbott http://wapo.st/3s8hk8T
💙 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson 1/ Good morning, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. ¤ Let’s review the bidding: the governors of two of the largest states are letting COVID burn because muh freedumb plays to an audience of a network owned by a crank Aussie billionaire. https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1425054985239339072?s=20
⭕ 9 Aug 2021
🐣 RT @Amy_Siskind A frightening and necessary read, by @JaneMayerNYer: Arizona Sos Katie Hobbs warned, “It’s dangerous. It’s feeding the kind of misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection… I think they’re laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 elections.”
⋙ NewYorker, Jane Mayer: The Big Money Behind the Big Lie http://bit.ly/37vY0Zt
// 8/2/2021; Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.
NYT, Paul Krugman: Climate Denial, Covid Denial and the Right’s Descent http://nyti.ms/3yCMUOf “it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the paranoid, anti-rational streak in American politics isn’t as bad as we thought; it’s much, much worse”
Before the right embraced Covid denial, there was climate denial. Many of the attitudes that have characterized the right-wing response to the coronavirus pandemic — refusal to acknowledge facts, accusations that scientists are part of a vast liberal conspiracy, refusal to address the crisis — were foreshadowed in the climate debate.
Yet from the response to Covid-19 among Republican officials — especially the opposition to lifesaving vaccines — it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the paranoid, anti-rational streak in American politics isn’t as bad as we thought; it’s much, much worse.
However, while there are important similarities between the right’s response to climate change and its response to Covid-19, there are also some important differences. The pandemic has opened frontiers in destructive irrationality.
You see, while climate denial was intellectually irresponsible and morally indefensible, it also made a kind of narrow-minded sense. ¤ For one thing, warnings about climate change always involved the long run, making it easy for denialists to claim that short-run fluctuations refuted the whole concept: “See, it’s cold today, so global warming is a hoax!” This kind of evasion has gotten harder lately, now that we’re having what were supposed to be once-in-100-years fires and floods every couple of years. But it helped confuse the issue. …
How did that happen? I’d tell the story this way: America’s rapid vaccination pace during the spring was very good news for the nation — but it was also a success story for the Biden administration. So influential conservatives, for whom owning the libs is always an overriding goal, began throwing up roadblocks to the vaccination program.
This had far-reaching consequences. As I’ve written before, the modern G.O.P. is more like an authoritarian political cult than a normal political party, so vaccine obstruction — not necessarily denunciation of the vaccines themselves, but opposition to any effort to get shots into people’s arms — became a loyalty test, a position you took to prove yourself a loyal Trumpist Republican.
Presumably, the politicians who made this calculation had no idea that reality would strike back this hard and this fast — that Florida would so quickly find itself with almost nine times New York’s rate of hospitalizations, that cities in Texas would find themselves virtually out of I.C.U. beds. But it’s almost impossible for them to change course. If Ron DeSantis were to admit the deadliness of his Covid mistakes, his political ambitions would be over.
So Covid denial has turned out to be even worse than climate denial. We’ve gone from cynical catering to corporate interests to aggressive, performative anti-rationality. And the right’s descent continues, with no bottom in sight.
NBCNews: 6 unvaccinated Florida church members die of Covid within 10 days, pastor says http://nbcnews.to/3s4dHk1
// None of the victims were vaccinated, and four were healthy and under the age of 35, according to the pastor at Impact Church in Jacksonville.
WaPo: Judge asks why Capitol rioters are paying just $1.5 million for attack, while U.S. taxpayers will pay more than $500 million http://wapo.st/3lMkcXG
// Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of Washington
‼️ 🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote WOW. Superseding indictments including conspiracy to aid and abet persons known AND unknown to obstruct electoral college verification (among other charges). Question: is it more likely they aided and abetted other insurrectionists, or bigger fish? [Indictments:] [pdf] http://bit.ly/3jBscYZ 41p
// leaders of the Oath Keepers, Eg Thomas Caldwell, Jessica Watkins, 15 others
WaPo, Greg Sargent: Shocking new Trump-DOJ revelations should shape the Jan. 6 investigation http://wapo.st/3xtJRqt “[T]hese revelations go to the core of Trump’s true intent”
🐣 RT @Msdesignerlady In 1923 Adolf Hitler attempted a failed coup, he went unpunished, then 10 years later he gained power. ¤ tRump refers to Hitler’s handbook. ¤ Seditionists must be held accountable, what happened on Jan. 6th was a dress rehearsal. ¤ #SeditionHasConsequences
// 8/7/2021
💙 ⋙ 🐣 So too with Russia 🔆 ‼️ ⋙ WaPo, Vladimir Kara-Murza (2017): Putin’s dark cult of the secret police http://wapo.st/3vJs8dr (Kara-Murza is a Russian dissident; this 2017 article not only proved prophetic for Russia but offers warnings the United States post-Jan 6) Text Block: ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1424702323167727623?s=20/photo/1
“The failure to condemn and eliminate the vestiges of the KGB in 1990s Russia is a textbook example of why it is important for post-totalitarian (or post-authoritarian) governments to fully face up to — and deal with — the past. Those who successfully opposed a full reckoning with the legacy of Soviet terror in Russia cited the alleged unwillingness of society to conduct “witch hunts.” They were warned by the most far-sighted of democrats (such as Galina Starovoitova and Vladimir Bukovsky) that “the witches will come back to hunt us.” And so they did — and continue today. A democratic post-Putin government in Russia must make every effort to fully come to terms with past crimes committed on behalf of the state — and to make an official celebration of the founding of the Cheka in Russia as unthinkable as a celebration of the founding of the Gestapo or Stasi would be in today’s Germany.”
MSN/ABCNews: Trump sees limits to his GOP sway as infrastructure advances: The Note http://bit.ly/3s3xO1J “Former President Donald Trump is warning his party to hold out, yet key GOP lawmakers either are not listening or do not care”
⭕ 8 Aug 2021
WaPo, Ruth Marcus: Trump’s coup attempt grows even more worrisome as new details emerge http://wapo.st/37sHsBD “The drip-drip-drip evolution of this story has served to mask how serious the threat was and how close it came to fruition”
WaPo: ‘Goldilocks virus’: Delta vanquishes all variant rivals as scientists race to understand its tricks http://wapo.st/3yzXw0f “The variant battles of 2021 are part of a longer war, one that is far from over”
Epidemiologists had hoped getting 70 or 80 percent of the population vaccinated, in combination with immunity from natural infections, would bring the virus under control. But a more contagious virus means the vaccination target has to be much higher, perhaps in the range of 90 percent.
Globally, that could take years. In the United States, the target may be impossible to reach anytime soon given the hardened vaccine resistance in a sizable fraction of the country, the fact that children under 12 remain ineligible and the persistent circulation of disinformation about vaccines and the pandemic.
⭕ 7 Aug 2021
NYT: For G.O.P., Infrastructure Bill Is a Chance to Inch Away from Trump http://nyti.ms/3AnNU9o “Even Mr. McConnell, who helped to orchestrate his two impeachment acquittals, now appears ready to buck the former president and embrace the infrastructure package”
// The former president’s efforts to bring down the bipartisan deal fell mostly on deaf ears among Republicans, signaling his waning influence on Capitol Hill. Can it last?
⭕ 6 Aug 2021
DailyBeast, Tim Lawrence: Sturgis Rally Death Cult Pits Nurses Against Panicked Docs http://bit.ly/2VFhI2b
// Last year was widely derided as a disaster. But health-care workers here are far from united on the eve of this year’s rally, which is fueled by a tradition of local bloodlust.
WaPo: Men from New Jersey and Washington state are first to plead guilty to assaulting police in Jan. 6 Capitol riot http://wapo.st/3CpOBRz “The agreements … set potential benchmarks for at least 165 defendants charged with assaulting or impeding officers”
// Scott K. Fairlamb and Devlyn D. Thompson face what they acknowledged in plea agreements could be three to five years in prison under sentencing guidelines.
💙 💽 CNN: CNN reporter to Mike Lindell: You have ‘proof of nothing’ http://cnn.it/2VzK3Yb
// interview
WaPo, Philip Bump: The most dangerous scam in American history http://wapo.st/2VzYhbk
// Mike Lindell’s deluded and well-financed false claims about the 2020 election are the sort of thing that led to Jan. 6.
WaPo: Sturgis Motorcycle Rally revs up, drawing thousands and heightening delta superspreader fears http://wapo.st/3lDcm2D
WaPo, Dana Milbank: We can’t let the terrorists rewrite the history of Jan. 6 http://wapo.st/3yx60Ft “In the retelling of Jan. 6, we see an echo of Lost Cause mythology”
HullaBaLoo, Digby: The coup attempt was much more serious than we knew http://bit.ly/3yyh9pu “Trump wanted the DOJ to back his Big Lie despite both Barr and Rosen telling him there was no fraud”
🐣 RT @tribelaw 56 years ago today, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act. Rarely has a more important piece of legislation become law. We should celebrate it by carving voting rights out of the filibuster.
🐣 RT @BarackObama The Voting Rights Act, signed into law 56 years ago today, was a monumental piece of legislation. But with the Supreme Court and state legislatures making it harder to cast a ballot, we can’t take voting rights for granted. 📌 https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1423690344798035972?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @BarackObama Congress needs to summon the same courage we saw a half century ago when the Voting Rights Act was passed and guarantee every American a voice and a vote.
⭕ 5 Aug 2021
CNN: MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell’s latest election conspiracy theory is his most bizarre yet http://cnn.it/3AjZsuy “Since Trump’s loss last fall, Lindell has been a superspreader of election misinformation”
Since the presidential election, Christina Jensen says she’s been stopped on the street several times by acquaintances who wanted to share troubling news: hackers from Beijing had switched nearly 24,000 votes for Donald Trump in their rural, GOP-leaning Wisconsin county. ¤ Jensen, the Clark County clerk and a Republican herself, has patiently explained that the local election computer system isn’t connected to the internet — and the county has less than 17,000 registered voters overall.
His latest and most operatic theory involves a sweeping conspiracy in which hackers from China and other foreign countries broke into elections office computer systems around the country to reduce the number of votes for Trump. The claim is supported, he says, by “heroes” who supposedly captured data proving the hacking and then leaked it to Lindell in January.
WaPo: ‘It was riot and mayhem’: Biden, honoring police, warns against distorting Capitol assault http://wapo.st/3rVW5qB
“It wasn’t dissent. It wasn’t debate. It wasn’t democracy,” Biden said during a somber ceremony in the Rose Garden. “It was insurrection. It was riot and mayhem. It was radical and chaotic, and it was unconstitutional. Maybe most important, it was fundamentally un-American.”
As Congress was certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election that day, a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump, many coming directly from a rally where Trump had urged them to “fight like hell,” stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the process.
“The tragedy of that day deserves the truth above all else,” the president said. “We cannot allow history to be rewritten. We cannot allow the heroism of these officers to be forgotten. We have to understand what happened — the honest and unvarnished truth. We have to face it. That’s what great nations do.”
The violence and menace of the Jan. 6 assault, now being investigated by a special House committee, have become increasingly clear as more information and videos have emerged. Lawmakers were forced into hiding, and rioters rampaged through the building, threatening to kill Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
One Capitol Police officer, Brian D. Sicknick, died after confronting the rioters, and four other officers who were at the Capitol that day have died by suicide in the days and months since.
Trump and his supporters, meanwhile, have become more outspoken in portraying the riot as a largely peaceful gathering of supporters, justifiably upset by the election, who have been unfairly targeted by Democrats and the media. They have even started to blame Pelosi for the violence, saying it was her responsibility to protect the Capitol.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the newly selected chair of the House GOP, recently said Pelosi “bears responsibility” for the violence, describing her as “an authoritarian who has broken the people’s house.”
Ashli Babbitt, a rioter and Trump supporter who was killed while storming the Capitol, has increasingly been transformed into a martyr among the former president’s supporters. Babbitt was shot as she attempted to jump through a door that led to the House chamber as police were trying to hold the chamber and defend those in it against the mob.
At a rally last month in Florida, Trump called the shooting “a terrible thing” and said “there was no reason for it.”
“The fallen, in my view, are casualties of a struggle literally for the soul of America,” Biden said. “A struggle that they didn’t start, a struggle we didn’t seek, and a struggle that, by the grace of God, we’ll win.”
💙 Slate, Richard Hasen: Trump Is Planning a Much More Respectable Coup Next Time http://bit.ly/2VBiVHU
WaPo: Merrick Garland: It is time for Congress to act again to protect the right to vote http://wapo.st/2VxaltY
Uprising, Hunter Walker: Exclusive: Going Down The ‘Big Lie’ Rabbit Hole With Former President Trump http://bit.ly/3yz6XgM “the workings of a complex effort to spread false election narratives”
// The Uprising obtained the former president’s purported evidence of election fraud. Trump’s statement reveals the origins of his conspiracy theories and how key conservative allies fuel them.
Politico: Jan. 6 select panel takes over House probe of Trump DOJ http://politi.co/3Cpcmt8
// The Oversight Committee’s chair said in a statement that “we look forward to the Select Committee fully exposing the former president’s unconstitutional attacks on our democracy.”
WaPo: Here’s a roadmap for the Justice Department to follow in investigating Trump http://wapo.st/3ClgKcA by Lawrence Tribe, Barbara McQuade and Joyce White Vance
// The Oversight Committee’s chair said in a statement that “we look forward to the Select Committee fully exposing the former president’s unconstitutional attacks on our democracy.”
⏳ JustSecurity: Mark Meadows Timeline: The Chief of Staff and Schemes to Overturn 2020 Election http://bit.ly/3rUWd9V
⭕ 4 Aug 2021
💽 MSNBC, Maddow: Trump DOJ official prepped to ask GOP in six states to void Biden win: Krishnamoorthi http://on.msnbc.com/3rXM6kx
// Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi discusses how close Donald Trump came to deploying Justice Department appointees to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and reveals that Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark drafted letters to six states that Joe Biden won, encouraging Republicans to overturn Biden’s win.
CNN: Justice official accused Trump of using DOJ to push election fraud claims in draft resignation letter http://cnn.it/3yqKimC
// Patrick Hovakimian, chief of staff to then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, wrote the resignation letter January 3 in anticipation that Rosen would be fired
🐣 RT @LuluLemew “It is one thing to note how the US appears to be following the template for a slide into autocracy. It is another to quantify it.” ¤ Welp… ¤ Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden has quantified it … and it’s not good. 📌 https://twitter.com/LuluLemew/status/1423116707007287298?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @LuluLemew “…how far and fast the U.S. has fallen. It adds to the body of evidence that Republicans have drifted toward authoritarianism, while their economic policies were always far to the right. The data only goes up to 2018, and does not represent the events of 2020” ¤ American Fascism[:] https://twitter.com/LuluLemew/status/1423116711696506882?s=20/photo/1
💙📔 V-Dem: Varieties of Democracy Report: Autocratization Turns Viral (2021) http://bit.ly/3irpea9
// University of Gothenburg, Sweden; “Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) produces the largest global dataset on democracy with almost 30 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2020. Involving over 3,500 scholars and other country experts, V-Dem measures hundreds of different attributes of democracy. V-Dem enables new ways to study the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy embracing its multiple meanings.”
🐣 RT @allinwithchris .@chrislhayes: “The document we learned about yesterday should live in infamy in American history as a truly villainous text. And if the acting AG at the time had signed that document, it would have likely thrown the U.S. into the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War.” 💽 https://twitter.com/allinwithchris/status/1423072954179538944?s=20/photo/1
Law&Crime: Seeking Immunity From Suit Over Jan. 6th Attack, Rep. Mo Brooks Tells Judge He Was Simply ‘Cooperating’ with the ‘White House’ http://bit.ly/3xpu1wM
WaPo, Max Boot: Yes, Trump tried to stage a coup. By denying it, the right is laying the groundwork for another one. http://wapo.st/2Vm07ws
WaPo, Philip Bump: A newly released letter tells us more about Trump’s last-ditch push to steal the election http://wapo.st/3imbWeX
// The insurrection before the insurrection
⭕ 3 Aug 2021
🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs Complete & utter madness. Rosen & Donoghue rightly rejected Clark’s anti-democratic plot. One more reminder of the former president’s insane agenda to overturn a free & fair election. We must learn. The threat remains. Those that don’t call this out for what it is are complicit.
⋙ 🐣≣ RT @alex_mallin Here’s the draft letter Jeffrey Clark wanted acting AG Rosen and Richard Donoghue to sign off on to send to officials in Georgia urging them to halt certification of Joe Biden’s election win. Rosen and Donoghue refused. https://abcn.ws/3xgKYtq https://twitter.com/alex_mallin/status/1422728769584906242?s=20/photo/1-4
⭕ 2 Aug 2021
NewYorker, Jane Mayer: The Big Money Behind the Big Lie http://bit.ly/37vY0Zt
// Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.
💙 🧵 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 1/ ¤ Most people have not yet grasped the importance of July 30 ¤ That date is when the TRAJECTORY changed on Trump path to prison ¤ And more importantly, it is a major milestone in how eventually the nation will be CURED of Trumpism, magamadness & #Cult45 📌 https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1422147669636665347?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 2/
We who are not part of Trump cult, have seen it all happening and knew Trump is a serial con artist, running a scam, there was no voter fraud, he tried to stage a coup d’etat to hold onto power etc. ¤ WE KNOW THIS. But there was plausible deniability
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 3/
Up to July 29, 2021, the Trump team & those who side with him, could cling to plausible deniability strategy
They could claim that Trump HIMSELF did not launch the attack. This could in court be claimed as a victim defense. The rioters misunderstood Trump
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 4/
Do not ARGUE this point with me. WE KNOW what is the truth. I am saying what THEIR SIDE could claim up to 29 July, 2021, on Fox, and by all corrupt defenders of Trump like Qevin McCarthy, Gym Jordan, Statutory Gaetz, Boebert = Gohmert, & Marjorie Three Toes
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 5/
That defense crumbled on Friday. Two TOPMOST attorneys at Department of Justice, the Acting Attorney General of the United States, and his immediate deputy AG, heard the President identify planners of a coup d’etat, IN CONGRESS, and that THERE WAS NO fraud
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 6/
Trump and Republicans cannot claim this is a partisan witch hunt, when a Republican President confesses to HIS appointed (acting) Attorney General, fellow Republican, that three Republican members of Congress are with him on a coup d’etat IN DECEMBER
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 7/
So Trump, a Republican President, confesses this to a Republican AG, while the Republican is the President, and the Republicans still control the Senate. It takes out ‘partisan’ in the claim of witch hunt. Because this happened WHILE HE WAS PRESIDENT
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 8/
Secondly. The witches. Are NAMED. We know there are more in Congress who participated in this plot to overturn the election, deny the vote of 81 million voters & make Trump King. Now we have a smoking gun, identifying three IN CONGRESS who plotted with him
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 9/
These 3 will be known as traitors, together with Trump, in history books:
● Corrupt R. Congressman House Rep Jim ‘Gym’ Jordan (OH)
● Corrupt R. Congressman House Rep Scott Perry (PA)
● Corrupt R. Congressman Senator Ron Johnson (WI)
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 10/
The correct course of action, for any Congressman who had sworn his oath to defend the Constitution, was at the FIRST mention of a coup, to report the other traitors to the FBI. There would have been 1,000 FBI agents in ambush at the Capitol with handcuffs
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 11/
Now we know that Trump was not a ‘victim’ of a mob that suddenly went berzerk, and rioted, against his will. Because we have CONTEMPORANEOUS notes from the phone call on 27 December, when Trump said, he KNEW there was no fraud, but he would take care of it
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 12/
This CHANGES THE TRAJECTORY
Now it was not a spontaneous riot on 6 January. It was a PLANNED attack from AT LEAST 27 December. Not only organized by Trump ‘supporters’ like Roger Stone & Giuliani, or Moron Son number 1, and the My Pillow Guy ¤ TRUMP KNEW
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 13/
We – you and I – knew Trump was planning this. but Fox could claim that Trump was innocent, and the riot went berzerk, and Trump is innocent.
That defense died 30 July. Trump KNEW there is no voter fraud, but planned an insurrection. We have smoking gun
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 14/
It is a LONG ROAD ahead, to take Trump to prison for January 6. This is a Mafia trial: the boss ALWAYS is tried last
● First rioters
● Then organizers
● Then planners
● Last Trump
Have patience, this takes YEARS. But we have a MAJOR change now, July 30, 2021
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 15/
Because the evidence will show, this was a PLANNED insurrection, terrorist attack and attempted coup d’etat, those who planned it will do LIFE SENTENCES without parole. Some who are first to flip, may do ‘only’ decades in prison
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 16/
Four elected Republicans conspired to attack America, knowing there is no fraud, but using a fake fraud claim as their excuse to try to overturn an election.
They will among other things face 14th Amendment punishment of never running for office again
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 17/
At some point, what remains of GOP, will denounce the traitors. Romney & Liz Cheney are in Congress leading that movement, supported by Republicans outside of Congress like Ana Navarro & John Kasich. ¤ This moment, July 30, is the threshold
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 18/
Republicans will have to take a side, are they with the seditionists Gym Jordan, Ron Johnson & Scott Perry, or do they stand with America & the Constitution. This is a watershed moment. Once GOP has seen the light, they will also extinguish Maga & Trumpism
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 19/
The internal civil war will likely rage inside GOP for next 3 years (past 2024 election loss) when EARLIEST timing of the purge of Trumpists & maga can start
MORE LIKELY timing is after 2028 election loss. GOP is now sick with #cult45 & damaging itself
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen Smoking Gun Thread 20/
Understand the relevance of Friday 30 July 2021. It was a CHANGE OF TRAJECTORY for not just Trump, but for Trumpism. We caught 3 Republican traitors. They will face justice & will spend life in prison (first to flip might get out after some decades)
⋙ 🐣 RT @tomishonen PS to everybody in this Thread ¤ THANK YOU. In just 8 hours you have helped make this one of my most-widely spread Threads, which has been read by over 210,000 people. That is more than twice my TOTAL reach. Thank you. You helped YOUR Tweeps read this and understand it.
🧵 RT @paulkrugman I’ve been doing some number-crunching on Florida, which has become the poster child for red-state Covid disaster; not only does it top the nation in hospitalizations per capita, but it’s far bigger than the other disaster states 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1422177108298719233?s=20/photo/1
Bloomberg: Trump’s GDP Growth Was the Worst Since the Great Depression http://bloom.bg/3rNwujD
// The pandemic was partly to blame, and there are some measures that make his record look better. But it was not a stellar performance
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: The most damning evidence against Trump http://wapo.st/3ig3XzU Trump’s Dec 27 phone call with Acting AG Jeffrey Rosen and Deputy AG Richard Donoghue settles it ~ or should
// cites Lawrence Tribe, Daniel Goldman, Norman Eisen
⭕ 1 Aug 2021
⭕ 31 Jul 2021
NYT: Already Distorting Jan. 6, G.O.P. Now Concocts Entire Counternarrative http://nyti.ms/2WHTDbz
// In the Republicans’ disinformation campaign, the arrested Capitol rioters are political prisoners and Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to blame for the attack.
WaPo, Dan Balz: ‘Leave the rest to me’: New DOJ memos show there’s more to learn about Trump and Jan. 6 http://wapo.st/3rTrnOY “The latest disclosures offer a reminder that it was the president himself who was doing the most to corrupt the election results”
For months, Trump has been on a political jihad. It began the night of the election and has never ended. The latest disclosures offer a reminder that it was the president himself who was doing the most to corrupt the election results. The House select committee and other investigations are one way to begin to hold him more accountable.
These revelations are from notes kept by then-acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue, top aide to then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, including a conversation the two men had with Trump on Dec. 27. The documents were provided by the Justice Department to Congress and released publicly on Friday.
Post journalists Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey had reported on Wednesday the existence of the notes, describing Trump as in regular, almost daily, contact with DOJ officials as he pressed them to investigate and prove various (false) claims of election irregularities. In that Dec. 27 conversation, Trump was told that the information he had about fraud claims was not accurate. Trump replied, according to the notes: “You guys may not be following the Internet the way I do.”
Trump was told further that the department would not and could not simply “snap its fingers” and change the outcome of the election. Trump said he understood but nonetheless wanted the department to “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. congressmen,” according to Donoghue’s summary of the conversation.
Trump’s goal was to delay or disrupt the final stage in the post-election vote-counting process. That last step was to take place on Jan. 6 before a joint session of Congress, with Vice President Mike Pence presiding. That was the day Congress was to affirm the electoral college vote count, sealing the victory of Joe Biden and closing the last door on the defeated incumbent.
In the weeks after the election, Trump had pressured Rosen’s predecessor, William P. Barr, who eventually said publicly the department had investigated various allegations and found no evidence of fraud big enough to change the election results (and has since been reported to say it was all a crock). Barr resigned as attorney general just before Christmas, leaving the department in the hands of Rosen and Donoghue. …
The value of a full investigation into what happened leading up to and including Jan. 6 is to tell the story whole. It is a story that begins not with the marauders who overwhelmed law enforcement officials at the Capitol. It begins long before and with Donald Trump. If it were not for him and what he did to try to subvert the election, it is doubtful the Capitol would have needed defending on Jan. 6.
NYT Editorial: Russia’s New Form of Organized Crime Is Menacing the World http://nyti.ms/ 3zYEL7k
⭕ 30 Jul 2021
WaPo: Congress should get Trump’s tax returns, Biden Justice Department says http://wapo.st/3zVZ5WW
WaPo: It’s a good thing Republican election-stealers are so incompetent http://wapo.st/3ye8uIU “The Arizona election audit, a kind of Renaissance fair for deranged conspiracy theorists and Donald Trump dead-enders, has finally wound down its work … ”
The Arizona election audit, a kind of Renaissance fair for deranged conspiracy theorists and Donald Trump dead-enders, has finally wound down its work, returning nearly 2.1 million ballots to county officials after they were massaged, squinted at, passed under UV lights and examined for traces of bamboo to see if they might have come from Asia (I kid you not). We await the final report, which may at last reveal that it was aliens from the planet Xerpdorp, working with George Soros and D.B. Cooper, who stole the state’s election.
The Maricopa County audit, which Trump has insisted all along would show that he really won the state, has been such a farce that even many Arizona Republicans have tried to distance themselves from it. GOP state senators are feuding with one another over whose fault it is; the governor says, “I don’t think we should spend any more time thinking about 2020”; and the whole thing has proved to be a gigantic embarrassment.
To understand just how much the Republican Party has changed, it’s instructive to think back to the last contested election before 2020, in 2000. When the results in Florida were thrown into uncertainty, the GOP mobilized its smartest and most ruthless operatives to make sure the outcome was secured in George W. Bush’s favor. The enterprise was run by the cool and efficient James Baker, who had been a Cabinet secretary and chief of staff to two presidents.
Baker assembled a team of the party’s best lawyers, including three future Supreme Court justices — John G. Roberts Jr., Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — to fight the battle in state and federal courts. There was no “release the Kraken” courtroom buffoonery and no Four Seasons Total Landscaping-style face plants. The drama may have been chaotic, but inside the chaos was a highly competent group of Republican professionals who navigated it all the way to the Supreme Court, where five Republican justices handed the victory to Bush. ¤ Now imagine if people like them — rather than Rudolph W. Giuliani, a bunch of QAnon believers and the MyPillow guy — were the ones trying to steal elections today.
So it would be wrong to say that we have nothing to worry about. This is only one part of a broader picture, which is that nearly everyone in the Republican Party has committed themselves to the idea that our election system must be altered so that it’s almost impossible for them to lose. They have put together a far-reaching and comprehensive effort that includes extreme gerrymandering; voter suppression measures to make it as difficult and cumbersome as possible for certain people to make it to the polls in the first place; and, perhaps most disturbingly, the creation of new avenues for state-level Republicans, especially GOP-dominated legislatures, to seize control of election administration and create the means for them to keep a thumb on the scale from beginning to end.
That’s where the real, grave danger lies. It has to be fought via the courts, Congress (which ought to pass the For the People Act, as unlikely as that seems right now) and the Justice Department, as well as ground organizing to get as many people as possible to the polls no matter the impediments Republicans impose. ¤ But when Democrats watch a farce like the Arizona audit play itself out, they ought to say a word of thanks. If these people knew what they were doing, it could be even worse.
WaPo: Trump to acting AG, according to aide’s notes: ‘Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me’ http://wapo.st/3C8wBev
💙 📋 DOJ: Notes from phone call with Trump on 12/27/2020 http://bit.ly/3yer0AV
// pdf of notes document
💙 🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Trump Pressed Justice Dept. to Declare Election Results Corrupt, Notes Show http://nyti.ms/37aIC4A
// “Leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, the former president is said to have told top law enforcement officials.
⭕ 29 Jul 2021
TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: Mike Lindell’s Plot to Destroy America http://bit.ly/3xfeH62
// In the time I spent with Mike Lindell, I came to learn that he is affable, devout, philanthropic—and a clear threat to the nation.
⭕ 28 Jul 2021
CNN: Subpoena fight looms over Trump as House committee plots extensive January 6 probe http://cnn.it/3y76Qsp
WaPo: Justice Dept: Republican Rep. Mo Brooks may be sued over Jan. 6 speech to Trump supporters http://wapo.st/3yds3kz
⭕ 27 Jul 2021
💙 🔄 🔆 This❗️⋙ House.gov: https://january6th.house.gov ¤ https://january6th.house.gov
🐣 RT @just_security #Jan6Clearinghouse update ¤ New Documents:
Department of Justice letters to former U.S. officials authorizing testimony to Congress without executive privilege
(section on government documents)
💙 🔄 ⋙⋙ JustSecurity: January 6 Clearinghouse ¤ Congressional Hearings, Government Documents, Court Cases, Academic Research http://bit.ly/
// 7/13/2021
⋙ 🐣 RT @ 2. Justice Dept Letters Authorizing Officials to Speak to Congress on Pres Trump’s Effort to Overturn Election
Sent to:
Jeffrey Rosen
Richard P Donoghue
Patrick Hovakimian
Byung Jin Pak
Bobby L Christine
Jeffrey B Clark
Direct link to letters: http://bit.ly/3zOmCbY
Sample 👇 https://twitter.com/just_security/status/1420081752744280066?s=20/photo/1-3
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw |@AndyMcCanse draws on his deep expertise in analyzing Justice Dept letters opening up former Trump officials to testify about #Jan6/2020 election. ¤ How DOJ position works well within existing framework. ¤ How it may implicate investigations/litigation.
🐣 RT @AndyMcCanse My @just_security analysis of the DOJ letter authorizing former Trump administration officials to provide “unrestricted testimony” in the congressional investigations of post-election machinations, and what it means for executive privilege doctrine.
💙 ⋙ JustSecurity, Andy Wright: Unpacking the DOJ Letters: No “Executive Privilege” for Trump-Era Witnesses on 2020 Election Machinations http://bit.ly/3j3OjqN
💙 WaPo: As Trump pushed for probes of 2020 election, he called Attorney General Rosen almost daily http://wapo.st/3rFJjMI DOJ has informed Rosen and others that Biden will “has decided that it would not be appropriate to assert executive privilege“ over these communications
President Donald Trump called his acting attorney general nearly every day at the end of last year to alert him to claims of voter fraud or alleged improper vote counts in the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
The personal pressure campaign, which has not been previously reported, involved repeated phone calls to acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen in which Trump raised various allegations he had heard about and asked what the Justice Department was doing about the issue. The people familiar with the conversations spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive legal and political issues that are not yet public.
Rosen told few people about the phone calls, even in his inner circle. But there are notes of some of the calls that were written by a top aide to Rosen, Richard Donoghue, who was present for some of the conversations, these people said.
Donoghue’s notes could be turned over to Congress in a matter of days, they added, if Trump does not file papers in court seeking to block such a handover. In addition, both Rosen and Donoghue could be questioned about the conversations by congressional committees examining Trump’s actions in the days after the election.
The Justice Department recently notified Rosen, Donoghue and others who were serving there during the end of Trump’s presidency that the agency would not seek to invoke executive privilege if they are asked about their contacts with the president during that period.
That posture — which the letter to Rosen calls a departure from normal agency practice — means that individuals who are questioned by Congress would not have to say the conversations with the president were off-limits. They would be able to share details that give a firsthand account of Trump’s frantic attempts to overturn the 2020 election and involve the Justice Department in that effort.
In May, Rosen pointedly told Congress he did not do many of the things Trump supporters had demanded.
“During my tenure, no special prosecutors were appointed, whether for election fraud or otherwise; no public statements were made questioning the election; no letters were sent to State officials seeking to overturn the election results; [and] no DOJ court actions or filings were submitted seeking to overturn election results,” Rosen testified.
The phone calls came in late 2020 and early 2021, when Trump and his supporters were furiously pressing for officials at all levels of the government to intercede in the usually routine process of certifying the election results — asking them to either launch new investigations, support unverified allegations of fraud or manipulation of vote counts, or otherwise throw up roadblocks to Democrat Joe Biden becoming president.
The calls began almost immediately after William P. Barr stepped down as attorney general in late December, and ended after the Jan. 6 insurrection at Congress, people familiar with them said.
Rosen was generally noncommittal, hearing the president out, while not promising to take any specific action in response, these people said. At times, they said, he would try to change the subject, but was usually unsuccessful. “Trump was absolutely obsessed about it,” one person with knowledge of the calls said.
Trump was not the only one at the White House reaching out to the Justice Department about dubious claims of election vote tampering. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, at times forwarded public claims of potential voter fraud to Justice Department officials, which some officials found exasperating, according to previously released emails. Meadows’s defenders have said he was just letting the department know about possible instances of illegality.
The conversations also offer new clues into the president’s mind-set in early January, when he entertained a plan to replace Rosen with a different senior lawyer at the department — Jeffrey Clark — who was more amenable to pursuing Trump’s unfounded claims of voter fraud. That possibility nearly touched off a crisis at the highest levels of federal law enforcement, people familiar with the matter have previously said.
On Monday, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer told Rosen in a letter: “You are authorized to provide information you learned while at the Department,” including “your knowledge of attempts to involve the Department in efforts to challenge or overturn the 2020 election results. This includes your knowledge of any such attempts by Department officials or by White House officials to engage in such efforts.” …
However, the letter continues, the “extraordinary events in this matter constitute exceptional circumstances warranting an accommodation to Congress in this case,” including lawmakers’ effort to determine “whether former President Trump sought to cause the Department to use its law enforcement and litigation authorities to advance his personal political interests with respect to the results of the 2020 presidential election.”
As a result, the letter said, President Biden “has decided that it would not be appropriate to assert executive privilege with respect to communications with former President Trump and his advisors and staff on matters related to the scope of the Committees’ proposed interviews, notwithstanding the view of former President Trump’s counsel that executive privilege should be asserted to prevent testimony regarding these communications.”
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote The DoJ says that Mo Brooks can’t be repped by them because his speech was a campaign activity, and further, if the court doesn’t dismiss based on that, they should dismiss it anyway unless Brooks can PROVE he didn’t instigate an attack on the capitol.
WaPo: Jan. 6 hearings open with visceral accounts of Trump supporters’ assault on police http://wapo.st/2TClDw8
⭕ 26 Jul 2021
WaPo Editorial: We have questions about Jan. 6. The new House committee can answer them3l05Y4Z. http://wapo.st/3l05Y4Z
WaPo, Bennie G Thompson: We have started investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Nothing will be off-limits. http://wapo.st/3x7rojg Thompson (D-MS) is chairman of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack
WaPo: Dems move to elevate Cheney on Jan. 6 committee, giving her prime speaking slot Tuesday http://wapo.st/3i62Qmw “Tuesday’s hearing will feature four police officers … who are expected to testify about their experiences of both physical and verbal abuse on Jan. 6”
Tuesday’s hearing will feature four police officers — two from the Capitol’s protection squad and two from D.C. police — who are expected to testify about their experiences of both physical and verbal abuse on Jan. 6, as they tried to protect the Capitol from a swelling horde of demonstrators determined to stop Congress’s efforts to certify the 2020 electoral college results and declare Joe Biden the next president.
WaPo Editorial: Arizona’s vote ‘audit’ is based on ignorance and dishonesty http://wapo.st/3y1TaPn “[T]he party’s goal is not to save U.S. democracy but to poison it, inspiring enough distrust in election systems to enable Republicans to pass unwarranted voting restrictions”
“We have 74,243 mail-in ballots where there is no clear record of them being sent,” declared Doug Logan, the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist who heads Cyber Ninjas, the Florida firm with no apparent expertise in election auditing whom the Arizona Senate Republican majority hired to examine Maricopa’s ballots. Election experts immediately pointed out that this number represents the in-person early ballots that voters cast, which Maricopa County counts in its submitted ballot tally. Similarly, Mr. Logan’s claim that 11,326 people suddenly showed up on the voting rolls after Election Day reflects provisional voters, whose ballots only counted if they demonstrate after Election Day that they were eligible. Instead of publicly revealing any of these alleged discrepancies, Mr. Logan should have consulted someone with a rudimentary knowledge of election procedures.
No one should seek to emulate this embarrassing spectacle, but Trump devotees in other swing states President Biden won, such as Georgia and Pennsylvania, are pushing to audit their ballot counts, too, despite the fact that intensive reviews have already found no reason to doubt the results. Pro-Trump activists in Georgia are suing to examine thousands of ballots with a high-powered microscope. They play up some 200 ballots that were initially double-counted in Atlanta’s Fulton County, despite the fact that there is no indication they ended up in the official results and that manual and machine recounts confirmed Mr. Biden’s victory.
Again and again, the “evidence” behind Mr. Trump’s lies fails to show fraud, yet Republican 2022 primary candidates in Georgia and elsewhere are embracing the fiction, while the party ridicules and sidelines those who continue to stand up for the truth. As the Arizona audit shows, the party’s goal is not to save U.S. democracy but to poison it, inspiring enough distrust in election systems to enable Republicans to pass unwarranted voting restrictions and to reject legitimate vote tallies that do not go their way. There is no more important priority than defending the nation’s democratic institutions from subversion and attack.
💙 LondonDaily: British Writer Pens The Best Description Of Trump I’ve Read http://bit.ly/3kWUZtk
⋙ Nate White “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”
// Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:
A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.
⭕ 25 Jul 2021
🐣 RT @BillKristol “This has an obvious solution: shots in arms. But short of a federal mandate—or a patchwork of mandates by municipalities, hospitals, colleges and businesses—it is hard to see how enough Americans will be immunized to form a buttress against the virus.”
⋙ NYT: The Delta Variant Is the Symptom of a Bigger Threat: Vaccine Refusal http://nyti.ms/3iJrM2k
// There are almost as many reasons for vaccine hesitancy and refusal as there are unvaccinated Americans. But this problem, not the variant, lies at the root of rising infection rates.
🐣 RT @nicholaswu12 KINZINGER in statement: “Today, I was asked by the Speaker to serve on the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th and I humbly accepted. I will work diligently to ensure we get to the truth and hold those responsible for the attack fully accountable.”
📋 WaPo, EJ Dionne: Republicans unleashed a deadly vaccine skepticism. Can they now contain it? http://wapo.st/2Vcpy34 As of July 6, the vaccination rate for counties that voted for Biden was 46.7%; for those that voted for Trump, it was 35% (Analysis by KFF of CDC data)
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that as of July 23, the 20 states with the highest vaccination rates (counting the District of Columbia as a state) all voted for President Biden.
A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of CDC data found that as of July 6, the average vaccination rate in counties that voted for Biden was 46.7 percent. In counties that voted for Donald Trump, the vaccination rate was 35 percent.
📋 UVirginia StatChat: Will Whites be a minority by 2040? http://bit.ly/3BGZspK The reports of the death of a White majority have been greatly exaggerated – due to mixing of ethnicity/race in “Hispanic” and growth of “Two or more races”; currently classification is not adequate
// 7/25/2017
📋 UVirginia StatChat: The Misleading Narrative of a Disappearing White Majority http://bit.ly/2TAByv5 According to current census categories, neither Barack Obama of Kamala Harris would be counted as Black; on top of that, “Hispanic” is a language group, not a race
// race categories race demographics
⭕ 24 Jul 2021
🐣🧵 💽 RT @atrupar Trump’s introduction at the “Rally to Protect Our Elections” in Phoenix is beyond parody 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1419068600200138763?s=20/photo/1
// Trump in Arizona
⭕ 23 Jul 2021
⭕ 22 Jul 2021
⭕ 21 Jul 2021
WaPo, Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman: How Kevin McCarthy is boosting the integrity of the Jan. 6 investigation http://wapo.st/3eH8Fon
📊 CBSNews: Still more to learn about January 6 attack, 67% of Americans say http://cbsn.ws/3roB1IU CBSNews/YouGov poll (7/14-17/2021; n=2238 adults)
What happened:
More to learn? Yes 72%, No 28% ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1417946730797146113?s=20/photo/1
What Happened? (Dem/GOP) ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1417947031004405761?s=20/photo/1
Trying to overturn election: 67/32%
Insurrection: 56/20%
Defending freedom: 31/55%
Patriotism: 29/51%
🐣 RT @nicholaswu12 Cheney: “at every opportunity, the minority leader has attempted to prevent the American people from understanding what happened” ¤ Says members Pelosi rejected didn’t take this seriously and one may be a “material witness”
🐣 RT @AndrewFineberg JUST NOW: @RepLizCheney again says @GOPLeader should not be Speaker if @HouseGOP takes the majority in 2022: “Any person who would be third in line to the presidency must demonstrate a commitment to the Constitution and…the rule of law and [McCarthy] has not done that.”
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman In other words, Barrack is charged for being a spy for the UAE.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DavidLaufmanLaw For the record, Tom Barrack was not charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act; he was charged under 18 U.S.C. section 951 for acting as “an agent of a foreign government” — a law typically used for espionage-like cases like Maria Butina
⋙⋙ DOJ: Former Advisor to Presidential Candidate Among Three Defendants Charged with Acting as Agents of a Foreign Government http://bit.ly/3eFGIx0
// Defendants Allegedly Acted and Conspired to Act at the Direction of Senior United Arab Emirates Officials to Influence a Presidential Campaign, Public Opinion and the U.S. Government
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Kevin McCarthy says that Republicans will now form their own team… to investigate… the insurrection… that members of their own party helped incite.
🐣 RT @harrylitman Politically, McCarthy’s move to take his ball and go home is a tricky, and perhaps forced, strategy—he has painted himself into a corner. But on the much more important axis of finding out the whole truth about 1/6, it’s a fantastic development and I hope it holds.
⭕ 20 Jul 2021
WaPo Editorial: Kevin McCarthy’s picks for the Jan. 6 panel make clear he wants to continue the coverup http://wapo.st/3iziPs6
// Front page title: Pelosi must not let Kevin McCarthy’s cynical gambit spoil the Jan. 6 investigation
WaPo, Perry Bacon Jr: The institutions that can defend the U.S. from Trumpism http://wapo.st/3iB8XOH
⭕ 19 Jul 2021
DailyBeast, Molly Jong-Fast: Certified Loser Donald Trump Is Rebranding MAGA as a Full-On Cult http://bit.ly/3muRESv
// As a twice-impeached, one-term historical freak show of a president, his only hope is to turn his movement into a cult, worshipping himself. It’s the Trump Steaks of religion.
💙 🐣 RT @RenewAmerica “One-third of Trump voters, one-third of conservatives, 34 percent of Republicans, and 39 percent of Independents said that there was no chance that they would consider a candidate who voted to block certification.”
NewRepublic, David Eichenthal: A Surprising Potential Swing Vote: Pro-Democracy Republicans http://bit.ly/3xRFVkn
// I ultimately decided against running for Congress in a red district. But my research found a way for Democrats to make inroads in such places.
NYT, Paul Krugman: Republicans Have Their Own Private Autocracy http://nyti.ms/3xUoO17 “hostility to vaccines has become a form of loyalty signaling”
YahooNews: Ex-Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen: ‘Incredibly disturbing’ that military leadership reportedly feared Trump coup http://yhoo.it/36K23RN
🐣 📊 RT @LaurieRoberts New poll shows 66% of AZ voters say there is no credible evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Put another way, Arizona voters, by a nearly 2-1 margin, discount all the crazy conspiracy talk. Can someone please let Sen. Karen Fann know?
⋙ AZCentral: 62% of Arizona Republicans (and almost no one else) say audit will show Trump won [$] https://twitter.com/LaurieRoberts/status/1417184678381965313?s=20
// A new poll shows 62% of Arizona Republicans believe Trump won in 2020. Here’s why that’s a problem for them in 2022.
🐣 @TeamPelosi Please – Don’t let Jim Jordan sit on the January 6 Committee. His ability to distract, gaslight and engage in whataboutism will only exacerbate divisions and diminish the seriousness of the investigation. It would be like putting Trump himself on the committee.
WaPo: First felony defendant sentenced in Capitol riot, gets eight months in prison http://wapo.st/3hPU6AP
Tampa crane operator Paul Allard Hodgkins, 38, pleaded guilty on June 2 to one count of obstructing a joint session of Congress meeting to confirm the results of the 2020 president election. He was seen carrying a red-and-white “Trump 2020” flag into the well of the evacuated Senate while others stood over the vice president’s abandoned chair.
“The symbolism of that act was unmistakable,” U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss said in sentencing Hodgkins. “He was staking a claim on the floor of the U.S. Senate not with an American flag, but declaring his loyalty to a single individual over the nation. In that act, he captured the threat to democracy that we all witnessed that day.”
The riots did far greater damage than delay Congress’s tallying of the electoral votes a few hours, the judge said. They “left a stain that will remain on our nation for decades,” one that will make it “harder for all of us to tell our children and grandchildren that democracy stands as the immutable foundation of our nation,” Moss said.
U.S. prosecutors sought an 18-month prison term for Hodgkins, citing the need to deter domestic terrorism. Hodgkins asked for probation or house arrest.
“January 6th was genuinely an act of terrorism. . . . The need to preserve respect for the law is really at its pinnacle in a crime like this,” Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Mona Sedky said, striking a theme amplified by Moss after a 2½ -hour argument in which she said that rioters sought to subvert the election and the peaceful transfer of power through intimidation, force and violence.
Sedky argued that an 18-month prison term “will send a loud and clear message” so that “people contemplating a follow-up to January 6th will stand down . . . and Mr. Hodgkins and other would-be rioters will be deterred and turn back, and so it won’t happen again and again and again.”
Hodgkins attorney Patrick N. Leduc answered by blasting the government’s terrorism claim and warning that a harsh sentence would further divide the nation.
Leduc urged Moss to heed the words in President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address and show grace that each side of the partisan divide would claim for itself and deny the other.
Calling the Capitol breach “domestic terrorism” is “offensive and gaslighting the country, and it needs to stop. . . . It was a protest that became a riot, period, full stop,” Leduc said.
The lawyer attempted to liken the Jan. 6 riot to violence that marred some racial-justice protests in 2020 in Minneapolis and Portland, Ore. He also invoked the First Amendment, arguing to the judge, “We need to be very careful.”
But he was cut off by Moss, who said that while he was not sentencing Hodgkins based on anyone else’s conduct, “I don’t think that any plausible argument can be made defending what happened at the Capitol as an example of the First Amendment.”
“There were people storming through the halls of the Capitol, shouting, ‘Where’s Nancy?’ ” Moss said. “There were people threatening the lives of members of Congress. There were members of Congress fleeing for their lives. This was more than a simple riot.”
The judge added: “The chambers of Congress were emptied during the most solemn act in a democracy, of certifying who the next president is going to be, by an angry mob. . . . This was not an exercise of First Amendment rights.”
About 540 people of an estimated 800 who entered the Capitol building have been charged. Hodgkins was one of about 50 who made their way to the Senate floor, the “heart” and “core” of where Congress was carrying out its statutory and constitutional responsibility to confirm the president’s win, Sedky said.
Unlike other defendants, Hodgkins was not accused of other wrongdoing, such as leading or coordinating others, making online threats or conspiring with extremists. Nor did he enter a cooperation deal with prosecutors. Prosecutors had sought a sentence at the midpoint of the 15 to 21 months set under advisory federal guidelines.
Prosecutors stopped short of seeking enhanced domestic terrorism penalties against Hodgkins that it has threatened to seek against other defendants. Such enhancements could more than double the sentencing guidelines range for such defendants, although judges would have the final say.
Moss acknowledged struggling over how to weigh the violence of the overall attack and the defendant’s lesser individual role, but he knocked down Leduc’s selective invocation of the 16th president.
Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, said the Union engaged in civil war to ensure that government of, by and for the people “did not perish from the earth,” Moss noted.
“If we allow people to storm the U.S. Capitol when they don’t like what the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives are doing, what are we doing to preserve democracy in our country?” Moss asked.
Moss said that he believed Hodgkins’s conduct was an “aberration” but that “people have to know that assaulting the Capitol and impeding the democratic process, even if you’re not bearing arms, will have consequences,” adding that it was more important for him “to deter others from ever again attempting anything like the events of January 6th.”
⭕ 18 Jul 2021
AP: Klobuchar: Infrastructure bill could include voting measures http://bit.ly/3zk1H07
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota who chairs the powerful Senate Rules Committee, said in an interview that the priority continues to be passing the legislation known as the For the People Act, which would usher in minimum voting standards in the U.S. such as automatic and same-day voter registration, early voting and no-excuse absentee voting.
But Klobuchar noted that Democrats could also use the process known as reconciliation to advance financial incentives for states to adopt certain reforms. Election systems have been designated critical infrastructure on par with the nation’s power plants, banks and dams.
“You can do election infrastructure in there because that is part of infrastructure,” Klobuchar said. “It’s no substitute for the For the People Act, but it is something we can start working on immediately and are working on right now.”
Pushing election-related measures into the infrastructure bill would be a high-stakes gambit with no guarantee of success.
Under the congressional budget process, certain measures regarding revenues, spending and the debt can be approved with a 51-vote threshold, which is why Democrats are pursuing it. The process allows them to bypass a near-certain filibuster from Republicans.
But there’s a catch: The Senate’s nonpartisan parliamentarian can rule for the removal of any provision not directly related to the budget, or items whose budget impact is “merely incidental” to their intended policy changes.
In the end, Democrats would not achieve their goal of federal standards through the infrastructure bill alone but could incentivize some states to move in that direction.
“Money with incentives has passed before. So let’s see what we can get approved,” Klobuchar said. “But again, that is only part of it. Look, it’s not the whole thing, right? But it’s a tool you don’t want to let go.”
NYT, by Donald Ayer, Danielle Brian and Norman Eisen: Merrick Garland Needs to Show He Knows What Jan. 6 Was Really About http://nyti.ms/2UmfPaG
// By Donald Ayer, Danielle Brian and Norman Eisen: Mr. Ayer was a deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration. Ms. Brian is the executive director of the Project On Government Oversight. Mr. Eisen served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment.
⭕ 17 Jul 2021
NBCNews: How Fox News’ Covid vaccine denialism hurts my patients http://nbcnews.to/3rtpacN
// Right-wing Covid-19 denialism hit my community hard during the first surge. Now, we’re seeing a new, dangerous anti-vaccine push from these same sources.
💙 WaPo/AP: AP FACT CHECK: Trump makes false claims about Arizona audit http://wapo.st/3ev7ZSQ
⭕ 16 Jul 2021
WaPo: ‘They’re Killing People’: Biden Denounces Social Media for Virus Disinformation http://wapo.st/3ex0cE1
// The president’s blunt statement capped weeks of frustration in the White House over the spread of vaccine disinformation on Facebook and other platforms.
CNN, Michael D’Antonio: The real reason Trump keeps telling the Big Lie http://cnn.it/3hMg0Vq
One by one, new excerpts of books about the end of Donald Trump’s presidency are bringing to light appalling reports on his final year in office.
In “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” Carol Loennig and Philip Rucker show how the nation’s top military leaders were poised to thwart a coup, had Trump or his allies attempted one. In “Landslide,” Michael Wolff writes that as late as the morning of January 6, Trump and his former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, may have believed the election wasn’t over. And in “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” Michael C. Bender depicts Trump shouting “treason!” and saying those who leaked the story about his family taking cover in the White House bunker during Black Lives Matter protests should be “executed.” (Trump has already denied much of the reporting in the new books.)
WaPo, Michael Bender: To Trump’s hard-core supporters, his rallies weren’t politics. They were life. http://wapo.st/2Tohk7K
// What 2020 looked like from the front row on the campaign trail
AP: FACT FOCUS: A false narrative of 74K extra votes in Arizona http://bit.ly/3BlXtY3
ForensicNews, Scott Stedman: Inside a Rudy Giuliani Operation to Smear Joe and Hunter Biden http://bit.ly/3hHXpde
// SeeView Media was incorporated in Feb. 2020, the brainchild of Giuliani and Republican operatives Tim Yale and George Dickson III.
⭕ 15 Jul 2021
Forbes: FBI Signals It’s Looking At Whether Members Of Congress Assisted Capitol Siege http://bit.ly/3ey1n6a
// Asked during a press briefing whether the FBI is looking into Congressional employees and lawmakers, Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono replied that the Bureau is “looking at every piece of the puzzle” and “not leaving any stone unturned.”
💽 MSNBC, Rachel Maddow: Cyber Ninja’ company in AZ ballot stunt under investigation by House Oversight Committee http://on.msnbc.com/2VJhver
// Rachel Maddow reads excerpts from a new letter from the House Oversight Committee to the Cyber Ninja company, requesting documents and explanations as it opens an investigation into whether the clumsy “audit” stunt impinges on the right to a free and fair election.
NYT, Michelle Cottle: Trump’s ‘Team Kraken’ Lands in Hot Water http://nyti.ms/
// The city of Detroit, among other entities, has accused the pro-Trump legal team [L Lin Wood and Sidney Powell] of abusing the court system by pursuing a frivolous, error-riddled case. The city wants the offending lawyers punished financially and referred for possible disbarment.
🧵 RT @peterbakernyt Shades of Nixon and Schlesinger: In Trump’s final days in office, Milley fretted about a military coup and instructed generals to check with him before carrying out any illegal orders from the White House. @sbg1 📌 https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/1415835804887310336?s=20
⋙ NewYorker, Susan Glasser: “You’re Gonna Have a Fucking War”: Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran http://bit.ly/3z4IpvG
// Inside the extraordinary final-days conflict between the former President and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Esquire, Jack Holmes: This Is an Absolutely Damning Account of What Trump Was Up to on January 6 http://bit.ly/3B7JqFg
// As his supporters sacked the Capitol, the president did not lift a finger to stop the madness. Because he wanted it to continue. Because it was his last chance to stay in power.
“If I was going to do a coup,” said the former President of the United States, “one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley.” Later in the statement, he added that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs “had no courage or skill, certainly not the type of person I would be talking ‘coup’ with. I’m not into coups!”
Finally, an answer to the question of what it might have looked like if O.J. Simpson were cast in Mean Girls. But this statement also came in response to Milley’s comments in a new book from Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It, on Donald Trump’s disastrous final days in the big chair. In the book, Milley is depicted as fearing a coup attempt from the then-sitting president, working with the other Joint Chiefs on a plan to resign en masse if Trump attempted anything truly insane. Like some of us around here, Milley was gravely concerned by Trump’s moves after Election Day to purge the security apparatus and fill senior positions at the Pentagon and the Justice Department with people Milley perceived as more dependable loyalists, all while yelling that the election had been stolen from him and he was the rightful president for four more years. Leading up to January 6, “Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.”
Of course, Trump did do something insane. He drew his most enthusiastic supporters to Washington on the day Congress was set to confirm he would soon leave power and sent them down to the Capitol to try to prevent that certification from taking place. They proceeded to riot, attacking police officers with whatever was available and breaking into the seat of the national legislature. And as the situation spun out of control, another excerpt from Leonnig and Rucker’s book, published Thursday in the Washington Post, sheds some light on what the sitting president—and commander-in-chief charged with defending the Constitution and the homeland—was up to.
WaPo: ‘I Alone Can Fix It’ book excerpt: The inside story of Trump’s defiance and inaction on Jan. 6 http://wapo.st/3kq76yG
// Terror at the Capitol, delay at the Pentagon, resistance in the Oval Office and democracy hanging in the balance
⭕ 14 Jul 2021
WaPo: Joint Chiefs chairman feared potential ‘Reichstag moment’ aimed at keeping Trump in power http://wapo.st/3hHFqmY
In the waning weeks of Donald Trump’s term, the country’s top military leader repeatedly worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing reelection, comparing his rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during the rise of Nazi Germany and asking confidants whether a coup was forthcoming, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.
As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”
Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.
Portions of the book related to Milley — first reported Wednesday night by CNN ahead of the book’s July 20 release — offer a remarkable window into the thinking of America’s highest-ranking military officer, who saw himself as one of the last empowered defenders of democracy during some of the darkest days in the country’s recent history.
Milley — who was widely criticized last year for appearing alongside Trump in Lafayette Square after protesters were forcibly cleared from the area — had pledged to use his office to ensure a free and fair election with no military involvement. But he became increasingly concerned in the days following the November contest, making multiple references to the onset of 20th-century fascism.
After attending a Nov. 10 security briefing about the “Million MAGA March,” a pro-Trump rally protesting the election, Milley said he feared an American equivalent of “brownshirts in the streets,” alluding to the paramilitary forces that protected Nazi rallies and enabled Hitler’s ascent. ¤ Late that same evening, according to the book, an old friend called Milley to express concerns that those close to Trump were attempting to “overturn the government.” ¤ “You are one of the few guys who are standing between us and some really bad stuff,” the friend told Milley, according to an account relayed to his aides. Milley was shaken, Leonnig and Rucker write, and he called former national security adviser H.R. McMaster to ask whether a coup was actually imminent. ¤ “What the f— am I dealing with?” Milley asked him.
The conversations put Milley on edge, and he began informally planning with other military leaders, strategizing how they would block Trump’s order to use the military in a way they deemed dangerous or illegal.
If someone wanted to seize control, Milley thought, they would need to gain sway over the FBI, the CIA and the Defense Department, where Trump had already installed staunch allies. “They may try, but they’re not going to f—ing succeed,” he told some of his closest deputies, the book says.
In the weeks that followed, Milley played reassuring soothsayer to a string of concerned members of Congress and administration officials who shared his worries about Trump attempting to use the military to stay in office. ¤ “Everything’s going to be okay,” he told them, according to the book. “We’re going to have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to land this plane safely. This is America. It’s strong. The institutions are bending, but it won’t break.” …
After the failed insurrection on Jan. 6, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called Milley to ask for his guarantee that Trump would not be able to launch a nuclear strike and start a war. “This guy’s crazy,” Pelosi said of Trump in what the book reported was mostly a one-way phone call. “He’s dangerous. He’s a maniac.”
Once again, Milley sought to reassure: “Ma’am, I guarantee you that we have checks and balances in the system,” he told Pelosi.
Less than a week later, as military and law enforcement leaders planned for President Biden’s inauguration, Milley said he was determined to avoid a repeat of the siege on the Capitol.s “Everyone in this room, whether you’re a cop, whether you’re a soldier, we’re going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power,” he told them. “We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”
At Biden’s swearing-in on Jan. 20, Milley was seated behind former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, who asked the general how he was feeling. ¤ “No one has a bigger smile today than I do,” Milley replied. “You can’t see it under my mask, but I do.”
WaPo: Trump Organization CFO has resigned from the trust that controls the company, documents show http://wapo.st/
// Allen Weisselberg “has resigned from a trust set up to control all of the company’s assets — seemingly giving up his place at the top of the company’s formal hierarchy”
⭕ 13 Jul 2021
TheAtlantic, David Frum: There’s a Word for What Trumpism Is Becoming http://bit.ly/2U1dHoy
// [ Fascism ]; The relentless messaging by Trump and his supporters has inflicted a measurable wound on American democracy.
≣ 💽 ABCNews: President Joe Biden’s speech on voting rights: TRANSCRIPT http://abcn.ws/3z0dXmB
// His fiery speech was meant to put pressure on Congress to enact voting reforms.
🐣 RT @OversightDems NEW: Chairs @RepMaloney and @RepRaskin sent a letter to Douglas Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, requesting information on his companies’ role in the “audit” of nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona in the 2020 election. https://twitter.com/OversightDems/status/1415399315405787136?s=20/photo/1
⋙ OversightComm: Chairs Maloney and Raskin Launch Investigation into Privately Run ‘Audit’ of Arizona 2020 Election Results http://bit.ly/3kwDDTU
“Americans’ right to vote is protected by the Constitution and is the cornerstone of our democratic system of government,” the Chairs wrote. “The Committee is seeking to determine whether the privately funded audit conducted by your company in Arizona protects the right to vote or is instead an effort to promote baseless conspiracy theories, undermine confidence in America’s elections, and reverse the result of a free and fair election for partisan gain.”
💙 WaPo: Biden calls passing voting legislation ‘a national imperative’ and castigates voting restrictions based on ‘a big lie’ http://wapo.st/3iaj4d5
NYT: Russia’s most aggressive ransomware group disappeared. It’s unclear who made that happen. http://nyti.ms/3wx7tKg
WaPo: Biden to raise stakes for voting rights as GOP-led states impose restrictions http://wapo.st/3iaj4d5 “biggest threat to the integrity of U.S. elections since the Civil War”
President Biden on Tuesday will deliver his most forceful condemnation yet of the wave of voting restrictions proposed in Republican-led states nationwide — efforts the president will argue are the biggest threat to the integrity of U.S. elections since the Civil War.
Biden’s speech in the afternoon at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the city where he began his presidential campaign two years ago, will underscore how the “denial of the right to vote” is “grounded in autocracy, undemocratic, un-American and unpatriotic,” a White House official said.
“He will note that while voter suppression that these 21st century Jim Crow laws represent is sadly not unprecedented in American history — looking back to the KKK campaigns of terror, poll taxes, literacy tests, and the disenfranchisement of women and enslaved people — these new insidious moves to empower partisans over independent election authorities in terms of who counts the votes are new and extremely dangerous,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the president’s remarks.
In his speech, Biden will again underscore how dozens of federal judges have tossed out challenges to the 2020 election results, which the White House official said “stands as a model for the trustworthiness and precision of our system,” particularly as it unfolded during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
And Biden also plans to call for what the official characterized as a “new coalition” of activists, students and leaders from the faith, labor and business communities to help bolster voter education and eventual turnout at the polls.
💙 WaPo: ‘I Alone Can Fix It’ book excerpt: Inside Trump’s Election Day and the birth of the ‘big lie’ http://wapo.st/36zL9VS
// At the end of a tumultuous day, the defiant president refused to accept the signs that he was losing the White House contest to Joe Biden. “I won in a landslide and they’re taking it back,” Trump told advisers.
// Part one of an excerpt from “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.” Leonnig and Rucker will discuss this book during a Washington Post Live event on July 20.
⭕ 12 Jul 2021
WaPo: The Republican Party’s top lawyer called election fraud arguments by Trump’s lawyers a ‘joke’ that could mislead millions http://wapo.st/3r72f6R
⭕ 11 Jul 2021
CNN: Trump wins the CPAC straw poll as attendees clamor for him to run again http://cnn.it/3AUrjCH
🧵 RT @atrupar CPAC ATTENDEE: Trump won! ¤ TRUMP: It’s true. We all won. ¤ (Trump lost) 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1414334068217585666?s=20
// Trump at CPAC
⭕ 10 Jul 2021
⭕ 9 Jul 2021
WaPo: The rapid decline of White evangelical America? http://wapo.st/3e1NhtI
// New data suggests a bigger decrease than previously understood — including in the GOP
⭕ 8 Jul 2021
⭕ 7 Jul 2021
⭕ 6 Jul 2021
DailyBeast, David Rothkopf (7/6): We Still Won’t Admit Why So Many People Believe the Big Lie http://bit.ly/3BfZ7u0
// Six months after the insurrection it triggered, it’s clear that the stolen-election nonsense is just a drop in a tidal wave of bullshit.
⭕ 5 Jul 2021
🐣 RT @MSNBC Opinion | @speechboy71: The vaccine fight, rather than an outgrowth of Trump’s divisive presidency, is just another example of how polarization is not just transforming American society — it’s literally killing people. – @MSNBCDaily
⋙ MSNBC, Michael A Cohen: Happy 4th of July, America. Stop letting polarization kill you. http://on.msnbc.com/3hFTdt4
// In post-Trump America, political affiliation is now directly tied to life expectancy.
⭕ 4 Ju1 2021 🇺🇸
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw Exquisitely analyzed piece. ¤ Trump lawyers laid false claim #Weisselberg-#TrumpIndictments were “fringe benefits” case. ¤ Since then, DJT, Eric and Don Jr. have maintained that frame. So has much of the media! ¤ Top #TaxLaw expert demolishes that framing.
⋙ JustSecurity, Daniel Shaviro: The Weisselberg Indictment Is Not A “Fringe Benefits” Case http://bit.ly/3dHLvhb
// Grasping the Full Scope of the Alleged Criminal Scheme
⭕ 3 Ju1 2021
WaPo: FBI launches flurry of arrests over attacks on journalists during Capitol riot http://wapo.st/3qKfPgc
WaPo: Hours-long standoff between police, heavily armed men in Massachusetts ends with 11 arrests http://wapo.st/2TB1O8z “The men appear to be adherents of the ‘Moorish Sovereign Citizens’”
WaPo: Trump appears to acknowledge tax schemes while questioning whether alleged violations are crimes http://wapo.st/3qIlHXs
⭕ 2 Ju1 2021
⭕ 1 Ju1 2021
NYT, Richard Hasen: The Supreme Court Is Putting Democracy at Risk http://nyti.ms/3xegTLU
WaPo: Pelosi names Republican Cheney to select committee investigating Jan. 6 attack on Capitol by pro-Trump mob http://wapo.st/3jOnKb9
NYT: Trump Organization Is Charged With Running 15-Year Employee Tax Scheme http://nyti.ms/3qEBXsg
// The company was accused of helping its executives evade taxes on compensation by hiding luxury perks and bonuses.
WaPo Editorial: The Roberts court systematically dismantles the Voting Rights Act http://wapo.st/3wcMqN1
💽 MSNBC, 11th Hour: Trump’s business was just labeled a ‘criminal organization http://on.msnbc.com/3hh5l57
// Calling the charges against the Trump Org. something like a ‘million-dollar heist,’ MSNBC Legal Analyst Neal Katyal explains how New York prosecutors are effectively alleging that the former president’s business is a ‘criminal organization.’
WaPo, Max Boot: Two House votes show the GOP is an authoritarian, white-power party http://wapo.st/3wcndlB
⭕ 30 Jun 2021
💙 💽 NYT: Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video Investigation http://nyti.ms/3qGdJxZ
// The Times analyzed thousands of videos from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building to understand how it happened — and why. Here are some of the key findings.
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs Biden has correctly identified the global contest between democracy and autocracy as the overarching challenge of the era, @HalBrands
writes. Now comes the hard part. He must make his strategy real, and make it work.
⋙ ForeignAffairs: The Emerging Biden Doctrine http://fam.ag/360p16C
// Biden has identified the defining strategic challenge of the twenty-first century, but he faces daunting problems.
Esquire, Charles Pierce: Kristi Noem Is Activating Forces That She Does Not Understand and Will Never Be Able to Control http://bit.ly/2UImiwb
// It’s one thing for the wingnut welfare apparatus to fund think tanks and cultivate the Ben Shapiros. This is a step down a road other republics have traveled, never to be seen again.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WSJ: Trump Organization and CFO Allen Weisselberg Expected to Be Charged Thursday http://on.wsj.com/363PEHW
// The Manhattan district attorney’s first charges in three-year probe will focus on alleged tax-related crimes at former president’s company
HuffPo: ‘Utterly Deranged’ Donald Trump Has Full Meltdown http://bit.ly/3xbGbKv
// The ex-president attacked two key figures who enabled his agenda. [Barr and McConnell]
⭕ 29 Jun 2021
⭕ 28 Jun 2021
WaPo, Greg Sargent: William Barr’s bombshell about Trump is more revealing than it seems http://wapo.st/3jmjjnn
⭕ 27 Jun 2021
TheAtlantic, Jonathan Karl: Inside William Barr’s Breakup With Trump http://bit.ly/2SA2Jpk
// In the final months of the administration, the doggedly loyal attorney general finally had enough.
Barr, Levi, and Cipollone walked to the president’s personal dining room near the Oval Office. Trump was sitting at the table. Meadows was sitting next to him with his arms crossed; the White House adviser Eric Herschmann stood off to the side. The details of this meeting were described to me by several people present. One told me that Trump had “the eyes and mannerism of a madman.”
He went off on Barr. … ¤ Trump brought up Barr’s AP interview. ¤ “Did you say that?” ¤ “Yes,” Barr responded. ¤ “How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?” ¤ “Because it’s true.” ¤ The president, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.” ¤ Barr thought that the president was trying to control himself, but he seemed angrier than he had ever seen him. His face was red. …
“They saw the boxes going in!” Trump yelled, referring to the stories about boxes of illegal ballots being counted. ¤ “You know, Mr. President, there are 662 precincts in Wayne County,” Barr said. Trump seemed taken aback that he knew the exact number. “It’s the only county with all the boxes going to a central place, and you actually did better there this time around than you did last time. You keep on saying that the Department of Justice is not looking at this stuff, and we are looking at it in a responsible way. But your people keep on shoveling this shit out.”
“You know, you only have five weeks, Mr. President, after an election to make legal challenges,” Barr said. “This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are.” ¤ Interestingly, Trump didn’t argue when Barr told him that his “clown show” legal team had wasted time. In fact, he said, “You may be right about that.”
After going through his litany of claims—stolen ballots, fake ballots, dead people voting, rigged voting machines—Trump switched to other grievances, shouting at Barr for failing to prosecute Biden’s son Hunter. “If that had been one of my kids, they would have been all over him!” he said. By the end of the meeting, Trump was doing almost all of the talking. Why hadn’t Barr released John Durham’s report on the origins of the Russia investigation before the election? Why hadn’t he prosecuted former FBI Director James Comey? Trump was banging on the table. He said that Barr had been worthless. …
Politico: Former attorney general describes break with Trump on election fraud http://politi.co/3A4le5Y //➔ I guess if you’re not running for anything, you can afford to grow a conscience
// complete article; “It was all bulls—,” William Barr told The Atlantic.
William Barr said he believed it was his obligation to publicly state that there was no evidence of voter fraud in 2020 no matter how angry it made then-President Donald Trump, the former attorney general is quoted as saying in an article published in The Atlantic.
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told Jonathan Karl in the article headlined “William Barr Speaks.”
Barr added: “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bulls—.”
The former attorney general told Karl that he knew Trump would push him to conduct investigations and confirm the president’s frequently stated belief that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him — and that Barr suspected from the get-go that no widespread fraud had taken place.
He also said that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell — understandably concerned about upcoming Senate runoffs in Georgia — encouraged him to speak out about the integrity of the election.
Barr’s conclusion that there was no widespread fraud, which he shared with an Associated Press reporter at the start of December, drew the wrath of Trump, who spoke of himself in the third person.
“You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump,” Barr quoted Trump as saying in a subsequent meeting.
Karl wrote: “Barr thought that the president was trying to control himself, but he seemed angrier than he had ever seen him.”
Barr said he also told Trump that the president had undermined his own efforts by launching a scattershot, incoherent legal team (“a clown show”) to challenge election results — something which he said Trump did not disagree with.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Trump Organization attorneys given Monday deadline to persuade prosecutors not to file charges against it http://wapo.st/3zYDnCp
📊 WaPo, EJ Dionne: The Catholic bishops’ anti-Biden project is backfiring http://wapo.st/3dkNuYq “It’s the anti-Francis majority of American bishops, not liberals or Francis defenders, who would put politics ahead of faith, ideology ahead of theology, and partisanship ahead of fellowship”
The decision of right-wing Catholic bishops to begin drafting a statement that many of them said was aimed at President Biden and his reception of communion was not just a rebuke to him and to other Catholic Democrats. It was also an attack on Pope Francis, who had made clear that he did not want them to go down this divisive road. And it reinforced the suspicions of the church among progressive-leaning young people already alienated from Christian institutions that champion extreme forms of conservative politics.
A group of angry men (they are all men) seemed to want nothing to do with their brothers and sisters who believe that social justice and a radical concern for “the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged,” as Francis put it in 2018, should be at the heart of Catholic teaching.
No, they would relegate all this to an inferior status in comparison with opposition to abortion. Which is a shame because, in its day-to-day life, the church does a great deal to fight poverty, injustice and exclusion.
It’s the anti-Francis majority of American bishops, not liberals or Francis defenders, who would put politics ahead of faith, ideology ahead of theology, and partisanship ahead of fellowship. The 75 percent of bishops who voted on June 17 to prepare the statement are importing the worst aspects of American politics into the life of the church. …
That’s especially true in light of a Pew Research Center survey this spring finding that given Biden’s views on abortion, 67 percent of U.S. Catholics still said that he should be allowed to receive communion; only 29 percent said he should not.
That this is even an issue shows how the viruses of the political right have infected the U.S. church leadership. It stands almost alone in the Catholic world in its singular focus on abortion, as Jason Horowitz reported in the New York Times. He noted that in “much of Europe and Latin America, it is essentially unthinkable for bishops to deny communion to politicians who publicly support abortion rights.”
Having pulled back ever so slightly, the bishops should now drop this ill-conceived project altogether. It will only continue to undercut their capacity — already strained by scandal — to preach, teach and persuade. They might take a moment to ponder the call to dialogue from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and brilliant writer whom Pope Francis lifted up in his 2015 speech to Congress.
“If I insist on giving you my truth, and never stop to receive your truth in return,” Merton wrote, “there can be no truth between us.”
⭕ 26 Jun 2021
NBCNews: Rudy Giuliani’s New York suspension proves dangers of Trump’s lies http://nbcnews.to/35R1k0C
// The court has sent a strong message about the real harm posed by those individuals who continue to push falsehoods about the 2020 election.
Disbarment — a punishment meted out by a court for code violations — is always devastating to a lawyer. This punishment occurs when a lawyer commits an offense that directly relates to his or her fitness to practice law. Such offenses may include dishonesty and negligent representation. Giuliani, whose license is now suspended, is likely on his way to permanent disbarment … ¤ [I]t certainly looks like Giuliani has finally pushed his luck too far. New York law, among other things, forbids a lawyer from “knowingly making a false statement of fact or law to a third person” in the course of representing a client (Rule 4.1) and “engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.” (Rule 8.4 (c)). In other words, Giuliani’s monthslong legal campaign on behalf of Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election through a series of baseless lawsuits and false public statements violated New York’s professional ethics code.
⭕ 25 Jun 2021
🐣 RT @propublica Rather than trying to halt the Jan. 6 march, Trump and his allies accommodated its leaders, according to text messages and interviews with Republican operatives and officials.
⋙ ProPublica: New Details Suggest Senior Trump Aides Knew Jan. 6 Rally Could Get Chaotic http://bit.ly/3jssilD
// Text messages and interviews show that Stop the Steal leaders fooled the Capitol police and welcomed racists to increase their crowd sizes, while White House officials worked to both contain and appease them.
🧵 RT @gtconway3 If journalists can uncover all this through the voluntary cooperation of sources, imagine what a commission, select committee, or grand jury could find out with subpoenas. 📌 https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1408967412075175938?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ RT @gtconway3 “‘Don’t denounce anything,’ he messaged his inner circle in January regarding the Capitol riot. ‘You don’t want to be on the opposite side of freedom fighters in the coming conflict. Veterans will be looking for civilian political leaders.'”
⋙ ProPublica New Details Suggest Senior Trump Aides Knew Jan. 6 Rally Could Get Chaotic http://bit.ly/3hdx7Oz
// Text messages and interviews show that Stop the Steal leaders fooled the Capitol police and welcomed racists to increase their crowd sizes, while White House officials worked to both contain and appease them.
NYT: They Seemed Like Democratic Activists. They Were Secretly Conservative Spies. http://nyti.ms/3xYBXpp
// Operatives infiltrated progressive groups across the West to try to manipulate politics and reshape the national electoral map. They targeted moderate Republicans, too — anyone seen as threats to hard-line conservatives.
WaPo: Justice Dept. sues state of Georgia over new voting restrictions http://wapo.st/3jf5lDP
🐣 RT @mccafffreyr3 Let this sink in. Tucker Carlson on live Fox TV called Gen Mark Milley the Chairman of the JCS “Stupid” and a “Pig”. Why hasn’t he been terminated? Who talks like this about a public official? Mark Milley …Princeton and Colombia. Years in combat.
NYT: Trump Aides Prepared Insurrection Act Order During Debate Over Protests http://nyti.ms/3h6C63r
// President Donald Trump never invoked the act, but fresh details underscore the intensity of his interest last June in using active-duty military to curb unrest.
⭕ 24 Jun 2021
WaPo, Aaron Blake: The most brutal debunking of Trump’s fraud claims yet — from Republicans http://wapo.st/3xLJEiE
WaPo: Giuliani’s N.Y. law license suspended in connection with efforts to overturn 2020 election http://wapo.st/3xS68P6
WaPo: Inside the ‘shadow reality world’ promoting the lie that the presidential election was stolen http://wapo.st/
// Wealthy allies of former president Donald Trump have spent millions on films, rallies and other efforts to tout falsehoods about the 2020 vote.
⭕ 23 Jun 2021
WaPo: In sentencing regretful Capitol protester, federal judge rebukes Republicans http://wapo.st/3d8gItu
⭕ 22 Jun 2021
⭕ 21 Jun 2021
NBCNews: Not acceptable’: Obama slams GOP plan to filibuster voting rights bill http://nbcnews.to/3d29VSd
// “They’re suddenly afraid to even talk about these issues and figure out solutions,” the former president said of Republican opposition to the For the People Act.
⭕ 20 Jun 2021
⭕ 19 Jun 2021
⭕ 18 Jun 2021
⭕ 17 Jun 2021
WaPo, Philip Bump: How the right is trying to reshape the history of the Jan. 6 riot http://wapo.st/3gGGmb4
WaPo, Vladimir Kara-Murza (2017): Putin’s dark cult of the secret police http://wapo.st/3vJs8dr (Kara-Murza is a Russian dissident leader; this article not only proved prophetic for Russia but offers warnings the United States)
After the coup attempt was defeated — as thousands of Muscovites went out into the streets and literally stood in front of the tanks — the KGB’s headquarters on Lubyanka Square was the first symbolic target of the crowds. On the evening of Aug. 22, people began spontaneously gathering on Lubyanka in a rally that culminated in the dismantling of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founding director of the Cheka. The “Iron Felix” hanging from a noose as it was lifted from its pedestal remains one of the most enduring images of the Russian democratic revolution. …
⭕ 16 Jun 2021
⭕ 15 Jun 2021
WaPo Editorial: The nation cannot forget Donald Trump’s betrayal of his oath http://wapo.st/2SueLRb
WaPo: Adam Schiff: The Justice Department must be depoliticized http://wapo.st/3gz7MOJ
⭕ 14 Jun 2021
WaPo: NATO expands focus to China, a win for Biden in his first trip to the battered alliance http://wapo.st/2Sy4gfv
WaPo, Michael Gerson: America’s contest of nightmares isn’t even close http://wapo.st/3gyPQnh Extreme “wokeness” can be an irritant; fascistic Trumpism is an existential threat to the republic
WaPo: Russia, U.S. and other countries reach new agreement against cyber hacking, even as attacks continue http://wapo.st/3cIMltl
⭕ 13 Jun 2021
sick
⭕ 12 Jun 2021
sick
⭕ 11 Jun 2021
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Garland announces expansion of Justice Department’s voting rights unit, vowing to scrutinize GOP-backed voting restrictions and ballot reviews http://wapo.st/3gqn4Fv
WaPo, Aaron Blake: New questions about a key GOP impeachment witness for Trump http://wapo.st/359jE4K
When President Donald Trump faced his first impeachment in 2019, Republicans focused on a firsthand witness who they claimed helped exonerate Trump: Kurt Volker.
But new evidence calls into question a key portion of Volker’s testimony, in which he repeatedly downplayed personal knowledge that the investigations the Trump team sought in Ukraine involved now-President Biden.
Volker, who was Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, was one of the “three amigos” tasked by Trump to work with Ukraine. Despite turning over text messages that detailed the pressure campaign on Ukraine to launch investigations related to the Bidens, Volker’s testimony was frequently highlighted by Trump allies. That’s because he said hadn’t been aware of a quid pro quo in which Ukraine would be given something for launching politically convenient investigations for Trump. And so the GOP called him as its witness.
CNN this week published a recording of a call between Volker, Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and a top Ukrainian official, Andriy Yermak, from July 2019. In the call, Giuliani discusses the matters involving the Bidens with Yermak. Details of the call had previously been reported, but this gave us a fuller accounting.
The call doesn’t necessarily add a ton to the known facts about what Giuliani et. al. requested of Ukraine. We knew they wanted dirt on the Bidens, as Giuliani himself acknowledged very early on. …
“Heard from White House — assuming President [Zelensky] convinces trump he will investigate / ‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington” for Zelensky, Volker said. ¤ One of the witnesses Republicans initially highlighted, Sondland, later confirmed there was a quid pro quo, effectively turning him into a hostile witness for Trump. This would seem to point to valid questions about the testimony of a second key witness cited in Trump’s defense.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Merrick Garland: “The Civil Rights Division is going to need a lot more lawyers” announcing he will double it in 30 days & vigorously use existing laws including the Voting Rights Act, the Motor Voter Act, the Help America Vote Act & more to aggressively protect the right to vote
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 BREAKING: Attorney General Garland has announced that the Justice Department will review new and current state voting laws for violations, and publish new guidance on early voting, mail voting and voting audits.
WaPo: Senate Democrats threaten to subpoena Barr, Sessions for testimony over Justice Dept.’s secret pursuit of two House Democrats’ data http://wapo.st/2TVgtLv
⭕ 10 Jun 2021
💙 WSJ, Peggy Noonan: Why We Can’t Move On From Jan. 6 http://on.wsj.com/3iBqwjd
// If you weren’t appalled by what happened that day, you have given up on American democracy.
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Flashback: May 2019 💽 https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1403176488753455107?s=20/photo/1
Harris: Has the president or anyone at the WH ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?
Barr: Um. …
Harris: Seems you’d remember something like that and be able to tell us.
Barr: Yeah, but I’m trying to grapple with the word suggest.
WaPo: Trump Justice Dept. secretly subpoenaed records of two Democrats on House Intelligence Committee http://wapo.st/3pG1Ck5
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Hunting Leaks, Trump Officials Focused on Democrats in Congress http://nyti.ms/3gpKkTX
// The Justice Department seized records from Apple for metadata of House Intelligence Committee members, their aides and family members.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d “The recording of the conversation contradicts Volker’s sworn testimony to Congress that he never witnessed any attempt on the part of Trump and Giuliani to muscle Ukraine into launching an investigation of Biden, Trump’s possible opponent in the upcoming presidential election.” https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1403208029374398466?s=20/photo/1-2
WaPo: Alleged supporters of right-wing Three Percenters group charged in new Jan. 6 Capitol riot conspiracy http://wapo.st/359gUEp
WaPo, Greg Sargent: A red-state Democrat shows how to talk about ending the filibuster http://wapo.st/3itbnR0
💙 📊 Pew Poll: America’s Image Abroad Rebounds With Transition From Trump to Biden http://pewrsr.ch/3zh9EUS ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1403069507371950089?s=20/photo/1
// World view of US; But many raise concerns about health of U.S. political system
⭕ 9 Jun 2021
📔 HouseJudiciary: House Judiciary Committee Releases Transcript of Interview with Former White House Counsel Don McGahn http://bit.ly/356sEri
⋙ ≣ Full Transcript [pdf] http://bit.ly/3vajWCM 241p
📔 BostonGlobe: The case for prosecuting Donald Trump http://bit.ly/3cvLg7Y
// Week-long series; Saving American democracy for the long run requires a clear condemnation of the Trump presidency. That means making clear that no one is above the law.
⭕ 8 Jun 2021
📔 Senate Bipartisan Report Investigating the January 6 Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3gkCz1r
// Report focuses on the security, planning, and response failures related to the violent and unprecedented attack on January 6th Full text of the report and recommendations is available for download HERE
⋙ Full Report [pdf] : http://bit.ly/3w4QbEF 128p
Today, U.S. Senators Gary Peters (D-MI) and Rob Portman (R-OH), Chairman and Ranking Member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Roy Blunt (R-MO), Chairwoman and Ranking Member of the Committee on Rules and Administration, released a bipartisan report on the security, planning, and response failures related to the violent and unprecedented attack on January 6th.
The report also includes a series of recommendations for the Capitol Police Board, United States Capitol Police (USCP), federal intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense (DOD), and other Capital region law enforcement agencies.
“Thanks to the heroic actions of U.S. Capitol Police, D.C. Metropolitan Police, the National Guard and others – rioters on January 6th failed to achieve their goal of preventing the certification of a free and fair presidential election. The events of January 6th were horrific, and our bipartisan investigation identified many unacceptable, widespread breakdowns in security preparations and emergency response related to this attack,” said Senator Peters. “Our report offers critical recommendations to address these failures and strengthen security for the Capitol to prevent an attack of this nature from ever happening again.”
“On January 6th, brave law enforcement officers were left to defend not only those in the Capitol, but our democracy itself – and they performed heroically under unimaginable circumstances. At our first bipartisan hearing, I announced as Chair of the Rules Committee that our purpose was to find solutions and issue timely recommendations so it never happens again. This report lays out necessary reforms including passing a law to change Capitol Police Board procedures and improving intelligence sharing. I will work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to implement the recommendations in this report that are needed to protect the Capitol and, in turn, our nation,” said Senator Klobuchar.
“The January 6 attack on the Capitol was an attack on democracy itself. Today’s joint bipartisan congressional oversight report from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Rules Committee details the security and intelligence failures in the days leading up to the attack, the lack of preparedness at the Capitol, and the slow response as the attack unfolded,” said Senator Portman. “We make specific recommendations to address key failures in the Capitol Police Board structure and processes; ensure Capitol Police has the training and equipment necessary to complete its mission; update how the intelligence agencies assess and issue intelligence bulletins, particularly as it relates to social media; enhance communications between the chain of command at the Department of Defense; and ensure timely and effective cooperation and coordination amongst federal, state, and local law enforcement. We must address these failures and make the necessary reforms to ensure this never happens again.”
“Over the past five months, our committees have worked together in a bipartisan way to thoroughly investigate the intelligence and security failures prior to and on January 6, and to develop recommendations to address them,” said Senator Blunt. “These recommendations are based on an extensive fact-finding effort that included interviews with key decision makers, firsthand accounts from law enforcement personnel, and the review of thousands of documents. Our focus now should be on immediately implementing these recommendations. We owe it to the brave men and women who responded that day to do everything we can to prevent an attack like this from ever happening again, and in every instance ensure that the Capitol Police have the training and equipment that they need.” … …
WaPo: Capitol Police had intelligence indicating an armed invasion weeks before Jan. 6 riot, Senate probe finds http://wapo.st/2T68jj2
The U.S. Capitol Police had specific intelligence that supporters of former president Donald Trump planned to mount an armed invasion of the Capitol at least two weeks before the Jan. 6 riot, according to new findings in a bipartisan Senate investigation, but a series of omissions and miscommunications kept that information from reaching front-line officers targeted by the violence.
A joint report, from the Senate Rules and Administration and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees, outlines the most detailed public timeline to date of the communications and intelligence failures that led the Capitol Police and partner agencies to prepare for the “Stop the Steal” protest as though it were a routine Trump rally, instead of the organized assault that was planned in the open online.
“There were significant, widespread and unacceptable breakdowns in the intelligence gathering. . . . The failure to adequately assess the threat of violence on that day contributed significantly to the breach of the Capitol,” Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the homeland security panel, told reporters. “The attack was, quite frankly, planned in plain sight.”
[T]he report provides a vivid picture of how poor communication and unheeded warnings left officers underequipped to face violent threats about which they had not been made aware, leaving the Capitol vulnerable to an attack that otherwise might have been preventable.
Giving the Capitol Police chief the power to call up the National Guard in emergencies is among the report’s 20 bipartisan recommendations for improving the Capitol’s security posture in the future — and the subject of forthcoming legislation from Rules and Administration Committee leaders, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). The recommendations also include pointed suggestions for federal agencies, such as exhorting the Defense Department and the D.C. National Guard to devise a standing plan for protecting the Capitol and mounting a faster response to terrorist threats.
The report faults slow mobilization and poor interdepartmental communication — not any sort of stand-down order from the White House, as some Trump critics had speculated — for the fact that it took the National Guard more than three hours to respond to pleas for help from the Capitol during the attack. According to its findings, it was Army staff — not Trump — expressing early reservations about a military intervention, while the Army secretary claimed he was never informed that the D.C. National Guard had a quick reaction force “ready to go” to the Capitol, just awaiting his approval.
⭕ 7 Jun 2021 🎂
🔊 CNN: Exclusive: New audio of 2019 phone call reveals how Giuliani pressured Ukraine to investigate baseless Biden conspiracies http://cnn.it/3cpGI32
NYT: Rejecting Biden’s Win, Rising Republicans Attack Legitimacy of Elections http://nyti.ms/3uYzUjh
// The next generation of aspiring G.O.P. congressional leaders has aggressively pushed Donald Trump’s false fraud claims, raising the prospect that the results of elections will continue to be challenged through 2024.
WaPo, Rosalind Helderman: Trump allies’ push for ballot reviews started quietly in Pa. http://wapo.st/3iwjtYS
// In December, Republican state senators asked several counties in the state to allow a private company to scrutinize ballots cast last fall, a tactic that allies of former president Donald Trump are seeking to employ across the country.
WaPo, Greg Sargent: Republican loyalty to Trump isn’t just about the ‘big lie.’ It’s much worse. http://wapo.st/3x8QvCL The audits and examinations are “dry runs in manufacturing fake rationales for treating legitimate (but despised) election outcomes as illegitimate”
The idea behind these audits and examinations isn’t merely to rewrite the history of Trump’s loss to flatter him and/or energize his supporters. ¤ Instead, these should be seen as dry runs in manufacturing fake rationales for treating legitimate (but despised) election outcomes as illegitimate, thus fake-justifying maximal procedural efforts to overturn them.
WaPo, Max Boot: Too many people are still underestimating the Trump threat http://wapo.st/3we8eby “Donald Trump’s secret weapon has always been that it is hard for educated people to take him seriously”
Former president Donald Trump’s secret weapon has always been that it is hard for educated people to take him seriously. He acts like a preening buffoon with pretensions of grandeur — doltish and delusional in equal measure. Everything about him, from his orange tan and bad combover to his insistence that he is a “very stable genius,” screams: Are you kidding me?
How can we take seriously someone who insisted that taking hydroxychloroquine, or possibly injecting bleach, could cure covid-19? Or who keeps on claiming, as he did in North Carolina on Saturday, that the election was “the crime of the century” even though more than 60 lawsuits alleging election irregularities have been dismissed by the courts?
Now Trump is avidly tracking a cuckoo audit of votes in Maricopa County, Ariz., where a group of conspiracy theorists is looking for evidence of bamboo fibers to show that fraudulent ballots were shipped from Asia. Most bizarre of all, Trump reportedly now insists that he will be reinstated as president in August. Doesn’t this ignoramus know there is no reinstatement clause in the Constitution?
But while Trump is not a serious person, he is a serious threat to our democracy — and we make a grave mistake if we dismiss him as a punch line. We’ve committed that blunder before. Recall that the star of “The Apprentice” was driven to run for the presidency partly because of the ridicule he received from comedian Seth Meyers and then-President Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Meyers even said: “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican — which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”
When Trump did run in 2015, most of the bien pensant refused to take him seriously. HuffPost initially announced that it was covering his campaign in its entertainment, not politics, section, because “Trump’s campaign is a sideshow.” (That decision was reversed in December 2015.) The Hillary Clinton campaign hoped Trump would win the Republican nomination because he was seen as so easy to beat. I, too, never imagined Trump would win a single primary, much less the Republican nomination, much less the presidency
Trump benefited, even more than George W. Bush, from being “misunderestimated” by his opponents. The same has been true of many demagogues. For rational people, it’s hard to take seriously preening popinjays such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Like Trump, many of them have also been in denial about covid-19. Lukashenko, for example, said people could take a sauna or drink vodka to “poison the virus,” and Bolsonaro insisted Brazilians “never catch anything.”
… What has made dictators and demagogues so dangerous is their ability to pull vast numbers of people into their personal delusions — to turn their paranoid fantasies and megalomaniacal dreams into a harsh reality for millions. ¤ Trump has the same malign gift. Despite presiding over what was arguably the worst presidency in U.S. history — with 400,000 dead from covid-19 during his term and the economy in ruins — he won more votes in 2020 (74.2 million) than in 2016 (62.9 million). Now, even after having incited a mob attack on the Capitol, Trump enjoys the approval of roughly 80 percent of Republicans. A Reuters-Ipsos poll even found that 53 percent of Republicans believe Trump is the “true president” now. …
I’m relieved that the news media are not covering Trump’s every inane and ignorant pronouncement, as they did in 2015 and 2016, because that only increased his appeal. But, please, don’t make the same mistake we made back then of assuming he is not a viable candidate for the presidency. His ability to hornswoggle tens of millions of voters is no laughing matter.
🧵 RT @SteveSchmidtSES History is not science, there are no algorithms or immutable laws. There is only memory and evidence. The history we all share and our understanding of it is highly variable and dependent on the story tellers. Where I grew up, everyone I ever met shared a story. (1) 📌 https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1401980212687028226?s=20
🐣 RT @ZelenskyyUa Thank you @POTUS @JoeBiden for inviting me to visit the @WhiteHouse in July during our phone conversation. I look forward to this meeting to discuss ways to expand strategic cooperation between Ukraine and #USA
RawStory: ‘QAnon Shaman’ Jacob Chansley moved to federal prison for ‘forensic evaluation’ – Raw Story – Celebrating 17 Years of Independent Journalism http://bit.ly/3w2VJzx
⭕ 6 Jun 2021
📊 WaPo, EJ Dionne: The GOP superspreaders of Trump’s contagion http://wapo.st/2T5raus
Donald Trump took his campaign against American democracy to North Carolina on Saturday and offered a rambling, grievance-laden harangue that ought to catalyze Republican leaders to repudiate a man whose lies, bigotry and irrationality are turning their party into a moral sinkhole.
Fat chance, I know. But Republicans should watch Trump’s 90-minute diatribe in its entirety. They might realize that tying their fate to a washed-up demagogue and the extremists he cultivates is not only an affront to decency. It could also be a colossal political mistake.
Most Washington Republicans say they want to “move on” from Trump. But they avoid anything that might offend his delicate sensibilities or those of his supporters. ¤ Sorry, guys, but you won’t be able to “move on” to the responsible governing you purport to believe in until you confront the anti-democratic virus in your party and the vile man spreading the contagion. …
Take the bizarre QAnon conspiracy. Pollsters at PRRI recently asked Americans if they agreed or disagreed that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
An astonishing 23 percent of Republicans agreed, and 28 percent of Republicans agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
How far do things have to go before GOP leaders join a brave few in their party in insisting that enough is enough? We’ve already had a violent assault on the Capitol, yet only 35 GOP House members and six senators were willing to support a bipartisan investigation into the events of Jan. 6. Silence or, at best, mumbled words of dissent leave the conspiracists, the advocates of violence and the believers in Trump’s nonsense unchallenged.
The GOP figures that staying close to Trump will rally his supporters to the polls in 2022. But Republican pollster Whit Ayres cites the 2017 governor’s race in Virginia as a cautionary tale: Turnout went up in pro-Trump rural counties but “went up far more in anti-Trump suburban and metropolitan counties,” leading to the defeat of Republican Ed Gillespie by Democrat Ralph Northam.
⭕ 5 Jun 2021
WaMonthly, David Atkins: Conservative Conspiracy Theories Around COVID Are About to Get Much Worse http://bit.ly/3wKUoxN
≣ Rev[.]com: Donald Trump Speech Transcript at North Carolina GOP Convention Dinner June 5 http://bit.ly/3z7dJuH
WaPo: Joe Biden: My trip to Europe is about America rallying the world’s democracies http://wapo.st/3uTAxdV
WSJ: G-7 Nations Agree on New Rules for Taxing Global Companies http://on.wsj.com/3cgr9L2
// Deal marks step toward adopting a global minimum corporate-tax rate sought by Biden administration
⭕ 4 Jun 2021
WaPo, Phillip Bump: Mike Lindell’s ‘fraud’ allegations are even more ridiculous than you might think http://wapo.st/3cfhapi
WaPo: Pence hopes the people who wanted to murder him on Jan. 6 will consider voting for him in 2024 http://wapo.st/3pm00eY
“Up to the 18th century, double negatives were used to emphasize negation” ~ Wikipedia http://bit.ly/34NRWu7 I guess it depends on your definition of “new”; to me it’s new; exceptions exist in certain regional dialects (“ain’t no”)
WaPo: Facebook suspends Trump for 2 years in response to Oversight Board ruling http://wapo.st/2T0mXbK
// The changes in response to the Oversight Board could reshape how the company treats inflammatory political figures.
⭕ 3 Jun 2021
WaPo: Facebook to end a longtime exception made for politicians who break its rules http://wapo.st/2T0mXbK
// The change is part of a series of responses to the Facebook Oversight Board’s ruling on former president Trump.
🐣 RT @HowardMortman “Tragedy in nations Capitol. Jan 6 was dark day in history of Capitol…Thanks to swift action of Capitol Police…That same day we reconvened Congress & did our duty…Trump & I spoken several times since left office. I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye to eye on that day” ¤ Pence 💽 https://twitter.com/HowardMortman/status/1400605089165975552?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tedlieu We have known for quite some time that #TrumpIsNotWell. But most @GOP legislators are not delusional. Their promotion of the #BigLie is a conscious decision to lie to the American people and to erode our democracy. And they still can’t identify who stole the election.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln #TrumpIsNotWell: “Donald Trump really does believe that he, along with two former GOP senators, will be ‘reinstated’ to office this summer.”
⋙ NationalReview: Maggie Haberman Is Right http://bit.ly/3wYDcEy
// Donald Trump really does believe that he, along with two former GOP senators, will be ‘reinstated’ to office this summer.
NYT: White House Warns Companies to Act Now on Ransomware Defenses http://nyti.ms/3igtZDy
// An open letter urged them to take many of the defensive steps that the federal government requires of its agencies and contractors.
TheAtlantic, Adam Serwer: The Capitol Rioters Won http://bit.ly/3cdNqcA
// Although some Republican leaders deplored their violence, most have come to support the rioters’ claim that Trump’s defeat meant the election was inherently illegitimate.
⭕ 2 Jun 2021
WaPo: Trump has grown increasingly consumed with ballot audits as he pushes falsehood that election was stolen http://wapo.st/3yYkpve
WaPo: Tampa man pleads guilty to felony in Jan. 6 Capitol riot; his recommended prison sentence could set bar for other cases http://wapo.st 3wRvrAh
WaPo, George T Conway III: Republican senators’ failure to investigate Jan. 6 is worse than their impeachment performance http://wapo.st/3g8Tsfo
They acquitted him even though they surely recognized, as their own leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), blisteringly said on the floor on Feb. 13 after voting to acquit, that Trump had engaged in a “disgraceful — disgraceful — dereliction of duty.” Rather than “do his job,” McConnell said, Trump “watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded,” hoping “to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”
And they did so out of raw political fear, this time without fig leaves. McConnell’s own leadership colleague, minority whip Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), actually admitted that Republicans feared that the commission’s findings “could be weaponized politically and drug into next year,” a midterm election year.
[I]f Republicans are worried about what would happen if the public learned more of the truth about Jan. 6, they have only themselves to blame. ¤ After all, they were the ones who acquitted Trump in the first impeachment trial and let him remain in office. They were the ones who stood mute before Jan. 6 as Trump propagated the “big lie” after the election. They were the ones who left open the horrifying prospect of letting Trump hold office again. They are the ones who continue to wish his wrongs away.
They quiver in fear of the man who cost them the presidency and both houses of Congress. As they continue to quake, the “big lie’s” cancer upon democracy grows, with spurious election audits in pursuit of fantasies of fraud, and with some insanely claiming — reportedly including Trump himself — that he’ll be “reinstated” in due course.
Four years of Trump have led to the Republican Party becoming a threat to democracy, a declining sect dominated by crackpots, charlatans and cowards. Of these, it’s the cowards, including the senators who killed last week’s legislation, who bear the most blame.
⭕ 1 Jun 2021
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The Republican Party can never again be trusted to lead the United States of America.
WaPo, Max Boot: The Republican plot to steal the 2024 election http://wapo.st/2RawXyk “Senate Democrats have to choose between saving the filibuster and saving democracy. They can’t do both.”
The Brennan Center for Justice reports that “between January 1 and May 14, 2021, at least 14 states enacted 22 new laws that restrict access to the vote” and “at least 61 bills with restrictive provisions are moving through 18 state legislatures.” Those bills are designed not to avert nonexistent voter fraud but to avert another election defeat for Republicans — and they are drawing perilously close to that goal.
While GOP efforts are ultimately aimed at the 2024 election, they will first make their impact felt in 2022. Off-year elections are always tough for the party in power. This one will be tougher still because of Republican-driven voter suppression, reapportionment and gerrymandering. Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report writes that Republicans will have full authority to redraw 187 congressional districts, while Democrats will control just 75. He estimates that redistricting in just four states — Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina — could be enough to deliver the House to Republican control.
Willingness to lie about election fraud has become a litmus test for Republicans, with the implicit threat of mob violence if they don’t go along. Republicans are so scared of Trump and his fanatical followers that most of them just voted against a bipartisan investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Many congressional Republicans will refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic win in swing states. If Republicans control Congress, they could deny the Democrats an electoral college majority and throw the election to the House — where each state delegation, regardless of population, would cast one ballot. Given that Republicans already control a majority of state delegations, they could override the election outcome. If that happens, it would spell the end of American democracy.
I hope I am being overly alarmist. I really do. But after the storming of the Capitol — and the Republican failure to hold the instigators to account — we have crossed a Rubicon. The best way to protect our electoral system is to pass the For the People Act, which would curb partisan gerrymandering and protect voting rights. Senate Democrats have to choose between saving the filibuster and saving democracy. They can’t do both.
⭕ 31 May 2021
≣ WhiteHouse[.]gov: Remarks by President Biden at the 153rd National Memorial Day Observance http://bit.ly/3z1PHRZ
// Arlington National Cemetery; partial transcript
We all know Memorial Day origins lie in the wake of the Civil War — a war for the freedom of all. A war for union. A war for liberty and for the preservation of the Constitution.
In calling for such today, General John Logan, commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued General Order Number 11. He directed the nation set aside a day to honor, and I quote, “those who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard throughout the land.”
You know, America has been forged in the battle and the fires of war. Our freedom and the freedom of innumerable others has been secured by young men and women who answered the call of history and gave everything in the service of an idea: the idea of America.
It’s the greatest idea in the long history of humankind. An idea that we’re all created equal in the image of Almighty God. That we’re all entitled to dignity, as my father would say, and respect, decency, and honor. Love of neighbor. They’re not empty words, but the vital, beating heart of our nation.
And that democracy must be defended at all costs, for democracy makes all this possible. Democracy — that’s the soul of America, and I believe it’s a soul worth fighting for, and so do you; a soul worth dying for. Heroes who lie in eternal peace in this beautiful place, this sacred place, they believed that too.
The soul of America is animated by the perennial battle between our worst instincts — which we’ve seen of late — and our better angels. Between “Me first” and “We the People.” Between greed and generosity, cruelty and kindness, captivity and freedom.
The Americans of Lexington and Concord, of New Orleans, Gettysburg, the Argonne, Iwo Jima and Normandy, Korea and Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and thousands of places in between — these Americans weren’t fighting for dictators; they were fighting for democracy.
They weren’t fighting to exclude or to enslave; they were fighting to build and broaden and liberate. They weren’t fighting for self; they were fighting for the soul of the nation, for liberty and simple fair play — simple fair play and decency.
Today, as we remember their sacrifice, we remind ourselves of our duty to their memory, to the future they fought for. We owe the honored dead a debt we can never fully repay. We owe them our whole souls. We owe them our full best efforts to perfect the Union for which they died.
We owe them the work of our hands and our hearts, to make real the promise of a nation founded on the proposition that all of us — all of us — all of us are created equal and deserve to be treated that way throughout our lives.
Democracy is more than a form of government. It’s a way of being; it’s a way of seeing the world. Democracy means the rule of the people — the rule of the people. Not the rule of monarchs, not the rule of the moneyed, not the rule of the mighty — literally, the rule of the people.
The lives of billions, from antiquity to our own hour, have been shaped by the battle between aspirations of the many and the greed of the few. Between people’s right to self-determination and the self-seeking of the dictator. Between dreams of democracy and appetites for autocracy, which we’re seeing around the world.
Our troops have fought this battle on fields around the world, but also the battle of our time. And the mission falls to each of us, each and every day. Democracy itself is in peril, here at home and around the world.
What we do now — what we do now, how we honor the memory of the fallen, will determine whether or not democracy will long endure. We all take it for granted. We think we learned in school. You have to — every generation has to fight for it.
But, look, it’s the biggest question: Whether a system that prizes the individual, that bends towards liberty, that gives everybody a chance at prosperity — whether that system can and will prevail against powerful forces that wish it harm.
All that we do in our common life as a nation is part of that struggle. The struggle for democracy is taking place around the world — democracy and autocracy. The struggle for decency and dignity — just simple decency. The struggle for posterity — prosperity and progress. And, yes, the struggle for the soul of America itself.
Folks, you all know it: Democracy thrives when the infrastructure of democracy is strong; when people have the right to vote freely and fairly and conveniently; when a free and independent press pursues the truth, founded on facts, not propaganda; when the rule of law applies equally and fairly to every citizen, regardless of where they come from or what they look like.
Wherever Americans are, there — there is democracy: churches and synagogues and mosques, neighborhoods and coffee shops and diners, bleachers at kids’ baseball or soccer games, libraries and parks. Democracy begins and grows in the open heart and the impetus to come together for a common cause.
And that’s where it will be preserved. For empathy is the fuel of democracy. Let me say that again: Empathy — empathy is the fuel of democracy, a willingness to see each other — not as enemies, neighbors. Even when we disagree, to understand what the other is going through.
To state the obvious: Our democracy is imperfect. It always has been. But Americans of all backgrounds, races, creeds, gender identities, sexual orientations, have long spilled their blood to defend our democracy. The diversity of our country and our arm- — and of our armed services is and always has been an incredible strength.
And generation after generation of American heroes have signed up to be part of the fight because they understand the truth that lives in every American heart: that liberation, opportunity, justice are far more likely to come to pass in a democracy than an autocracy.
If every person is sacred, then every person’s rights are sacred. Individual dignity; individual worth; individual sanctity; the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We say those words so often, but think of it: the right to vote, the right to rise in a world as far as your talent can take you, unlimited by unfair barriers of privilege and power — such are the principles of democracy.
So how would you put these noble principles into practice? How do we do that? How do we make the idea real, or as close to real as we can make it?
This nation was built on an idea — the only nation in the world built on an idea. Every other nation was built on ethnicity, geography, religion, et cetera.
We were built on an idea: the idea of liberty and opportunity for all. We have never fully realized that aspiration of our founding, but every generation has opened the door a little wider, and every generation has opened it wider and wider to be more inclusive, to include those who have been excluded before. It’s a mission handed down generation to generation: the work of perfecting our union.
In 1830, when we were a young nation, dis-unionists put their sectional interests ahead of the common good. A great senator, Daniel Webster, rose in the Capitol to defend the Union. To him, we were not just a collection of competing forces, but a coherent whole.
His cry, first uttered just across the Potomac in the Capitol, resonates even now. He stood on the floor and he said, “Liberty and Union, now on forever, one and inseparable.” Liberty and Union.
More than 142 years later, when I first came to the United States Senate — at a time when our country was so deeply divided over Vietnam, the struggle of civil rights, the fight over women’s rights — I had the notion that my first task, as I stood to make my first speech on the floor of the Senate — it all of a sudden hit me: I’m standing where Daniel Webster had stood; his desk was next to mine.
And I was struck by the weight of history, as corny as it sounds, by the legacy of the work we’re charged to carry forward: liberty and union, now and forever.
We must honor their sacrifice by sustaining the best of America, while honestly confronting all that we must do to make our nation fuller, freer, and more just. We must remember that we may find the light and the wisdom and, yes, the courage to move forward — in the words of that great hymn, fight as they “nobly fought of old.”
For in remembrance lies not just our history, but our hope. Not just our solemn remembrance, but our renewed purpose. Not just our solace, but our strength.
This Memorial Day, remember that not all of us are called to make the ultimate sacrifice. We all are called, by God and by history and by conscience, to make our nation free and fair, just and strong, noble and whole.
To this battle, may we now dedicate our souls, that our work may prove worthy of the blood of our fallen. For this work — the work of democracy — is the work of our time, and for all time. And if we do our duty, then ages still to come will look back on us and say that we too kept the faith. And there’s nothing more important, nothing more sacred, nothing more American than keeping the faith.
WaPo: After defeating restrictive voting bill, Texas Democrats send loud message: ‘We need Congress to do their part’ http://wapo.st/3fFundk
🔄 Wikipedia: 2021 storming of the United States Capitol http://bit.ly/3i3Uv2Y
// A request that this article title be changed to January 6 United States Capitol attack is under discussion
⭕ 30 May 2021
WaPo: Texas Democrats try to block restrictive voting bill before midnight deadline http://wapo.st/2RWnTO0
Texas Republicans scrambled late Sunday to approve one of the most restrictive voting bills in the country, as Democrats made a series of emotional pleas and threw up procedural objections in a last-ditch effort to defeat the measure.
The Republican-majority House took up the legislation after the Senate passed it early Sunday following a marathon overnight debate that stretched more than seven hours. The measure mirrors other GOP-backed legislation approved in Georgia, Florida and other states at the urging of former president Donald Trump, who has falsely claimed that his defeat in the 2020 election was tainted by fraud.
WaPo: Four more indicted in alleged Jan. 6 Oath Keepers conspiracy to obstruct election vote in Congress http://wapo.st/2TvbXmT
Four more Oath Keepers associates have been indicted and three were arrested in Florida in recent days in the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol, bringing the number of co-defendants charged in the largest conspiracy case from that day to 16, court records show.
Joseph Hackett, 51, of Sarasota, Fla., Jason Dolan, 44, of Wellington, Fla., and William Isaacs, 21, of Kissimmee, Fla., each face multiple counts in an indictment handed up Wednesday and unsealed Sunday in Washington. The three appeared Thursday before U.S. magistrates in Tampa, West Palm Beach and Orlando. ¤ The name of a fourth defendant not known to be in custody was redacted.
The four new defendants are charged with conspiring to obstruct Congress’s confirmation of the 2020 presidential election in joint session on Jan. 6. They are accused of forcing entry through the Capitol’s East Rotunda doors after marching single-file up the steps wearing camouflaged combat uniforms, tactical vests with plates, helmets, eye protection and Oath Keepers insignia.
🐣 RT @BillKristol The state of the GOP, May 30, 2021: ¤ Republican senators kill a Jan. 6 commission, Trump’s national security advisor calls for military coup, Republican governors and legislators cater to anti-vaxxers, & Texas Republicans make it harder to vote and easier to overturn an election.
⋙ 🐣 It’s awful, yes, but the GOP has been helped by trouble-makers since Nixon, stoked division and conspiracies since Gingrich and sought votes from the uninformed since the “Moral Majority.” There has not been a true leader since Eisenhower. Finnegan, begin again.
⭕ 29 May 2021
⭕ 28 May 2021
WaPo: The Senate vote on the bipartisan Jan. 6 commission showed Trump’s power and a government under duress http://wapo.st/34sM2P2
WaPo: Sen. Murkowski delivers pointed criticism of fellow Republicans, including McConnell, who oppose Jan. 6 commission http://wapo.st/2RNafNg
⭕ 27 May 2021
TheBulwark, Tim Miller: Mitch McConnell Saw the Insurrection Clearly and Then Decided He Liked It http://bit.ly/3vBELbf
// McConnell now considers protecting the insurrectionists a personal favor.
CNN: Prosecutors announce fresh charges against ‘Maga Caravan’ leader, others in January 6 insurrection http://cnn.it/3vAECVC
NYT: Prosecutors Investigating Whether Ukrainians Meddled in 2020 Election http://nyti.ms/3fv2OD8
// The Brooklyn federal inquiry has examined whether former and current Ukrainian officials tried to interfere in the election, including funneling misleading information through Rudolph W. Giuliani.
NYT: Paul Ryan Critiques Trump’s Grip on the Republican Party http://nyti.ms/3i03gLm
// In a speech, the former House speaker called on the Republican Party not to move forward in Donald Trump’s image, though he did not criticize the former president by name.
🐣 RT @MichaelSteele When you just don’t give a damn: A grieving mother leaves her home to ask GOP Senators to do the right thing. And they still say no. #January6thCommission @DeadlineWH w/ @NicolleDWallace
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “This mom has to leave her home, to come up to Capitol Hill, to ask these people to do the very thing they’ve been elected to do… It is unsightly to have Republicans… to say ‘I”ll meet with her but I’m still voting against her'” – @MichaelSteele w/
⋙ 🐣 RT @natsechobbyist [Rachel Vindman]] Betrayal. My heart aches for his family. COWARDS.
💙 🐣 Wow. Stock buybacks! I’ve been harping on this since 2014, when Wm Lazonick wrote “Profits Without Prosperity” in the Harvard Review of Business http://bit.ly/34lTmfh ¤ Biden on Economy. He’s talking about the End of Reagonomics. #TrickleDownDidnt
AP: GOP set to block 1/6 panel, stoking Senate filibuster fight http://bit.ly/3bXwwyL
⭕ 26 May 2021
📊 QuinnipiacPoll: 85% Of Republicans Want Candidates To Agree With Trump, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Americans Support Early Cut To Federal Jobless Benefit http://bit.ly/3wCRD14
As candidates begin to enter races for the 2022 mid-term elections, more than 8 in 10 Republicans (85 percent) say they would prefer to see candidates running for elected office that mostly agree with Donald Trump, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University national poll of adults released today. Overall, a majority of Americans (53 – 39 percent) say they would prefer to see candidates running for elected office that mostly disagree with Trump.
Asked whether they would like to see Trump run for president in 2024, Republicans say 66 – 30 percent they would. Overall, two-thirds of Americans (66 – 30 percent) say they do not want to see him run.
Six months after the 2020 presidential election, two-thirds of Republicans (66 – 25 percent) say they think that Joe Biden’s victory was not legitimate. Overall, Americans say 64 – 29 percent that Biden’s victory was legitimate. Among registered voters, it’s also 64 – 29 percent, which is fairly similar to polls taken in December 2020 and January 2021. [ ✛ more ]
WaPo: Mother and partner of fallen Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick request meetings with all GOP senators, urging them to back Jan. 6 commission http://wapo.st/34l4Yin
In the statement, which was included in the email, Gladys Sicknick said that her son and his fellow police officers “fought for hours and hours against those animals who were trying to take over the Capitol Building and our Democracy, as we know it.”
“Not having a January 6 Commission to look into exactly what occurred is a slap in the faces of all the officers who did their jobs that day,” she said in the statement. “Because of what they did, the people in the building were able to go home that evening and be with their families. Brian and many other officers ended up in the hospital. I suggest that all Congressmen and Senators who are against this Bill visit my son’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery and, while there, think about what their hurtful decisions will do to those officers who will be there for them going forward.”,
⭕ 25 May 2021
WaPo: Prosecutor in Trump criminal probe convenes grand jury to hear evidence, weigh potential charges http://wapo.st/3vo5mbW
⭕ 24 May 2021
sick in hospital
⭕ 23 May 2021
sick in hospital
⭕ 22 May 2021
⭕ 21 May 2021
SelectedWisdom, Clint Watts: Why Does Social Media Lead Us to Believe Things That Are Not True? http://bit.ly/3p3vtCG
// Overcoming vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. – Part 1 (linked series)
⭕ 20 May 2021
TheAtlantic, Peter Wehner: Trump Is Marching Down the Road to Political Violence http://bit.ly/34592TT
// The Republican Party must counteract lies rather than indulge them.
WaPo, Michael Gerson: The threat of violence now infuses GOP politics. We should all be afraid. http://wapo.st/3ve2EWj
WaPo: Several Republicans who oppose Jan. 6 commission are potential witnesses about Trump’s conduct that day http://wapo.st/341s79k
WaPo: The GOP keeps reinforcing the real reason it opposes a Jan. 6 commission http://wapo.st/3fxNKDQ
//. It’s as if Republicans were trying to prove they were just doing this for political reasons
⭕ 19 May 2021
WaPo: Attorney for ‘QAnon Shaman’ questions mental abilities of his client, others in Jan. 6 riot http://wapo.st/3fAIQpq
WaPo, Philip Bump: A significant Trump fear inches closer: Accountability http://wapo.st/3oInXNv
⭕ 18 May 2021
WaPo: Investigation of Trump Organization now exploring possible criminal conduct, N.Y. attorney general’s office says http://wapo.st/33TaSqO ¤
⭕ 17 May 2021
🐣 RT @BillKristol It’s a tricky moment, but it seems to me that pro-democracy Republicans, ex-Republicans, and conservatives should, for now
1) support elected Republicans, like Liz Cheney and the Maricopa Supervisors, fighting for democracy, &
2) mostly vote for Democrats in the general election.
⭕ 16 May 2021
WaPo, EJ Dionne: Democracy depends on two guys named Joe http://wapo.st/3bw4kCE “These are no ordinary Joes. I am, of course, speaking of President Biden and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) … At stake is the For the People Act”
⭕ 15 May 2021
WaPo: Republicans’ conflicting message: Embracing Trump election lie is key to prominence, just stop asking us about it http://wapo.st/2S0Pk8T
⭕ 14 May 2021
CNN: Biden administration gives House panel documents related to Trump hotel http://cnn.it/3byyvt7
WaPo: Republican chairman of Arizona county calls state-led election review ‘dangerous’ as tensions rise over 2020 recount http://wapo.st/3eMRQbW
WaPo: House members announce bipartisan deal for Jan. 6 commission http://wapo.st/3bsbckA
The proposed 10-member commission, which emulates the panel that investigated the causes and lessons of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, would be vested with subpoena authority and charged with studying the events and run-up to Jan. 6 — with a focus on why an estimated 10,000 supporters of former president Donald Trump swarmed the Capitol grounds and, more important, what factors instigated about 800 of them to break inside. Trump’s critics in both political parties view it as a means to bring further public scrutiny to his role in inspiring the violence.
“There has been a growing consensus that the January 6th attack is of a complexity and national significance that what we need [is] an independent commission to investigate,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, announcing that he had reached agreement with the panel’s top Republican, Rep. John Katko (N.Y.). “The creation of this commission is our way of taking responsibility for protecting the U.S. Capitol.”
On the heels of the commission deal, House Democrats on Friday also announced their proposal for $1.9 billion of supplemental funds to pay for security upgrades for the Capitol and other parts of the federal government.
The bill puts over a half-billion dollars toward hardening the Capitol and congressional office buildings with movable fences, door and window reinforcements, and additional security cameras and checkpoints. It also dedicates $21.5 million to stepping up security details for members facing threats, whether in Washington, their home districts or traveling between the two — and $18 million to better train and equip the U.S. Capitol Police to respond to riot situations.
But the largest part of the hefty spending bill — nearly $700 million — is simply to pay money owed to the Capitol Police, D.C. police, the National Guard and other federal agencies for costs they incurred in responding to the riot and its aftermath. It also dedicates more than $200 million to the federal courts to address threats to judges and to meet various other costs related to prosecuting those charged in connection with the insurrection.
The commission would have the power to subpoena witnesses, but not without an agreement between the Democrat-appointed chair and the Republican-appointed vice chair, or a majority vote of the panel. Current government officials, including those holding elective office, would not be allowed to serve on the panel, to maintain its independence.
The commission would be tasked with producing a final report detailing its findings, as well as any recommendations for preventing similar attacks in the future, by the end of this year, giving it only about six months to complete its work — if Congress approves the commission in short. By comparison, the 9/11 Commission took 20 months to publish its findings.
In his announcement, Thompson predicted that legislation would be on the House floor as soon as next week. While it is almost certain to gain majority support from the Democratic-led House, Republicans will have to decide whether to side with moderates like Katko or with GOP leaders who have resisted efforts to hold Trump accountable for the violence. Many Republicans fear that supporting the commission risks alienating the former president’s followers, a base of political support they consider vital to reclaiming majorities in the House and Senate.
DemocracyDocket, Marc Elias: The Big Lie is a Pillar of the State http://bit.ly/3uStwej
⭕ 13 May 2021
MotherJones: Leaked Video: Dark Money Group Brags About Writing GOP Voter Suppression Bills Across the Country http://bit.ly/3ojFc7e
// “We did it quickly and we did it quietly,” said the executive director of Heritage Action.
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: The stampede away from the GOP begins http://wapo.st/3yaoxYw
That’s where a new group of challengers to the GOP comes in. On Thursday, 150 former governors, members of Congress, Cabinet officials, senior administration officials, strategists and grass-roots leaders issued their own declaration of independence with an explicit threat to leave the party if the GOP does not abandon the MAGA mentality. In a document titled, “A Call to American Renewal,” the signatories reference Cheney’s ouster and write, “This ‘common-sense coalition’ seeks to catalyze the reform of the Republican Party and its recommitment to truth, founding ideals, and decency or, if unsuccessful, lay the foundation for an alternative.”
The group set out a list of principles, emphasizing democracy, constitutional order, truth, ethical government, conservation (“stewardship of America’s resources — natural, environmental and financial”), pluralism (rejecting the notion that America is defined by race, religion or birthplace) and rejection of “all forms of bigotry.”
Some of the stated principles hint at stances on current issues. In declaring they “oppose disenfranchisement of voters,” for example, the signatories position themselves as opponents of the voter suppression laws growing like weeds around the country. Other statements avoid specific positions, such as their support for “policies that further public safety, health, and defense as required for national sovereignty and prosperity.”
For now, Cheney and this group of dissident Republicans might embrace a common endeavor: stripping the bark off McCarthy and his enablers to make sure voters know the danger in handing over the House to MAGA cultists.
WaPo: CDC says fully vaccinated Americans no longer need masks indoors or outdoors in many cases http://wapo.st/3uO1hgH
// The relaxation of restrictions incentivizes people to get the shots and helps pave the way for a full reopening of society.
⭕ 12 May 2021
WaPo: U.S. has entered unprecedented climate territory, EPA warns http://wapo.st/3bmYvri
//. The Trump administration delayed the report, which cites urban heat waves and permafrost loss as signs of global warming, for three years
‼️ 🐣 RT @ jcartiller “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election” ¤ Kevin McCarthy
⭕ 11 May 2021
🐣 RT @BillKristol Liz Cheney’s speech marked her farewell to the House GOP leadership. But it also marked the beginning of an effort to save the Republican Party for democracy, freedom, and the rule of law. If that effort results in a 2024 presidential campaign, this speech will have launched it.
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Liz Cheney delivers defiant speech on House floor ahead of vote to oust her from G.O.P. leadership. http://nyti.ms/3eBAw9Q
Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming delivered a defiant last stand hours before facing a vote to purge her from House Republican leadership for her outspoken repudiation of former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies, declaring Tuesday night on the House floor that she would not sit back quietly as her party aided Mr. Trump’s attempts to undermine democracy.
Ms. Cheney, who is facing a vote Wednesday morning that is almost certain to succeed in ousting her from House Republicans’ No. 3 post, declared on Tuesday that the nation was facing a “never seen before” threat in a former president who provoked the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and who “has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him.”
“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” Ms. Cheney said. “I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence, while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”
The Wyoming Republican’s remarkable broadside illustrated her unrepentant response to the effort to dethrone her. She has cast her almost certain expulsion from the leadership ranks as a “turning point” for her party and told allies that the leadership post is simply not worth having if it requires her to lie.
Rather than fighting to hold onto her post, Ms. Cheney has embraced her downfall, offering herself as a cautionary tale in what she is portraying as a battle for the soul of the Republican Party. Emphasizing that framing Tuesday night, Ms. Cheney wore a replica pin of George Washington’s battle flag as she spoke on the House floor.
🐣 RT @stuartastevens What’s happening in this moment is that @RepLizCheney is becoming an international symbol for anti-authoritarian freedom. She is a dissident facing down a thuggish power structure just as Alexei Navalny is in Russia. We are a democracy in da
⋙ 🐣 “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds” — Mexican Proverb
NYT: Over 100 Republicans, including former officials, threaten to split from G.O.P. http://nyti.ms/2RbaC3L
Politico: House, Justice Department report deal on McGahn testimony http://politi.co/3o6OJ1E
// The “accommodation” to end the dispute over a subpoena for the former White House counsel does not involve former President Donald Trump, who could try to scuttle it.
🐣 RT @CNN The House of Representatives and the Biden administration say they have reached an agreement “in principle” on the long-running standoff over a subpoena for former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn to testify about the ex-President’s obstructive acts
🔆 This❗️⋙ CNN: House and Biden administration reach deal on subpoena for former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn’s testimony http://cnn.it/3xYFOE1
🐣 RT @djrothkopf Rep. Cheney is standing up for the country. Set her past politics aside for a moment. The stakes are very high right now and courage like hers is essential. There will be plenty of time for debating policies later…if we can save our democracy now. First things first.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom If the coalition for democracy includes everyone from Liz Warren to Liz Cheney, that’s a pretty big tent, and I’m in. ¤ If you’re one of the people whose purity demands that you can’t be in a coalition with either of them, you’re not focused on the real problem here.
≣ CNN: READ: Liz Cheney’s remarks on the House floor on the night before her expected removal from leadership post http://cnn.it/3uI4aQ6 transcript
⋙ CNN: Video: http://cnn.it/2SAKZcS
… “Today we face a threat America has never seen before. A former president, who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol in an effort to steal the election, has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him. He risks inciting further violence.
“Millions of Americans have been misled by the former President. They have heard only his words, but not the truth, as he continues to undermine our democratic process, sowing seeds of doubt about whether democracy really works at all.
“I am a conservative Republican and the most conservative of conservative principles is reverence for the rule of law. The Electoral College has voted. More than sixty state and federal courts, including multiple judges he appointed, have rejected the former president’s claims. The Department of Justice in his administration investigated the former president’s claims of widespread fraud and found no evidence to support them. The election is over. That is the rule of law. That is our constitutional process.
“Those who refuse to accept the rulings of our courts are at war with the Constitution.
“Our duty is clear. Every one of us who has sworn the oath must act to prevent the unraveling of our democracy. This is not about policy. This is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans. Remaining silent, and ignoring the lie, emboldens the liar.
“I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.
“As the party of Reagan, Republicans championed democracy, won the Cold War, and defeated the Soviet Communists. As we speak, America is on the cusp of another Cold War — this time with communist China. Attacks against our democratic process and the rule of law empower our adversaries and feed Communist propaganda that American democracy is a failure. We must speak the truth. Our election was not stolen, and America has not failed.
“I received a message last week from a Gold Star father who said, ‘Standing up for the truth honors all who gave all.’ We must all strive to be worthy of the sacrifice of those who have died for our freedom. They are the patriots Katherine Lee Bates described in the words of America the Beautiful: ‘Oh beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved and mercy more than life.’
“Ultimately, this is at the heart of what our oath requires — that we love our country more. That we love her so much we will stand above politics to defend her. That we will do everything in our power to protect our constitution and our freedom — paid for by the blood of so many.
“We must love her so much we will never yield in her defense.
“That is our duty.”
WaPo: Jeff Flake: In today’s Republican Party, there is no greater offense than honesty http://wapo.st/3vU1vD6
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” — George Orwell
Near the beginning of the document that made us free, our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
There you have it. From the very beginning of America, our freedom has been predicated on truth. For without a principled fidelity to truth and to shared facts, our democracy will not last.
On Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will most likely lose her leadership post within the House Republican Conference, not because she has been untruthful. Rather, she will lose her position because she is refusing to play her assigned role in propagating the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Cheney is more dedicated to the long-term health of our constitutional system than she is to assuaging the former president’s shattered ego, and for her integrity she may well pay with her career.
No, this is not the plot of a movie set in an asylum. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your contemporary Republican Party, where today there is no greater offense than honesty.
It seems a good time to examine how we got to a place where such a large swath of the electorate (70 percent of Republican voters, according to polling) became willing to reject a truth that is so self-evident.
This allergy to self-evident truth didn’t happen all at once, of course. This frog has been boiling for some time now. The Trump period in American life has been a celebration of the unwise and the untrue. From the ugly tolerance of the pernicious falsehood about President Barack Obama’s place of birth to the bizarre and fanatical fable about the size of inauguration crowds, to the introduction of the term “alternative facts” into the American lexicon, the party’s steady embrace of dishonesty as a central premise has brought us to this low and dangerous place.
I don’t know what will happen to Cheney politically after Wednesday. For me, I knew that I couldn’t support Trump’s election or reelection after his seminal falsehood about Obama’s birth certificate, to say nothing of the cascade of untruths, from the trivial to the consequential, that followed daily. I had hoped that, over time, my Republican constituents would feel differently about the former president, or at least value a Republican who pushed back, and that I could stand for reelection in 2018 with a reasonable chance of surviving a Republican primary. It soon became apparent that Republican voters wanted someone who was all in with a president that I increasingly saw as a danger to the republic. That could not be me, so I spoke out instead and didn’t stand for reelection.
When I became an unwitting dissident in my party by speaking in defense of self-evident truths, I assumed that more and more of my colleagues would follow me. I remain astonished that so few did. Congresswoman Cheney, I know how alone you must be feeling. But just know that history keeps the score, not Kevin McCarthy or Elise Stefanik.
In January 2018, three years before the Capitol insurrection, I said the following on the Senate floor:
“Mr. President, let us be clear. The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy cannot be overstated.”
Three years later, it’s clear that I didn’t know the half of it. The destructive effect of the president’s behavior — and the willingness of Republican elected officials to indulge, excuse, defend, justify and, in many cases, just roll with it — has taken a devastating toll.
It is elementary to have to say this, but we did not become a great nation by believing or espousing nonsense, or by embracing lunacy. And if my party continues down this path, we will not be fit to govern.
Cheney has proved her fitness, and today it seems that adherents to the “big lie” will cast her out. Hold your head high, congresswoman. Those of us who believe in American democracy and who live in objective reality are grateful that you have chosen to take a stand for truth — self-evident truth — regardless of the consequences.
⭕ 10 May 2021
WaPo, Michael Gerson: Meet Kevin McCarthy, political hollow man http://wapo.st/
I hereby nominate House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for the James Buchanan prize, awarded for monumental smallness in a time demanding leadership. The 15th president, you might recall, was a politician who tried to take both sides on a matter of conscience and chose to temporize rather than govern. In his 1857 inaugural address, Buchanan proclaimed that slavery was “happily, a matter of but little practical importance.” Five years later came Antietam.
It wasn’t easy, but McCarthy has managed to fill Buchanan’s teensy, tiny shoes. In a normal political time, it would make perfect sense for a minority leader to keep his caucus happy by throwing a controversial member of the House leadership off the lifeboat. It would make sense to avoid internal GOP debates, wait patiently for likely midterm victories and slip into the speakership with little fuss. It would make sense to take the easiest path to power — which runs, McCarthy believes, through Mar-a-Lago.
These are not, however, normal times. And in a trial testing this claim, McCarthy would be a prime witness. He is the one who made the desperate call to President Donald Trump when the Capitol was under siege by a violent mob Trump had assembled, incited and sent in McCarthy’s direction. McCarthy is the one who, during that chaotic conversation, was reportedly taunted by Trump for lacking the anti-constitutional enthusiasm of the rioters. McCarthy is the one who said that Trump “bears responsibility” for the Jan. 6 attack and floated the idea of censure.
There is a reason McCarthy now resists an impartial investigation of the events of Jan. 6: his honest testimony about Trump would be damning. And that is what makes his reversion to sycophancy so contemptible. McCarthy stands condemned by his own 10 minutes of moral clarity. His slinking to Mar-a-Lago to repent for disloyal honesty shows a tolerance for humiliation akin to masochism. Is the speakership worth achieving when it involves the sacrifice of your character, your country and your dignity?
McCarthy is engaged in an elaborate political ploy. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is making a moral and historical argument. “Trump is seeking,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work — confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law.” And the former president, she warns, is advancing such claims under the vague — and sometimes not so vague — threat of violence. In her view, this has created an inflection point for the GOP. Is it dedicated to the application of conservative ideas or to the maintenance of a personality cult? Does it defend constitutional norms or edge toward authoritarianism?
How does McCarthy respond to these substantive claims? He doesn’t. He probably couldn’t. So he dismisses the discussion as divisive and seeks to throw a deadly riot, including dead and wounded police officers, down the memory hole.
Instead of dealing with reality, McCarthy mouths partisan pablum that the actions of his own party have rendered ridiculous. “Democrats,” he says, “are destroying this nation” — when only the GOP is actively undermining the U.S. system of government. Democrats are responsible for “the greatest expansion of government” — when Trump in power spent money like a drunken socialist. The damage done by Democrats, insists McCarthy, will be irreversible — when it is Republicans who seek to make Trump’s malignant hold on the country permanent.
In handing over Cheney to the braying MAGA crowd, McCarthy explained: “Any member can take whatever position they believe in. … What we’re talking about is a position in leadership.” So it is McCarthy’s official view that “leadership” is no place for, well, leadership. It is a place for limitless fealty to a failed, corrupt and lawless former president. It is dedicated to Trump and Trump eternal.
… In a crisis of national identity, he has done what comes easy to him. He has shown only shallowness, cravenness and negligence. He has been a quailing, simpering paragon of mediocrity. It is the work of a political hollow man — a Buchanan all our own.
The bad news? McCarthy’s party does have a good shot at winning the House in 2022. Smallness of spirit and vision may well be rewarded.
The good news? The 15th president was followed by the 16th president. America has a history of finding large leaders in times of greatest need.
WaPo, Dana Milbank: Kevin McCarthy hits the bottom of the barrel http://wapo.st/3o4jiVH
A few days before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, the House Republican leader had a conference call with GOP lawmakers. On the call, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois warned McCarthy that his and other party leaders’ claims — that the election had been stolen and that Republicans had the power to block Joe Biden’s victory from being certified — “would lead to violence on January 6th.”
The response? Crickets, Kinzinger said, and then McCarthy “dismissively” blew off the warning. “Ok, Adam,” the GOP leader replied, “operator next question.” The rest — a Capitol ransacked, certification halted, five dead — is history.
Kinzinger brought all this up, he said, because McCarthy is seeking to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) as the No. 3 House Republican over her refusal to embrace the “big lie” that then-President Donald Trump won the election — the very lie that provoked the Capitol attack. “Liz is being chased out for one thing,” Kinzinger said. “… Her consistency. She said the same exact thing that Kevin McCarthy said on January 6th, which is Donald Trump is responsible” for the insurrection.
But while Cheney continues to speak the truth about Trump’s election fantasies and his role in the Capitol attack, McCarthy went to Florida soon after the insurrection to see a politically finished Trump and “resurrected him politically back to life.”
I’ve been on book leave this spring, watching from a distance as the Republican crazy train careened down the line toward Wit’s End:
● In Arizona, supporters of the defeated Trump are examining ballots with UV light to see “if there’s bamboo in the paper” in support of a conspiracy theory that 40,000 fake ballots were surreptitiously flown in from Asia.
● Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a Fox News-only signing ceremony for a state law that will disproportionately stop non-White people from voting.
● Republican legislators in Tennessee and Colorado have offered defenses of the three-fifths compromise.
● House Republicans attempted to form a caucus in support of “Anglo-Saxon” traditions.
● Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) got ensnarled in a sex-for-cash probe that involves an underage girl.
● Rudy Giuliani had his home and office raided by federal agents.
● Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that “100 percent of my focus is on standing up to this [Biden] administration.”
● And at the bottom of the barrel is McCarthy, now publicly backing Cheney’s ouster, which is likely to come to a vote Wednesday. Last week, in hot-mic remarks, McCarthy said: “I’ve had it with her. You know, I’ve lost confidence.” Instead, he’s backing a challenge by Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), who is far less conservative than Cheney but has the essential credential of supporting Trump’s “big lie” about the election — including the bamboo boondoggle in Arizona.
Kinzinger, like Cheney, is an outlier in the Trump-occupied GOP. Like others who voted to impeach, he has been censured by local Republicans at home and already has a primary challenger. But Kinzinger, who served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, isn’t the sort to live in fear of losing an election.
And so he has been relentless in calling out McCarthy’s cowardice. He has tweeted about McCarthy’s attempts to whitewash Jan. 6. He said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the Republican Party is “basically the Titanic … in the middle of this slow sink” — a condition caused when McCarthy “put the paddles on Donald Trump and resurrected him in the party.”
Kinzinger told me Monday afternoon that he thinks McCarthy, once a good friend, has made an ends-justify-the-means calculation to “accept the lie at the moment so we can win the majority and then address it.” He thinks that only about 10 House Republicans are dumb enough to genuinely believe that Trump won the election. The rest simply fear primary challenges and therefore accept McCarthy’s belief that “winning a majority was more important than a clear-eyed recognition of what happened on January 6.”
But Kinzinger sees this craven acceptance of lies destroying the Republican Party. “I have watched us compromise with crazy basically every two years,” he said. “All that becomes is the starting position for the next iteration towards crazy.”
💙 WaPo, Eugene Robinson: The biggest threat to America is the Republican break with reality http://wapo.st/33vlQmj “For Democrats, losing next year’s midterm elections is simply not an option”
The greatest threat to our nation’s future is not covid-19 or the rise of China or even the existential challenge of climate change. It is the Republican Party’s attempt to seize and hold power by offering voters the seductive choice of rejecting inconvenient facts and basic logic.
For the American experiment and people to survive, much less prosper, this iteration of the GOP must fail.
The blind-loyalty-even-to-dishonest-insanity Republican litmus test that is about to cost Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) her leadership job is only the most acute manifestation of the party’s decline into utter irresponsibility. It’s bad enough that those who want to remain in good standing must embrace the “big lie” about purported fraud in the 2020 election. But the requirement doesn’t stop there. On issue after issue, Republicans are cynically adopting a kind of pre-Enlightenment insistence on the primacy of belief over evidence.
Honest leadership would require leveling with GOP constituents about the impossibility of turning back the flow of history. It would involve telling voters that globalization and information technology have forever changed the U.S. economy. It would involve proposing solutions for the way things are — or are becoming — rather than the way some might want them to be.
And Democrats who want to make real progress on any of these urgent issues need a Republican Party with that fortitude. We laugh about the party being obsessed about Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Dr. Seuss and whether a few transgender girls can run on their high school track teams at not just our own peril, but that of our political system.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) understands how Trump’s lies about the election led directly to the Capitol insurrection; he told us so himself on Jan. 6. But now he is ready to boot Cheney out of her high-ranking post for simply telling the truth and to replace her with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). Relative to Cheney, Stefanik is a moderate on policy. That no longer matters. Her core qualification is a willingness to go along with the “voter fraud” lie, and presumably with other lies as well, in the name of her own ambition. Shame on her. Shame on all of them.
The scary thing is that this GOP, untethered from reality and the material needs of the country, is within a handful of seats of taking back both the House and the Senate. As exhausting as it is to acknowledge this, the 2020 election was just the first step toward restoring a shared reality. For Democrats, losing next year’s midterm elections is simply not an option.
🐣 RT @VABVOX If Democrats lose the House in 2022, Kevin McCarthy will be Speaker. ¤ McCarthy led 140+ GOP in an effort to decertify the 2020 vote. ¤ What do you think he will do in 2024?
🐣🌎 RT @rcooley123 These are the states with the highest and lowest vaccination rates https://twitter.com/rcooley123/status/1391931606814928903?s=20/photo/1
⋙ CNN: These are the states with the highest and lowest vaccination rates http://cnn.it/3vV8UlN
🐣 RT @Amy_Siskind Feels like we are living through what will someday be recorded in the history books as the end of a major politician party.
NBCNews: Kinzinger says McCarthy dismissed warnings of violence ahead of Jan. 6, praises Cheney http://nbcnews.to/3eAfTKW
//. Kinzinger said Cheney is being forced from her leadership position because her refusal to equivocate about Trump’s election defeat makes GOP members “uncomfortable.”
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Republicans don’t just lie to voters. They lie to themselves. http://wapo.st/33ucHKE
… The truth-tellers and the deniers of the Jan. 6 insurrection cannot coexist. It is one or the other. Republicans who say otherwise really mean that Cheney should just shut up so that the Former Guy does not pitch a fit. Her point is that it is not sustainable for a party to lie to prevent a disloyal authoritarian from having a temper tantrum.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) at least does not try to sell his party a bill of goods. Also appearing on “Meet the Press,” he was blunt: “This is going to be a battle for the soul of the Republican Party.” In other words, Republicans need to dispense with the fantasy that abject liars willing to rewrite history can coexist with principled lawmakers who insist on defending the Constitution.
United on policy? Few Republicans are talking about policy at all. Instead, they are fighting fictitious culture wars and cheering efforts to suppress the vote.
Republican politicians are deceiving themselves about the former president’s toxicity and about the incompatibility of Cheney Republicans and MAGA Republicans. They try to keep up the pretense that all will be fine in the GOP, ignoring the party’s absence of viable policy ideas and its preference for performance politics and right-wing conspiracy theories. Perhaps kicking Cheney out of her leadership spot will force some honest discussion among Republicans. If not, the GOP crackup will only intensify.
⭕ 9 May 2021
WaPo: The making of a myth http://wapo.st/3uFjX2s
// Russell J. Ramsland Jr. sold everything from Tex-Mex food to light-therapy technology. Then he sold the story that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
WaPo, Ellen Weintraub: Close this FEC loophole that killed the case over Trump’s payment to Stormy Daniels http://wapo.st/3bcmFVq
NBCNews, MeetThePress: Larry Hogan: GOP turning into ‘circular firing squad’ over Trump loyalty http://nbcnews.to/3f8rhwU
// As House Republicans prepare to oust Liz Cheney from leadership, one outspoken GOP Trump critic says the party should not swear fealty to a “dear leader.”
WSJ: Trump 2020 Election Lawsuits Lead to Requests to Discipline Lawyers http://on.wsj.com/2RGrNu0
// Courts, licensing bodies consider whether attorneys abused the legal system in challenging vote results
⭕ 8 May 2021
🐣 RT @Chrisvance123 YES!! After roughly three months of discussions and planning it is time to launch something new in American politics. Next week is going to be big
⋙ 🐣 RT @MilesTaylorUSA Enough is enough. ¤ We’re going to announce a “resistance of the rationals” against the radicals in the GOP. ¤ Next Thursday. Watch this space.
WaPo: Liz Cheney’s months-long effort to turn Republicans from Trump threatens her reelection and ambitions. She says it’s only beginning. http://wapo.st/3vNaeXG
📊 When staff from the National Republican Congressional Committee rose to explain the party’s latest polling in core battleground districts, they left out a key finding about Trump’s weakness, declining to divulge the information even when directly questioned about Trump’s support by a member of Congress, according to two people familiar with what transpired.
Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post. Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.
⭕ 7 May 2021
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Trump and the Republicans in Congress are now an acute threat to our democracy. They voted to overthrow an election after the 6 Jan assault on the Capitol. Trump in his ignorance and lawlessness governs this great party’s behavior. Danger ahead.
⭕ 6 May 2021
💙 NewYorker, Jane Mayer: The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized http://bit.ly/3tzhMvF https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1391921225925017601?s=20/photo/1
// An infamous Republican political operative’s unpublished memoir shows how the Party came to embrace lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost.
NYT: Arizona Review of 2020 Vote Is Riddled With Flaws, Says Secretary of State http://nyti.ms/2R0St8H
// Arizona’s top election official said the effort ordered by Republican state senators leaves ballots unattended and lacks basic safeguards to protect the process from manipulation.
⭕ 5 May 2021
🐣 RT @MollyMcKew If you want to imagine how bad & stupid things would have been in a 2nd Trump term—how accelerated the downward spiral of American relevancy could be—feast your eyes upon the marvels of the Arizona ballot recount, where conjurers may as well be dousing for demons in the ballots.
WaPo, Liz Cheney: The GOP is at a turning point. History is watching us. http://wapo.st/3thDl3S “Republicans need to stand for genuinely conservative principles, and steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality”
While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fundraising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country. Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people. This is immensely harmful, especially as we now compete on the world stage against Communist China and its claims that democracy is a failed system.
For Republicans, the path forward is clear. ¤ First, support the ongoing Justice Department criminal investigations of the Jan. 6 attack. Those investigations must be comprehensive and objective; neither the White House nor any member of Congress should interfere.
Second, we must support a parallel bipartisan review by a commission with subpoena power to seek and find facts; it will describe for all Americans what happened. This is critical to defeat the misinformation and nonsense circulating in the press and on social media. No currently serving member of Congress — with an eye to the upcoming election cycle — should participate. We should appoint former officials, members of the judiciary and other prominent Americans who can be objective, just as we did after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The commission should be focused on the Jan. 6 attacks. The Black Lives Matter and antifa violence of last summer was illegal and reprehensible, but it is a different problem with a different solution.
Finally, we Republicans need to stand for genuinely conservative principles, and steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality. In our hearts, we are devoted to the American miracle. We believe in the rule of law, in limited government, in a strong national defense, and in prosperity and opportunity brought by low taxes and fiscally conservative policies.
… Reagan formed a broad coalition from across the political spectrum to return America to sanity, and we need to do the same now. We know how. But this will not happen if Republicans choose to abandon the rule of law and join Trump’s crusade to undermine the foundation of our democracy and reverse the legal outcome of the last election.
History is watching. Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.
WaPo, Spencer Hsu: Judge blasts Barr, Justice Dept. for ‘disingenuous’ handling of secret Trump obstruction memo http://wapo.st/3h8Jvkm
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington ordered the release Monday of a 2019 memo prepared by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Barr and a string of Justice Department officials had sought to keep the memo secret, asserting it was part of the department’s internal decision-making process before he selectively announced the Mueller report’s findings that March. ¤ Jackson wrote in a blistering opinion after viewing the memo and other evidence that the department’s claims “are so inconsistent with evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence.”
In a 35-page opinion ordering the memo’s release in a public records lawsuit, Jackson called suspicions that Barr and department lawyers had been “disingenuous” in withholding the document “well-founded,” saying the department had sought to “obfuscate” its true purpose of justifying a decision that had already been made.“The review of the document reveals that the Attorney General was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the President should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” Jackson wrote.
Both judges blasted Barr’s four-page letter to Congress in March 2019 that said the special counsel did not draw a conclusion as to whether Trump obstructed the investigation and that Barr’s own opinion was that the evidence was insufficient to bring such a charge.
In reality, Mueller’s report laid out evidence of obstruction but said the special counsel could not fairly make a charging decision, given department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
Jackson’s opinion echoed another federal judge’s criticism last year of Barr over a “lack of candor” and truthfulness in his handling of the release of Mueller’s report.
Writing in March 2020, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton called Barr’s public statements “misleading” and said he had “grave concerns about the objectivity of the process” that led up to the public release of the Mueller report.
“The Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report,” he wrote, adding, “These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility.”
Jackson’s ruling handed a victory to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit following Barr’s April 2019 testimony to Congress. Walton’s decision came in a public records lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, a watchdog group, and BuzzFeed News, seeking to unredact information in Mueller’s report.
Judges typically give the government the benefit of the doubt when officials handling the release of information under the Freedom of Information Act evaluate whether some records should be withheld based on the law’s exemptions, such as for internal deliberations. But that is not the case when judges find evidence of bad faith.
In her opinion, Jackson noted that Barr had asserted to Congress that April that he and his deputy had reached the decision that Trump could not be charged “in consultation” with the Office of Legal Counsel and other department lawyers, testifying after Mueller accused Barr of twisting the findings and undermining public confidence in the investigation. Barr’s assertions, Jackson said, prompted Trump to claim he had been exonerated and came shortly after Barr received the 448-page report but before it was publicly released in March 2019.
“The Attorney General’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less, study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,” Jackson wrote. ¤ In fact, Jackson said, Barr’s statement to Congress that Trump hailed and the Office of Legal Counsel’s memo that Barr said his decision was based on were “being written by the very same people at the very same time.”
The memo’s authors and recipients worked “hand in hand to craft the advice” that it supposedly delivered, but it was the letter to Congress that was the priority and that was getting completed first, Jackson said.
“Not only was the Attorney General being disingenuous then, but DOJ has been disingenuous to this Court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege,” Jackson concluded.
Jackson gave the Justice Department until May 17 to decide whether it would seek to appeal her order or oppose the unsealing of redacted passages.
Jackson was deeply familiar with the special counsel’s work, overseeing its prosecution in Washington of former 2016 Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the trial of the then-president’s political confidant Roger Stone.
WaPo: Facebook’s Oversight Board upholds ban on Trump. At least for now. http://wapo.st/3xONjgE
// The panel faulted the social network for making a hasty decision without clear criteria and told the company to reevaluate the decision within six months.
⭕ 4 May 2021
💙 NYT, Thomas Friedman: Trump’s Big Lie Devoured the G.O.P. and Now Eyes Our Democracy http://nyti.ms/3emDDSN “Unless more principled Republicans stand up for the truth about our last election, we’re going to see exactly how a democracy dies”
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Judge Says Barr Misled on How His Justice Dept. Viewed Trump’s Actions http://nyti.ms/3b200uI
// by Michael D Schmidt; Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in a ruling that the misleading statements were similar to others that William P. Barr, the former attorney general, had made about the Mueller investigation.
⋙ 📔 Document, Judge Amy Berman Jackson: Memorandum Opinion: CREW v DOJ (pdf) http://bit.ly/3tja1tH 41p
On Friday, March 22, 2019, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III delivered his Report of the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election1 to the then-Attorney General of the United States, William P. Barr.2
But the Attorney General did not share it with anyone else. ¤ Instead, before the weekend was over, he sent a letter to congressional leaders purporting to “summarize the principal conclusions” set out in the Report, compressing the approximately 200 highly detailed and painstakingly footnoted pages of Volume I – which discusses the Russian government’s interference in the election and any links or coordination with the Trump campaign – and the almost 200 equally detailed pages of Volume II – which concerns acts taken by then-
President Trump in connection with the investigation – into less than four pages.3 The letter asserted that the Special Counsel “did not draw a conclusion – one way or the other – as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction,” and it went on to announce the Attorney General’s own opinion that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”4
The President then declared himself to have been fully exonerated.5
The Attorney General’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less, study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball.
– – – – – – – – – – –
… [T]he affidavits are so inconsistent with evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence. The review of the unredacted document in camera reveals that the suspicions voiced by the judge in EPIC and the plaintiff here were well-founded, and that not only was the Attorney General being disingenuous then, but DOJ has been disingenuous to this Court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege. The agency’s redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum, and the excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the Attorney General to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time.Given the fact that the review of the document in camera reveals that there was no decision actually being made as to whether the then-President should be prosecuted, — the Court is not persuaded that the agency has met its burden to demonstrate that the memorandum was transmitted for the purpose of providing legal advice, as opposed to the strategic and policy advice that falls outside the scope of the privilege. Section I of the memo, which was entirely redacted with no separate justification, contains no legal advice at all, but it offers only strategic advice, so — this explanation is entirely deficient to justify the withholding of that portion of the document.
Section II is a blend of legal and strategic advice prepared, at least in part, and reviewed in its entirety, by an attorney within the OLC. However, since the memorandum was being written at the same time and by the same people who were drafting the Attorney General’s letter to Congress setting forth his views on the basis for a prosecution, and the record reflects that the priority was to get the letter completed first, see Attachment 1, one simply cannot credit the declarant’s statement that the Attorney General made the “decision” he announced based on the advice the memo contains. … [T]he chronology undermines the assertion that the authors were engaged in providing their legal advice in connection with any sort of pending prosecutorial decision, and this misrepresentation, combined with the lack of candor about what any legal advice provided was for or about, frees the Court from the deference that is ordinarily accorded to agency declarations in FOIA cases.
NBCNews: Texas leaders, corporations form coalitions to fight voting restrictions http://nbcnews.to/3xNnfCz
// HP Inc, Patagonia and American Airlines are among at least 50 businesses that have formed a coalition known as Fair Elections Texas.
WSJ: Purging Liz Cheney http://on.wsj.com/33gFguX
// GOP leaders shouldn’t have to lie about 2020 to keep their job.
⭕ 3 May 2021
WaPo, Michael Gerson: Elected Republicans are lying with open eyes. Their excuses are disgraceful. http://wapo.st/33971pk
WaPo: The obvious goal of the Arizona recount: Injecting more doubt into the 2020 results http://wapo.st/3nS9XjK
WaPo: Biden says he will raise refugee cap from 15,000 to 62,500, after widespread criticism for extending Trump-era levels http://wapo.st/3xJd6GR ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1389415760116781058?s=20/photo/1
// Part of Statue of Liberty poem by Emma Lazarus
⭕ 2 May 2021
⭕ 1 May 2021
⭕ 30 Apr 2021
⭕ 29 Apr 2021
NYT: Firing of U.S. Ambassador Is at Center of Giuliani Investigation http://nyti.ms/333XUWK
// Prosecutors want to scrutinize Rudolph W. Giuliani’s communications with Ukrainian officials about the ouster of the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch.
[T]he federal authorities were expected to scour the electronic devices for communications between Mr. Giuliani and Trump administration officials about the ambassador before she was recalled in April 2019, one of the people added.
The warrant also sought his communications with Ukrainian officials who had butted heads with Ms. Yovanovitch, including some of the same people who at the time were helping Mr. Giuliani seek damaging information about President Biden, who was then a candidate, and his family, the people said.
At issue for investigators is a key question: Did Mr. Giuliani go after Ms. Yovanovitch solely on behalf of Mr. Trump, who was his client at the time? Or was he also doing so on behalf of the Ukrainian officials, who wanted her removed for their own reasons?
Mr. Giuliani’s work to oust Ms. Yovanovitch was part of a larger effort to attack Joseph R. Biden Jr. and tie him to corruption in Ukraine, much of which played out in public.
But intelligence officials have long warned that Mr. Giuliani’s work in Ukraine had become ensnared with Russia’s efforts to spread disinformation about the Biden family to weaken Mr. Trump’s election rival.
The F.B.I. stepped up its warnings about Russian disinformation before the 2020 election, including giving a defensive briefing to Mr. Giuliani, cautioning him that some of the information he was pushing on the Biden family was tainted by Russian intelligence’s efforts to spread disinformation, according to a person briefed on the matter.
… Senior officials had warned Mr. Trump in late 2019 that Mr. Giuliani was pushing Russian disinformation, and the intelligence community had warned the American public that Moscow’s intelligence services were trying to hurt Mr. Biden’s election chances by spreading information about his family’s work in Ukraine.
⭕ 28 Apr 2021
📊 Politico: Biden beats Trump in poll of first 100 days by 12 points http://politi.co/3tCapns
// Biden’s overall approval rate was 60 percent, well above Trump’s 48 percent approaching 100 days in office.
NBCNews: Federal investigators search Rudy Giuliani’s NYC apartment http://nbcnews.to/3vpSjGv
// Prosecutors have been investigating Giuliani, who is former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and a former mayor of New York, for his dealings in Ukraine.
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Federal Investigators Search Rudy Giuliani’s Apartment and Office http://nyti.ms/2QwxjiI
// Prosecutors obtained the search warrants as part of an investigation into whether Mr. Giuliani broke lobbying laws as President Trump’s personal lawyer.
⭕ 27 Apr 2021
Politico: How Trump’s renewed election rhetoric is complicating Capitol rioters’ legal fight http://politi.co/3dUQWcS
// Judges are citing former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on election fraud as they deny some accused Capitol rioters bail, saying there’s a risk they’ll commit violent acts in Trump’s name again.
WaPo: White House seeks to make massive boost to IRS enforcement centerpiece of new spending plan http://wapo.st/3xv2wmP
// Republicans have long sought to shrink the tax-collecting agency, but Biden aides believe hundreds of billions of dollars go uncollected each year.
WaPo: To lead ICE, Biden picks Texas sheriff who criticized Trump’s immigration policies http://wapo.st/3dUq8tg “Biden’s pick for ICE director is Harris County, Tex., Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a veteran law enforcement officer who transformed the sheriff’s office in … Houston”
WaPo, Max Boot: Trump’s first 100 days were sheer craziness. Biden’s are sheer competence. http://wapo.st/3dXy3Gs Making competence cool again
⭕ 26 Apr 2021
WaPo, Aaron Blake: Kevin McCarthy’s bizarre attempt to rewrite the narrative of Jan. 6 http://wapo.st/2QsJMny
🐣 RT @axios Rep. Liz Cheney publicly broke from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, saying an independent commission should focus solely on the Capitol insurrection, not include other instances of political violence, like Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests.
⋙ Axios: Cheney: Congressional commission should narrowly review Capitol siege http://bit.ly/3aKvzJo
⭕ 25 Apr 2021
⭕ 24 Apr 2021
NYT, Frank Bruni: So Anthony Fauci Isn’t Perfect. He’s Closer Than Most of Us. http://nyti.ms/3gGbmbu “We owe him an immeasurable debt of gratitude, not the mind-boggling magnitude of grief that he gets”
⭕ 23 Apr 2021
⭕ 22 Apr 2021
⭕ 21 Apr 2021
⭕ 20 Apr 2021
🐣 RT @lauragreenaura Some QAnon & far-right connections that bear further examination relate partly to Michael Flynn’s connections to the relatively obscure London Center for Policy Research.
⋙ DailyBeast, David Freedlander: The Creepily Influential Trumpist Foreign-Policy Think Tank You’ve Never Heard Of http://bit.ly/3vcvwOp
// Herb London used to be a fringey, failed conservative candidate in New York. Now he’s a fringey, successful guru who’s helping to shape U.S. foreign policy in the Trump era.
🐣 RT @tribelaw Chauvin might never see the light of freedom again. That would be just. But it wouldn’t be nearly enough. The SYSTEM that let him murder George Floyd must be changed. But for a bystander’s iPhone camera, Chauvin wd’ve gotten away with murder!
🐣 RT @davidaxelrod The thing that was so chilling about the George Floyd death scene was Chauvin’s defiant stare at horrified bystanders as he kneeled on Floyd’s neck. ¤ Today, a jury stared back. Chauvin stands convicted of murder. ¤ Justice was done.
🐣 It’s unthinkable to me that a ‘not guilty‘ verdict could be arrived at so quickly. But I’m not a lawyer. ¤ Praying for justice 🙏
// George Floyd; Derek Chauvin trial
WaPo: Judge jails two Proud Boys leaders pending trial tied to Jan. 6 Capitol riot http://wapo.st/2Qla7DR “[B]oth defendants are charged with ‘seeking to steal one of the crown jewels in our country . . . by interfering with the peaceful transfer of power.’”
A federal judge on Monday jailed two Proud Boys leaders pending trial in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, handing a victory to U.S. prosecutors in a closely watched conspiracy case accusing the pair of planning to disrupt Congress and leading as many as 60 others to impede police that day.
U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly of Washington … ruled, “these defendants are alleged by their leadership and planning to have facilitated political violence on January 6th, even if they themselves did not carry a weapon or strike a blow.”
Calling the factual allegations “gravely serious,” Kelly said in an unusual two-hour-long reading of his decision from the bench that both defendants are charged with “seeking to steal one of the crown jewels in our country . . . by interfering with the peaceful transfer of power.” Kelly added that nothing short of jail could assure that they did not mobilize others to violate the law or threaten public safety.
⭕ 19 Apr 2021
🌎 WaPo, Alexandra Petri: We are the Anglo-Saxon caucus! Let us have maethlfrith! Let us have drihtinbeage! http://wapo.st/3aqCIOY The British Isles have seen waves and waves of immigration This map doesn’t even cover the Norman Invasion or the influence of Latin: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1384558778473926657?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 Ironically, the Scots-Irish Americans who represent a significant segment the GOP base, were Gaelic speakers and were often at odds in with the Germanic “Anglo-Saxons” and the French
⭕ 18 Apr 2021
🐣 RT @Billbrowder This is very disturbing. Val Broeksmit, a source for various journalists and the FBI on alleged corruption at Deutsche Bank has gone missing in LA and hasn’t been seen since April 6th. Apparently his car was found running with the keys in the car.
⋙ 🐣 RT @rocco_castoro Val missing persons report attached below. ¤ It was filed with the INCORRECT date of Val’s disappearance. ¤ Once again: Deutsche Bank whistleblower VAL BROEKSMIT HAS BEEN MISSING SINCE APRIL 6. ¤ If you have info on Val’s disappearance, contact LAPD missing persons — details below. [Missing Person Report:] https://twitter.com/Billbrowder/status/1383728810483355653?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ScottMStedman .@BikiniRobotArmy is missing. I’ve worked with Val for almost 2 years now on matters about Deutsche Bank, where his father was a senior exec before committing suicide. Val’s car was found last week in LA without him. If you know anything please let me know. https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/status/1381823464944758784?s=20/photo/1-2
WaPo: NSA official installed as Trump left office resigns after he was sidelined http://wapo.st/3x7EUo4
Michael Ellis, a former Republican political operative, resigned Friday as the National Security Agency’s top lawyer, having been sidelined for three months after President Biden took office. ¤ The NSA director, Gen. Paul Nakasone, had placed Ellis on administrative leave the day President Donald Trump left the White House — just as Ellis was taking up the position. The reasons: a pending Pentagon inspector general probe, an official told The Washington Post at the time, and a security inquiry into Ellis’s handling of classified information, according to a letter from Ellis’s attorney to Nakasone, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.
Nakasone had agreed to install Ellis as general counsel just days earlier under orders from Trump’s acting defense secretary. The role does not require Senate confirmation. … ¤ Ellis joined the Trump White House in early 2017, becoming a lawyer on the National Security Council. Before that, he was chief counsel to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a staunch Trump supporter who at the time was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
WaPo: Trump’s grip on GOP looms as support falters for independent probe of Capitol riot http://wapo.st/3dya0Od
Initial negotiations aimed at establishing an independent commission in the style of the panel that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks ran aground earlier this year after Republican leaders insisted that it scrutinize left-wing extremism — including the amorphous antifa movement that Trump and other conservatives have blamed for fomenting violence in D.C. and other cities — alongside the far-right and white nationalist groups suspected of having planned or encouraged the mayhem. Democrats resisted, accusing the GOP of trying to distract the public from the fact that extremist groups in the Republican base were responsible for the riot.
Many rank-and-file Republicans have been forced to walk a political tightrope, as a majority still believe the election was stolen from Trump. The former president still wields outsize influence in the GOP, which is presently the minority party in Washington but is within striking distance of making a comeback in 2022 — if leaders can hold their ranks together.
The pressure to prioritize a political win over accountability for the former president kept the vast majority of Republicans in both the House and Senate from endorsing impeachment charges against Trump accusing him of inciting the riot. The discrepancy was especially apparent in the Senate, where several Republicans — including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — blamed Trump for the attack but refused to vote to convict him.
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 WOWSER! This is demonic. These are extremely dangerous and deluded people. Democrats need to gather people of goodwill to Biden leadership until a rational opposition party can be created. Many in GOP are pandering to these people or intimidated.
⋙ 🐣 RT @PatriotTakes Lin Wood stating Q is the truth and that the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bidens, and the Bushes are all involved in sex trafficking. 💽 https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/1383712195742105600?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 17 Apr 2021
🐣 RT @BillKristol Worst day for the Anglo-Saxons since 1066.
⋙ CNN: Marjorie Taylor Greene scraps planned launch of controversial ‘America First’ caucus amid blowback from GOP http://cnn.it/3gl8mRt
The reversal from her office comes a day after top House Republican Kevin McCarthy indirectly referenced the congresswoman’s new caucus, tweeting, “The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln & the party of more opportunity for all Americans—not nativist dog whistles.”
And GOP conference chair Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, responded to the reporting about the new caucus from Greene in a tweet.“Republicans believe in equal opportunity, freedom, and justice for all. We teach our children the values of tolerance, decency and moral courage,” she wrote. “Racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism are evil. History teaches we all have an obligation to confront & reject such malicious hate.”
Embattled GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who is under federal investigation over allegations involving sex trafficking and prostitution, tweeted Friday, “I’m proud to join @mtgreenee in the #AmericaFirst Caucus. We will end wars, stop illegal immigration & promote trade that is fair to American workers. This is just a hit piece from the America Last crowd in Big Media, Big Tech & Big Government.”
GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said that he was “disgusted” following initial reports of the new caucus, and on Friday said that anyone who joins the caucus should have their committee assignments stripped and be expelled from Republican conference participation.
“While we can’t prevent someone from calling themselves Republican, we can loudly say they don’t belong to us,” he wrote on Twitter.
⋙⋙ Document via PunchbowlNews: “America First Caucus Policy Platform [pdf] http://bit.ly/3tv87qO 7p
⭕ 16 Apr 2021
🐣 RT @ChrisAlbertoLaw POTENTIALLY EXPLOSIVE! ¤ After AG Barr abandoned Trump’s authoritarian dreams, Kash Patel became Trump’s point man in a post-Nov 3rd effort to have Trump loyalists take over the Pentagon & US Intel. ¤ Now DOJ is investigating him. He knows a lot.
⋙ WaPo, David Ignatius: How Kash Patel rose from obscure Hill staffer to key operative in Trump’s battle with the intelligence community http://wapo.st/3afWOv4
In the Trump administration’s four-year battle with the intelligence community, a recurring character was a brash lawyer named Kashyap P. “Kash” Patel. He appeared so frequently, in so many incarnations, that he was almost a “Zelig” figure in President Donald Trump’s confrontation against what he imagined as the “deep state.”
Patel repeatedly pressed intelligence agencies to release secrets that, in his view, showed that the president was being persecuted unfairly by critics. Ironically, he is now facing Justice Department investigation for possible improper disclosure of classified information, according to two knowledgeable sources who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe. The sources said the investigation resulted from a complaint made this year by an intelligence agency, but wouldn’t provide additional details.
WaPo: Founding member of Oath Keepers enters first guilty plea in Jan. 6 Capitol breach http://wapo.st/32mszhG
A founding member of the Oath Keepers arrested in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol pleaded guilty Friday and agreed to cooperate against others in the case — the first defendant to publicly flip in the sprawling domestic terrorism investigation that has led to charges against more than 410 people.
The plea comes exactly 100 days after Jon Ryan Schaffer and hundreds of other supporters of former president Donald Trump allegedly stormed the Capitol hoping to prevent Joe Biden from being confirmed as the next president. Prosecutors hope Schaffer’s plea spurs others to provide additional evidence in hopes of avoiding long prison sentences.
The plea marks a new stage in the historic investigation, as prosecutors seek to work up the chain of defendants to gather evidence and better understand the full scope of any planning and organizing of the violence — particularly among groups like the far-right Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. Dozens of members from both groups appeared to act in concert to storm the building, prosecutors have alleged.
⭕ 15 Apr 2021
CNN, Chris Cillizza: The HUGE Russia 2016 election story you probably missed http://cnn.it/2QDC09N
Consider what we now know:
1. Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton because of a belief that the billionaire businessman would be better for the country’s interest than would the ex- Secretary of State.
2. The highest echelon of the Trump campaign – Manafort and Gates – passed along internal polling and strategy memos that found their way into the hands of the “Russian Intelligence Services.”
Now, that’s not to say that Manafort and Gates knew that Kilminik would (or did) hand over the information to Russian intelligence agencies. (Although given Kilimnik’s background as Russian-linked intelligence operative it probably wasn’t that big a leap of faith.) This also doesn’t mean Trump had any idea what they were doing.
But what it is to say is that proprietary data from Trump’s presidential campaign wound up in the possession of the intelligence service of a country that was seeking to actively interfere in an election to help the guy they thought would be better for them win. And it was that guy’s campaign who provided the data to them (whether wittingly or unwittingly)!
It’s long been true that Trump’s insistence that the investigation into Russia interference was a “hoax” has been without merit. Mueller, the US intelligence community and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee all arrived at the same conclusion: Russia actively meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump and hurt Clinton. (Earlier this month, the US intelligence community released a report making it clear that Russia again meddled in the 2020 election, with the goal of “denigrating” Joe Biden’s chances and “supporting” Trump’s reelection.)
Mueller did not look for “collusion,” only proof of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. He said he didn’t find enough evidence to bring those charges. But this back-channeling of campaign information from Americans to Russians would seem to fit the layman’s definition of “collusion.”
💽 WaPo: 17 requests for backup in 78 minutes http://wapo.st/3ag6GFi
// A reconstruction shows how failures of planning and preparationleft police at the Capitol severely disadvantaged on Jan. 6
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman One note about Kilimnik that is not getting enough attention: this is almost certainly not information new to the US Government given that it happened almost 5 years ago. ¤ So did the Trump admin simply hide this intelligence from Mueller and SSCI?
🐣 RT @MarshallCohen Today the US government confirmed that there was a direct line in 2016 from Manafort –> Kilimnik –> Russian intelligence. Internal Trump campaign data was passed to the Russians. Here’s why that matters, all these years later. w/ @jeremyherb @b_fung
⋙ CNN: Six key takeaways from Biden’s Russia sanctions announcement http://cnn.it/2RF7nl2
● Sanctions are strongest US response to date to massive hack
● Flicking at collusion, all these years later
With one sentence in a 2,000-word press release, the Treasury Department perhaps did more to lay out the case for potential Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election than has happened before.
The Treasury statement confirmed that Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-linked intelligence operative, provided Russian intelligence with “with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.” He got that inside information from Trump campaign officials.
● After criticism of Trump, no action on Russian bounties
● GOP knocks Biden for not issuing pipeline sanctions
● Foreign policy — and Russia — will keep Biden’s attention
🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “You now have a direct link of internal, sensitive data, that went form the Trump campaign through Paul Manafort to Konstantin Kilimnik to the Russians. And that was always Robert Mueller’s bet…” – @AWeissmann_ w/ @NicolleDWallace 💽 https://twitter.com/DeadlineWH/status/1382802702229508097?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @FrankFigliuzzi1 There was collusion with Russia:
⋙ 🧵 RT @Tom_Winter NEW: Konstantin Kilimnik, Paul Manafort’s former employee, has been sanctioned by the U.S. for his interference in the 2020 election namely that Kilimnik “sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016” election. [Wanted Poster:] 📌 https://twitter.com/Tom_Winter/status/1382670244444045315?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Tom_Winter The FBI is offering a $250,000 for information leading to the arrest of Kilimnik. ¤ He is wanted on an indictment for obstruction of justice and has been designated as a Russian Intelligence Services agent.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Tom_Winter Here’s a story detailing all of what was announced today on sanctions against Russia:
⋙⋙⋙ NBCNews: Biden calls for de-escalation with Russia following sanctions, proposes meeting with Putin http://nbcnews.to/
// President Joe Biden has characterized Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “killer” and said he would “pay the price” for a range of malicious activities Washington blames on Moscow.
🧵 RT @rgoodlaw Trump Campaign Chair Manafort gave sensitive polling data to his associate Kilimnik, Russian intel agent.
What did Kilimnik do with it?
● Mueller report 2019: Don’t know
● Senate report 2020: Don’t know
● Treasury Dep’t 2021: He passed polling data to Kremlin
📌 https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1382720042517794818?s=20
⋙ JustSecurity, Justin Hendrix: US Treasury Provides Missing Link: Manafort’s Partner Gave Campaign Polling Data to Kremlin in 2016 http://bit.ly/3e0KQqk
Kilimnik is, according to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, a Russian Intelligence Services officer who became central to investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election thanks to his close ties to Manafort, who served as Donald Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. After being indicted in 2018 on charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice related to his unregistered lobbying work on behalf of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Kilimnik is now being targeted by Treasury for “having engaged in foreign interference in the U.S. 2020 presidential election.” The FBI is offering a reward of $250,000 for information related to his potential arrest. He is currently residing in Russia.
The Treasury Department’s statement about Kilimnik and his role in the 2016 election definitively connects dots that previous investigations did not.
The Mueller investigation uncovered that Manafort had directed his associate Rick Gates to provide Kilimnik with polling data repeatedly throughout the summer of 2016, but it was unable to conclude what Kilimnik did with that information afterward. The 448-page Mueller Report, released in a redacted version on April 18, 2019, stated:
Because of questions about Manafort’s credibility and our limited ability to gather evidence on what happened to the polling data after it was sent to Kilimnik, the Office could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it. The Office did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort’s sharing polling data and Russia’s interference in the election, which had already been reported by U.S. media outlets at the time of the August 2 meeting [between Manafort and Kilimnik].
The 966-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, for its part, stated that
The Committee was unable to reliably determine why Manafort shared sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy with Kilimnik or with whom Kilimnik further shared that information. The Committee had limited insight into Kilimnik’s communications with Manafort and into Kilimnik’s communications with other individuals connected to Russian influence operations, all of whom used communications security practices. The Committee obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.
The Committee report also stated:
While the Committee obtained evidence revealing that Kilimnik shared with [Oleg] Deripaska other information passed on by Manafort–such as links to news articles–the Committee did not obtain records showing that Kilimnik passed on the polling data. However, the Committee has no records of, and extremely limited insight into, Kilimnik’ s communications [redacted]. As a result, this lack of documentary record is not dispositive.
The Treasury Department’s new statement raises questions about why this information is coming out now and why the Special Counsel’s office did not have access to it during its investigation. Was it not available then or did it exist but was not provided to
the Mueller team?
🐣 RT @brianklaas To summarize: Trump’s campaign chair and deputy campaign chair provided an internal strategy memo and private polling to a Russian agent who then passed it onto Russian intelligence agencies. The Kremlin then used that information to try to help Trump win the 2016 election.
🐣 RT @PeterStrzok Confirms our suspicions- ¤ Direct line from the campaign to Kilimnik to Russian intel. ¤ “During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @MacFinn44 The polling data (and probably #Kilimnik) was most likely taken out of US on Oleg Deripaska’s jet M-ALAY. It landed in New York on the night Manafort met Kilimnik in Grand Havana Club 8/2/16 and flew to Moscow a few hours later. [Flight map 8/3/2016:] https://twitter.com/MacFinn44/status/1382730432194699268?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MacFinn44 Deripaska’s M-ALAY flew on 8/5/16 from Moscow to Molde and returned to Moscow after a short landing. His M-UGIC flew from Montenegro to Molde on the same day and flew from Molde to Moscow on 8/7/16 (Deripaska, Sergei Prikhodko and Nastya Rybka in Molde). Some “coincidence”, eh?
// 8/3/2018
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MacFinn44 Two days after Deripaska’s M-ALAY flew the polling data, and likely #Kilimnik, from New York to Moscow Deripaska met with Prikhodko on his yacht Elden in a bay near Molde. [Flight maps 8/5-7/2016]] https://twitter.com/MacFinn44/status/1382751387176603655?s=20/photo/1-3
// 8/3/2018
⋙⋙⋙⋙ Wikipedia: Sergei Eduardovich Prikhodko: “In February 2018, Alexei Navalny published a video alleging that Prikhodko had been receiving various bribes from Russian oligarch and dollar billionaire Oleg Deripaska, including prostitutes services as well as real estate valued at at least 1.5 billion rubles (some 25 million dollars).[6][7][8][9] Prikhodko himself denied the allegations, accusing Navalny of “mixing the facts” about his “friend” Deripaska, Donald Trump and Paul Manafort, while also voicing his wish to have a talk with Navalny as a “man with a man”.[10][11][12] A day after the video was published the Roskomnadzor added the video to the Federal List of Extremist Materials, thus making accessing the video illegal for all Russian citizens.[13][14] In the video known as Fishgate (Russian: «Рыбка-гейт»), Navalny explains the characters and setting for Nastya Rybka’s book Who Wants to Seduce a Billionaire (ISBN 978-5-699-93242-9): Ruslan Zolotov is Deripaska, Papa is Prikhodko, Vitya or Victor or V is Yevgeny Agarkov and the Rybka’s book setting of Greenland is actually Norway.[15][16][17] Rybka refers to Papa as Richelieu, or a Cardinal in the Kremlin who is the person actually responsible for Russia’s foreign policy during the governments of Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Dmitri Medvedev.[15]” http://bit.ly/3e8CUDy
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman I can’t wait for Trump and allies to apologize for falsely claiming that there was no collusion. Perhaps proving conspiracy is too difficult — sensitive intel often cannot be used in court and must prove PM’s knowledge/intent — but there is no longer any doubt about collusion.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MarshallCohen For the first time EVER, the US government said Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik provided Russian intelligence agencies with the internal Trump campaign polling/strategy data he received from Manafort and Gates in 2016. Even Mueller didn’t go that far. https://twitter.com/MarshallCohen/status/1382705877719908361?s=20/photo/1
🔆 This❗️⋙ USDeptTreasury: Treasury Escalates Sanctions Against the Russian Government’s Attempts to Influence U.S. Elections http://bit.ly/2OSIZvf
WaPo: Biden administration imposes significant economic sanctions on Russia over cyberspying, efforts to influence presidential election http://wapo.st/3mNEDlH
The Biden administration on Thursday imposed the first significant sanctions targeting the Russian economy in several years in order to punish the Kremlin for a cyberespionage campaign against the United States and efforts to influence the presidential election, according to senior U.S. officials.
The administration also sanctioned six Russian companies that support Russian spy services’ cyberhacking operations and will expel 10 officials at the Russian embassy in Washington, most of them identified as intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover, U.S. officials said. The administration formally named the Russian intelligence service SVR as responsible for the hacking operation commonly known as SolarWinds.
The measures were taken under a new executive order and are an effort to make good on President Biden’s vow to hold Moscow accountable for a series of operations, including the election influence and the cyberhacks, that compromised nine federal agencies and about 100 private firms.
Biden, in remarks at the White House, said he had warned Russia during the campaign and after he took office that he would respond to hacking or election interference, but that the U.S action was measured.
The package includes sanctions on all debt Russia issues after June 14, barring U.S. financial institutions from buying government bonds directly from the Russian Central Bank, Russian National Wealth Fund and the Ministry of Finance. The action, experts said, will complicate Moscow’s ability to raise money in the international capital markets.
The European Union, Australia and Canada issued statements of support following the White House’s actions on SolarWinds, noting that European countries were also affected but they did not join in sanctions targeting Russia’s sovereign debt.
The new executive order focuses on Russian activities outside its borders and “is intended to signal to the Russian government that its destabilizing behavior is unacceptable and that the United States will impose economically impactful costs if it continues or escalates,” the senior official said.
The U.S. intelligence community last month issued a report concluding that Putin sought to sway the 2020 election in President Donald Trump’s favor by spreading misleading information about Biden.
In response, the Treasury Department is sanctioning a total of 32 entities and individuals involved in the influence campaign as well as other acts of disinformation. They include Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian-Russian who worked in Ukraine with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. A U.S. senate panel last year concluded Kilimnik was a Russian intelligence officer, and Treasury on Thursday offered new details, saying that during the 2016 campaign, Kilimnik “provided Russian intelligence services” with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.
Treasury also sanctioned Russian disinformation sites including InfoRos, which calls itself a news agency but is primarily run by the GRU; and the Strategic Culture Foundation, an online journal controlled by the SVR that Treasury said promoted false narratives in the 2020 election and tried to obscure its Russian origins.
⭕ 14 Apr 2021
NYT: Biden Administration to Impose Tough Sanctions on Russia http://nyti.ms/3e2Wwc1
// Administration officials were determined to draft a response that would impose real costs on Moscow, as many previous rounds of sanctions have been shrugged off.
WaPo, James Hohman: Republicans will keep up the craziness until they pay a real price http://wapo.st/3wXay7O “The inmates now run the asylum”
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 Sad commentary on the state of the GOP when we are obliged to applaud the rare member who will say publicly not to drink poison, because that is what Trump is.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MaxBoot Kudos to @Liz_Cheney! Few GOP politicians are brave enough to say this.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Question: If Donald Trump were the 2024 nominee, would you support him? ¤ Liz Cheney: I would not [Fox:] 💽 https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1382428244331307011?s=20/photo/1
CNN: US intelligence community warns of devastating long-term impact of coronavirus pandemic http://cnn.it/3siCOyf
// See also Report from 4/13/2021
The fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic is poised to fracture societies worldwide, increase instability across the globe and reshape political and economic realities for years to come, the US intelligence community warned in a stark report laying out the top security concerns facing the country.
“The economic fallout from the pandemic is likely to create or worsen instability in at least a few—and perhaps many—countries, as people grow more desperate in the face of interlocking pressures that include sustained economic downturns, job losses, and disrupted supply chains,” the report warns.
The report, known as the Annual Threat Assessment, is typically made public annually. But bitter wrangling between the Trump administration and Congress kept the 2020 report locked away, making Tuesday’s release among the first public glimpses into the intelligence community’s assessment of the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also offers grim warnings about Russian and Chinese covert influence operations, and an early insight into Iran’s nuclear ambitions since President Joe Biden took office as he attempts to renegotiate an updated version of the 2015 nuclear deal that former President Donald Trump exited in 2018.
The report also issues an unequivocal warning on Russian activity, saying that Moscow “presents one of the most serious intelligence threats to the United States.” It confirmes influence operations targeting the 2020 election, noting that Moscow “almost certainly views US elections as an opportunity to try to undermine US global standing, sow discord inside the United States, influence US decision-making, and sway US voters.”
That this conclusion appeared in an annual threat assessment without fanfare demonstrates an immediate departure from the battle over public intelligence assessments under the Trump administration, when officials faced inevitable blowback from Trump whenever they made information about Russian election interference public.
China, intelligence leaders warn, also “presents a growing influence threat” in the United States — an assertion that may give some political cover to former Trump administration appointees who sought to portray China as the bigger counterintelligence threat during the 2020 election. Declassified documents later showed that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election.”
[White supremacists have been responsible “for at least 26 lethal attacks that killed more than 141 people and for dozens of disrupted plots in the West since 2015,” the report says.
“While these extremists often see themselves as part of a broader global movement, most attacks have been carried out by individuals or small, independent cells,” it adds. “Australia, Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom consider white racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, including Neo-Nazi groups, to be the fastest growing terrorist threat they face.”
[Separately:] Last month, CNN reported that the summary of a new joint US intelligence assessment said “narratives of fraud in the recent general election” and “the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the US Capitol” will “almost certainly” spur domestic extremists to try to engage in additional acts of violence this year.
That summary was released on the same day that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told lawmakers domestic violent extremism is the “greatest threat” to the US — a clear reminder that federal officials remain very concerned about the potential for more violence in the coming months.
“Newer sociopolitical developments — such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the US Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence — will almost certainly spur some (domestic violent extremists) to try to engage in violence this year,” the unclassified summary says.
🐣 RT @FinancialTimes In less than 24 hours during a lonely pandemic lockdown, Leila Hay, a student from northern England, became a supporter of QAnon. ¤ Although its main focus has been the US, the conspiracy theory has drawn in millions of supporters in dozens of countries
⋙ FT: Quitting QAnon: why it is so difficult to leave a conspiracy theory http://on.ft.com/3e4nIHg
// Although its prophecies have proven to be false, the pro-Trump movement remains popular around the world
NYT: Hundreds of Companies Unite to Oppose Voting Limits, but Others Abstain http://nyti.ms/3si6gEi Who didn’t sign? It’s complicated. Some issued separate statements. Some CEOs expressed support personally. A list of signers will appear the @nytimes Wednesday
// Amazon, Google, G.M. and Starbucks were among those joining the biggest show of solidarity by businesses over legislation in numerous states.
⭕ 13 Apr 2021
📔 🔆 This❗️⋙ ODNI: 2021 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community http://bit.ly/2ONACB9 DNI Avril Haines, in coordination with Intelligence Community leaders, released to Congress an unclassified annual report of worldwide threats to the US
⋙ Report: [pdf] http://bit.ly/3x2NvZt 27p
In the coming year, the United States and its allies will face a diverse array of threats that are playing out amidst the global disruption resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and against the backdrop of great power competition, the disruptive effects of ecological degradation and a changing climate, an increasing number of empowered non-state actors, and rapidly evolving technology. The complexity of the threats, their intersections, and the potential for cascading events in an increasingly interconnected and mobile world create new challenges for the IC. Ecological and climate changes, for example, are connected to public health risks, humanitarian concerns, social and political instability, and geopolitical rivalry. The 2021 Annual Threat Assessment highlights some of those connections as it provides the IC’s baseline assessments of the most pressing threats to US national interests, while emphasizing the United States’ key adversaries and competitors. It is not an exhaustive assessment of all global challenges and notably excludes assessments of US adversaries’ vulnerabilities. It accounts for functional concerns, such as weapons of mass destruction and technology, primarily in the sections on threat actors, such as China and Russia.
Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang have demonstrated the capability and intent to advance their interests at the expense of the United States and its allies, despite the pandemic. China increasingly is a near-peer competitor, challenging the United States in multiple arenas—especially economically, militarily, and technologically—and is pushing to change global norms. Russia is pushing back against Washington where it can globally, employing techniques up to and including the use of force. Iran will remain a regional menace with broader malign influence activities, and North Korea will be a disruptive player on the regional and world stages. Major adversaries and competitors are enhancing and exercising their military, cyber, and other capabilities, raising the risks to US and allied forces, weakening our conventional deterrence, and worsening the longstanding threat from weapons of mass destruction.
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to strain governments and societies, fueling humanitarian and economic crises, political unrest, and geopolitical competition as countries, such as China and Russia, seek advantage through such avenues as “vaccine diplomacy.” No country has been completely spared, and even when a vaccine is widely distributed globally, the economic and political aftershocks will be felt for years. Countries with high debts or that depend on oil exports, tourism, or remittances face particularly challenging recoveries, while others will turn inward or be distracted by other challenges.
Ecological degradation and a changing climate will continue to fuel disease outbreaks, threaten food and water security, and exacerbate political instability and humanitarian crises. Although much of the effect of a changing climate on US security will play out indirectly in a broader political and economic context, warmer weather can generate direct, immediate impacts—for example, through more intense storms, flooding, and permafrost melting. This year we will see increasing potential for surges in migration by Central American populations, which are reeling from the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and extreme weather, including multiple hurricanes in 2020 and several years of recurring droughts and storms.
The scourge of illicit drugs and transnational organized crime will continue to take its toll on American lives, prosperity, and safety. Major narcotics trafficking groups have adapted to the pandemic’s challenges to maintain their deadly trade, as have other transnational criminal organizations.
Emerging and disruptive technologies, as well as the proliferation and permeation of technology in all aspects of our lives, pose unique challenges. Cyber capabilities, to illustrate, are demonstrably intertwined with threats to our infrastructure and to the foreign malign influence threats against our democracy.
ISIS, al-Qa‘ida, and Iran and its militant allies continue to plot terrorist attacks against US persons and interests, including to varying degrees in the United States. Despite leadership losses, terrorist groups have shown great resiliency and are taking advantage of ungoverned areas to rebuild.
Regional conflicts continue to fuel humanitarian crises, undermine stability, and threaten US persons and interests. Some have direct implications for US security. For example, the fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria has direct bearing on US forces, while tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan remain a concern for the world. The iterative violence between Israel and Iran, the activity of foreign powers in Libya, and conflicts in other areas—including Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—have the potential to escalate or spread.
The 2021 Annual Threat Assessment Report supports the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s transparency commitments and the tradition of providing regular threat updates to the American public and the United States Congress. The IC is vigilant in monitoring and assessing direct and indirect threats to US and allied interests. As part of this ongoing effort, the IC’s National Intelligence Officers work closely with analysts from across the IC to examine the spectrum of threats and highlight the most likely and/or impactful near-term risks in the context of the longer-term, overarching threat environment.Page 24: Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists
DVEs [Domestic Violent Extremists] motivated by a range of ideologies that are not connected to or inspired by jihadi terrorist organizations like al-Qa‘ida and ISIS pose an elevated threat to the United States. This diverse set of extremists reflects an increasingly complex threat landscape, including racially or ethnically motivated threats and antigovernment or antiauthority threats.Of these, violent extremists who espouse an often overlapping mix of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and exclusionary cultural-nationalist beliefs have the most persistent transnational connections via often loose online communities to like-minded individuals and groups in the West. The threat from this diffuse movement has ebbed and flowed for decades but has increased since 2015.
● Violent extremists who promote the superiority of the white race have been responsible for at least 26 lethal attacks that killed more than 141 people and for dozens of disrupted plots in the West since 2015. While these extremists often see themselves as part of a broader global movement, most attacks have been carried out by individuals or small, independent cells.
● Australia, Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom consider white racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, including Neo-Nazi groups, to be the fastest growing terrorist threat they face.
● Both these and other DVEs, such as antigovernment or antiauthority extremists, are motivated and inspired by a mix of ideological, sociopolitical, and personal grievances against their targets, which have increasingly included large public gatherings, houses of worship, law enforcement and government facilities, and retail locations. Lone actors, who by definition are not likely to conspire with others regarding their plans, are increasingly choosing soft, familiar targets for their attacks, limiting law enforcement opportunities for detection and disruption.
🧵 RT @OlgaNYC1211 I feel like I have to constantly post this reminder and it’s frustrating. There are no two sides to Russia’s escalation and threats towards Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine 7 years ago and has been occupying parts of Ukraine and waging daily war resulting in over 14,000 deaths 📌 https://twitter.com/OlgaNYC1211/status/1382176684963684352?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @OlgaNYC1211 There is no conflict, no civil war. Just Russia’s increasing aggression and threats of further invasion which threatens Ukraine and the West. Also Russia has been using Ukraine as testing grounds for all the hellish tactics they have unleashed on the West including America.
⋙ 🐣 RT @OlgaNYC1211 Ukraine has zero desire to invade or attack Russia and poses absolutely no threat. They recently have been moving military on their sovereign territory to defend themselves in case of an attack. Not sure why this bothsidesism keeps appearing by people discussing what is happening
🐣 RT @starsandstripes NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg expressed the Western military alliance’s “unwavering” support for Ukraine and warned Moscow on Tuesday not to push its troop buildup along Russia’s border with the neighboring country.
⋙ Stars&Stripes: NATO, US vow support for Ukraine, warn Russia on troops http://bit.ly/3uMtRP7
NYT: Capitol Police Told to Hold Back on Riot Response on Jan. 6, Report Finds http://nyti.ms/3sjcNyC “In a 104-page document, the inspector general, Michael A. Bolton, criticized the way the Capitol Police prepared for and responded to the mob violence”
// Despite being tipped that “Congress itself is the target” on Jan. 6, Capitol Police were ordered not to use their most powerful crowd-control weapons, according to a scathing new watchdog report.
The Capitol Police had clearer advance warnings about the Jan. 6 attack than were previously known, including the potential for violence in which “Congress itself is the target.” But officers were instructed by their leaders not to use their most aggressive tactics to hold off the mob, according to a scathing new report by the agency’s internal investigator.
In a 104-page document, the inspector general, Michael A. Bolton, criticized the way the Capitol Police prepared for and responded to the mob violence on Jan. 6. … ¤ Mr. Bolton found that the agency’s leaders failed to adequately prepare despite explicit warnings that pro-Trump extremists posed a threat to law enforcement and civilians and that the police used defective protective equipment. He also found that the leaders ordered their Civil Disturbance Unit to refrain from using its most powerful crowd-control tools — like stun grenades — to put down the onslaught.
The report offers the most devastating account to date of the lapses and miscalculations around the most violent attack on the Capitol in two centuries.
Three days before the siege, a Capitol Police intelligence assessment warned of violence from supporters of President Donald J. Trump who believed his false claims that the election had been stolen. Some had even posted a map of the Capitol complex’s tunnel system on pro-Trump message boards.
“Unlike previous postelection protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counterprotesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th,” the threat assessment said, according to the inspector general’s report. “Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike.”
But on Jan. 5, the agency wrote in a plan for the protest that there were “no specific known threats related to the joint session of Congress.” And the former chief of the Capitol Police has testified that the force had determined that the likelihood of violence was “improbable.”
Mr. Bolton concluded such intelligence breakdowns stemmed from dysfunction within the agency and called for “guidance that clearly documents channels for efficiently and effectively disseminating intelligence information to all of its personnel.”
That failure conspired with other lapses inside the Capitol Police force to create a dangerous situation on Jan. 6, according to his account. The agency’s Civil Disturbance Unit, which specializes in handling large groups of protesters, was not allowed to use some of its most powerful tools and techniques against the crowd, on the orders of supervisors.
“Heavier, less-lethal weapons,” including stun grenades, “were not used that day because of orders from leadership,” Mr. Bolton wrote. Officials on duty on Jan. 6 told him that such equipment could have helped the police to “push back the rioters.”
Since the Jan. 6 attack, Congress has undertaken a series of security reviews about what went wrong. The three top security officials in charge that day resigned in disgrace, and they have since deflected responsibility for the intelligence failures, blaming other agencies, each other and at one point even a subordinate for the breakdowns that allowed hundreds of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol.
But the inspector general report makes clear that the agency had received some warnings about how Mr. Trump’s extremist supporters were growing increasingly desperate as he promoted lies about election theft.
“Supporters of the current president see Jan. 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election,” said the assessment three days before the riot. “This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent.”
The Department of Homeland Security warned the Capitol Police on Dec. 21 of comments on a pro-Trump website promoting attacks on members of Congress with a map of the tunnel system, according to the inspector general’s findings. ¤ “Several comments promote confronting members of Congress and carrying firearms during the protest,” a Capitol Police analyst wrote.
Among the comments reported to the Capitol Police: “Bring guns. It’s now or never,” and, “We can’t give them a choice. Overwhelming armed numbers is our only chance.”
On Jan. 5, the F.B.I.’s Norfolk field office, in Virginia, relayed another threat from an anonymous social media thread that warned of a looming war at the Capitol. ¤ “Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled,” the message read. “Get violent … stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”
WaPo, Aaron Blake: Inside Trump’s private, revisionist, grievance-laden speech to the RNC http://wapo.st/3uHHlM0
NYT: U.S. to Increase Military Presence in Germany http://nyti.ms/3s9H2rH Reverses Trump’s planned pull-back and adds 500 troops to “create more space, more cyber and more electronic warfare capabilities in Europe,” per Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III
// Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, on a visit to Germany, announced an addition of 500 personnel to strengthen deterrence and defenses in Europe.
⭕ 12 Apr 2021
NYT: Defying Republicans, Big Companies Keep the Focus on Voting Rights http://nyti.ms/3dd1VOA “Beyond making statements, business leaders are weighing what actions they can take to influence the policy decisions made by Republican lawmakers”
// A coalition of law firms has joined business leaders in wanting to use their clout to oppose state legislation that would make it harder to vote.
WaPo: Biden faces pressure from Pelosi, Sanders over whether to double down on Obamacare or expand Medicare http://wapo.st/3ddXYcE Why not make pandemic changes to ACA permanent AND let 55yo✛ Opt In to a Public Option that = Medicare? PayFor: ⇈ cap on withholding @SenSanders
// House Democratic leadership and Sen. Bernie Sanders split as Biden administration sculpts next package
📋 🔆 This❗️⋙ TheAtlantic, Adam Jentleson: How to Stop the Minority-Rule Doom Loop http://bit.ly/3tcAie0 “After 1888 until 2000, every president who won the White House won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.” Not anymore.
// The next two years might be America’s last chance to protect the basic democratic principle of majority rule.
President Joe Biden came into office facing four “converging crises”: COVID-19, climate change, racial justice, and the economy. But after a few weeks of fast action on a pandemic relief plan, a fifth crisis will determine the fate of the rest of his administration, and perhaps that of American democracy itself: the minority-rule doom loop, by which predominantly white conservatives gain more and more power, even as they represent fewer Americans.
The doom loop consists of four interlocking components. Candidates who represent white conservatives—Republicans, in our ideologically sorted era—begin every election cycle buoyed by a sluice of voter suppression and gerrymandering (what I call electoral welfare), which makes it easier for them to win. Then antidemocratic features of the American system that have always existed but never benefited one party over the other in any systematic way help those same candidates take control of institutions such as the White House and the Senate, despite winning fewer votes and representing fewer people than their opponents. Once in control of these institutions, these newly elected officials use them to entrench their power beyond the reach of voters. If they are eventually voted out of power, they retain a veto over the agenda of the majority, which they use to block change and feed the conservative case that the government is “broken.” This hastens their return to power—along the very path they greased with voter suppression.
The net effect of this doom loop is a growing divergence between the agenda of the government and the will of the governed, an untenable dynamic in any democracy. With Democratic control of Congress hanging by a handful of seats, the next two years might be the country’s last chance to stop this cycle.
TheBulwark, Tim Miller: The Insurrection Is the Message. And Republicans Are All Still Onboard. http://bit.ly/32a7iry “Trump once again clarified—for anyone who had lingering doubts—that he did, in fact, want the election to be overturned”
// Inside the Republican donor retreat.
The panoply of GOP elites once again made the pilgrimage to one of God-King Trump’s holy sites, choosing Trump International Palm Beach to host their spring donor confab rather than retreating to literally any other high-end club which would’ve brought the dual benefits of (1) not being owned by a failed insurrectionist and (2) serving rock-hard steaks with a side of ketchup.
Look, I don’t want to torment you with gratuitous reading about the details of the RumpRoast Master of Palm Beach’s unemployment routine, but here’s the deal: When the party’s entire leadership reaffirms their captivity to a man who attempted to overturn our democracy, it merits being called out with specificity. And that’s what happened Saturday night in South Florida.
The Republican party wants all of us to forget what happened in the lead-up to January 6. Kevin McCarthy said recently that his vote to overturn the election “wasn’t to overturn an election” because it wasn’t really going to happen . . . or something.
Well on Saturday, at an event that also featured such top Republicans as Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Kristi Noem, Tom Cotton, and McCarthy, Trump once again clarified—for anyone who had lingering doubts—that he did, in fact, want the election to be overturned.
Trump once again stated specifically that he wanted Mike Pence to have “the courage” to not certify the election, for the purpose of keeping Trump in the White House.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jdawsey1 “I wish that Mike Pence had the courage to send it back to the legislatures… I like him so much. I was so disappointed,” Trump said. Most of the speech was about the election.
Now you might think that a former president declaring that he was disappointed that his sincere effort to become an unelected autocrat would get some pushback from attendees. That people with live political careers—people who currently hold elective office and are due to face voters soon—might see some benefit to distancing themselves from the most direct assault on our democracy undertaken by a president in the postwar era. ¤ Crickets.
And while all of the elected officials who are asking voters to entrust them with their judgment were silent in the face of Trump’s continued anti-democratic assault, there was one group that spoke out . . . some of the Republican donors in attendance.
Well, they didn’t speak out exactly. They whispered. On background. To Politico. (What journalistic purpose is being served by granting donors anonymity exactly?) ¤ These donors thought the speech had been a bit “dour” and “negative.” ¤ Donald Trump, negative? You don’t say!
Trump’s anti-democratic fight continues, and DeSantis was there with him on Saturday as he made his intentions explicit and attacked Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, and others who didn’t stick with him the whole way like the Florida governor did.
DeSantis might think that he can argue sometime in the future that the “fight” he was pushing was something other than an insurrection that resulted in a deadly siege of the Capitol. But Donald Trump continues to publicly disabuse him of that notion every time he opens his mouth. And DeSantis and the rest merely smile and applaud. ¤ Then and now, insurrection was the message. ¤ They are all on board. ¤ We are not. And we will never stop calling them out.
🐣 RT @Acyn Psaki response on Cornyn: I can confirm that the President of the United States does not spend his time tweeting conspiracy theories. He spends his time working on behalf of the American people.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson No, it begs the question, “Was Trump a corrupt, manic narcissist driven to scrape the bottom of every barrel of attention and who lacked an ability to focus on the work of being President?”
⋙ 🐣 RT @JohnCornyn The president is not doing cable news interviews. Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional. The public comments are largely scripted. Biden has opted for fewer sit down interviews with mainstream outlets and reporters.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JohnCornyn Invites the question: is he really in charge?
◕ WaPo: The rise of domestic extremism in America http://wapo.st/3dZL1lw “Since 2015, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities … [A]ttacks and plots ascribed to far-left views accounted for 66 incidents leading to 19 deaths” ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1381639908935278598?s=20/photo/1
// Source: Center for Strategic and International Studies: Data shows a surge in homegrown attacks not seen in a quarter-century; chart is from CSIS report
⋙ New report on domestic extremism: Deaths since 2015: 83% rightwing, 17% leftwing
Domestic terrorism incidents have soared to new highs in the United States, driven chiefly by white-supremacist, anti-Muslim and anti-government extremists on the far right, according to a Washington Post analysis of data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The surge reflects a growing threat from homegrown terrorism not seen in a quarter-century, with right-wing extremist attacks and plots greatly eclipsing those from the far left and causing more deaths, the analysis shows. ¤ The number of all domestic terrorism incidents in the data peaked in 2020.
Since 2015, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities, the data shows. At the same time, attacks and plots ascribed to far-left views accounted for 66 incidents leading to 19 deaths.
“What is most concerning is that the number of domestic terror plots and attacks are at the highest they have been in decades,” said Seth Jones, director of the database project at CSIS, a nonpartisan Washington-based nonprofit that specializes in national security issues. “It’s so important for Americans to understand the gravity of the threat before it gets worse.”
More than a quarter of right-wing incidents and just under half of the deaths in those incidents were caused by people who showed support for white supremacy or claimed to belong to groups espousing that ideology, the analysis shows.
Victims of all incidents in recent years represent a broad cross-section of American society, including Blacks, Jews, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, Asians and other people of color who have been attacked by right-wing extremists wielding vehicles, guns, knives and fists.
Dozens of religious institutions — including mosques, synagogues and Black churches — as well as abortion clinics and government buildings, have been threatened, burned, bombed and hit with gunfire over the past six years.
Left-wing attacks reached 25 in 2020. Those incidents include multiple attempts by extremists to derail trains to hinder oil pipeline construction and at least seven incidents in which police and their facilities were targeted with guns, firebombs and graffiti. The incidents included the burning of a Minneapolis police precinct during protests over the death of George Floyd.
In August, a supporter of President Donald Trump was shot dead in Portland, Ore., by a suspected gunman who was a self-described antifa supporter. That killing was the only death last year attributed to far-left violence, the data shows. There were two deaths attributed to far-right attacks. …
Data released by the CSIS on Monday includes the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol as one of 11 far-right terrorism incidents that month — the most for any January in the database. The new report highlights more involvement in far-right attacks and plots by military service members, veterans and current and former police officers, some of whom participated in the riot at the Capitol.
⇈ ⇊
📔◕ CSIS: The Military, Police, and the Rise of Terrorism in the United States http://bit.ly/3fYMLyi
⋙ PDF: http://bit.ly/3mMMrnB 15p
WaPo: How the corporate backlash to Georgia’s new voting law is shaping other fights around the country over access to the polls http://wapo.st/3mH1Zte “Voting access now looms as one of the defining battles between the parties as they prepare for the 2022 midterms”
WaPo: ADL demands Fox News fire Tucker Carlson over anti-Semitic trope: ‘This has deadly significance’ http://wapo.st/3a6AJiF Jonathan A. Greenblatt, Director of the Anti-Defamation League, slammed Carlson and the Murdochs: “Tucker has to go”
// Anti-Defamation League; “white replacement theory”
Last week on Fox News, Tucker Carlson argued that immigration to the United States would “dilute the political power” of Americans in a segment that also referenced “white replacement theory” — a discriminatory trope, often weaponized by white nationalists, suggesting that people of color are “replacing” White Americans.
The segment left the Anti-Defamation League urging Fox News to fire Carlson for his “open-ended endorsement of white supremacist ideology,” the first time the group has made such a demand, according to the Associated Press.
On Sunday, Jonathan A. Greenblatt, chief executive and national director of the ADL, repeated those demands on CNN, slamming Carlson for his remarks and condemning the network’s owners, the Murdoch family, for not immediately taking action. ¤
“I think we’ve really crossed a new threshold when a major news network dismisses this or pretends like it isn’t important,” Greenblatt told to CNN’s Brian Stelter. “This has deadly significance.” ¤ “Tucker has got to go,” he added.
Carlson then referenced the racist theory by name, dismissing it as the motivation for his remarks. ¤ “Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the white replacement theory? No, no, no,” he said. “I have less political power because they are importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?”
… The theory has evolved into a bogus notion that a cabal of elite Jews are plotting to replace White populations with immigrants, Muslims and Black and Brown people, according to the ADL. ¤ The theory has been employed by far-right groups and mass killers. In 2017 hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members marched through the streets of Charlottesville, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” The man responsible for the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people at two mosques, cited the theory, as did the gunman who killed 20 people, seven of them Mexicans, at a Walmart in El Paso.
⭕ 11 Apr 2021
🐣 RT @Strandjunker 1923: Hitler’s failed coup.
No real consequences.
No fundamental changes.
1933: Hitler takes power.
I wish I could implant this into everyone’s brain.
🐣 RT @FPWellman January 6th didn’t just happen. Trump lied over and over to build up the anger and encourage his followers to violence. Friday is 100 days since the Capitol Insurrection. We aren’t forgetting. Follow @ProjectLincoln all week as we remember that fateful day. #Jan6NeverAgain
⋙ 🐣 RT @LincolnProject This Friday marks 100 days since the attack on our Capitol. It all started with #TheBigLie. #Jan6NeverForget #100DaysSince 💽 https://twitter.com/FPWellman/status/1381383276707872768?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @atrupar Liz Cheney on Trump’s continued embrace of insurrection: “The former president is using the same language that he knows provoked violence on Jan. 6. As a party, we need to be focused on the future. We need to be focused on embracing the Constitution, not embracing insurrection.” [Face The Nation]
WaPo: More than 100 corporate executives hold call to discuss halting donations and investments to fight controversial voting bills http://wapo.st/3uIGElP “Many of the corporate leaders who joined the call seemed to view the voting restrictions as attacks on democracy”
🐣 RT @Anthony WSJ EXCLUSIVE: Dozens of CEOs and other senior leaders from America’s biggest companies gathered on Zoom this weekend to plot how to fight what they see as voter suppression efforts under way in Texas and other states
⋙ WSJ: CEOs Plan New Push on Voting Legislation http://on.wsj.com/3dVBgoI “The new statement could come early this week, the people said, and would build on one that 72 Black executives signed last month in the wake of changes to Georgia’s voting laws”
// Companies from PayPal to AMC have signaled they will support joining effort for voter access, people say
⏳ AP: ‘Clear the Capitol,’ Pence pleaded, timeline of riot shows http://bit.ly/3tbayyy
TheGuardian, Jon Ronson: Making sense of conspiracy theorists as the world gets more bizarre http://bit.ly/2PSO3QK “64% of [Facebook] users who joined extremist groups were enticed to do so by clicking on the ‘Groups you should join’ and ‘Discover’ buttons”
// It is 20 years since Jon Ronson wrote Them, his eye-popping investigation into conspiracy theorists. Now, in a world awash with tales of paedophile elites and puppet masters, is he any closer to understanding it all?
⭕ 10 Apr 2021
🐣 RT @NoahBookbinder At a RNC event at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump restated the lie that he won the election and bragged about the crowd at the rally that preceded the insurrection. By giving him business and a forum for this dangerous rhetoric, the RNC is endorsing insurrection.
💙 ⋙ WaPo: Trump slashes at McConnell as he reiterates election falsehoods at Republican event http://wapo.st/3uNZpV8
DailyBeast/AP: Pence Begged Military to ‘Clear the Capitol’ During Jan. 6 Riot, New Docs Show http://bit.ly/3mDgePD
A new document obtained by the Associated Press reveals more details about the timeline of law enforcement responses to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. The document, which does not appear to have been provided to congressional investigators for their public hearings in February, highlights how President Donald Trump took no steps to contain the chaos. It says Vice President Mike Pence made a phone call around 4 p.m. to the acting defense secretary, saying that the Capitol was not protected and asking that the military “clear the Capitol.” By this point, however, it had been two hours since rioters breached the building, injuring scores of police officers. And it would be another hour before defense officials approved a National Guard deployment.
Additionally, days before Jan. 6, government officials met to discuss the use of the National Guard, but said they’d only be called if the crowd exceeded 20,000. There was an hours-long delay in deploying the military on Jan. 6, leaving lawmakers, congressional staff and outnumbered police to largely fend for themselves.
🐣 RT @maggieNYT Trump rant on McConnell at RNC was brutal, per attendee. He took credit for Mr. McConnell’s margin of win. “Did he ever say thank you to me? No. I hired his wife. Did he ever say thank you to me? No.” He said he feels “sorry” for her, said, “She’s suffered so greatly.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @maggieNYT “A real leader” would not have accepted the results of the 2020 election, Trump said of McConnell, per attendee.
⋙ 🐣 RT @maggieNYT Trump continues attacking Mike Pence, whose life was in danger from Trump supporters on Jan. 6, saying he should have had “the courage” to refuse to certify the results.
⏳ AP: ‘Clear the Capitol,’ Pence pleaded, timeline of riot shows http://bit.ly/3tbayyy
📋 NYT, Anton Troianovski: ‘You Can’t Trust Anyone’: Russia’s Hidden Covid Toll Is an Open Secret http://nyti.ms/3dRqY99 “The country’s official coronavirus death toll is 102,649. But at least 300,000 more people died last year … than were reported in Russia’s most widely cited official statistics” ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1381081748000407555?s=20/photo/1
🌎 WaPo: On Ukraine’s doorstep, Russia boosts military and sends message of regional clout to Biden http://wapo.st/323xl3x “Russia’s sudden military surge appears to be more about sending messages than launching a fresh offensive, analysts said” ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1381066342606995456?s=20/photo/1
// Russia’s moves are seen more as a statement of resolve than as a prelude to an offensive.
⭕ 9 Apr 2021
💙❤️ ★ ScienceMag, Anthony Fauci: The story behind COVID-19 vaccines http://bit.ly/2QoXCXu
TPM (4/9): Prosecutors Detail Oathkeepers’ Alleged ‘Street Race’ To Capitol Attack — In Golf Carts http://bit.ly/2RmlATE Did they got the keys to the golf carts as part of providing security for Roger Stone?
TheGuardian: Biden orders commission to study supreme court expansion and reform http://bit.ly/2Q77mWe
● Executive order fulfils campaign pledge to examine court reform
● Biden has not said if he favors expanding nine-justice court
NYT: After Capitol Riot, Pentagon Announces New Efforts to Weed Out Extremism Among Troops http://nyti.ms/3mzbFFM ‘With a handful of exceptions, every unit has now had some sort of discussion about why white supremacy and extremism … have no place in the US military’
// Defense Department officials acknowledge that rooting out far-right extremist thinking from a military of 1.3 million active-duty troops will be an uphill slog.
WaPo: In new book, John Boehner says today’s GOP is unrecognizable to traditional conservatives and dishes on his time in politics http://wapo.st/3mxYRzH
WaPo: Trump officials celebrated efforts to change CDC reports on coronavirus, emails show http://wapo.st/3s74g1E
// Political appointees also tried to blunt scientific findings they deemed unfavorable to Trump, according to new documents from House probe
⭕ 8 Apr 2021
NYT: Former In-Law of Trump Executive Gives Prosecutors Boxes of Documents http://nyti.ms/31YRoA9 Jennifer Weisselberg is the ex-wife of Trump Organization financial executive Allen Weisselberg’s son Barry
// The handover of the documents suggests prosecutors are stepping up pressure on the executive, Allen H. Weisselberg.
“I can confirm that Jennifer Weisselberg has been in close contact with the district attorney’s office, has been turning over documents to them and continues to do so,” said Duncan Levin, a lawyer for Ms. Weisselberg, who is the ex-wife of Mr. Weisselberg’s son Barry. “She is committed to cooperating with law enforcement and being fully transparent with investigators.
Ms. Weisselberg said in a recent interview that investigators from the district attorney’s office visited her apartment weeks ago at her invitation, to review a number of documents involving her ex-husband and her former father-in-law. She said investigators took several of the documents. Thursday’s visit suggests that prosecutors are collecting additional records.
🐣 RT @ChristopherJM “Russia now has more troops on the border with Ukraine than at any time since 2014,” says @PressSec. 💽 https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1380231723598946307?s=20/photo/1
CNN: Mueller fraud investigator brought in to help Vance’s probe of Trump Org. http://cnn.it/3fVUY6s
A former FBI forensic accountant key to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election is one of several accountants working on the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into the Trump Organization, people familiar with the matter say. ¤ Morgan Magionos, who was a lynchpin to the prosecution of former President Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is a member of the team of outside experts from FTI Consulting aiding New York prosecutors.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance brought on FTI Consulting last year as part of his office’s wide-ranging investigation into possible insurance fraud, fraud involving lenders, and tax fraud.
Magionos, a certified fraud examiner and accountant, spent nine years at the FBI where she worked in its international corruption squad in Washington, DC. She was detailed to the Mueller investigation and traced Manafort’s assets across four countries. Manafort was charged with multiple counts of bank fraud, failing to report foreign bank accounts, and filing false tax returns, among other crimes. …
Trump has called the district attorney’s investigation a “witch hunt.” The Trump Organization this week beefed up its legal team by bringing on criminal-defense attorney Ronald Fischetti, who decades earlier was a law partner with Pomerantz. Fischetti’s hiring was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
🐣 RT @MSNBC According to NYT, fmr. GOP Speaker Boehner writes in his new book that fmr. Pres. Trump incited the Jan. 6 riot and the former president’s “refusal to accept the result of the election not only cost Republicans the Senate but led to mob violence.”
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, MorningJoe: Trump responsible for ‘bloody insurrection,’ says John Boehner http://on.msnbc.com/3mwAxy4
// Former Republican House Speaker John Boehner blames Donald Trump in his upcoming memoir for losing the Senate and inciting the January 6 Capitol riot. The Morning Joe panel discusses.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @FridaGhitis Former top GOP leader and ex House Speaker John Boehner on the Jan 6 attack: ¤ Trump “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November”
🐣 RT @ChrisAlbertoLaw BREAKING: The Capitol Police IG reveals even more failures prior to Jan 6, including “a previously unreported warning more than 2 wks ahead of the insurrection about a map of the Capitol’s underground tunnels that was posted on a pro-Donald Trump website.”
⋙ CNN: Watchdog reveals new warning about map of Capitol’s underground tunnels posted before insurrection http://cnn.it/3wFjrCS
⭕ 7 Apr 2021
🐣 RT @ACEurasia Biden can’t stop at phone-call diplomacy, says @melindaharing. “Washington needs to tell Moscow that if it doesn’t leave the Donbas in six months, the United States will levy more sanctions and begin visa bans on top Russian officials and their children.”
⋙ AtlanticCouncil: FAST THINKING: Russia’s making military moves in Ukraine. What’s it up to? http://bit.ly/3g31KXM
// 4/2/2021
Law&Crime: Ten Lawmakers Join Lawsuit Accusing Trump, Giuliani, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys of Inciting Capitol Riot http://bit.ly/3rXIpK4
NYT, Thomas Edsall: The Fear That Is Shaping American Politics http://nyti.ms/3my0NYP
// It affects everyone from Joe Manchin to Joe Biden.
CNN: Capitol riot defendant flips to help prosecutors against Proud Boys http://cnn.it/3s2fQuW “Prosecutors had revealed the witness heard Proud Boys members talking about wanting to kill members of Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence … and had access to guns”
The development is the first indication that people charged in the insurrection are cooperating against the pro-Trump extremist group. Federal prosecutors have made clear they are focused on building conspiracy cases against leadership of the Proud Boys and paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers.
Court records have made murmurs for weeks about cooperators and plea deals in the works, and prosecutors revealed that a rioter wearing an Oath Keepers hat was in talks to cooperate earlier this week.
What happens next is likely to follow the same pattern as in organized crime or drug investigations, with prosecutors pressuring knowledgeable defendants to become witnesses. Some may sign up to cooperate, and many of those charged are likely to plead guilty to avoid trial or more severe charges. ¤ So far, around two dozen people associated with the Proud Boys have been charged with federal crimes related to the riot.
It’s always been likely that prosecutors would gain cooperators against the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other extremist factions involved in the riot, according to several defense attorneys involved in the cases.
[Martin] Tankleff represents a handful of Capitol riot defendants, including alleged Proud Boy “warrior” Dominic Pezzola; Ryan Samsel, who his attorneys say was beaten by a guard at the DC Jail in March; and Richard Barnett, the boastful Arkansas man accused of putting his feet on a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. Tankleff and his law partner Steven Metcalf declined to comment on the status of their clients’ cases in the Capitol riot investigation.
Weeks ago, [an] attorney for Pezzola wrote in court filings that he believed a so-called “cooperating witness” was sharing information about the Proud Boys. Prosecutors had revealed the witness heard Proud Boys members talking about wanting to kill members of Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence and return to Washington for Inauguration Day, and that members of the group had access to guns. The witness wasn’t charged with a crime and isn’t affiliated with the Proud Boys, the Justice Department later clarified.
At least one defendant, Jon Schaffer, a guitarist with the heavy metal band Iced Earth, is considering cooperating, according to a filing on Monday. Schaffer allegedly charged at police officers in the Capitol insurrection and is in jail while he awaits trial. In court, he has distanced himself from the Oath Keepers. ¤ Still, Schaffer did “debrief interviews” starting in March, according to the filing, which prosecutors intended to share in court confidentially and mistakenly made public.
📊 WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Someone shrunk the GOP http://wapo.st/3tcdvik 49% Dem to 40% GOP (including leaners): “That nine-point gap dwarfs the usual four- to six-point Democratic advantage. It has not been this big since the fourth quarter of 2012”
Gallup reports that during the first quarter of 2021 “an average of 49% of U.S. adults identified with the Democratic Party or said they are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party. That compares with 40% who identified as Republicans or Republican leaners.” That nine-point gap dwarfs the usual four- to six-point Democratic advantage. It has not been this big since the fourth quarter of 2012.
House and Senate Republicans continue to oppose Biden’s uber-popular initiatives, engage in silly cultural memes, obsess over the amorphous cancel culture (even as they “cancel” Major League Baseball for taking its All-Star Game to Denver) and perpetuate the Big Lie that the election was stolen. They are leaders of a smaller army, acting as if they can survive with only the MAGA base on their side. This is a winning formula only if they can suppress the vote of non-MAGA voters. Hence, we see the frenzy to shrink the electorate to match the shrunken GOP ranks.
Biden seems ideally suited for a moment when the public embraces more government and a larger percentage of voters are fleeing the MAGA-saturated GOP. So long as he can deliver — a big question mark — and quiet the culture wars, he can set the foundation for a broad coalition that ranges all the way from the center-right to the progressive left.
📊 📋 WaPo, Max Boot: The GOP can’t be saved. Center-right voters need to become Biden Republicans. http://wapo.st/3muNqIN “The GOP remains a cult of personality for the worst president in U.S. history”
Most Republicans don’t care that Trump locked up children, cozied up to white supremacists, tear-gassed peaceful protesters, benefited from Russian help in both of his campaigns, egregiously mishandled the pandemic, incited a violent attack on the Capitol and even faced fraud complaints from his own donors. A new Reuters-Ipsos poll finds that 81 percent of Republicans have a favorable impression of Trump. Wait. It gets worse: 60 percent say the 2020 election was stolen from him, only 28 percent say he is even partly to blame for the Capitol insurrection, and 55 percent say that the Capitol attack “was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad.”
This is a portrait of a party that can’t be saved — at least in the foreseeable future. The GOP remains a cult of personality for the worst president in U.S. history. It has become a bastion of irrationality, conspiracy mongering, racism, nativism and anti-scientific prejudices.
It’s possible to oppose Biden’s plans on fiscal conservative grounds, but Republicans have no standing left on that issue after supporting Trump’s $1.9 trillion tax cut during an economic expansion. Likewise, Republicans have lost all credibility on free trade by supporting Trump’s trade wars and on foreign policy by backing Trump’s neo-isolationism. What do they have left? Scare-mongering rhetoric (every Democratic initiative is a sign of “socialism”) and culture wars (Dr. Seuss, Major League Baseball) to distract their base.
But while Biden hasn’t gotten any GOP votes in Congress for his agenda yet, he has won broad approval from the country at large. At 53.1 percent, Biden’s approval rating is higher than Trump’s ever was. Polls show that 73 percent approve of Biden’s handling of the coronavirus and 60 percent of his handling of the economy. There is also broad support for his infrastructure plan, with 64 percent backing tax hikes on corporations to pay for it.
Biden is governing from the “new center,” while Republicans are increasingly catering to the far right with shrill, divisive rhetoric and antidemocratic actions such as bills to restrict voting. ¤ Under those circumstances, those of us on the center-right can’t afford a third-party flirtation. We need to become Biden Republicans.
⭕ 6 Apr 2021
🐣 RT @TomJChicago Fox is creating an alternate reality to minimize the 1/6 insurrection. It’s a reminder of the importance of indicting & locking away Trump for the rest of his miserable life for trying to overturn the election. The Senate voted 57-43 to convict him. A real trial would convict him 💽 https://twitter.com/TomJChicago/status/1379593575873318913?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Capitol Rioters Face the Consequences of Their Selfie Sabotage http://nyti.ms/39UtASc
// Joe Biggs and his fellow Proud Boys left an incriminating social media trail for federal investigators before and during the Capitol attack on Jan. 6.
🐣 RT @MilesTaylorUSA Today I joined 100+ former national security, military & elected officials in a letter to Congress calling for a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan 6 Insurrection. Help us by making sure your representatives see it. https://twitter.com/MilesTaylorUSA/status/1379488755619258369?s=20/photo/1
WaPo, Paul Waldman: The Senate just moved one step closer to sanity http://wapo.st/31P8wbu “Fortunately, Democrats have gotten burned by … GOP strategy too many times, and they seem to finally understand how it works”
🌎 WaPo (3/10): How the 2022 Senate map is shaping up http://wapo.st/3cTDllC ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1379559336075231235?s=20/photo/1
// tags 2022 Senate 2022 Senators up for re-election in 2022 map 2022 Senate map
⇈ ⇊
🔄 “Potentially competitive races as judged by Cook Political Report. 2020 results from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.”
💙 WaPo, Jonathan Gould, Kenneth Shepsle and Matthew Stephenson: Don’t eliminate the filibuster. Democratize it. http://wapo.st/2Q5BPUo Now THIS is a brilliant idea: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1379520041880813576?s=20/photo/1
The Senate could change this rule so that ending debate would instead require the support of a majority of senators who collectively represent a majority of the U.S. population, with each senator considered to represent half of his or her state’s residents. This rule, which should be extended to all legislation as well as confirmation of judicial appointments, would allow a bare majority of senators to overcome a filibuster — if those senators together represented a majority of the American people.
WaPo: What an analysis of 377 Americans arrested or charged in the Capitol insurrection tells us http://wapo.st/3cS4RQC “Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges”
// Robert A. Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.
The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), working with court records, has analyzed the demographics and home county characteristics of the 377 Americans, from 250 counties in 44 states, arrested or charged in the Capitol attack.
… Only Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Montana appear to have sent more protesters to D.C. suspected of crimes than their populations would suggest.
Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties.
But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.
… [C]ounties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance.
One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the “Great Replacement.” Great Replacement theory has achieved iconic status with white nationalists and holds that minorities are progressively replacing White populations due to mass immigration policies and low birthrates. Extensive social media exposure is the second-biggest driver of this view, our surveys found.
⭕ 5 Apr 2021
WaPo, Michael Gerson: Why tearing down Fauci is essential to the MAGA myth http://wapo.st/3fI0sBp “Fauci is practicing epidemiology. His critics are practicing idiocy. Both are very good at their chosen work”
… Fauci was a surefire applause line at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. Former Trump administration officials continue to target him. Republican members of Congress vie with one another to put Fauci in his place.
For Trump officials, including Donald Trump himself, this makes perfect sense. If Fauci has been right about covid, then playing down the disease, mocking masks, modeling superspreader events, denying death tolls, encouraging anti-mandate militias and recommending quack cures were not particularly helpful. If Fauci has been right, they presided over a deadly debacle.
When former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro claims that Fauci is “the father of the actual virus” or former chief of staff Mark Meadows complains about Fauci’s indifference to the (nearly nonexistent) flow of covid across the southern border, the goal is not really to press arguments. It is to create an alternative MAGA reality in which followers are free from the stress of truth — a safe space in which more than half a million people did not die and their leader was not a vicious, incompetent, delusional threat to the health of the nation.
There were, of course, disagreements along the way about the length of lockdowns and the form of mandates. But on the whole, American citizens have witnessed one of the most dramatic vindications of scientific expertise in our history. We have been healthier when we listened to the experts and sicker when we did not.
All these critics of Fauci have chosen to attack the citadel of science at its strongest point. With squirt guns. While naked and blowing kazoos. … Fauci is practicing epidemiology. His critics are practicing idiocy. Both are very good at their chosen work.
🔄 📋 Insider: 397 people have been charged in the Capitol insurrection so far. This searchable table shows them all. http://bit.ly/3cTYJHs
📊 Reuters: Half of Republicans believe false accounts of deadly U.S. Capitol riot-Reuters/Ipsos poll http://reut.rs/39NKmme (n=1005, 3/30-31/2021) 8 in 10 Republicans hold a favorable view of Trump compared to only 3 in 10 Independents
Since the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have pushed false and misleading accounts to downplay the event that left five dead and scores of others wounded. His supporters appear to have listened.
Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.
Since the Capitol attack, Trump, many of his allies within the Republican Party and right-wing media personalities have publicly painted a picture of the day’s events jarringly at odds with reality.
Hundreds of Trump’s supporters, mobilized by the former president’s false claims of a stolen election, climbed walls of the Capitol building and smashed windows to gain entry while lawmakers were inside voting to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory. The rioters. – many of them sporting Trump campaign gear and waving flags – also included known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll shows a large number of rank-and-file Republicans have embraced the myth. While 59% of all Americans say Trump bears some responsibility for the attack, only three in 10 Republicans agree. Eight in 10 Democrats and six in 10 independents reject the false claims that the Capitol siege was “mostly peaceful” or it was staged by left-wing protestors.
The disinformation campaign aimed at downplaying the insurrection and Trump’s role in it reflects a growing consensus within the Republican Party that its fortunes remain tethered to Trump and his devoted base, political observers say.
According to the new Reuters/Ipsos poll, Trump remains the most popular figure within the party, with eight in 10 Republicans continuing to hold a favorable impression of him.
Some mainstream Republicans contend that after Republicans lost both the White House and control of both chambers of Congress on Trump’s watch, the party must move on from the former president in order to attract suburban, moderate and independent voters.
In the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, only about three in 10 independents said they have a favorable view of Trump, among the lowest level recorded since his presidency. Most Americans — about 60% — also believe Biden won the November election fair and square, and said Trump should not run again.
🐣 RT @thedailybeast Russia is gearing up for war again, local experts, state media propagandists, and government officials are all saying. The fight will begin once again on the real-world battlefield of Ukraine. But it will extend much, much further
⋙ DailyBeast, Julia Davis: Russia State Media Gears Up for a War ‘Against the West’ http://bit.ly/3uuAINf “When the time comes, pro-Russian forces will stage a provocation and step in to “defend” Russian citizens from the Ukrainian government” – from Russian TV
// One Kremlin propagandist even suggested that the struggle for Ukraine will end in a “nuclear conflict” between Russia and NATO.
🐣 RT @RexChapman Mitch McConnell’s whole career has been kissing up to big corporations. ¤ But if they won’t let him make it harder for Black people to vote, then he wants to break up. ¤ Everyone can see the real Mitch now.
⋙ 🐣 RT @burgessev McConnell takes aim at corporate US: “Parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”
WaPo, Alyssa Rosenberg: The only question about QAnon that really matters http://wapo.st/3up4W49 “Given the damage QAnon has done to individuals and families, it’s far more important to determine what might bring individual adherents to their senses”
WaPo: A QAnon revelation suggests the truth of Q’s identity was right there all along http://wapo.st/
// The extremist movement’s leader had purported to be a top-secret government operative. But a possible slip-up in a new documentary about QAnon suggests that Q was actually Ron Watkins, the longtime administrator of the 8kun message board.
But in the Sunday finale for the HBO series “Q: Into the Storm,” filmmaker Cullen Hoback points to what he argues is a key piece of evidence that Watkins had lied about his role in the more than 4,000 messages Q had posted since 2017.
In a final scene, after Watkins talked about how he had shared baseless claims about voter fraud after Trump’s loss in the 2020 elections, he told Hoback: “It was basically three years of intelligence training, teaching normies how to do intelligence work. It was basically what I was doing anonymously before, but never as Q.”
⭕ 4 Apr 2021
🐣 RT @SkinnerPm 53 years ago tonight RFK said this about the murder of MLK: ¤ ‘In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of nation we are, and what direction we want to move in.’ ¤ We need ask that question again. And finally answer it
NYT: Biden Steps Up Federal Efforts to Combat Domestic Extremism http://nyti.ms/2R7Mizt
// The administration has taken a series of steps to prioritize dealing with white supremacists and militias, especially after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
The attempts to more assertively grapple with the potential for violence from white supremacists and militias are a shift from President Donald J. Trump’s pressure on federal agencies to divert resources to target the antifa movement and leftist groups despite the conclusion by law enforcement authorities that far-right and militia violence was a more serious threat.
President Biden’s approach also continues a slow acknowledgment that especially after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, the federal government needs to put more attention and money into tracking and heading off threats from inside the United States, after two decades in which it made foreign terrorism the security priority.
In an intelligence report delivered to Congress last month, the administration labeled white supremacists and militia groups as top national security threats. The White House is also discussing with members of Congress the possibility of new domestic terrorism legislation and executive orders to update the criteria of terrorism watch lists to potentially include more homegrown extremists.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who helped investigate the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, said the Justice Department would also make domestic extremism a priority.
F.B.I. agents have worked domestic extremism cases for years. But the renewed focus from the highest levels of government is a major shift, especially as the administration grapples with whether current tactics and resources are enough to prevent future attacks.
The decision to confront the issue more directly stands in contrast to the approaches of the Trump and Obama administrations. In 2009, the Obama administration rescinded an intelligence assessment after it mentioned that veterans could be vulnerable to recruitment by domestic extremist groups, prompting political backlash.
Researchers say that the United States is years behind European countries like Germany and Norway in understanding the threat of far-right extremism. Daniel Koehler, a researcher in Germany who has helped other countries carry out deradicalization programs, said the United States still had not built a system for families who notice a member using threatening language or otherwise signaling that they could engage in violence.
“I have parents writing to me, ‘I don’t know what to do,’” Mr. Koehler said, adding that many American families had reached out to him after the Capitol riot with nowhere else to turn.
The Biden administration’s emphasis on the issue is a welcome sign for many current and former government officials who have said that such efforts were stunted under the Trump administration.
In September, Brian Murphy, a former head of the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence branch, filed a whistle-blower complaint accusing the department’s leadership of ordering the modification of intelligence assessments to make the threat of white supremacy “appear less severe” and including information on left-wing groups to align with Mr. Trump’s messaging. The Homeland Security leadership under the Trump administration denied the accusations.
The Obama administration also treaded carefully on the issue out of political concerns. Before announcing his presidential candidacy in 2019, Mr. Biden asked Janet Napolitano, who served as the homeland security secretary at the start of the Obama administration, about the decision in 2009 to rescind a report warning that U.S. military veterans were vulnerable to recruitment by extremist groups.
During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing last month, Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, noted the United States did not have a statute that would empower prosecutors to charge and investigate homegrown extremists with the same tools that are used against terrorism suspects from abroad.
Mr. Biden’s campaign platform said he would work to establish such a law “that respects free speech and civil liberties, while making the same commitment to root out domestic terrorism as we have to stopping international terrorism.” …
⭕ 3 Apr 2021
🐣 RT @rulajdbreal How the Trump campaign used prechecked boxes on digital fundraising solicitations to repeatedly take money $$$ from the bank accounts of onetime donors without their realizing it.
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Unsurprisingly, the Trump campaign scammed its donors
💙 ⋙ NYT: How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations http://nyti.ms/3dAVILc
// Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions. Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald Trump’s struggling campaign afloat.
⭕ 2 Apr 2021
AtlanticCouncil: FAST THINKING: Russia’s making military moves in Ukraine. What’s it up to? http://bit.ly/3g31KXM
🐣 RT @FredClarkson What is known & not known about Trump & Russia, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Opus Dei, & William Barr all in one place — in American Kompromat, by @craigunger Strong case that Trump has been a “Russian asset” for decades.
Reuters: Biden offers Ukraine ‘unwavering support’ in faceoff with Russia http://reut.rs/3sPUXV9
WaPo: How America’s surveillance networks helped the FBI catch the Capitol mob http://wapo.st/3cIT6vJ
// Federal documents detailing the attacks at the U.S. Capitol show a mix of FBI techniques, from license plate readers to facial recognition, that helped identify rioters. Digital rights activists say the invasive technology can infringe on our privacy.
⭕ 1 Apr 2021
WaPo: Oath Keepers founder, associates exchanged 19 calls from start of Jan. 6 riot through breach, prosecutors allege http://wapo.st/31WqYPs
DOJ AUSA DC: Oath Keeper Affiliates Charged in Superseding Indictment for Conspiracy Leading to the U.S. Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3fy8hJQ
// Joshua James and Roberto Minuta are the Latest Individuals to be Indicted for Conspiracy to Obstruct Congress on Jan. 6, 2021
WASHINGTON — Two individuals associated with the Oath Keepers, a large but loosely organized collection of individuals who explicitly focus on the recruitment of current and former military, law enforcement and first responder personnel, were indicted yesterday in federal court in the District of Columbia for conspiring to obstruct Congress, among other charges. James and Minuta are the 11th and 12th defendants to be charged in this case.
Joshua James, 33, of Arab, Alabama, was arrested on March 9, 2021 in Arab, Alabama; and Roberto Minuta, 36, of Prosper, Texas, was arrested on March 7, 2021, in Newburgh, New York. Both individuals were charged by superseding indictment with conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, and entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds. If convicted, James and Minuta each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
According to the charging documents, James and Minuta communicated with co-conspirators in advance of the Jan. 6, 2021, incursion on the U.S. Capitol. The indictment alleges frequent and consistent communication leading up to the attack, such as in reserving hotel rooms and making phone calls to co-conspirators the morning of the breach.
According to the indictment, in response to a call for individuals to head to the Capitol after the building was breached, James and Minuta drove to the Capitol in a golf cart, at times swerving around law enforcement vehicles with Minuta stating, “Patriots are storming the Capitol…so we’re en route in a grand theft auto golf cart to the Capitol building right now…it’s going down guys; it’s literally going down right now Patriots storming the Capitol building…”
Once they arrived, Minuta aggressively berated and taunted law enforcement officers in riot gear guarding the perimeter of the Capitol near the East side of the building. At 3:15 p.m., Minuta and James forcibly entered the Capitol building through the same east side Rotunda doors through which their alleged co-conspirators had entered earlier.
They then stormed the building, wearing military gear. Minuta additionally wore hard-knuckle tactical gloves, ballistic goggles, a radio with an earpiece and bear spray. Video captures Minuta yelling at an officer: “All that’s left is the Second Amendment!” as he exited the building at 3:19 p.m. Not long after 4:00 p.m., individuals who breached the Capitol – including James, Minuta and many of their alleged co-conspirators – gathered together approximately 100 feet from the Capitol near the northeast corner of the building.
The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, Counterterrorism Section. Valuable assistance was provided by the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices for the Southern District of New York, Eastern District of Texas and Northern District of Alabama. The case is being investigated by the FBI’s New York, Dallas, Birmingham and Washington Field Offices.
NYMag, Jonathan Chait: Russia Keeps Bribing Foreign Politicians. Is Trump Different? http://nym.ag/2PqLgOD
AP: Russian Foreign Minister says relations with West have ‘hit the bottom’ http://bit.ly/2PXfZ5L
Russia’s top diplomat said Thursday that the country’s relations with the United States and its allies have “hit the bottom” and no date has been set for sending the Russian ambassador back to Washington.
Russia recalled its ambassador to the United States after U.S. President Joe Biden was asked in an interview if thought Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “killer” and replied, “I do.”
Addressing the issue Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called Biden’s remarks “appalling” and said they had forced Moscow to rethink its ties with Washington.
Biden has said the days of the U.S. “rolling over” to Putin are done. And he has taken pains to contrast his approach with that of former President Donald Trump, who avoided direct confrontation with Putin and frequently spoke about the Russian leader with approval.
The Biden administration has warned that Russia would face sanctions soon over the massive SolarWinds hacks and attempts to influence last year’s U.S. presidential election to help keep Trump in the White House.
💙 WaPo, Karen Tumulty: How Nancy Reagan helped end the Cold War http://wapo.st/3wlXfxu
CNN: Two US Capitol Police officers sue Trump and say he should be held responsible for January 6 attack http://cnn.it/31Dln0s
⭕ 31 Mar 2021
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Pleased to speak with @DmytroKuleba today to discuss the United States unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. We continue to support Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression in the Donbas and Crimea.
⭕ 30 Mar 2021
WaPo: Two Capitol police officers sue Trump for ‘physical and emotional injuries’ suffered in riots http://wapo.st/3sFc6Rc
⭕ 29 Mar 2021
TheGuardian/AP: Suspected Russian hackers gained access to US homeland security emails http://bit.ly/3cN7wuD
// Intelligence value of SolarWinds hacking of then acting secretary Chad Wolf is not publicly known
NewYorker, Jane Mayer: Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century http://bit.ly/3waJKAu
// On a leaked conference call, leaders of dark-money groups and an aide to Mitch McConnell expressed frustration with the popularity of the legislation—even among Republican voters.
DailyBeast: Dominion Builds Legal Behemoth To Drain Trumpland of Billions http://bit.ly/2O58WHr
// Dominion Voting Systems is adding a new team of lawyers as they prepare for their current lawsuits—and another potential round.
⭕ 28 Mar 2021
🐣 RT @GeoffyPJohnston Just watched the excellent @CNN documentary “COVID War.” Dr. @drsanjaygupta did an outstanding job of both interviewing the doctors at the centre of the U.S. COVID-19 response & of telling the narrative of the ill-fated U.S. handling of the pandemic. Riveting journalism.
💙 🐣 RT @RamCNN The revelations emerging in every minute of this Covid-19 special from @drsanjaygupta, “The Pandemic Doctors”
⋙ 🐣 RT @RamCNN Quite extraordinary
⋙ 🐣 RT @RamCNN Some highlights from the special, captured in updates here: 💽 https://twitter.com/RamCNN/status/1376368035091656705?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 💽 CNN: Pandemic doctors speak out http://cnn.it/3mbLsgF Good summary (with lots of video clips) of this CNN special on COVID-19. It’s one for the history books @drsanjaygupta Thank you.
NYT, Nicholas Kristof: He’s a Famous Evangelical Preacher, but His Kids Wish He’d Pipe Down http://nyti.ms/39jJdT2
// The Rev. Rick Joyner has called on Christians to arm themselves for civil war. But his children would be on the other side.
⭕ 27 Mar 2021
⭕ 26 Mar 2021
Newsweek: Mitt Romney, Only GOP Senator to Back Donald Trump Impeachment in 2020, Wins Courage Award http://bit.ly/2PcoTMr ‘A committee appointed by the JFK Library Foundation decides the annual award honoring public officials unafraid to take unpopular positions’
⭕ 25 Mar 2021
WaPo: Calls, texts by Oath Keepers founder contain ‘substantial evidence’ of Capitol conspiracy, prosecutors allege http://wapo.st/2PqFg8p
⭕ 24 Mar 2021
Vice, David Gilbert: Why QAnon Followers Are Suddenly Saying There’s No Such Thing as QAnon http://bit.ly/2Pv1ZzF //➔ Saying it doesn’t exist proves you think it does
// A lot of recent negative media attention has led to some backpedaling.
NYT: Democrats Begin Push for Biggest Expansion of Voting Since 1960s http://nyti.ms/2P4roR2
// Democrats characterized the far-reaching elections overhaul as the civil rights battle of modern times. Republicans called it a power grab that would put their party at a permanent disadvantage.
↥ ↧
NYT: Republicans Aim to Seize More Power Over How Elections Are Run http://nyti.ms/31gyd4t
// G.O.P. lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are trying to gain broad influence over the mechanics of voting, in an effort that could further undermine the country’s democratic norms.
↥ ↧
NYT: Republicans Fear Flawed Candidates Could Imperil Key Senate Seats http://nyti.ms/2QBPuDc
// Races in Missouri and Alabama, with others to come, reflect the potential risks for a party in which loyalty to Donald Trump is the main criterion for securing nominations.
🐣 RT @hugolowell Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: “Instead of doing what you should be doing when you lose an election in a democracy, Republicans instead are trying to disenfranchise those voters. Shame on them.”
💙 WaPo: Angus King: What happens to the filibuster depends on how Republicans play their hand http://wapo.st/31dkyLk //➔ Clearly lays out arguments on both sides, but says Voting Rights are a special case because they involve “democracy itself”
Politico: New evidence suggests ‘alliance’ between Oath Keepers, Proud Boys ahead of Jan. 6 http://politi.co/3rkLcg5 “Along with the Oath Keepers cases, the Proud Boys charges are the gravest to arise from the Jan. 6 assault“
// The evidence is the first to suggest coordination among the various extremist groups as they prepared to descend on Washington.
A key member of the Oath Keepers militia told associates he had coordinated alliances with the Proud Boys and other paramilitary groups in advance of Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, according to new evidence filed by the Justice Department.
Spurred on by the president’s incendiary rhetoric at that day’s rally, Trump supporters, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, rioted at the Capitol and assaulted police officers later that day in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Kelly Meggs, the Florida leader of the Oath Keepers — who’s been charged along with nine others with conspiring to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election — said in private messages obtained by prosecutors that he’d been in touch repeatedly with Proud Boys leadership in particular. He said he had worked out a strategy to confront potential violence from antifa, a loosely organized collection of left-wing extremists.
“This week I organized an alliance between Oath Keepers, Florida 3%ers, and Proud Boys,” Meggs wrote in a Dec. 19 message to an associate via Facebook. “We have decided to work together and shut this shit down.”In Dec. 22 and Dec. 25 messages, Meggs got more specific, describing tactical maneuvers they would conduct with the Proud Boys if they encountered antifa: “We’re going to march with them for awhile then fall to the back of the crowd and turn off. Then we will have the Proud Boys get in front of them the cops will get between antifa and Proud Boys. We will come in behind antifa and beat the hell out of them.”
The evidence is the first to suggest coordination among the various extremist groups as they prepared to descend on Washington. Oath Keepers attorneys have emphasized in court papers that evidence they were preparing for violence was limited to potential confrontation with antifa — not a plan to storm the Capitol.
But prosecutors say the planning, plus a growing body of evidence that the Oath Keepers executed a coordinated plan to enter the Capitol and rallied to the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, after first breaching the building, suggesting it was an element of their effort. In addition, prosecutors revealed messages of Oath Keepers celebrating the Capitol assault and promising to “reload” for further action.
Prosecutors unveiled an indictment last week against four Proud Boys leaders for similarly coordinating movements in advance of Jan. 6, with an emphasis on dividing into small groups ahead of their march on the Capitol. Along with the Oath Keepers cases, the Proud Boys charges are the gravest to arise from the Jan. 6 assault. Prosecutors have arrested more than 300 participants in the Capitol attack. Dozens unaffiliated with either militia have been charged with brutal assaults on police and breaching the building or causing property damage. …
According to court papers filed by prosecutors, the Oath Keepers moved on the building in a military-style “stack” formation and were among the first to enter the Capitol complex. They then dispersed to various points in the building, and messages show they were intent on heading to the Senate, where then-Vice President Mike Pence was presiding over a GOP-led challenge to Arizona’s electoral vote count. Prosecutors note they’re still reviewing footage to determine whether Oath Keepers followed the mob to the Senate chamber.
Meggs’ messages indicated that just days before the Jan. 6 attack, he and others anticipated that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, which they viewed as permission to aid his effort to stay in power.
“Trump’s staying in, he’s gonna use the emergency broadcast system on cell phones to broadcast to the American people. Then he will claim the insurrection act,” Meggs wrote in a Dec. 26 Facebook message.
“Any idea when?” an associate replied.
“Next week,” Meggs said. “Then wait for the 6th when we are all in dc to insurrection.”
Meggs’ messages also show that Pence’s actions ahead of Jan. 6 — in which he agreed he would entertain challenges to the counting of electoral votes, as procedures required — emboldened the group. “That checks all the boxes,” Meggs wrote. “I think this is why we were called there.”
Meggs also indicated that about 200 Oath Keepers had heeded what rioters said was a call to come to Washington. It’s unclear how many actually showed up. Ten have been indicted as part of the conspiracy, and prosecutors indicated they anticipate up to about five more being added to these particular charges.
In a court hearing Wednesday morning, Mehta agreed to release one of the 10 charged Oath Keepers, Laura Steele, from pretrial detention. Though he agreed that the charges against Steele were significant, he said prosecutors had presented minimal evidence that she played a role in planning the alleged conspiracy, committed violent acts, carried weapons or destroyed any property during the Capitol siege.
Though prosecutors had claimed that Steele, a former police officer, attempted to destroy evidence of her involvement in the Oath Keepers’ plot, Mehta said it wasn’t enough to keep her detained pending trial. He noted that Steele had no prior criminal history and strong community ties — including a husband and two children who are also in law enforcement.
“Steele doesn’t pose the type of danger to the community that warrants continued detention pending trial,” Mehta said.
Mehta accompanied his release order with strict conditions that include surrendering her passport, refrain from contact with anyone affiliated with the Oath Keepers — including her brother Graydon Young, who is one of the other Oath Keepers charged in the conspiracy. He also restricted Steele to home confinement, required GPS monitoring and barred her access to computers and electronic devices that would permit her to communicate electronically with her associates.
RFE/RL: Ukraine Places Sanctions On Dozens Of Russian Officials, Entities http://bit.ly/3cfJKaw The decree targets “26 foreigners and 81 legal entities, blocking their assets and restricting travel or operations in the country”
⭕ 23 Mar 2021
WaPo: Former top prosecutor in Capitol riot case faces internal review after 60 Minutes interview http://wapo.st/3chkG36 “US District Judge Amit P Mehta called a surprise hearing … on six hours’ notice to discuss his concerns [about] comments by Michael R Sherwin on Sunday”
// “… and a separate article published Monday by the New York Times indicated the Justice Department was not following the court’s rules or the agency’s internal procedures to refrain from speaking about ongoing cases outside of court.“
💙 WaPo: Sidney Powell does an about-face on her Stop the Steal claims http://wapo.st/39aHM9l sort of
Attorney Sidney Powell, you may recall, was the Madame Defarge of the recent attempt to overturn the election results. She knitted elaborate lawsuits from the yarns of unreliable witnesses, patterned with a vast conspiracy to rig voting machines, as the partisans she inflamed rolled their tumbrels toward the Capitol in search of such supposed traitors as then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Sued for defamation by the voting-machine vendor in question, Powell is now scoffing in federal court at the idea that anyone could have taken her seriously. “Reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact,” Powell averred in her motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Instead, the allegations that helped to fuel the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol were mere “claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”
When she said, as the nation was spinning into crisis, that she had evidence of “the greatest crime of the century if not the life of the world” — a world that in living memory has witnessed the Holocaust and other unspeakable crimes — Powell meant nothing of the sort, she now admits. That was just politics. Wrapping herself in an earlier court ruling, she quoted the “well recognized principle that political statements are inherently prone to exaggeration and hyperbole.
In another remarkable contortion, Powell quotes her antagonists at the voting-machine vendor, Dominion Voting Systems, calling her charges “outlandish” and “impossible.” What more proof is needed, she concludes, that folks were onto her fictions and distortions all along?
She had promised a “Kraken,” a fraud so vast and many-tentacled that it would resemble the mythical sea monster, but delivered not so much as a goldfish — and now she’s in court saying, in essence, we should have known all along that Krakens aren’t real. In passing, she says she still believes her own story, but that’s in the context of a 90-page filing that insists no one else ever should have done so.
Powell joins a roster of Stop the Stealers who have tried to wriggle out of their hype. In December, Fox News took the unusual step of airing a video that debunked election-fraud myths during programs hosted by Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo. The right-wing outlet Newsmax likewise backed off.
Don’t be surprised if former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani soon joins the club. He, too, has been sued by Dominion for damages in excess of $1 billion — enough to make a guy sweat his hair dye. Yet another Dominion lawsuit calls out Mike Lindell on his extravagant claims of election fraud. The My Pillow man may want to pull the covers over his head, but sooner or later he is likely to emerge to offer his own strained “never mind.”
Powell’s confession that no reasonable person could take her seriously, even when she is leveling profoundly serious charges, is important in itself. The implications are perhaps even more important. For example, the former president of the United States, who touted Powell’s lawsuits and news conferences via his once-deafening Twitter megaphone, is not a reasonable person. Many of us have known that for years, but it’s useful to hear it from one of his most ardent supporters.
It’s true that Team Trump, and its cowering minions in Congress, eventually parted ways with Powell as her professional demeanor gradually slipped to reveal her tinfoil hat. They took refuge in an abstruse argument over regulatory powers of election officials in assorted states. But the window-smashing, cop-battering, death-chanting mob at the Capitol wasn’t there for a discussion of delegated authority of various secretaries of state. They had swallowed the hash that Powell & Co. were slinging.
And Powell’s brief offers a fresh suggestion of the real reason why this hash was ever slung in the first place. Hype makes the cash register ring, Powell informs the court: “Public disclosure helps gain public and financial support.” In Powell’s case, the “financial support” poured into an affiliated website called Defending the Republic. Giuliani sought his “financial support” in increments of $20,000 per day from the Trump campaign. The former president continues to raise millions for his lightly regulated PAC from his cheerfully hoodwinked supporters.
As for the Fox News conspiracists, their business model remains unchanged. Election fraud is so yesterday; today, it’s anti-vaccine and cancel culture. Theirs is a steam-powered money machine, requiring only that the pot be kept boiling.
The Post’s Annie Gowen reported recently on her visit with Jenna Ryan, the Texas real estate agent who touted her business on social media while assaulting the Capitol in January. Now facing federal charges, Ryan said: “I bought into a lie, and the lie is the lie, and it’s embarrassing.” Now she tells us.
⭕ 22 Mar 2021
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Republicans’ war on voting feels increasingly frantic http://wapo.st/3lLdE9J “Republicans do not even attempt to conceal their ambition, which is to diminish non-Whites’ participation in our elections”
The anti-voting crusade has produced, by the Brennan Center for Justice’s count, 253 bills to restrict voting. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says there will be “scorched earth” if Democrats touch the filibuster. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), sounding more hysterical than usual, claims Democrats want “child molesters” and “illegal aliens” to vote.
Republicans do not even attempt to conceal their ambition, which is to diminish non-Whites’ participation in our elections. The New York Times explains that [in Georgia] legislation to limit drop boxes, curb automatic registration and end “Souls to the Polls” efforts to turn out churchgoers to vote early on Sundays “would have an outsize impact on Black voters, who make up roughly one-third of the state’s population and vote overwhelmingly Democratic.” While the state legislature may protect Sunday voting, a proposed amendment would give counties the option to offer early voting on a Saturday or Sunday.
No matter how hard Asian Americans and African Americans advocate for anti-hate legislation or gun safety, Republicans appear determined to ignore them, to play to the extremists in their base and to rely on everything from gerrymandering to curtailing voting access for minorities to keep them in power. Using anti-democratic means to keep Whites in power is the very essence of white supremacy.
Compare that to the worldview expressed in a recent Pew survey, which found that “About a quarter of Republicans (26%) say that White people face a lot of discrimination; just 4% of Democrats say this. White Republicans are 24 percentage points more likely than White Democrats to say that White people face a lot of discrimination.”
Republicans can no longer bank on keeping power merely through pandering to the White base. Their solution: Take away non-Whites’ access to the ballot. The question is not whether we keep the filibuster, but whether we want to permanently enshrine white supremacy and thereby unravel our democracy.
⭕ 21 Mar 2021
WaPo: Evidence in Capitol attack investigation trending toward sedition charges, departing chief says http://wapo.st/3f3WUZR The chief prosecutor also happens to have an eye witness.
Former interim U.S. attorney Michael R. Sherwin, of Washington, reiterated Sunday that he thinks charges of seditious conspiracy could be brought against certain defendants in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, a rarely invoked charge for those who use violence to hinder the execution of federal law.
In a “60 Minutes” interview aired on CBS two days after he stepped down from supervising the investigation, Sherwin said, “I personally believe the evidence is trending toward that, and probably meets those elements.”
“I believe the facts do support those charges. And I think that, as we go forward, more facts will support that,” he said.
Sherwin’s comments echo those he made Jan. 26, when he said, “We are closely looking at evidence related to the sedition charges. . . . We are working on those cases. I think the results will bear fruit very soon.”
On Friday, authorities unsealed the latest indictment, charging four Proud Boys leaders from Washington state, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania with conspiracy to aid and abet the obstruction of Congress’s confirmation of the 2020 presidential election and police attempts to protect the Capitol from rioting that led to five deaths and 130 police assaults.
Prosecutors and the FBI also have accused 10 members and affiliates of the Oath Keepers with conspiring to obstruct Congress. The Justice Department is now looking at whether a larger conspiracy case can be made, including against senior figures in the group, which recruits military, law enforcement and first-responder personnel and claims authority to disobey government orders that some think are part of a conspiracy to strip Americans of their constitutional rights.
Members or associates of the two groups make up about 10 percent of more than 300 charged so far. Prosecutors have said they expect at least 400 people to be charged.
Federal law makes conspiring to overthrow or oppose by force federal authority punishable by up to 20 years in prison, including the use of violence to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of law.
Sherwin also told “60 Minutes” that he personally witnessed some of the events Jan. 6, noticing some people in Kevlar vets, helmets and tactical gear leave early while he accompanied D.C. police to President Donald Trump’s rally on the Ellipse.
In unaired portions of the interview, Sherwin debunked claims about left-wing extremists posing as Trump supporters and discussed tours of the building that took place before Jan. 6, “60 Minutes” reported.
Sherwin said investigators are examining whether suspects who toured the Capitol days before the attack were “casing or doing reconnaissance runs” or on “a basic tour.” He called the possibility troubling.
Sherwin, a career prosecutor from Miami, was named by then-Attorney General William P. Barr to be the top D.C. federal prosecutor last spring, while he was on detail to Barr’s deputy. Sherwin stepped down March 3, allowing the Biden administration to rename Channing D. Phillips as acting U.S. attorney while the White House and Attorney General Merrick Garland select a permanent nominee.
Reuters: DOJ official says there is evidence to charge sedition in U.S. Capitol assault: ’60 Minutes’ http://reut.rs/311XaRb
CBSNews, 60Minutes: Inside the prosecution of the Capitol rioters http://cbsn.ws/3r8CfX8
// Scott Pelley speaks with Michael Sherwin, the federal prosecutor who was leading the criminal investigation, the largest in U.S. history, into the assault on the Capitol.
⋙ YouTube: https://youtu.be/FoAqWnD7NTI
Until this past Friday, federal prosecutor Michael Sherwin was leading the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history. Sherwin’s team has charged hundreds of suspects in January’s assault on the Capitol. Sherwin has said little. But Wednesday, before he moved to his next assignment for the Department of Justice, he sat down with us to explain the nationwide dragnet that began after the riot.
Michael Sherwin: As looking eight, nine weeks out from the events, we’re over 400 criminal cases, which is a pretty amazing number, I think, in a very limited time frame.
Scott Pelley: 400 defendants?
Michael Sherwin: Correct. 400 defendants. And the bulk of those cases are federal criminal charges, and significant federal felony charges. Five, 10, 20-year penalties. Of those 400 cases, the majority of those, 80, 85%, maybe even 90, you have individuals, both inside and outside the Capitol, that breached the Capitol, trespassed. You also have individuals, roughly over 100, that we’ve charged with assaulting federal officers and local police officers. The 10% of the cases, I’ll call the more complex conspiracy cases where we do have evidence, it’s in the public record where individual militia groups from different facets: Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, did have a plan. We don’t know what the full plan is, to come to D.C., organize, and breach the Capitol in some manner.
Michael Sherwin was an eyewitness to that alleged plan. As acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia– the top prosecutor– he dressed that morning in running clothes and joined D.C. Police at the president’s rally.
Michael Sherwin: And I wanted to see the crowd, gauge the temperature of the crowd, it was like a carnival environment. People were selling shirts, popcorn, cotton candy, I saw hot dogs. As the morning progressed, I noticed though there were some people that weren’t the typical, like, carnival-type people. I noticed there were some people in tactical gear. They were tacked up with Kevlar vests. They had the military helmets on. Those individuals, I noticed, left the speeches early. ¤ They headed to the Capitol and Sherwin walked with them.
Michael Sherwin: You could see it was getting more riled up. And more people with bullhorns chanting and yelling. And it became more aggressive. Where it was initially pro-Trump, it digressed to anti-government, anti-Congress, anti-institutional. And then I eventually saw people climbing the scaffolding. The scaffolding was being set up for the inauguration. When I saw people climbing up the scaffolding, hanging from it, hanging flags, I was like, “This is going bad fast.”
Michael Sherwin, 49, is a federal prosecutor from Miami. After successful terrorism and espionage cases, the Trump administration asked him to fill a temporary vacancy leading the Washington U.S. Attorney’s Office. That’s how, on January 6th, Sherwin found himself launching a 50-state manhunt — made urgent by what was coming in just two weeks.
Michael Sherwin: After the 6th, we had an inauguration on the 20th. So I wanted to ensure, and our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe that we could charge as many people as possible before the 20th. And it worked because we saw through media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they’re like, “If we go there, we’re gonna get charged.”
More than 100 arrests were made before the inauguration.
Michael Sherwin: So the first people we went after, I’m gonna call the internet stars, right? The low-hanging fruit. The ‘zip-tie guy,’ the ‘rebel flag guy,’ the ‘Camp Auschwitz guy.’ We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did.
Sherwin told us the most serious cases, so far, focus on about two dozen members of far-right militias.
Scott Pelley: Was there a premeditated plan to breach the Capitol?
Michael Sherwin: That’s what we’re trying to determine right now. We’ve charged multiple conspiracy cases, and some of those involve single militia groups, some of them involve multiple militia groups. For example, individuals from Ohio militia were coordinating with the– a Virginia militia group of Oath Keepers, talking about coming to the capital region, talking about– no specific communication about breaching the Capitol– but talking about going there, taking back the House. Talking about stopping the steal. Talking about how they need a show of force in DC. And we see that in December.
At the center of one video are members of the Oath Keepers in military gear. Michael Sherwin says their tight, single-file formation is evidence of a military-style assault.
Michael Sherwin: That’s what you learn in close, you know, order combat, how you stay with your team to– breach a room where maybe there’s a terrorist, to breach a room where maybe there was an Al Qaeda operative.
Scott Pelley: The infantry calls it a stack.
Michael Sherwin: Correct. A stack or a Ranger File, a column, a close-quarter combat column going up that staircase.
Scott Pelley: The Oath Keepers in that stack, what have they been charged with?
Michael Sherwin: The most significant charge is obstruction. That’s a 20-year felony. They breached the Capitol with the intent, the goal to obstruct official proceedings, the counts, the Electoral College count.
Prosecutors say 139 police officers were assaulted. Brian Sicknick died the next day. This month, Sherwin charged two men with assaulting Sicknick with a spray designed to repel bears.
Scott Pelley: The medical examiner has not yet determined how Officer Sicknick died. If the medical examiner determines that his death was directly related to the bear spray would you imagine murder charges at that point?
Michael Sherwin: If evidence directly relates that chemical to his death, yeah. We have causation, we have a link. Yes. In that scenario, correct, that’s a murder case.
There could have been many more deaths, but Sherwin says two dangerous plots failed.
Scott Pelley: What were the intentions of the suspect who was found with the 11 Molotov cocktail bombs?
Michael Sherwin: So you’re referring, Scott, to Lonnie Coffman. And I think this is emblematic, that that day, as bad as it was, could have been a lot worse. It’s actually amazing more people weren’t killed. We found ammunition in his vehicle. And also, in the bed of the vehicle were found 11 Molotov cocktails. They were filled with gasoline and Styrofoam. He put Styrofoam in those, according to the ATF, because when you throw those, when they explode, the Styrofoam will stick to you and act like napalm.
Coffman’s lawyer did not respond to us. In the other plot, the FBI is looking for a person seen near pipe bombs that were planted by the Capitol.
Scott Pelley: Why didn’t they explode?
Michael Sherwin: It appears they weren’t armed properly. And there could be a whole host of reasons. But they were not hoax devices, they were real devices.
Michael Sherwin: We have to protect the First Amendment. The great majority of the people there were protesters. When do you cross that line? You cross the line when you cross a police line aggressively. You throw something at a cop. You hit a cop. You go into a restricted area, knowing you’re not supposed to be there. These are the plus factors that cross that line from a protester to a rioter.
Scott Pelley: Has the role of former President Trump been part of your investigation?
Michael Sherwin: It’s unequivocal that Trump was the magnet that brought the people to D.C. on the 6th. Now the question is, is he criminally culpable for everything that happened during the siege, during the breach? What I could tell you is this, based upon, again, what we see in the public record. And what we see in public statements in court. We have plenty of people– we have soccer moms from Ohio that were arrested saying, “Well, I did this because my president said I had to take back our house.” That moves the needle towards that direction. Maybe the president is culpable for those actions. But also, you see in the public record too militia members saying, “You know what? We did this because Trump just talks a big game. He’s just all talk. We did what he wouldn’t do.”
Scott Pelley: In short, you have investigators looking into the president’s role?
Michael Sherwin: We have people looking at everything, correct. Everything’s being looked at.
But, so far, prosecutors have not charged sedition–attempting to overthrow the government.
Scott Pelley: I’m not a lawyer, but the way I read the sedition statute, it says that, “Sedition occurs when anyone opposes by force the authority of the United States, or by force hinders or delays the execution of any law of the United States.” Seems like a very low bar, and I wonder why you’re not charging that now?
Michael Sherwin: Okay, so I don’t think it’s a low bar, Scott, but I will tell you this. I personally believe the evidence is trending towards that, and probably meets those elements.
Scott Pelley: Do you anticipate sedition charges against some of these suspects?
Michael Sherwin: I believe the facts do support those charges. And I think that, as we go forward, more facts will support that, Scott.
Scott Pelley: What do you want people to understand about this investigation?
Michael Sherwin: That we tried to move quickly to ensure that there is trust in the rule of law. You are gonna be charged based upon your conduct and your conduct only. Not what you may have posted about the election, not what you may have posted about different political views. The world looks to us for the rule of law and order and democracy. And that was shattered, I think, on that day. And we have to build ourselves up again. The only way to build ourselves up again is the equal application of the law, to show the rule of law is gonna treat these people fairly under the law.
🐣 RT @AJentleson Powerful, pithy summary of the filibuster and its destructive effects on our democracy. Thank you, @FareedZakaria, for turning your incisive eye to this.
⋙ 🐣 RT @FareedZakaria This week’s Last Look: a history of the filibuster—and how ending it could help heal America’s polarized politics 💽 https://twitter.com/AJentleson/status/1373813490205474818?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @60Minutes Prosecutors have not yet charged any Capitol rioters with sedition. But asked whether he anticipates those charges, federal prosecutor Michael Sherwin says, “I believe the facts do support those charges.” https://cbsn.ws/2OMEkuV 💽 https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/1373782931186024452?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @svdate Your periodic reminder that Donald Trump tried to overthrow American democracy in an attempt to hang onto power. ¤ His people did exactly what he wanted. March on the Capitol and intimidate Pence and Congress into not certifying Biden’s win.
⋙ 🔊NYT: ‘We’ve Lost the Line!’: Radio Traffic Reveals Police Under Siege at Capitol http://nyti.ms/3r83QrA
// The Times obtained District of Columbia police radio communications and synchronized them with footage from the scene to show in real time how officers tried and failed to stop the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
💙 NYT: Evidence in Capitol Attack Most Likely Supports Sedition Charges, Prosecutor Says http://nyti.ms/3c8aSYR
// “I personally believe the evidence is trending toward that, and probably meets those elements,” said Michael Sherwin, who had led the Justice Department’s inquiry into the riot.
The department has rarely brought charges of sedition, the crime of conspiring to overthrow the government. ¤ But in an interview with “60 Minutes,” Mr. Sherwin said prosecutors had evidence that most likely proved such a charge.
“I personally believe the evidence is trending toward that, and probably meets those elements,” Mr. Sherwin said. “I believe the facts do support those charges. And I think that, as we go forward, more facts will support that.”
The last time federal prosecutors brought a sedition case was 2010, when they accused members of a Michigan militia of plotting to provoke an armed conflict with the government. They were ultimately acquitted, and the judge in the case said the Justice Department had not adequately proved that the defendants had entered a “concrete agreement to forcibly oppose the United States government.”
The statute on seditious conspiracy also says that people who conspire to “oppose by force the authority” of the government or use force “to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States” can be charged with sedition. ¤ The government has charged some defendants in the Jan. 6 case with conspiring to derail the final certification of President Biden’s electoral victory.
Mr. Sherwin witnessed the crime as it unfolded. After he dressed in his running clothes and entered the crowd at the rally near the White House, he observed a “carnival environment” of people listening to speeches and selling T-shirts and snacks.
“I noticed there were some people in tactical gear. They were tacked up with Kevlar vests. They had the military helmets on,” he said in the “60 Minutes” interview. “Those individuals, I noticed, left the speeches early.”
“Where it was initially pro-Trump, it digressed to anti-government, anti-Congress, anti-institutional,” Mr. Sherwin said. “And then I eventually saw people climbing the scaffolding. The scaffolding was being set up for the inauguration. When I saw people climbing up the scaffolding, hanging from it, hanging flags, I was like, ‘This is going bad fast.’”
From the start, Mr. Sherwin oversaw the investigation as the acting U.S. attorney in Washington, a role that he ceded to a new interim leader in early March. He stepped down from leading the investigation on Friday and returned to Miami, where he had been a line prosecutor.
Mr. Sherwin told “60 Minutes” that the government had charged more than 400 people. Among them are hundreds accused of trespassing and more than 100 accused of assaulting officers, including Brian D. Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died after fighting with rioters.
Mr. Sicknick and two other officers were sprayed with an unidentified chemical agent that one of the assailants said was used to repel bears. ¤ A medical examiner has not determined how Officer Sicknick died, Mr. Sherwin said, so two suspects were charged with assaulting an officer instead of murder. But that could change, he said.
“If evidence directly relates that chemical to his death,” Mr. Sherwin said, “in that scenario, correct, that’s a murder case.”
Mr. Sherwin said that only about 10 percent of the cases so far dealt with more complicated conspiracies planned and executed by far-right extremists — including members of the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and the Proud Boys — to organize, come to Washington and breach the Capitol.
He reiterated assertions he made shortly after the attack that prosecutors were examining the conduct of former President Donald J. Trump, who had told his supporters to attend the rally on Jan. 6 and egged them on with baseless claims that he had won the election.
“It’s unequivocal that Trump was the magnet that brought the people to D.C. on the 6th. Now the question is, is he criminally culpable for everything that happened during the siege, during the breach?” Mr. Sherwin said. ¤ “We have people looking at everything,” he said.
💙 Long thread linking numerous articles on the Insurrection:
🧵 RT @Otpor “Secor has openly espoused white supremacy views online … He broadcast a livestream from the Capitol with a username that appears to be a reference to [incel Elliot Rodger], who killed 6 people in Isla Vista, CA in 2014. ¤ Secor previously bragged that he would not be caught.” https://twitter.com/Otpor17/status/1362433602680717317?s=20/photo/1
🔆 This❗️⋙ 🐣 RT @WordswithSteph DOJ has obtained sufficient evidence in their investigation into the Jan. 6 terrorist attack on the Capitol to charge some of the suspects w/ sedition: conspiring to overthrow the govt. 400+ cases, and approx. 10% involve complex conspiracies. #60Minutes 💽 https://twitter.com/WordswithSteph/status/1373788434385473536?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 20 Mar 2021
DailyBeast, Anna Nemtsova: Putin Reignites Ukraine Conflict as Rift With Biden Blows Up http://bit.ly/30XAGRj “Many prominent Ukrainians believe that the country’s only hope for peace is Washington”
// Facing escalating attacks from Russian-backed militants, many say Kyiv’s only hope is “Ukraine’s big friend,” President Joe Biden.
Ukraine has become caught in a broader conflict between the U.S. and Russia, which escalated this week. Russia recalled its ambassador from Washington, after Biden called Putin “a killer.” ¤ The Ukraine war is the only hot conflict between Russia and the West in Europe, and the U.S. and the EU imposed sanctions after the outbreak of conflict in Eastern Ukraine and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. ¤ When tensions rise between Moscow and Washington, there is always a risk of escalation out in the trenches. The conflict is certainly bubbling up again now.
⭕ 19 Mar 2021
NYT: Stay Scattered and Avoid Police, Proud Boys Were Told Before Capitol Riot http://nyti.ms/3cP0FzF
// Prosecutors detailed a chat among group members on the eve of the insurrection by a pro-Trump mob.
WaPo, Alexandra Petri: McConnell threatens to hold the Senate hostage unless he can keep holding the Senate hostage http://wapo.st/3f4YaMi
🐣 RT @petestrzok .@anneapplebaum’s look at the recent DNI report reveals a daunting CI challenge: ourselves. ¤ “Russian disinformation works because Americans allow it to work—and because those same Americans don’t care anymore about the harm they do to their country.”
💙 ⋙ TheAtlantic, Anne Applebaum: The Science of Making Americans Hurt Their Own Country http://bit.ly/3c2r1iH
// A new report lays bare why Russian disinformation succeeds.
⭕ 18 Mar 2021
RawStory, Alison Greene: How Marco Rubio turned the Senate Intel Committee into a Trump defensive team http://bit.ly/3s8QT1P
CNN: Roger Stone makes appearances in pair of Oath Keeper court filings http://cnn.it/3vHttml
TexasTribune: George W. Bush on Capitol insurrection: “I was sick to my stomach” http://bit.ly/30XuRmV
// 2/24/2021, upd today; The former president’s comments came during an interview that was part of this year’s virtual SXSW programming and kicked off Bush’s promotional tour of his new book, “Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants.”
🐣 RT @JuliaDavidNews Based on these screenshots from Putin’s response to Biden calling him a killer, he seems to be taking it well. https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1372664571916353537?s=20/photo/1
// sarcastic; 6-photo collage
💽 FBI[.]gov: FBI Washington Field Office Releases Videos of Assaults on Officers at U.S. Capitol, Seeks Public’s Help to Identify Suspects http://bit.ly/3cLvHIJ
WaPo, David Ignatius: Russia’s disinformation campaign will keep rolling, as long as Republicans are gullible enough http://wapo.st/3r9VU9j “Republicans … continued to peddle Moscow’s line even after they were warned about the Russian disinformation campaign”
Slate, William Saletan: A New Report Adds Evidence That Trump Was a Russian Asset http://bit.ly/3ty2p7e
// He helped Putin manipulate the U.S. election in 2020, as he did in 2016.
🐣 💽 RT @PoliticusSarsh Rachel Maddow just reminded Republicans that Devin Nunes is a Russian asset. #maddow https://twitter.com/PoliticusSarah/status/1372722157864771590?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MaddowBlog July 31, 2020 – “The information in question pertained to packets reportedly sent to GOP members of Congress, including Nunes, by Ukranian lawmaker Andrii Derkach — who has worked closely with President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.”
⋙ CNN: Devin Nunes declines to say whether he received foreign information meant to damage Biden http://cnn.it/3cFfYLa
// 7/31/2020
🐣 RT @ Putin, whose government has been fingered in the murders or attempted murders of multiple opposition figures and journalists, objects to being called a killer. @antontroian
⋙ NYT: Russia Erupts in Fury Over Biden’s Calling Putin a Killer http://nyti.ms/3cQFpJQ Methinks the Kremlin doth protest too much
// The Kremlin described the U.S. president’s response to an interview question as “very bad,” and recalled its ambassador to “analyze what needs to be done” about the countries’ relations.
WaPo: Senate confirms William Burns as next director of the CIA http://wapo.st/3tyNRUX
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Seriously, screen the president’s food and drinks. That’s not a funny joke from Putin.
⋙⋙ 🐣 💽 RT @disclosetv NEW – “I wish you good health,” Putin responds to Biden after the US president called the Russian president a “killer.” https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1372569556015800331?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @waltshaub If Putin wants to make threats like this, maybe the State Department can mock him by sending a fresh package of Fruit of the Loom briefs to the Kremlin. I read that Putin is annoyed by taunts that he’s the underpants killer.
⋙ 🐣 RT @docLT2 Coming from Putin it isn’t a joke, it is a direct threat, just as “she’s going to go through some things” was a threat coming from Trump. It’s crime-boss speak for plausible deniability when it comes time to charge them in court. ¤ PS: Cell phone app=can work as geiger counters.
⋙ 🐣 RT @audubon3514 Putin poisoned his chief political adversary who nearly died. That same adversary is now in a Russian penal farm. A former KGB officer, if Putin wished our president good health, I’d worry about what he eats/drinks and would reassess those protecting him.
⭕ 17 Mar 2021
TheIntercept: White Supremacists, Conspiracy Theorists Are Targeting Critical Infrastructure http://bit.ly/3c6AsxE
// Extremist groups joined forces in the weeks after the election to target critical infrastructure and “incite fear,” an NYPD intelligence report said.
WaPo: Postal Service finds no evidence of mail ballot fraud in Pa. case cited by top Republicans http://wapo.st/3eOa6lx
// Letter carrier Richard Hopkins told federal agents he “assumed” supervisors discussed backdating ballots and then recanted his claim, inspector general’s report says
NYT: New Report Warns of Rising Threat of Domestic Terrorism http://nyti.ms/30SP4Kp
// President Biden requested the intelligence community complete the assessment shortly after taking office, and his administration has made fighting domestic terrorism a priority.
⋙ 🔆 This❗️⋙ ≣ ODNI: Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021 http://bit.ly/2P1e3sj 5p
WaPo, Max Boot: The GOP is accelerating its descent into authoritarianism http://wapo.st/3rYjDdH “The real GOP plan is, of course, to disenfranchise Democrats, and especially minority voters in big cities. This is the most blatant assault on voting rights since the 1960s”
When I was growing up in the 1980s, the Republican Party stood for freedom — freedom from big government at home and from communist tyranny abroad. It was why I, as a young refugee from the Soviet Union, became a Republican in the first place.
I am, therefore, agonized and appalled to see the GOP rapidly metamorphosing into an authoritarian party that has more in common with the Law and Justice party in Poland or the Fidesz Party in Hungary than with mainstream center-right parties such as the Christian Democrats in Germany. The transformation has been in the works at least since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, but it has accelerated alarmingly in the past year.
A newly declassified report from the director of national intelligence confirms that the Trump White House, the Republican Party and their propaganda organs colluded with, or at least worked on parallel lines with, a Russian campaign to defeat now-President Biden. The report notes that Moscow “sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.” Russian agents also “spread unsubstantiated or misleading claims about President Biden and his family’s alleged wrongdoing related to Ukraine.”
Sound familiar? It should, because those are precisely the same narratives that were being pushed by Trump and his supporters at places such as Fox News and One America News. That’s no coincidence. The report notes that Russian intelligence sought to “launder” its propaganda “through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration.” The report cites Ukrainian politician Andriy Derkach as one of the “Russian proxies” active in this disinformation campaign; he provided information to, among others, Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani.
This was the second election in a row where Trump and his supporters were serenely untroubled by the help he received from a hostile authoritarian regime. The Russian effort to influence our election didn’t succeed this time, but even after Trump lost, he kept pushing the Big Lie that he had actually won and continued to demand that either the courts or Republican lawmakers overturn the results. On Tuesday night, Trump was still at it, lamenting on Fox News that “our Supreme Court and our courts didn’t have the courage to overturn elections.”
This is the kind of blatantly anti-democratic rhetoric that incited the insurrection on Jan. 6. Yet even after a Trump mob stormed the Capitol, 147 Republicans in both houses voted to toss out electoral votes. In other words, nearly 60 percent of Republicans were willing to subvert democracy to win power. By contrast, only 17 Republicans — a mere 6.5 percent of the total — voted to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection.
Republicans realize that Trump remains unpopular with the country as a whole. (His approval rating among registered voters is only 37 percent.) But instead of renouncing Trump, they are renouncing democracy. “In 43 states across the country,” The Post notes, “Republican lawmakers have proposed at least 250 laws that would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting with such constraints as stricter ID requirements, limited hours or narrower eligibility to vote absentee.”
The ostensible justification for this legislation is to combat voter fraud. Except there isn’t any. Republicans looked really, really hard and could not find any widespread voter fraud. The real GOP plan is, of course, to disenfranchise Democrats, and especially minority voters in big cities. This is the most blatant assault on voting rights since the 1960s — and if it succeeds it will greatly increase the chances that Republicans will win back the House and Senate in 2022.
The Democratic-controlled House recently passed a bill, H.R. 1, to strengthen voting rights without a single GOP vote. Republicans are hysterical in their opposition. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said, “This is a bill as if written in hell by the devil himself.” What are its hellish provisions? Proposals such as automatically registering citizens to vote, allowing same-day voter registration, expanding voting by mail and early voting, making it harder for states to purge registered voters from the rolls, and banning partisan gerrymandering. These are all provisions that would strengthen our democracy. But the GOP is increasingly invested in authoritarianism as the best route to power.
The only way this bill, or any version thereof, can pass the Senate is if the Democrats eliminate or amend the filibuster rule that demands 60 votes to pass most legislation. Unfortunately, there aren’t 10 Republicans in the Senate who can be counted upon to support voting rights. It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of the party once led by freedom fighters such as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
CNN, Stephen Collinson: New US intel report shows Russia, Trump and GOP acolytes have same goals http://cnn.it/38RQw45
⭕ 16 Mar 2021
🐣 RT @BusinessInsider What led up to Putin’s rise? 💽 https://twitter.com/BusinessInsider/status/1371702924917768193?s=20/photo/1
// apartment bombings; deals with Yeltsin
NBCNews: Russia tried to help Trump in 2020, Iran tried to hurt him and China stayed out of it, says new report http://nbcnews.to/3cIAWca
// A newly declassified intelligence community assessment also says no foreign actor hacked into the U.S. voting infrastructure, meaning machines or data.
Despite repeated assertions by senior Trump administration officials that China sought to hurt President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, a newly declassified intelligence assessment finds that China did not seek to influence the outcome.
That is perhaps the most interesting revelation from a summary of election interference that proclaims what the government had already been telling the public: that Russian operatives didn’t hack into election infrastructure but that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized “influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.”
China, on the other hand, “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election,” the assessment says, noting that the intelligence agencies have “high confidence in this judgment.” ¤ The assessment contradicts statements last year by Trump administration officials — National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, Attorney General William Barr and national security adviser Robert O’Brien — that China was interfering in the election to hurt Trump. ¤ Last fall, Trump administration officials sought to portray China as seeking to influence the election. O’Brien, for example, told reporters in September that “the Chinese have taken the most active role” and that China had “had the most massive program to influence the United States politically,” followed by Iran and then Russia.
In discussing Russian interference, the assessment is in line with previous U.S. government statements describing social media propaganda and disinformation and the use of “cutouts” — people who do Russia’s bidding while appearing unconnected to the government — to spread the Russian message, which centered on accusing Biden of corruption.
One key figure was Andriy Derkach, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament with ties to Russian intelligence who was regularly speaking to Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani. ¤ The report says Putin “was aware of and probably directed” the influence operations, including those of Derkach. ¤ “We assess that Putin had purview over the activities of Andriy Derkach,” the assessment says. “Derkach has ties to Russian officials as well as Russia’s intelligence services.” ¤ The assessment says Derkach worked along with “Russian influence agent” Konstantin Kilimnik, a former associate of onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, “to use prominent U.S. persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences.”
Among those efforts, “they also made contact with established U.S. media figures and helped produce a documentary that aired on a U.S. television network in late January 2020.” ¤ That appears to be a reference to an hour of programming on One America News Network titled “The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder with guest host Michael Caputo.” ¤ Caputo is a longtime Trump associate who was a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. He left the job amid a controversy over remarks urging Trump supporters to prepare for armed insurrection. He declined to comment.
NBCNews: Russia tried to help Trump in 2020, Iran tried to hurt him and China stayed out of it, says new report http://nbcnews.to/3cIAWca
// A newly declassified intelligence community assessment also says no foreign actor hacked into the U.S. voting infrastructure, meaning machines or data.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Whoa. Trump flat-out says that he wanted the courts “to overturn elections.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Our Supreme Court and our courts didn’t have the courage to overturn elections” — Trump 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1371967099980120068?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Russia, Iran sought to influence 2020 election, but no foreign government tried to change votes, U.S. says http://wapo.st/3rTbMy4 China considered interference but did not
MotherJones, David Corn: Putin Did It Again: New Intelligence Report Says Moscow Helped Trump in 2020 http://bit.ly/3wYGA3e
// Konstantin Kilimnik, Rudy Giuliani roles; Anti-Biden propaganda was prepared with the assistance of Russian intelligence.
🐣 RT @emptywheel Pretty much the biggest news in this IC Report (which is mandated by a Trump Executive Order, btw), is that John Ratcliffe used his position as DNI to lie to the American people (as if his selective declassification didn’t already demonstrate that).
↥ ↧
🔆 This❗️⋙ RT @ODNIgov Today #ODNI released the declassified Intelligence Community assessment of foreign threats to the 2020 U.S. federal elections, view the full report here:
⋙ ODNI: Intelligence Community Assessment on Foreign Threats to the 2020 U.S. Federal Elections http://bit.ly/3tsCPAx ⋙ Report: http://bit.ly/30PoBgS 15p
// 3/10/2021
WaPo: Momentum of Capitol riot inquiries stalls amid partisan flare-ups http://wapo.st/2ODMXrq “[D]isputes have cast a pall over leaders’ vow to investigate the insurrection and its significance in the greater context of how the United States responds to such homegrown threats”
NYT, Bret Stephens: America Could Use a Liberal Party http://nyti.ms/3rS3JkU “The debates that used to divide the parties — the proper scope of government, the mechanics of trade — amounted to parochial quarrels within a shared liberal faith”
// The new division in politics isn’t between liberals and conservatives. It’s between liberals and illiberals.
By “liberal,” I don’t mean big-state welfarism. I mean the tenets and spirit of liberal democracy. Respect for the outcome of elections, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and the principle (in courts of law and public opinion alike) of innocent until proven guilty. Respect for the free market, bracketed by sensible regulation and cushioned by social support. Deference to personal autonomy but skepticism of identity politics. A commitment to equality of opportunity, not “equity” in outcomes. A well-grounded faith in the benefits of immigration, free trade, new technology, new ideas, experiments in living. Fidelity to the ideals and shared interests of the free world in the face of dictators and demagogues.
All of this used to be the more-or-less common ground of American politics, inhabited by Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes as much as by Barack Obama and the two Clintons. The debates that used to divide the parties — the proper scope of government, the mechanics of trade — amounted to parochial quarrels within a shared liberal faith. That faith steadied America in the face of domestic and global challenges from the far right and far left alike.
The illiberalism of the right is typified by the likes of Stephen Miller on immigration, Steve Bannon on trade, Josh Hawley on elections and Marjorie Taylor Greene on every manner of lunatic and bigoted conspiracy theory. It is by far the most dangerous form of illiberalism today, because it has shown that it is capable of winning elections and, when it loses, subverting them.
But there’s also the illiberalism of the left, typified by the excesses of the MeToo movement that ruined people’s lives, the anti-Semitism among some of the leaders of the Women’s March, the “antiracism” pedagogy that casts people who disagree with its Manichaean worldview into supposed racists, and the cancellations of careers, book contracts, speeches and dissenting opinions at places like Slate and other presumptively liberal publications. Anyone on the left who hasn’t noticed the climate of fear that now grips liberal institutions needs to start paying closer attention.
The new illiberalism is frightening. It could also be productive. Everyone who has been bitten by it, left or right, is rediscovering how capacious the old liberal faith was, how trivial its internal differences really were, how much they might yet have in common — including common enemies — with people they once regarded as ideological opposites.
This is not a political party, yet. But it could be the seeds of a party. America needs a Liberal Party that represents what we used to be and what we desperately need to become again.
💙 WaPo: CDC identifies public-health guidance from the Trump administration that downplayed pandemic severity http://wapo.st/3vnbcuq “[T]he review provides official confirmation … that political appointees ordered revisions to critical CDC guidance”
// The analysis was done to promote public trust and ensure that the agency’s coronavirus guidance ‘is evidence-based and free of politics,’ a memo says.
TheAtlantic, Renée DiResta: The Misinformation Campaign Was Distinctly One-Sided http://bit.ly/3tpyoqg “21 prominent influencers, including the actor James Woods, Donald Trump Jr., a couple of QAnon leaders, and former President Trump himself, had each amplified misinformation”
// In 2020, false propaganda about voting came almost exclusively from the right, putting tech companies in a bind.
… In fact, the Democrats had not tried to steal the election, but by that point, the facts didn’t matter. The outrage machine had moved on, drawing its audience’s attention to other manufactured grievances.
Research teams participating in the Election Integrity Partnership saw this process play out repeatedly, via many of the same accounts. One team, at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, looked at which accounts were involved in specific viral misinformation “incidents”—for example, claims that Arizona voters had been improperly given Sharpies to mark their ballot, that Republican poll watchers were illegally excluded from Philadelphia vote-counting sites, that dead people had voted in Michigan. The researchers noted that 21 prominent influencers, including the actor James Woods, Donald Trump Jr., a couple of QAnon leaders, and former President Trump himself, had each amplified misinformation about at least 10 incidents. The University of Washington team also examined the domains of articles that were shared in voting-related viral misinformation incidents. The Gateway Pundit topped the list. It and Breitbart News are among the hyper-partisan media outlets that bundle small kernels of truth—such as the Greenville mail discovery—within concentric applications of falsehood.
The distinct behavior of serial spreaders of misinformation should theoretically make them easy for Facebook or Twitter to identify. Platforms that place warning labels on false or misleading content could penalize accounts that repeatedly create it; after an account earned a certain number of strikes, the platform’s algorithms could suspend it or limit users’ ability to share its posts. But platforms also want to appear politically neutral. Inconveniently for them, our research found that although some election-related misinformation circulated on the left, the pattern of the same accounts repeatedly spreading false or misleading claims about voting, or about the legitimacy of the election itself, occurred almost exclusively among pro-Trump influencers, QAnon boosters, and other outlets on the right. We were not the only ones to observe this; researchers at Harvard described the former president and the right-wing media as driving a “disinformation campaign” around mail-in voter fraud during the 2020 election; the researchers’ prior work had meticulously detailed a “propaganda feedback loop” within the closely linked right-wing media ecosystem.
If the problem were more evenly distributed, policy changes would be harder to miscast as anti-conservative bias. Tech companies are in a bind. They recognize that inaction toward certain crucial types of misinformation puts them at greater risk of regulation by a Democratic administration and investigation by a Democratic Congress. And yet, if any single platform acts too forcefully, it risks provoking the wrath of the hyper-partisan influencers, who take to competing platforms to decry their supposed mistreatment. Social-media companies find themselves in the position of having to act decisively and collectively—and yet, collective action begets further allegations of collusion to silence conservatives.
The question now is what to do about the problem. Online influencers and hyper-partisan micro-media properties don’t all possess robust distribution channels of their own. The Gateway Pundit and Donald Trump Jr. achieve their reach, and their ability to promote viral lies, because social networks allow them to. The platforms—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Parler—offer an audience of millions of users, sophisticated targeting, and curation algorithms that amplify precisely the kind of wildly sensational, high-engagement content that these influencers traffic in. Likes and shares and retweet buttons are the means by which their content spreads; algorithmically produced echo chambers entrench the fan base that they rely on to maintain influence (and, for some influencers, an income stream). The relationship is symbiotic up to a point; tech companies have benefited from the engagement that top influencers generate. But the worst of the repeat misinformation spreaders need Big Tech infrastructure, and have therefore worked hard to frame access to it as a fundamental right. And so these creatures of social media have come to regard the platforms’ growing distaste for high-impact misinformation as an existential threat.
Amid the right-wing effort to deny Trump’s election loss—and its explosive culmination in the Capitol riot—social-media companies felt compelled to step in. The insurrection pushed companies collectively to take policy actions, such as banning Trump from Twitter and Facebook, and eliminating tens of thousands of QAnon accounts and groups, that individually might have left each platform vulnerable to accusations of censorship from the right. But the post–January 6 status quo is unstable.
🧵 RT @anders_aslund Secretary of State @ABlinken’s outstanding speech on March 3 has received far too little attention, perhaps because it is too sound & principled. The first principles are obvious: US leadership and international cooperation. 📌 https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1371661388729479169?s=20
🐣 RT @AmyAThatcher Per WaPo: Two men charged with assaulting Officer Brian Sicknick. Julian Elie Khater and George Pierre Tanios were arrested on Sunday. They are charged with 9 counts and face up to 20 years in prison.
⭕ 14 Mar 2021
NYT: Police Shrugged Off the Proud Boys, Until They Attacked the Capitol http://nyti.ms/3leiX14
// Two Proud Boys accused of leading a mob to Congress followed a bloody path to get there. Law enforcement did little to stop them.
⭕ 13 Mar 2021
Vox: A Trump criminal probe in Georgia expands to include Sen. Lindsey Graham http://bit.ly/38Cw8E7
// A Georgia district attorney is investigating whether Graham violated state law in a call with an elections official.
The investigation, which was opened by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis earlier this month, will probe whether Trump — and now Graham — violated state law in the course of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election results in Georgia following the 2020 presidential election.
According to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Graham — a Republican from South Carolina — asked Raffensperger in November whether the secretary of state had the power to throw out all mail-in ballots in certain Georgia counties, a move that could potentially have tipped the state, and its 16 electoral votes, to Trump in the November election.
It’s unclear exactly how much legal jeopardy Trump and Graham are facing, but a Wednesday letter by Willis indicates that her investigation will take a broad look at possible criminal violations involving the Georgia election, including “the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office, and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”
Neither Trump nor Graham are mentioned by name in the letter, but Willis has signaled that prosecutors will look into actions by both men. According to the New York Times, the investigation will also encompass election fraud conspiracies spread by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, as well as the ouster of Byung J. Pak, then the US Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. ¤ Pak was reportedly forced out of the job by the White House in early January for refusing to open an investigation into nonexistent election fraud.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Straightforward from here:
1. Introduce skinny H.R. 1 focused on securing voting rights and nonpartisan redistricting.
2. By majority vote Senate adopts Manchin rule requiring talking filibuster, with 41 senators on floor, for bills focused on voting rights and fair elections.
⭕ 12 Mar 2021
NewYorker, Jane Mayer: Can Cyrus Vance, Jr., Nail Trump? http://bit.ly/2RGDG3z
WaPo: Army reviewing investigation into Michael Flynn’s dealings with Russia, foreign firm http://wapo.st/3eBcwnI
💙 WaPo: Justice Dept. calls Jan. 6 ‘Capitol Attack’ probe one of largest in U.S. history, expects at least 400 to be charged http://wapo.st/2OOP5fE
U.S. prosecutors on Friday sketched out the gargantuan scope of the investigation in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, asking for courts to delay most cases by at least two months after being pressed by a handful of defendants and some judges to speed up trials and plea offers.
“The investigation and prosecution of the Capitol Attack will likely be one of the largest in American history, both in terms of the number of defendants prosecuted and the nature and volume of the evidence,” the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. wrote in morning court filings in seeking a delay before turning over evidence to defendants. …
Charges have been brought against 312 people and are expected against at least 100 more, according to court officials and prosecutors. ¤ Investigators have executed more than 900 electronic and physical search warrants, and amassed more than 15,000 hours of law enforcement surveillance and body-camera video, 1,600 electronic devices and 210,000 tips, prosecutors said.
With the volume of cases and evidence only growing, “the unusual complexity of the Capitol Attack investigation warrants” postponement, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn L. Rakoczy and others wrote in a filing Friday involving “key figure” Caldwell, who is charged with eight other alleged associates of the right-wing, anti-government Oath Keepers group. ¤ Moving too fast will make prosecution “impossible, or result in a miscarriage of justice,” Rakoczy said.
More than 100 federal prosecutors are working full or part-time on cases — including 30 detailed from U.S. attorney offices around the country — with some prosecutors and judges handling seven cases or more apiece.
In a sign of the probe’s vast scope, several unsealed search warrants have requested subject’s records dating to Nov. 1 — about Election Day — and at least one Feb. 25 warrant sought all of one individual’s Facebook account information dating to Sept. 1. Magistrates have authorized the FBI to search such information for all relevant material to be copied and retained while sealing the rest pending further court order or potential use to authenticate evidence at trial.
🐣 RT @KatiePhang “‘It seems cause-and-effect,’ Miller said, referring to Trump’s speech and the violent riot that left five people dead. ‘The question is, did he know he was enraging people to do that? I don’t know.’”
⋙ VICE: Even Trump’s Defense Secretary During the Capitol Riot Blames Him for Inciting It http://bit.ly/3lhWYqg
// 3/11/2021; Former Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller told VICE on Showtime he believes Trump’s speech caused the violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
⭕ 11 Mar 2021
🔊WaPo: Recording reveals details of Trump call to Georgia’s chief elections investigator http://wapo.st/3vkfcMr
“The people of Georgia are so angry at what happened to me,” Trump told Frances Watson, the chief investigator for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, according to the recording. “They know I won, won by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”
Trump … urged Watson to continue investigating past the Christmas holiday “because, you know, we have the date, which is a very important date” — an apparent reference to Jan. 6, the day a joint session of Congress was scheduled to formalize the electoral college results.
Trump was fixated on that date as a last opportunity to overturn the election results, encouraging thousands of his supporters to descend on Washington and protest the vote. The ensuing riot at the U.S. Capitol left five people dead, including one police officer. Dozens of officers were injured. In the aftermath of the violence, Congress formally recognized President Biden’s win that night.
WaPo: DOJ seeks to build large conspiracy case against Oath Keepers for Jan. 6 riot http://wapo.st/3bGGnJe
🐣 RT @kyledcheney GARLAND has essentially made his first working day at DOJ entirely about the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. ¤ Aside from some ceremonial stuff, he’s getting briefed by FBI Director Wray on the Capitol riot investigation and meeting with DC prosecutors pursuing those cases.
⭕ 10 Mar 2021
💙 TheAtlantic, Shadi Hamid: America Without God http://bit.ly/3esG7iY
// Apr 2021 issue: tags: Trumpism, wokeism, Qanon; religion in America; As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen. Will the quest for secular redemption through politics doom the American idea?
AP: RICO expert hired by prosecutor investigating Trump call http://bit.ly/30A4t2i
// RICO = Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has engaged John Floyd to serve as a special assistant district attorney to work with lawyers in her office on any cases involving allegations of racketeering, her spokesman Jeff DiSantis said. A Fulton County Superior Court judge swore him in Wednesday morning.
In letters sent to state officials last month asking them to preserve evidence for her investigation into potential attempts to influence last year’s election, Willis mentioned racketeering as one of the possible violations of Georgia law that she was examining.
CNN: Wall Street Journal: Trump pressured Georgia investigator to find ‘the right answer’ in baseless fraud push http://cnn.it/3t3PFVy
↥ ↧
🔊WSJ: Trump Call to Georgia Lead Investigator Reveals New Details http://on.wsj.com/3cjWdsG
// Then-president says ‘Something bad happened’ and presses for investigation into Fulton County votes
↥ ↧
⋙ WaPo: ‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction http://wapo.st/38tUosk
// 3/9/2021
WaPo: ‘QAnon Shaman’ stays in jail as judge slams his arguments: ‘So frivolous as to insult the Court’s intelligence’ http://wapo.st/3bDvw34
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Merrick Garland confirmed as attorney general http://wapo.st/3l4i0s5 Finally, I am really truly ready to heave that big sigh of relief ~ more excited about this ⇈ than the Heroes Act passing OR the fact I got my first Pfizer shot today!
⭕ 9 Mar 2021
NYT: Trump, Hungry for Power, Tries to Wrestle Away G.O.P. Fund-Raising http://nyti.ms/3elULsl
// Angry at his critics in the party and seeking to keep his options for raising money open, the former president is trying to take charge of the online fund-raising juggernaut he helped create.
Last week, Mr. Trump sent cease-and-desist letters — which appear to have little legal standing — to the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, warning them not to appeal to donors using his name and image.
The jockeying comes as the party struggles to chart its path forward after losing the House, the Senate and the White House during Mr. Trump’s tenure, with moderate party leaders pushing the party to move beyond the divisive former president while much of the G.O.P. base remains firmly behind him. Who controls a majority of donors’ cash is set to be a fiercely contested point of dispute as Republicans try to regroup and take back power in the 2022 midterm elections.
Mr. Trump’s maneuvering is born partly out of his anger toward Republican leaders who he feels were disloyal when they edged away from him after Jan. 6. The former president is also being encouraged by people like Dick Morris, the notorious political consultant known for flipping between the parties, who has been meeting with him in New York and encouraging him to take on the party he once led.
Mr. Trump’s actions could give him a stream of money at a time when his private company is struggling under the scrutiny of investigations, with some discussions of whether properties need to be sold. His business is now politics, and political action committees have few restrictions on how they operate and use their money, according to campaign finance experts. ¤ The former president could, in theory, pay himself and his family members salaries from the money raised there.
🐣 RT @tribelaw Racketeer in Chief Donald J. Trump. It fits.
⋙ Reuters: Georgia prosecutor probing Trump taps leading racketeering attorney http://reut.rs/3ryRmdv
// 3/6/2021
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has enlisted the help of Atlanta lawyer John Floyd, who wrote a national guide on prosecuting state racketeering cases. Floyd was hired recently to “provide help as needed” on matters involving racketeering, including the Trump investigation and other cases, said the source, who has direct knowledge of the situation.
The move bolsters the team investigating Trump as Willis prepares to issue subpoenas for evidence on whether the former president and his allies broke the law in their campaign to pressure state officials to reverse his Georgia election loss. Willis has said that her office would examine potential charges including “solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering” among other possible violations.
“It’s not a stretch to see where she’s taking this,” said Cathy Cox, the dean of Mercer University’s law school in Macon, Georgia and a former Georgia secretary of state. “If Donald Trump engaged in two or more acts that involve false statements – that were made knowingly and willfully in an attempt to falsify material fact, like the election results – then you can piece together a violation of the racketeering act.”
In a Jan. 2 phone call, Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to “find” just enough votes to allow him to win. In the hour-long call, Trump repeated false voter-fraud claims, insisting he won Georgia by a landslide and that Democrat Joe Biden received thousands of votes from people who were out-of-state, unregistered, or dead. Trump made another phone call in late December to Georgia’s chief elections investigator, urging the official to “find the fraud.”
On Dec. 5, Trump called the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, to urge him to hold a special session of the legislature to overturn the election results. Three days later, Trump called Georgia’s Republican attorney general, Chris Carr, warning him not to interfere with a Texas lawsuit that challenged the election results in Georgia and other states.
Carr stated publicly that he opposed the Texas lawsuit. The offices of Kemp and Carr did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Willis’ office has indicated it is also examining efforts to influence the election by Trump’s allies, including a November phone call made by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham to Raffensperger to discuss mail-in ballots; false election fraud claims made by Trump’s then personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, in testimony at state legislative hearings; and the abrupt removal of Byung J. “BJay” Pak, a U.S. attorney in Georgia who angered Trump by not doing enough to investigate his unfounded fraud claims.
.
WaPo: Biden’s Justice Dept. already has split from Trump. Merrick Garland will go even further. http://wapo.st/3byXI7c “Garland … will inherit a Justice Department damaged by President Donald Trump’s efforts to use its power to benefit his friends and hurt his enemies”
BuzzfeedNews: Prosecutors Say The Oath Keepers’ Leader Directed Followers During Capitol Riot http://bit.ly/3kURgKI
// “Come to the South Side of the Capitol on steps,” Stewart Rhodes allegedly instructed on Jan. 6.
⭕ 8 Mar 2021
💙★ WSJ: What You Can and Can’t Do if You’ve Been Vaccinated: Travel, Gatherings, Risk Factors, What You Need to Know http://on.wsj.com/3lxKCKJ
// Until we reach herd immunity, vaccinated people must navigate some complicated decision-making. Here’s how to assess the risks.
MSNBC, Steve Benen: After boasting of ‘unity,’ Trump sends cease-and-desist letter to RNC http://on.msnbc.com/3t0XjjF
// Trump doesn’t just intend to lead the Republican Party, he also intends to control it.
🐣 RT @PalmerReport Trump has apparently decided to spend his final days trying to steal all the donations that would have gone to the Republican Party, so he can funnel the money into his legal defense as he faces criminal trials. His life is basically over, and he’s taking the GOP down with him.
R.I.P. GOP 3/8/2021. ¤ Lindsey Graham was right. He destroyed you. And you deserve it. ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1369162915606040578?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @maggieNYT He didn’t start his own party, which is complicated to do and be competitive, but Trump is trying to set himself up as the place where money for Republicans should go as opposed to GOP committees Text Block: https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1369110810690285576?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 As JFK said, riding the tiger risks ending up inside
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Cindy McCain: “I just don’t believe that our party can survive by appealing to the dark side of humanity.” ¤ “I don’t understand how we got to where we’re at but now that we’re here we can no longer have our leaders work with fear and anger and hate.” @MSNBC
WaPo: Sen. Roy Blunt won’t run for reelection, marking fifth Senate GOP retirement http://wapo.st/3ctC2bV “Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio), Richard C. Shelby (Ala.) and Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.) already have said they will not seek reelection”
// Sens. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) have yet to announce their intentions.
NYT, Michelle Cottle: Don’t Let QAnon Bully Congress http://nyti.ms/30mKS5o
// Allowing the U.S. government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
Last Thursday was not Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power after all. ¤ While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.
This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials. …
March 4 was just one target. The acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, recently warned that extremists have been talking about possibly blowing up the Capitol during President Biden’s first address to a joint meeting of Congress, which has not yet been scheduled, with an eye toward killing “as many members as possible.”
Also in discussion around the QAnon water cooler is that Mr. Trump will be reinstalled on March 20, with the help of the U.S. military. Indeed, the F.B.I. and Homeland Security bulletin cited an increased risk from violent domestic extremists for all of 2021. …
On Monday, lawmakers were briefed on the findings of the security assessment that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, requested in the wake of Jan. 6. Russel Honoré, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the task force, recommended a variety of permanent enhancements. These include beefing up the Capitol Police force, in terms of increased staffing, improved training, enhanced authority for its leadership and a new emphasis on intelligence work; creating a quick-reaction force to be on call 24-7 to handle imminent threats; installing a retractable fencing system; and adding protections for rank-and-file members of Congress at home and while they are traveling and back in their districts.
Congress can now start haggling over which measures to adopt. Don’t look for the process to be silky smooth. Republicans, many of them desperate to downplay the Jan. 6 tragedy, are already attacking General Honoré as biased. The general has not been shy about criticizing lawmakers and others he regards as having fed the postelection chaos, and he has suggested that some Capitol Police officers may have been complicit in allowing rioters into the building. …
Trump toadies should not be allowed to turn this issue into a partisan game. Steps must be taken to safeguard the seat of government. Going forward, lawmakers cannot be seen as bowing to political thugs, their work upended whenever there is a semi-credible threat. That is not the American way.
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Minuta is an associate of Roger Stone’s. We’ve all seen how much Stone wants to avoid prison. So if he was involved in Jan 6 in some way, convincing Minuta to cooperate against him could pave the way to learn details of whether there was an organized plan to attack the Capitol.
⋙ 🐣 RT @FBI Over the weekend, we arrested Roberto Minuta and Issac Sturgeon for their respective roles in the assault on the Capitol. Keep the tips coming as we work to identify those responsible so they can be held accountable. See our latest photos at [link]
⭕ 7 Mar 2021
Reuters: Accountant faces pressure to turn on Trump in criminal probe http://reut.rs/3c9WcYa
Few people have been as deeply involved in Trump’s finances as [Allen] Weisselberg, a trusted figure in Trump’s family business who began working for Trump’s father, Fred, in 1973 at the company’s Brooklyn office, paying bills and tracking the rental payments from apartment towers. ¤ Legal experts and a source familiar with the criminal investigation say prosecutors’ apparent goal is to convince Weisselberg to cooperate with the probe into Trump’s dealings.
🔆 This❗️⋙ Politico: Manchin wants to make filibuster ‘painful’ to use http://politi.co/2OAHUaH
// The pivotal West Virginia Democrat is also open to using budget reconciliation to pass voting reforms.
WaPo: Biden signs executive order promoting voting rights on 56th anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’ http://wapo.st/2PzIk1C He “warned that the country is witnessing a ‘never-before-seen effort to ignore, undermine and undo the will of the people.’”
⭕ 6 Mar 2021
⭕ 5 Mar 2021
WaPo, Dana Milbank: Republicans aren’t fighting Democrats. They’re fighting democracy. http://wapo.st/3c4M6aR “The Republican Party’s dalliance with authoritarianism can be explained in one word: race”
Trump’s overt racism turned the GOP into, essentially, a white-nationalist party, in which racial animus is the main motivator of Republican votes. But in an increasingly multicultural America, such people don’t form a majority. The only route to power for a white-nationalist party, then, is to become anti-democratic: to keep non-White people from voting and to discredit elections themselves. In short, democracy is working against Republicans — and so Republicans are working against democracy.
WaPo: F.B.I. Finds Contact Between Proud Boys Member and Trump Associate Before Riot http://wapo.st/3c5rsHR
// A leader of the far-right group separately said he had been in touch with Roger Stone, but an official said it was not the same contact investigators found through electronic communications records.
🐣 RT @tribelaw Go Eric! This @RepSwalwell lawsuit against Trump in his personal capacity is one Trump won’t easily escape. Its legal basis is solid and its factual predicates are overwhelming.
⋙ CNN: House impeachment manager Eric Swalwell sues Trump and close allies over Capitol riot in second major insurrection lawsuit http://cnn.it/3qpp2sy
Former House impeachment manager Eric Swalwell has sued former President Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani and Republican Rep. Mo Brooks in a second major lawsuit seeking to hold Trump and his allies accountable for inciting the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6.
The new lawsuit filed on Friday by Swalwell, a California Democrat who helped to lead impeachment arguments against Trump for inciting insurrection, follows a similar suit filed last month by Rep. Bennie Thompson against Trump, Giuliani and the extremist groups the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Swalwell’s case makes some of the same claims as Thompson’s — citing a civil rights law meant to counter the Ku Klux Klan’s intimidation of elected officials.
But it also alleges Trump, Trump Jr., Giuliani and Brooks broke Washington, DC, laws, including an anti-terrorism act, by inciting the riot, and that they aided and abetted violent rioters and inflicted emotional distress on the members of Congress.
“The Defendants, in short, convinced the mob that something was occurring that — if actually true — might indeed justify violence, and then sent that mob to the Capitol with violence-laced calls for immediate action,” the lawsuit, in Washington, DC’s federal District Court, alleges.
The lawsuits will unfurl as Trump faces mounting pressures in investigations by House committees that seek his financial records, as well as in criminal probes related to his private business and his post-election actions. He has not been charged with any crime.
Friday’s suit could bump up against free speech protections for speakers at the rally, as well as immunity Trump could try to claim he had while serving as president. All of the elected officials in the lawsuit, including Trump, are named in their personal capacities in court, meaning they would use private lawyers and not be shielded by their public offices.
But should either this suit or Thompson’s proceed, it would mean the former President and his allies would be subject to discovery and depositions, potentially exposing details and evidence that weren’t released during the Senate impeachment trial.
WaPo: State Department aide appointed by Trump stormed the Capitol, beat police with a riot shield, FBI says http://wapo.st/3ca8pMi Federico Guillermo Klein “has been arrested on charges that he stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and assaulted an officer with a weapon”
⭕ 4 Mar 2021
💙 WaPo, Max Boot: How Trump’s politicized Pentagon bungled the response to the Capitol invasion http://wapo.st/3bhGr20 //➔ “bungled” is being generous
… Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commander of the D.C. National Guard, told a Senate committee Wednesday that he had been prevented by then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy from deploying a quick-reaction force or distributing weapons and riot gear before Jan. 6. McCarthy, in turn, was acting on the orders of then-acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller. Walker said such restrictions were “unusual” and were not imposed during Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Washington.
When the attack on the Capitol began, Walker continued, he received a frantic call for assistance at 1:49 p.m. from the then-head of the Capitol Police and immediately relayed the request to the Pentagon. But it was not until 5:08 p.m. — three hours and 19 minutes later — that Walker finally received permission to deploy his troops. That was long after the Capitol had been overrun.
We still don’t have the full story of what happened; Congress will need to hear from McCarthy, Miller, Piatt and Charles Flynn, among others. Clearly there were multiple failures that day at different government agencies, including the Capitol Police, not just at the Defense Department. But what we already know suggests that the senior Pentagon leadership, installed by Trump, was either incompetent or malevolent. Or, quite possibly, both.
The best-case scenario is that the Pentagon was slow to respond in January because of all the blowback it had received for deploying troops to Lafayette Square in June. This might explain the generals’ concern about “optics,” which was shared by the House sergeant-at-arms. But it should have been obvious that there was a world of difference between using troops to attack unarmed demonstrators and using troops to stop terrorists from overrunning the Capitol.
The worst-case scenario is that Pentagon leaders were slow to act because they did not want to battle a mob that had been mobilized and incited by their commander in chief. As my colleague Dana Milbank notes, Miller, the acting defense secretary, did not finally give permission for the Guard to deploy until after Trump had belatedly told the insurrectionists to “go home.”
The larger problem is that Miller should never have been running the Defense Department even temporarily — and he should never have been surrounded by a coterie of unqualified Trump loyalists with extremist views. They were installed in November after Trump “terminated” Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, who had angered him by opposing the deployment of active-duty troops to quell racial justice demonstrations.
After four years of assiduous effort, Trump succeeded in politicizing the Defense Department and undermining its effectiveness. The result was the Jan. 6 catastrophe. It is terrifying to imagine how much worse the Pentagon would have gotten if Trump had won a second term. Now it is incumbent on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to clean up the department and rebuild the battered guardrails of military professionalism.
💙 🐣 RT @tribelaw Smells like it, sounds like it, looks like it, walks like it . . .
⋙ 🐣 RT @waltshaub What conclusion are we supposed to draw from the former Defense Secretary ordering the national guard to stand down, barring them from acting without his personal authorization, the day before the Capitol insurgency? ¤ It smells like a murderous attempt to aid the terrorists.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ryannobles Stunning-> DC’s National Guard Commander told members of Congress that he had the authority to mobilize troops to respond to a civil disturbance… until the guidance changed the day before the insurrection. ¤ via/ @OrenCNN @ZcohenCNN & @ellieckaufman
// 3/3/2021 ↥ ↧
⋙⋙⋙⋙ CNN: DC National Guard commander says ‘unusual’ Pentagon restrictions slowed response to Capitol riot http://cnn.it/3uS6BAp link: https://twitter.com/ryanobles/status/1367195564501307395?s=20
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Medit8Now Is anyone going to connect the obvious dots of why Christopher Miller was installed?
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @mailelei Something fishy? ¤ Barr left early so he couldn’t do a repeat like in June. ¤ That left tRump to his own devices and to manipulate all the secretaries of all the branches to get his way. To let the rioters tear down the capitol and stop the cert. He wanted to win at any cost.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @getgoing100 Media/congress is unwilling to acknowledge that the US military was co-opted in the capitol insurrection. It aided & abetted the overthrow of election results by Trump mobs by its acts of omission (delaying deploying national guard) & commission (taking away authority to deploy)
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Shimha18 Guidance Changes: After Trump fired #DOD Secretary Esper on 11/09/20, he then removed his staff of senior defense officials and installed MAGA loyalists who then changed policy to protect the #January6Insurrection. #CapitolRiotHearing https://twitter.com/Shimha18/status/1367233307784585216?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @mmagersdc Guidance changed day before, this is huge exposure of complicity in this insurrection! ¤ Whom, what & why(we know the why) was behind this hindrance of providing help to Capitol Police. ¤ Prosecute anyone involved in changing this guidance, impeding National Guard from support!
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Pugmothersue And this is how it happened: [Memo to Walker from Acting Defense Minister Christopher Miller:] https://twitter.com/Pugmothersue/status/1367210977322622976?s=20/photo/1
CNN: Federal investigators are examining communications between US lawmakers and Capitol rioters http://cnn.it/3rkWVMx
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote If you were wondering why republicans kept asking the FBI if their phones were being tapped or if geo-location was being used without warrants during insurrection security hearings, here’s your answer.
⋙ 🐣 RT @LinkedHD CNN is reporting that investigators are looking into certain members of Congress for their role in the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Here we go.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @LinkedHD “The data gathered so far includes indications of contact with lawmakers in the days around January 6, as well as communications between alleged rioters discussing their associations with members of Congress, the official said.”
⭕ 3 Mar 2021
WSJ, Karl Rove: Trump’s Appeal Rings Hollow at CPAC http://on.wsj.com/3qoAjcR “Supporters want him to offer a forward-looking vision, but he won’t. Some view his declarations of civil war on Republicans as counterproductive and claims of political power hollow”
// Only 68% of a crowd of Trump’s fervent supporters want him to run in 2024.
📋… [W]hile 97% rated Mr. Trump favorably in a straw poll, only 68% wanted him to run for president again, and 55% said they supported his nomination in 2024.
Why the muted enthusiasm from a crowd of Mr. Trump’s most fervent fans? The explanation may be in what the ex-president said and didn’t say in his 15-minute definition of Trumpism. There was no forward-looking agenda, simply a recitation of his greatest hits. People like fresh material. Repetition is useful to a point, but it grows stale.
Mr. Trump also claimed his “endorsement is the most powerful asset in politics,” crowing that “because of my efforts . . . we had huge gains in the House, and I helped keep many senators in their seats.” This is somewhat true of November’s 10 most competitive U.S. Senate races. Successful Republican candidates ran ahead of Mr. Trump’s percentage and won in three contests—Alaska, Maine and Texas. Five who ran behind him still managed to win, in Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana and North Carolina.
Mr. Trump followed up with an extended rant, claiming “this election was rigged and the Supreme Court and other courts didn’t want to do anything about it.” Instead, they “used process and lack of standing” to avoid the controversy. That’s deeply misleading. Judges in all six contested states found the Trump lawyers didn’t produce sufficient evidence.
The Arizona Supreme Court said the Trump campaign didn’t present “any evidence of ‘misconduct,’ ‘illegal votes’ ” while federal courts in the state dismissed complaints as “largely based on anonymous witnesses, hearsay and irrelevant analysis.”
Georgia courts held the Trump claims “rest on speculation” and lack “facts or evidence.”
A Michigan judge characterized the claims “as hearsay” while a federal judge in the Wolverine State dismissed them as “nothing but speculation and conjecture.” A Nevada judge wrote that Mr. Trump’s lawyers “failed” to provide “credible and relevant evidence.”
The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld lower-court decisions in Pennsylvania that Team Trump didn’t provide “specific allegations and then proof.” In Wisconsin, a judge ruled that “on the merits of plaintiff’s claims,” Trump’s team “has not proved that defendants violated his rights.” The state Supreme Court concurred, saying his challenge was “meritless on its face.”
Perhaps the CPAC poll results are a manifestation of growing skepticism about Mr. Trump’s viability. Supporters want him to offer a forward-looking vision, but he won’t. Some view his declarations of civil war on Republicans as counterproductive and claims of political power hollow. And his repeated cries of stolen elections are causing some supporters to abandon politics altogether and others to doubt his claims.
Elements of Mr. Trump’s speech were fine. But true to form, the former president did it his way. The speech’s divisive, controversial and embittered parts dominated the coverage. He might be pleased by that, but shouldn’t be. Republicans shouldn’t be either.
DailyBeast, David Rothkopf: If Jan. 6 Was ‘Domestic Terror,’ Who Was the Terrorist in Chief? http://bit.ly/3rgkG8s
// Somehow, the FBI director and a committee of senators managed to avoid asking, let alone answering, the most obvious question.
WaPo Editorial: The Pentagon delayed three hours in sending troops on Jan. 6. It still hasn’t given a good reason. http://wapo.st/308SwQT
💙 WaPo, Dana Milbank: Did the Pentagon wait for Trump’s approval before defending the Capitol? http://wapo.st/3sSCl6B
Three hours and 19 minutes. ¤ That’s how long it took from the first, desperate pleas for help from the Capitol Police to the Trump Pentagon on Jan. 6 until the D.C. National Guard finally received permission to help put down the bloody insurrection.
During those 199 minutes, the mob sacked the Capitol. People died. Overwhelmed Capitol and D.C. police were beaten. Lawmakers’ lives were jeopardized. And violent extremists defiled the seat of government, temporarily halting the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
“At 1:49 p.m., I received a frantic call from then-chief of United States Capitol Police, Steven Sund, where he informed me that the security perimeter of the United States Capitol had been breached by hostile rioters,” Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, commander of the D.C. Guard, testified Wednesday to a joint Senate committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. “Chief Sund, his voice cracking with emotion, indicated that there was a dire emergency at the Capitol, and he requested the immediate assistance of as many available national guardsmen that I could muster.”
Walker immediately alerted senior Army leadership — and then waited. And waited. Approval to mobilize the guard wouldn’t be received until 5:08 p.m.
At best, this was a catastrophic failure of government. At worst, political appointees and Trump loyalists at the Defense Department deliberately prevented the National Guard from defending the Capitol against a seditious mob.
The man ultimately responsible for the delay, Christopher Miller, had been a White House aide before Donald Trump installed him as acting defense secretary in November, as the president began his attempt to overturn his election defeat. Miller did Trump’s political bidding at another point during his 10-week tenure, forcing the National Security Agency to install a Republican political operative as chief counsel.
Also involved in the Pentagon delay was Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, brother of disgraced former Trump adviser Michael Flynn, convicted (and pardoned) for lying to the FBI. Michael Flynn had suggested Trump declare martial law, and he helped to rile Trump supporters in Washington the day before the Capitol attack. The Pentagon had falsely denied to Post journalists that Charles Flynn was involved in the pivotal call on Jan. 6.
… An hour and six minutes of the holdup was because then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy “was asking a lot of questions” about the mission. Another piece of the delay: The 36 minutes between when the Pentagon claims Miller authorized the action and when the D.C. Guard was informed of the decision. “That’s an issue,” Salesses allowed.
Curiously, the Pentagon claims Miller’s authorization came at 4:32 — 15 minutes after Trump told his “very special” insurrectionists to “go home in peace.” Was Miller waiting for Trump’s blessing before defending the Capitol?
The Pentagon’s 199-minute delay looks worse in light of a Jan. 4 memo Miller issued saying that without his “personal authorization” the D.C. Guard couldn’t “be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.”
The Army secretary added more restrictions the next day, saying in a memo that he would “withhold authority” for the D.C. Guard to deploy a “quick reaction force” and that he would “require a concept of operation” before allowing a quick reaction force to react. McCarthy even blocked the D.C. Guard in advance from redeploying to the Capitol guardsmen assigned to help the D.C. police elsewhere in Washington.
Without such restrictions, Walker, the D.C. Guard commander, could have dispatched nearly 200 guardsmen soon after the Capitol Police mayday call. “That number could have made a difference,” Walker testified. …
WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: The FBI director confirms the right is lying about Jan. 6 http://wapo.st/3rgYZVE
WaPo: Capitol Police say intelligence shows militia group may be plotting to breach the Capitol http://wapo.st/2Pw5qX4
⭕ 2 Mar 2021
TheConversation, Richard Amesbury: Can QAnon survive another ‘Great Disappointment’ on March 4? History suggests it might http://bit.ly/3qdz5kz
// Millerites
🐣 RT @ZekeJMiller WASHINGTON (AP) — Domestic extremist groups pose a serious threat to the military by seeking to recruit service members into their ranks and, in some cases, joining the military to acquire combat experience, according to a Pentagon report.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ AP: Pentagon report cites threat of extremism in military http://bit.ly/3qbgXHN
💙 🔲 💽 C-SPAN: FBI Director Christopher Wray Testifies on January 6 Capitol Attack http://bit.ly/3bZwfKP
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the department’s preparations and response to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In his opening remarks, Director Wray said he was “appalled” at the attack on the U.S. Capitol and told members the “siege was criminal behavior plain and simple.” He later said the January 6 event was not an isolated issue and answered several questions on the rise of domestic terrorism and white supremacist violence in the country. Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) said in his remarks, “the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 did not wear white robes and hoods. They might as well have. They are the latest incarnation of a violent white supremacist movement that has terrorized fellow Americans on the basis of their race, religion, and national origin for more than 150 years.” Other questions focused on the diversity in the department, rising cases of hate crimes against Asian Americans, and cybersecurity concerns in the wake of the SolarWinds breach.
🐣 RT @JVLast The GOP is a revanchist minority, which is why their only paths forward are geographic leverage and voter suppression. Which is why the D’s first priority should be expanding voting rights. That’s the cornerstone of the pro-democracy movement.
⋙ TheBulwark, Jonathan Last: Biden’s Future Has Two Parts http://bit.ly/3e43wXK
// definition: four types of conservatism (Trump is none); temperamental, foreign affairs, fiscal, social; There are going to be two different Biden administrations.
WaPo: FBI director says domestic terrorism ‘metastasizing’ throughout U.S. as cases soar http://wapo.st/3kIDtXp
WaPo: Wray delivers a big blow to Jan. 6 baseless claims about antifa, but the GOP keeps feeding them http://wapo.st/3sJKdqV
🐣 RT @ If there’s a lesson to take from the last four years, it is that the work of democracy is never done and that any one of us may stumble, @danbbaer writes.
⋙ ForeignPolicy, Dan Baer: America Is Back. But Can Allies Ever Trust It Again? http://bit.ly/2NW5A9J
// Fears of another Trump make it even more urgent that allies work with Biden now.
⭕ 1 Mar 2021
🐣 RT @TheReidOut The Brennan Center recently reported that state legislatures are currently considering more than 250 bills restricting voting access in 43 states.
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, TheReidOut: The GOP is using ‘The Big Lie’ to push new voting restrictions http://on.msnbc.com/2NSvzig
// Joy explains how Republicans are using ‘The Big Lie’ to promote voting restrictions across the country. The Brennan Center recently reported that state legislatures are currently considering more than 250 bills restricting voting access in 43 states.
💙 WSJ Editorial: The Grievances of Trump Past http://on.wsj.com/3raEhGT
// If he was so great politically for the GOP, why is the party now out of power?
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Weisselberg is in a position to know what Trump knew & what financial activity he directed. If he flips & works with prosecutors, he could be the key witness they need.
⋙ NYT: Prosecutors Investigating Trump Focus on His Finance Chief http://nyti.ms/3kzsjV3
// Manhattan district attorney investigators who are examining possible financial fraud have asked witnesses about Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer at the Trump Organization.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @MaryLTrump Weisselberg started working for my grandfather at Trump Management in Brooklyn in 1971 and most likely followed Donald to Manhattan in order to keep an eye on him. He knows close to everything.
WaPo: Rewriting January 6th: Republicans push false and misleading accounts of Capitol riot http://wapo.st/2MDMFzV
WaPo, Michael Gerson: The GOP is now just the party of white grievance http://wapo.st/301RCFw
// Trump mainstreamed bigotry in the Republican Party.
One of the poisonous legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency has been to expand the boundaries of expressible prejudice. Through the explicit practice of White-identity politics, Trump has obviated the need for code words and dog whistles. Thus his strongest supporters during the Jan. 6 riot felt free to carry Confederate battle flags and wear “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirts without fear of reproof from their political allies. Many in the crowd surely didn’t consider themselves racists, but they were perfectly willing to make common cause with racists. In social effect, it is a distinction without a difference.
⭕ 28 Feb 2021
CNN: DOJ charges man who allegedly sprayed chemicals at cops in Capitol riot http://cnn.it/2OeRP5A “The use of chemical sprays has been a major focus of the investigation into the death of US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick”
WaPo: Allies of Rep. Adam Kinzinger launch super PAC to support Republicans who have bucked Trump http://wapo.st/3sGQCDj
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Russian state media remains vehemently anti-American, anti-Biden and consistently pro-Trump. That should tell you all you need to know.
⭕ 27 Feb 2021
⭕ 26 Feb 2021
🚫 Esquire, Charles Pierce: This Year’s CPAC Is Approaching the Wingnut Singularity http://bit.ly/3kA9fpx
// Jesus, what a banana farm. Did they pad the rostrum? ⋙ not much else
NYT: F.B.I. Said to Have Singled Out Potential Assailant in Capitol Officer’s Death http://nyti.ms/2NKKISz They “suspect his death was related to an irritant, like mace or bear spray, that he had inhaled during the riot”
// The death of the officer, Brian Sicknick, after the Capitol riot has been a major focus for investigators scrutinizing the attack by a pro-Trump mob.
WaPo: FBI focuses on video of Capitol Police officer being sprayed with chemicals before he died in pro-Trump riot http://wapo.st/3pZ7mDR
🐣 RT @ryanjreilly NEW: Meet Danny “DJ” Rodriguez, the MAGA hatted Trump fanatic who brawled with cops, smashed out a Capitol window, and appeared to tase D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Mike Fanone in the neck during the insurrection. Story with @JessReports:
⋙ HuffPo: Revealed: Meet The Trump Fanatic Who Tasered A Cop At The Capitol Insurrection http://bit.ly/3uDIpl9
// Danny “DJ” Rodriguez brawled with cops, tried to smash out a Capitol window, and assaulted a police officer on Jan. 6. He’s still at large.
CBSNews: Over 300 charged from more than 40 states: What we know about the “unprecedented” Capitol riot arrests http://cbsn.ws/307WhpP
🐣 RT @thedailybeast QAnon Shaman: Donald Trump “groomed” me and millions of others to believe conspiracy theories for years
⋙ DailyBeast: QAnon Shaman Whines: Trump ‘Groomed’ Me and Millions of Other Americans http://bit.ly/3spXjt8
💙 WaPo: Capitol riot defendants facing jail have regrets. Judges aren’t buying it. http://wapo.st/3dQApag
WaPo: As fractures emerge among Proud Boys, experts warn of a shift toward extremist violence http://wapo.st/3r0q67h
⭕ 25 Feb 2021
🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “Today in a congressional hearing into the insurrection of January 6th, a new warning from the acting Capitol Police chief about the same right-wing extremist groups who stormed the Capitol… targeting Biden’s first official address to Congress” – @NicolleDWallace 💽 https://twitter.com/DeadlineWH/status/1365067609591476229?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “The period of time [Cy Vance] has is important because it predates Trump’s ascent into the White House and helps build the narrative around the money trail and Trump’s motivations for his destructive and obscene dance with people like Putin” – @TimOBrien w/ @NicolleDWallace 💽 https://twitter.com/DeadlineWH/status/1365091382940041216?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 24 Feb 2021
CNN: Pentagon report reveals disturbing details about White supremacists in the ranks http://cnn.it/2O4DoAY
CNN: Close ally of Marjorie Taylor Greene among those in Capitol mob http://cnn.it/3sqWMqZ
⭕ 23 Feb 2021
🧵 RT @BigElad After the January 6 “Stop the Steal” event at the Capitol, @MarkPedroli and I requested records of communications between Missouri’s Attorney General’s Office and dark money groups that issued a robocall recruiting people to the event. ¤ My report: http://bit.ly/3aNMj2V 📌 https://twitter.com/BigElad/status/1364335691149303813?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Twitter just blocked 100 Russian state-affiliated accounts. Russia is already complaining and calling it “censorship.” Meanwhile, good riddance to 100 of my former troll followers. I won’t miss them for a minute. Text Block: https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1364280219260043270?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Tom_Winter NEW: Statement from the NYPD’s largest union @NYCPBA “This was a disgusting assault on our Capitol Police brothers & sisters, on our government and on everything that NYC police officers stand for. Even worse: the suspect once wore our uniform. Justice must be swift and severe.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @NBCNews A retired New York police officer is facing charges for participating in the Capitol riot last month, where he allegedly attacked a Capitol officer.
⋙⋙ NBCNews: Retired NYPD cop charged in Capitol riot, accused of attacking officer http://nbcnews.to/2ZJMRAv
// Prosecutors said Thomas Webster attacked a Capitol police officer with a flag pole that was flying a Marine Corps flag.
WaPo: FBI alert about possible ‘war’ against Congress reached D.C. and Capitol Police on eve of attack, deepening security questions http://wapo.st/3sjDSCg
WaPo: Life amid the ruins of QAnon: ‘I wanted my family back’ http://wapo.st/2P5ozPo “To some it seemed as if the United States was gripped by an epidemic of conspiracy theories”
// An epidemic of conspiracy, fanned by social media and self-serving politicians, is tearing families apart.
🐣 RT @MarshallCohen Tucker Carlson last night: “There is no evidence that white supremacists were responsible for what happened on January 6. That’s a lie” ¤ Moments ago: ex-Capitol Police chief, DC police chief, ex-House and Senate sergeant-at-arms all testified that white supremacists were involved
🐣 RT @hugolowell Senate Rules chair Amy Klobuchar whacks Ron Johnson over questioning at hearing into Capitol attack, saying he’s always a problem: “Ron Johnson has again engaged in a conspiracy theory — that’s what he does.”
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @jimsciutto A sitting Senator and member of the committee charged with defending the homeland is lying about a terrorist attack, contradicting the witnesses before him and every law enforcement agency. Will his party censure him or sanction him in any way?
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Ron Johnson is using his questioning time during the Capitol security hearing to promote a conspiracy theory that the January 6 insurrectionists weren’t actually Trump supporters, but were “provocateurs” and “fake Trump protesters” 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1364256884044271620?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 22 Feb 2021 Merrick Garland DOJ Hearing
WaPo: At stake in Senate hearing Tuesday: The story of the Capitol riot, and who is responsible http://wapo.st/3siokPd
🐣 RT @warontherocks Why are these events occurring more frequently and more widely now, and what can be done to mitigate the dangers inherent in such encounters?
⋙ WarOnTheRocks, Ralph Clem: Risky Encounters with Russia: Time to Talk About Real Deconfliction http://bit.ly/3pLxQZA
// 2/18/2021
… [T]here is one other issue with Moscow that requires immediate attention and is worth the effort to cooperate on: the growing number of close contacts between U.S. and NATO air, land, and naval forces and their counterparts on the Russian side. Any of these encounters implies a threat of rapid escalation should something go terribly wrong, like a mid-air collision, a prospect made more likely owing to reckless conduct by the Russians during some of these incidents.
WaPo: Half million people should not have died in a country as ‘rich and sophisticated’ as the United States, says Fauci http://wapo.st/
In remarks to Reuters on Monday, Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the death toll of 500,000 “stunning” and said that “intense” political divisiveness contributed to the nation’s poor handling of the pandemic. ¤ “This is the worst thing that’s happened to this country with regard to the health of the nation in over 100 years,” he said.
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Powerful reassurance to witness our President and Vice President and spouses recognize the sweeping tragedy that has engulfed and indeed numbed us. This Administration has the competence and organization to lead us out to health.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AP BREAKING: The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 tops 500,000, a staggering total that nearly equals the number of Americans killed in World War II, Korea and Vietnam combined. http://apne.ws/NGY6EfC
📋 🐣 RT @NumbersMuncher Summary of recent polls of how many Republicans believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump:
USA Today/Suffolk: 73%
Quinnipiac 76%
Gallup 83%
CNN 75%
Monmouth 72%
Fox News 68%
These numbers are a barrier to any unity in the country, and this was all cultivated by Trump.
🐣 RT @BillKristol “His outpouring of rage that Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance will finally have access to his financial documents suggests the only plausible reason for Trump’s evident dismay: He is very scared of being charged with crimes.”
⋙ NYMag, Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump Is Extremely Mad Prosecutors Will See His Tax Returns http://nym.ag/
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Acosta Trump responds to SCOTUS decision on his tax returns, claiming he’s the victim of “political persecution.” Text Block: https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/1363927173489393668?s=20/photo/1
📋 🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Keeping track:
Dominion Voting Systems:
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — $1.3 billion in damages
Sidney Powell — $1.3 billion in damages
Rudy Giuliani — $1.3 billion in damages
Smartmatic:
Powell, Giuliani, Fox and Fox hosts — $2.7 billion in damages
Reuters: White supremacy a ‘transnational threat’, U.N. chief warns http://reut.rs/3qKMQIz
🐣 RT @JudiciaryDems #FACTCHECK: The polarization of DOJ did not come from President Obama. It came from the four tumultuous years of President Trump treating the Attorney General as his own personal lawyer and demanding that DOJ advance the interests of himself, his family, and his political allies.
NYT: Here’s What’s Next in the Trump Taxes Investigation http://nyti.ms/3pNR5l4
// A Supreme Court ruling has paved the way for prosecutors to begin combing through Mr. Trump’s financial records.
🐣 RT @RachelAbramsNY SCOOP: Congressional Dems sent a letter to Comcast, Amazon, Google, ATT & others, demanding to know what they plan to do about the “the spread of dangerous misinformation” from Fox News, OAN and Newsmax – including whether they will continue to carry them
⋙ NYT: House Democrats Press Cable Providers on Election Fraud Claims http://nyti.ms/3uokOol
// Before a hearing set for Wednesday, Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee asked cable companies what they did to combat “the spread of misinformation.”
🧵 RT @NatashaBertrand NEW: Trump staffers prepared a sanctions package targeting Russia over its poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. It was basically ready to go—but never got final sign-off. It was handed off to Biden admin, which is now preparing its own response: 📌 https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1363999445747175426?s=20
⋙⋙ Politico: Biden readies his first major penalties on Russia http://politi.co/3sjX7vq
// The Trump administration had prepared a sanctions package in response to the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, but Biden’s national security team wants to chart its own course.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NatashaBertrand The Trump admin package proposed 3 types of sanctions: Magnitsky Act, sanctions under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act); and sanctions under Executive Order 13382. It stalled right when it needed final, high level approval.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NatashaBertrand The new admin is set to respond, likely in form of sanctions coordinated with European allies, in the coming weeks. But it is unlikely to use the exact blueprint left by Trump’s national security team. The current National Security Council views that package as overly unilateral.
💙 NYT: The Lost Hours: How Confusion and Inaction at the Capitol Delayed a Troop Deployment http://nyti.ms/3pQGtlK
// As violence grew out of control on Jan. 6, the head of the Capitol Police made an urgent request for the National Guard. It took nearly two hours to be approved.
🧵 RT @SCOTUSblog BREAKING: After 4 months of inaction, SCOTUS in a one-sentence unsigned order declines Trump’s request to further postpone enforcement of a Manhattan DA subpoena for his financial records. The order clears the way for a NY grand jury to obtain the records & review them in secret. 📌 https://twitter.com/SCOTUSblog/status/1363860115502354436?s=20
🐣 RT @LukeLBarr Perhaps the strongest moment of the hearing – Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland chokes up when he talks about his motivations for taking the AG job. “The country took us in and protected us and I feel an obligation to the country to pay back.” 💽 https://twitter.com/LukeLBarr/status/1363916753458372614?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Merrick Garland tells senators Capitol riot investigation will be his first priority as attorney general http://wapo.st/3kfKGhG
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq I’ve barely heard a real question directed towards Garland yet by the GOP. There are serious matters of policy, institutional reforms and law enforcement that need to be addressed by a nominee. ¤ So far this is “reaffirm that Trump’s grievances were legitimate” on a loop.
THREADS:
🧵 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Merrick Garland: Willing to step away from lifetime appointment as a federal judge because of the importance of DOJ and the rule of law. 📌 https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1363867770010673153?s=20
🧵 RT @KlasfeldReports “Watch Live: Merrick Garland Finally Gets a Confirmation Hearing—This Time, for Attorney General” ¤ Follow along with me today. ¤ Chairman Durbin just finished his opening remarks. via @lawcrimenews 📌 https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1363862417218932750?s=20
⋙ Law&Crime: Watch Live: Merrick Garland Finally Gets a Confirmation Hearing—This Time, for Attorney General http://bit.ly/3kcEqHb
🧵 RT @benjaminwittes Listening to Chuck Grassley congratulate himself for the way he and the Republicans treated Merrick Garland while Garland has to sit patiently and listen makes me want to throw things across the room. [Thread:] 📌 https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/1363864122723602432?s=20
🧵 RT @emptywheel You can watch Merrick Garland hearing at either of these links:
⋙ 💽 CSPAN: Attorney General Nominee Merrick Garland Testifies at Confirmation Hearing, Part 1 http://bit.ly/3qMWZUX
// Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland testified at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
⋙ 💽 Senate Judiciary: The Nomination of the Honorable Merrick Brian Garland to be Attorney General of the United States: Day 1 http://bit.ly/3kjYlUU
📌 Thread: https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1363859490647474177?s=20
🧵 RT @atrupar Merrick Garland: “If confirmed, I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy.” 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1363869639286095872?s=20
━━━━━━━
💙≣ Rev[.]com: Merrick Garland Opening Statement Transcript: Confirmation Hearing for Attorney General http://bit.ly/3kaSkty
The President nominates the Attorney General to be the lawyer, not for any individual, but for the people of the United States. July 2020 marked the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Department of Justice, making this a fitting time to remember the mission of the Attorney General and of the Department.
It is a fitting time to reaffirm that the role of the Attorney General is to serve the rule of law and to ensure equal justice under law. …
Before I became a judge almost 24 years ago, a significant portion of my professional life was spent at the Justice Department. As a special assistant to Ben Civiletti, the last of the trio of post-Watergate Attorneys General, as a Line Assistant US Attorney, as a supervisor in the Criminal Division, and finally, as a senior official in the Department. Many of the policies that the Justice Department developed during those years are the foundation for reaffirming the norms that will ensure that the Department adheres to the rule of law.
These are policies that protect the independence of the department from partisan influence in law enforcement. That strictly regulate communications with the White House. That established guidelines for FBI domestic operations and foreign intelligence collection. That ensure respectful treatment of the press. That read the Freedom of Information Act generously. That respect the professionalism of DOJ employees, and that set out the principles of federal prosecution to guide the exercise of prosecutorial discretion.
Celebrating DOJ’s 150th year reminds us of the origins of the Department, which was founded during Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War to secure the civil rights that were promised in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
The first Attorney General appointed by President Grant to head the new Department led it in a concerted battle to protect black voting rights from the violence of white extremists, successfully prosecuting hundreds of cases against white supremacist members of the Klu Klux Klan.
Almost a century later, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 created the Department’s Civil Rights Division with a mission to uphold the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans, particularly some of the most vulnerable members of our society. That mission, on the website of the Department’s Civil Rights Division, remains urgent because we do not yet have equal justice.
Communities of color and other minorities still face discrimination in housing, in education, in employment and in the criminal justice system, and they bear the brunt of the harm caused by pandemic, pollution, and climate change. 150 years after the Department’s founding, battling extremist attacks on our democratic institutions also remains central to the Department’s mission.
From 1995 to 1997, I supervised the prosecution of the perpetrators of the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, who sought to spark a revolution that would topple the Federal Government. If confirmed, I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government. …
As Attorney General, later Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson famously said, quote, “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. While prosecutors at their best are one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when they act from malice or other base motives, they are one of the worst.”
Jackson then went on to say, “The citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches the task with humility.”
That was the prosecutor I tried to be during my prior service in the Department of Justice. That is the spirit I tried to bring to my tenure as a Federal Judge, and if confirmed, I promise to do my best to live up to that ideal as Attorney General. Thank you.
⭕ 21 Feb 2021
WaPo, Rosalind Helderman: Impeachment is over. But other efforts to reckon with Trump’s post-election chaos have just begun. http://wapo.st/2NvVyM6
Although Trump was acquitted by the Senate on a charge that his rhetoric incited the deadly Capitol siege, public officials and private companies are pursuing a multi-front legal effort to hold him and his allies accountable in other ways. The actions target the former president and numerous others — including elected officials, media pundits and lawyers — who indulged and echoed his falsehoods that President Biden did not win the election.
The goal, according to lawyers and others supportive of such efforts, is to mete out some form of punishment for those who helped undermine confidence in the election results and fueled the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. But even more, they said, they hope to discourage other public officials from rerunning Trump’s strategy of attempting to overturn an election result by sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the vote.
“There has to be some consequence for telling these lies — because when you lie to people, they take action based on what they think is true,” said Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican who received threats after false allegations of fraud in the counting of the city’s votes. “Because it’s such a dangerous new thing that occurred, there has to be some reconciliation. Moving on isn’t enough.”
A federal judge in D.C. late Friday referred one lawyer for possible disciplinary action. Still, it’s not yet clear how far courts will go in pursuing sanctions against lawyers who may have believed in their own conspiracy theories, or whether prosecutors will ultimately bring criminal charges related to the election. The civil litigation could linger for years.
The most serious ongoing legal actions involve criminal inquiries. More than 225 people have been charged with various crimes directly related to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. Justice Department officials have said they do not expect to file criminal charges against Trump or others who gave incendiary speeches in Washington that day before the violence, but they also said the case is complex and the investigation ongoing.
But even without charges against the former president, several lawyers representing alleged rioters have signaled they plan to argue that their clients were merely following what they thought were Trump’s directions that day — meaning there could be lengthy legal wrangling over Trump’s culpability. …
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: A Small Group of Militants’ Outsize Role in the Capitol Attack http://nyti.ms/3seC0dV ‘Federal prosecutors have repeatedly highlighted the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys as being the most organized and planning their strategy ahead of time’
As federal prosecutors unveil charges in the assault on the Capitol last month, they have repeatedly highlighted two militant groups — the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys — as being the most organized, accusing them of planning their strategy ahead of time and in some cases helping escalate a rally into an attack.
The two organizations stand in contrast to a majority of the mob. Of the more than 230 people charged so far, only 31 are known to have ties to a militant extremist group. And at least 26 of those are affiliated with the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys.
The groups differ in their focus and tactics: The Oath Keepers are part of an anti-government militia movement that emphasizes military-style training, while the Proud Boys espouse an ideology of male and Western superiority, with members often expressing white-supremacist and anti-immigrant views. But the groups have been united in their allegiance to former President Donald J. Trump.
Conspiracy charges, among the most serious levied so far, indicate that members of these groups may have worked together and planned their activities, potentially in ways that made them more dangerous than other rioters. Federal prosecutors have said that some members used teamwork to help people escape arrest and to direct and provoke protesters to overwhelm police defenses.
Of the 22 people charged with conspiracy crimes by mid-February, 18 were known to have ties to one of those two groups.
⭕ 20 Feb 2021
NYMag, Jonathan Chait: An Ex-KGB Agent Says Trump Was a Russian Asset Since 1987. Does it Matter? http://nym.ag/2ZAZoX2
If I had to guess today, I’d put the odds higher, perhaps over 50 percent. One reason for my higher confidence is that Trump has continued to fuel suspicion by taking anomalously pro-Russian positions. He met with Putin in Helsinki, appearing strangely submissive, and spouted Putin’s propaganda on a number of topics including the ridiculous possibility of a joint Russian-American cybersecurity unit. (Russia, of course, committed the gravest cyber-hack in American history not long ago, making Trump’s idea even more self-defeating in retrospect than it was at the time.) He seemed to go out of his way to alienate American allies and blow up cooperation every time they met during his tenure.
He would either refuse to admit Russian wrongdoing — Trump refused even to concede that the regime poisoned Alexei Navalny — or repeat bizarre snippets of Russian propaganda: NATO was a bad deal for America because Montenegro might launch an attack on Russia; the Soviets had to invade Afghanistan in the 1970s to defend against terrorism. These weren’t talking points he would pick up in his normal routine of watching Fox News and calling Republican sycophants.
A second reason is that reporter Craig Unger got a former KGB spy to confirm on the record that Russian intelligence had been working Trump for decades. In his new book, “American Kompromat,” Unger interviewed Yuri Shvets, who told him that the KGB manipulated Trump with simple flattery. “In terms of his personality, the guy is not a complicated cookie,” he said, “his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.” …
This is what intelligence experts mean when they describe Trump as a Russian “asset.” It’s not the same as being an agent. An asset is somebody who can be manipulated, as opposed to somebody who is consciously and secretly working on your behalf.
Shvets told Unger that the KGB cultivated Trump as an American leader, and persuaded him to run his ad attacking American alliances. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations at that time,” he said, “It was a big thing — to have three major American newspapers publish KGB soundbites.”To be clear, while Shvets is a credible source, his testimony isn’t dispositive. There are any number of possible motives for a former Soviet spy turned critic of Russia’s regime to manufacture an indictment of Trump. But the story he tells is almost exactly the possibility I sketched out. And it fits the known facts about how Russian intelligence works and what Trump has done pretty tightly.
One reason I think that is because a great deal of incriminating information was confirmed and very little in fact changed as a result. In 2018, Buzzfeed reported, and the next year Robert Mueller confirmed, explosive details of a Russian kompromat operation. During the campaign, Russia had been dangling a Moscow building deal that stood to give hundreds of millions of dollars in profit to Trump, at no risk. Not only did he stand to gain this windfall, but he was lying in public at the time about his dealings with Russia, which gave Vladimir Putin additional leverage over him. (Russia could expose Trump’s lies at any time if he did something to displease Moscow.)
Mueller even testified that this arrangement gave Russia blackmail leverage over Trump. But by the time these facts had passed from the realm of the mysterious to the confirmed, they had become uninteresting.
We don’t know what other sources of leverage Russia had, or how far back it went. Ultimately, whatever value Trump offered to Russia was compromised by his incompetence and limited ability to grasp firm control even of his own government’s foreign policy. It was not just the fabled “deep state” that undermined Trump. Even his own handpicked appointees constantly undermined him, especially on Russia. Whatever leverage Putin had was limited to a single individual, which meant there was nobody Trump could find to run the State Department, National Security Agency, and so on who shared his idiosyncratic Russophilia.
The truth, I suspect, was simultaneously about as bad as I suspected, and paradoxically anticlimactic. Trump was surrounded by all sorts of odious characters who manipulated him into saying and doing things that ran against the national interest. One of those characters was Putin. In the end, their influence ran up against the limits that the character over whom they had gained influence was a weak, failed president.
NYT: Merrick Garland Faces Resurgent Peril After Years Fighting Extremism http://nyti.ms/3aDmbHI
// The fallout from the Capitol attack and the shadow of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing are likely to take center stage at the confirmation hearings for President Biden’s pick for attorney general.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: U.S. investigating possible ties between Roger Stone, Alex Jones and Capitol rioters http://wapo.st/3duNupx Lots of smoke, but whether purveyors of disinfo and instigators can be charged under existing laws is very unclear, esp given 1st Amendment
“We are investigating potential ties between those physically involved in the attack on the Capitol and individuals who may have influenced them, such as Roger Stone, Alex Jones and [Stop the Steal organizer] Ali Alexander,” said a U.S. official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a pending matter.
All three amplified and intensified Trump’s incendiary claims that the 2020 election was illegitimate in the weeks leading up to the riot. But Stone and Alexander have directly credited each other with inspiring and planning the pro-Trump Stop the Steal campaign, with Alexander saying he came up with the idea and helped organize the Jan. 6 rally that drew Trump supporters to Washington. Stone and Jones also promoted the extremist groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and had preexisting business or personal ties with members the government has charged with coordinating and planning certain parts of the breach or with violence at an earlier Trump rally, records and documents show.
A key task for prosecutors and agents is to sift through the multitude of motives and intentions of the roughly 800 people in the mob that descended upon the Capitol — from those who came as individuals drawn to the idea of derailing Joe Biden’s presidency before it began, to those who allegedly began organizing immediately after the election to show up in Washington in large numbers to use force to try to keep Trump in power.
The U.S. official and others familiar with the investigation cautioned that the role of firebrands like Stone and Jones may be important mostly to painting a complete picture of that day’s events, regardless of whether they ultimately rise to the level of conspiracy or other crimes.
In recorded videos and on Infowars, Stone and Jones have lifted the profiles of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence, and Oath Keepers — a loose network of self-styled militias — branding them as street-level security forces for right-wing causes and VIPs. A half-dozen alleged members of the Oath Keepers have been charged with conspiracy and leading up to 30 to 40 others in the break-in, according to court filings. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, has said he gave no direction or signals to members to storm the Capitol. The leader of the Proud Boys has msaid the group did not plan to interrupt Congress.
… [O]fficials have charged three Proud Boy leaders in connection with the Capitol riot or an earlier pro-Trump rally in Washington — Proud Boys chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, organizer Joe Biggs and Seattle leader Ethan Nordean. The three registered a company together last year, and Tarrio and Biggs also have preexisting personal or business connections to Stone and Jones, respectively, according to records and documents.
⭕ 19 Feb 2021
WaPo: U.S. alleges wider Oath Keepers conspiracy, adds more defendants in Jan. 6 Capitol riot http://wapo.st/3k9J6xM
A 21-page indictment alleged that the defendants “did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with each other and others known and unknown” to force entry to the Capitol and obstruct Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden as president in riots that led to five deaths and assaults on 139 police.
The nine-person indictment named three already charged military veterans — Jessica Marie Watkins, 38, and Donovan Ray Crowl, 50, both of Woodstock, Ohio; and Thomas E. Caldwell, 66, of Berryville, Va. The six new defendants include siblings Graydon Young, 54, of Englewood, Fla., and Laura Steele, of Thomasville, N.C. It also includes married couples Kelly and Connie Meggs, 52 and 59, of Dunnellon, Fla.; and Bennie and Sandra Parker, 70 and 60, of the Cincinnati area.
On Dec. 22, Kelly Meggs wrote a Facebook message saying Trump’s comment that Jan. 6 would be “wild” meant he “wants us to make it WILD. . . . He called us all to the Capitol. . . . Gentlemen we are heading to DC,” the indictment alleges.
Kelly Meggs added a few days later that there would be “at least” 50 to 100 Oath Keepers in attendance, the indictment said, and posted on Christmas that he “was named State lead of Florida today.”
WaPo: How the Oklahoma City bombing case prepared Merrick Garland to take on domestic terrorism http://wapo.st/2ZKDrF3 Garland worked not only to convict Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, but also “The Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski
⭕ 18 Feb 2021
CNN: 6 Capitol Police officers suspended, 29 others being investigated for alleged roles in riot http://cnn.it/2ZwoLcw
🐣 RT @brhodes Outright and offensive lies and disinformation are at the center of the right wing authoritarian political project in this country today. They have to create an alternate world because they can’t win debates or elections in the real one.
WaPo: Biden memo for ICE officers points to fewer deportations and strict oversight http://wapo.st/3s7bDXj
Reuters: Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen interviewed by Manhattan DA’s office and newly hired litigator http://reut.rs/2ZsXzeH
ForeignPolicy, Laurie Garrett: Trump Is Guilty of Pandemicide http://bit.ly/3bgJsi1 //➔ The greater impact on communities of color was know from the very early months, so I think it also qualifies as bona fide genocide
// History will show the former U.S. president was staggeringly negligent during the pandemic’s deadly third wave.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d I know everyone’s focused on upgrades on flights from Cancun, but this is huge news. ¤ This strongly suggests an intent to try a case.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Jonesieman New: The Manhattan district attorney has brought in a former federal prosecutor who is an expert on white-collar crime to join the team investigating the Trump family business. From @WRashbaum, @benprotess and me.
⋙⋙ NYT: Manhattan D.A. Recruits Top Prosecutor for Trump Inquiry http://nyti.ms/3pubNWZ
// The Manhattan district attorney has enlisted a former federal prosecutor who is an expert on white-collar crime to join the team investigating the Trump family business.
🐣 RT @JakeTapper .@MittRomney: “Like you, I hear many calls for unity. It is apparent that calling for unity while at the same time appeasing the big lie of a stolen election is a fraud. It is the lie that caused the division. It is in the service of that lie that a mob invaded the Capitol” Jan 6 Text Block: https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1362459765725683712?s=20/photo/1-2
WaPo: The 150-year-old Ku Klux Klan Act being used against Trump in Capitol attack http://wapo.st/3av5iz6
⭕ 17 Feb 2021
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote I love that Russia Ron has to answer to Ossoff.
⋙ 🐣 RT @mkraju Freshman Jon Ossoff named chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a panel that has done some substantial bipartisan probes in recent years. The ranking member: Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin
WaPo: Trump-McConnell clash threatens to settle into a cold war as GOP eyes midterms http://wapo.st/3qA4oqK
🐣 Limbaugh was smart enough to know better. Yet he took the dark road and led many others down it. I do not rejoice at anyone’s death, but the absence of his voice may save weak souls.
🐣 RT @WIRED To belong to the QAnon pack is to be part of a massive crowdsourcing project that sees itself cracking a mystery
⋙ WIRED, Clive Thompson: QAnon Is Like a Game—a Most Dangerous Game http://bit.ly/3jXqVLz
// The conspiracy theory has the best attributes of a multiplatform game, except that it can cause harm in the real world.
QAnon, as you very likely know, is the right-wing conspiracy theory that revolves around a figure named Q. This supposedly high-ranking insider claims that the deep state—an alleged cabal led by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros and abetted by decadent celebrities—is running a global child-sex-trafficking ring and plotting a left-wing coup. Only Donald Trump heroically stands in the way.
ARGs [Artificial Reality Games] are designed to be clue-cracking, multiplatform scavenger hunts. They’re often used as a promotion, like for a movie. A studio plants a cryptic clue in the world around us. If you notice it and Google it, it leads to hundreds more clues that the gamemaker has craftily embedded in various websites, online videos, maps, and even voice message boxes. The first big ARG—called The Beast—was created in 2001 to promote the Steven Spielberg movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence and began with a reference to a “sentient machine therapist” in the credits listed on the movie poster.
First off, QAnon poses a mystery that feels so big it can only be solved by crowdsourcing. It’s thrilling to be involved with other people in something bigger than yourself. Plus, it turns one’s armchair-warrior Googling into a heroic quest for truth.
“They’re all saying, ‘I’ve done my research,’” Hon told me of Q followers. “They’re looking for signals in the noise.”
There’s also the thrill of creativity, of adding to a canon. QAnon followers “don’t just passively receive Q drops. They create new videos and texts,” notes Marc-André Argentino, a public scholar at Concordia University who researches QAnon. Q’s followers behave like religious devotees who pore over their faith’s central texts, crafting interpretations that become part of the official creed.
And, like an ARG, QAnon brings social rewards. If you’re the first to post a new discovery, “other people can see it, and they instantly recognize it,” notes Dan Hon, Adrian’s brother, who helped create the Perplex City ARG.
In a way, ARGs and QAnon are the quintessence of internet culture. The web has always been about making willy-nilly connections: This links to that which links to this. And cyberspace facilitates the obsessive joint scrutiny of everything, from TV shows to knitting patterns to the belief that reptilians walk among us.
… [W]ith QAnon, the appeal has pushed the conspiracy dangerously from the fringes into the mainstream. An internal Facebook review reportedly found millions of people on various QAnon sites, and QAnon believers recently won congressional primary races in Georgia and Florida. All of which suggests that QAnon is, alas, unlikely to fade away soon. Quite apart from its ideological roots, it’s fueled by one of the oldest internet urges: It’s fun.
WaPo: One down, 44 to go’: Inside the House impeachment team’s uphill battle http://wapo.st/3auEtLx
// A group of House Democrats thought they had a chance to secure a
conviction of former president Donald Trump — despite the steep odds.
WaPo, Brian Klaas: Restoring sanity to the GOP will take years. Here’s how to start. http://wapo.st/3dlypXn
⭕ 16 Feb 2021
WaPo, Tom Coleman and John Danforth: Congress must invoke the 14th Amendment to stop Trump from running again http://wapo.st/37lf7NT “Former president Donald Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy.”
The Senate impeachment trial has provided further proof of what can no longer be denied: Former president Donald Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy. The harrowing evidence shows that Trump incited and supported the violent insurrection at the Capitol that aimed to prevent the peaceful transition of power and resulted, tragically, in multiple deaths. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) confirmed these facts in his statement following the Senate vote.
Such anti-democratic conduct should disqualify Trump from ever holding future public office. While conviction by the Senate would have been the best and quickest route to disqualification, because that failed, Congress can — and must — pursue an alternative path to protecting our republic from a future Trump presidency: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Section 3 bars from public office those officials who engage in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. Passed in the wake of the Civil War, Section 3 sought to ensure that those who have violated their oaths to defend the Constitution by threatening our democracy cannot hold public office in the future. Importantly, Congress did not limit Section 3 to disqualifying only members of the former Confederacy, but instead deliberately drafted language to encompass any future acts of insurrection or rebellion — such as those of Jan. 6.
In addition to not being subject to a two-thirds majority vote, such legislation has numerous advantages. First, it would provide a strong basis for state election officials or political opponents to challenge his candidacy based on Congress’s finding that Section 3 disqualifies him from holding office. This would create a cloud of illegitimacy over a potential Trump candidacy, deterring supporters and donors. Second, while it is most important to prevent any future Trump campaign, any judicial procedures created by Congress could also be used to disqualify others involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection from holding future office.
In 1868, the republic amended the Constitution with a means to protect against the grave threat of insurrectionists and those who give them aid or comfort. In the face of this modern threat to our republic, Congress must revive Section 3 so it can serve its noble purpose of protecting American democracy against those who would do it harm.
WaPo, Lloyd Austin III: The U.S. can’t meet its responsibilities alone. That’s why we believe in NATO. http://wapo.st/3bgSNGF
At the president’s direction, we are conducting a global posture review that will help us do just that. But we are not withdrawing from Europe. Indeed, we have already halted previously announced drawdowns of U.S. forces in Germany. And any decisions we make as a result of our review will be made in close consultation with our allies and partners.
⭕ 15 Feb 2021
WSJ, Mitch McConnell: Acquittal Vindicated the Constitution, Not Trump http://on.wsj.com/3s2savJ
// Impeachment isn’t a moral tribunal. It is a specific tool with a narrow purpose: restraining government officers
CNN: The accountability era begins http://cnn.it/37h90tV Opinion by Christine Todd Whitman, Norman Eisen and Joanna Lydgate
There is an urgent window for government and private parties to pursue accountability through investigations, prosecutions and litigation. The magnificent work of the House impeachment managers established the roadmap. They revealed a startling pattern of intentional misconduct by Trump in inciting insurrection, and they backed up each of their contentions with a mountain of evidence, some of which was not previously available to the public.
While the US Senate did not ultimately convict, the courageous votes of seven Republicans to hold Trump accountable shows the bipartisan opportunity for the road ahead. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has given Trump much cover and did the same again by voting against conviction here, said Trump is “still liable to be tried and punished in the ordinary tribunals of justice…Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, he didn’t get away with anything yet.”
What might that accountability agenda look like? ¤ Thanks to Trump’s outrageous behavior in the waning days of his reign, he has exposed himself to possible state criminal prosecution in Georgia. Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, has announced her intent to investigate the ex-president and his shocking call to the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2. The call may well violate state law, including a statute prohibiting the solicitation of election fraud.
According to The New York Times, her investigation is a broad one, looking at other offenses by Trump and by those around him, such as his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who is alleged to have provided false information to Georgia officials. Giuliani did not respond to the Times request for comment. Meanwhile, a Trump adviser has said the investigation “is simply the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump, and everybody sees through it.”
Other jurisdictions might also have criminal cases against Trump for his post-Election Day misconduct, including his alleged incitement of insurrection. Prosecutors have already charged hundreds of people involved in the insurrection with federal crimes, including conspiracy, and we know the insurrectionists came from many states and planned in advance. If Trump was a part of any conspiracy, he could face criminal or civil liability in multiple places. There are laws against insurrection, sedition, racketeering and related misconduct, and they should — and likely will — get a close look.
In addition, there may well be civil action on behalf of those who were killed and injured during the events of January 6 — among them, the Capitol Police officers and other law enforcement. Members of Congress and staff who were traumatized or otherwise harmed may also have civil claims such as for intentional infliction of emotional distress. We can expect that civil litigation to go on for years.
Given the powerful and disturbing footage that has now been seen by virtually every American, the insurrection is something deeply concerning to the American people far beyond the walls of Congress, and judges and juries take these cases seriously.
Yet another category of accountability for the “Big Lie” perpetuated by Trump and his allies: regulatory actions, like bar complaints against the attorneys who allegedly enabled Trump’s misconduct. One complaint has already been filed in New York against Giuliani. Giuliani’s public reactions to the complaint suggest he is at least somewhat ruffled by the action, (“I don’t want to get in trouble. And I have a high sense of ethics, personally. I hate it when people attack my integrity”). Meanwhile, officials in Michigan are seeking disbarment of Sidney Powell and her cohort, and the Georgia bar has opened an investigation of Lin Wood. Wood has taken umbrage with the effort, asking supporters to donate money to fight it, telling them that the Georgia bar authorities “have through the kitchen sink at me,” and calling on his followers to dig for damaging information against members of the Georgia State Bar Disciplinary Board. Powell has not commented on the allegations against her.
Organizations that helped sponsor the January 6 rally and foment the insurrection also face calls for investigation, including under state laws that regulate charitable entities. These avenues are slower and may be seen as less hard-hitting, but it does not change their significant contribution to the accountability effort. If there is no consequence for misconduct, then what is there to prevent such behavior from happening again and again?
The Trump era taught us that pursuing justice for presidents who do wrong, and the individuals and groups who enable them, is not self-executing. The rule of law only works if it is activated. Now come state and federal prosecutors and civil plaintiffs, who must move quickly to hold Trump and his associates and followers responsible for the insurrection and much that preceded it over the past four years.
While the hill might feel steep and the climb slow — the justice system is not always known for its swiftness — there is a solution. Civil society organizations like ours, and many hundreds of others, can and will work together to drive accountability forward.
The law is propelled by argument and evidence. Those of us in the civil society must support prosecutors and plaintiffs by putting our shoulders to the effort of developing and publicizing the analysis of these legal matters. This can help explain accountability measures to the public and even inform the internal decision-making process of the accountability agencies. It can show them that a path is possible and how to pursue it. Whether considered a legal fire starter or an emotional support system, when civil society does its job, our movement does in fact move justice forward.
Will achieving all — or even some — of this accountability be easy? Of course not. The impeachment and trial proved that. But the fact that the majority of the public and the Senate agreed in a bipartisan fashion on Trump’s liability offers hope and motivation. The voluminous record the managers established lays out a detailed roadmap to get there, as does the work of so many dedicated state and local officials over the past four years. ¤ We should, as a nation, drive down those paths with all deliberate speed, knowing that we are in this together.
🚫 🐣 RT @_SOS_whs I believe this was a coordinated effort led by Trump like a terrorist network with cells. The plan was to rile up the crowd and use them as cover to infiltrate the capitol, stop the electoral vote & then declare a state of emergency so he could declare martial law. https://twitter.com/_SOS_whs/status/1361529001760739329?s=20/photo/1
// unfamiliar w this account
💙 🐣 RT @SteveTDennis Thread of [all] Republican senator statements on why they voted Guilty/Not Guilty on Trump’s impeachment on incitement of insurrection 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/StevenTDennis/status/1361333916494401538?s=20
🐣 RT @RobReiner Witness tampering. Obstruction of Justice. Tax fraud. Bank fraud. Insurance fraud. Money laundering. Campaign finance corruption. Rape/libel. Election tampering. Incitement of a deadly Insurrection to overthrow the US Government. Take your pick. Trump’s done ‘em all.
WaPo, Michael Gerson: Trump’s rot has reached the GOP’s roots http://wapo.st/3u2hY8l “The case presented by the House impeachment managers was so compelling and overwhelming that the extent of Republican cravenness was highlighted in neon”
// Can the GOP really produce a conservatism that opposes authoritarianism?
WaPo, Daniel Goldman: Lack of witnesses at Trump’s trial is not the problem. Witness intimidation is. http://wapo.st/3qvqESE
// The former president has a record of threatening rhetoric toward anyone who crosses him. Now there’s a record of supporters willing to back him with violence.
💙 AP: The superspreaders behind top COVID-19 conspiracy theories http://bit.ly/3jQNBNi
// with Atlantic Council’s @DFRLab Digital Forensics Lab
🐣 RT @People4Bernie “Either the Republican Party will be the party of the Big Lie, the party of conspiracy theories, the party of racism, and divisiveness, the party of violence, or else it will be… a conservative body operating within the framework of a democracy.” @BernieSanders
NYT, Michelle Goldberg: Impeachment’s Over. Bring On the Criminal Investigations. http://nyti.ms/2ZmASbL
// After Mitch McConnell’s cynical speech, Republicans can’t complain.
WaPo, Colbert King: McConnell has basically written the Senate’s censure resolution already http://wapo.st/2LXLBqe
WaPo: Pelosi says there will be a 9/11 Commission-style panel to examine Jan. 6 Capitol riot http://wapo.st/2OD1fYV
⭕ 14 Feb 2021
NYT: First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack. [Interactive] http://nyti.ms/3dLGxPD
WaPo, EJ Dionne: The beginning of the end of Trumpism http://wapo.st/3tZqm8B “By tying themselves to Trump with their votes, most House and Senate Republicans made themselves complicit in his behavior”
Led with extraordinary grace by Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a diverse and able group of prosecutors laid out an indelible record not only of what happened on Jan. 6 and why, but also Trump’s irresponsibility throughout his term of office: his courting of the violent far right; his celebration of violence; his habit of privileging himself and his own interests over everything and everyone else, including his unrequitedly loyal vice president.
This record matters. We often like to pretend that we can move on and forget the past. But our judgments about the past inevitably shape our future. Every political era is, in part, a reaction to the failures — perceived and real — of the previous one.
By tying themselves to Trump with their votes, most House and Senate Republicans made themselves complicit in his behavior. And Trump will prove to be even more of an albatross than Hoover, who, after all, had a moral core.
🐣📊 RT @lindsaywise 71% of American adults, including nearly half of all Republicans, believe former President Donald Trump was at least partially responsible for starting the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to an Ipsos poll conducted for Reuters. Reuters: http://reut.rs/3jQt77w
WaPo, Margaret Sullivan: ‘A moment of truth’? After years of Trump’s lies, amplified by MAGA media, that proved impossible for most Republicans http://wapo.st/3rNKys2
NYT: Calls Grow for Commission to Investigate Capitol Riot http://nyti.ms/2OFn5Lx
// Lawmakers are increasingly pushing for a 9/11-style panel that would examine failures and make recommendations. It could also be a final chance for Congress to hold Donald J. Trump to account.
WaPo, George Will: Now begins McConnell’s project to shrink Trump’s GOP influence http://wapo.st/3qkOMHi McConnell’s long game
[ McConnell: ]Trump fed his supporters “wild falsehoods” making him “practically and morally responsible” for Jan. 6, which was “a foreseeable consequence” of “false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole” and a “manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe,” all “orchestrated” by Trump, who then “feign[ed]” surprise about his mob’s behavior, as he “watched television happily.”
While explaining his opposition to the Senate’s convicting Trump, McConnell pointedly noted that “impeachment was never meant to be the final forum for American justice,” and that “we have a criminal justice system” and “we have civil litigation.” Trump’s potential problems, legal and financial, might shrink his stature in the eyes of his still-mesmerized supporters. McConnell knows, however, that the heavy lifting involved in shrinking Trump’s influence must be done by politics.
🐣 💽 RT @frontlinepbs In “Trump’s American Carnage,” FRONTLINE examines how former President Trump stoked division, violence and insurrection, from his first days as commander in chief to his last. STREAM NOW: https://to.pbs.org/39VWBvY
NYT: After the Speech: What Trump Did as the Capitol Was Attacked http://nyti.ms/37cJ2Yw
// New evidence emerged in the impeachment trial about what President Donald J. Trump did from roughly 1 to 6 p.m. the day of the Capitol attack. But many questions remain unanswered.
NYT: First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack. http://nyti.ms/2MY9YER
WaPo: With impeachment over, 9/11 probe leaders lend weight to calls for an independent commission to investigate Capitol attack http://wapo.st/2NobqjE
⭕ 13 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 5
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @jentaub Day 5 of the Donald Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. February 13, 2021. Wonderful! They are going to debate whether to subpoena witnesses and documents ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1360605971198967809?s=20
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar “Lord, touch and move them to believe that end does not justify the means” — Senate Chaplain Barry Black’s prayer begins the Saturday portion of the #ImpeachmentTrial 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360607971055656962?s=20
~~~~~~~~~~~
Statements of GOP Senators voting to convict Trump:
waiting on Murkowski
🐣 RT @SenBillCassidy Full statement below: “…Now before you disagree, I ask you to go on @CSPAN and listen to the argument yourself and come to your own conclusion.” 💽 https://twitter.com/SenBillCassidy/status/1359655602386051080?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AndrewSolander Toomey: “His behavior after the election betrayed the confidence millions of us placed in him. His betrayal of the Constitution and his oath of office required conviction.” ¤ Full statement Text Block: https://twitter.com/AndrewSolender/status/1360705829444456450?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SenatorCollins My statement on the Article of Impeachment: Text Block: https://twitter.com/SenatorCollins/status/1360725182491549697?s=20/photo/1-3
🐣 RT @NBCNews Republican Sen. Burr on vote to convict former President Trump: ¤ “By what he did and by what he did not do, President Trump violated his oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Text Block: https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1360695797843689479?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @JakeTapper Sasse: Text Block: https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1360693494206062593?s=20/photo/1-2
🐣 RT @MittRomney My statement on today’s impeachment vote: Text Block: https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/1360722571004678147?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @EvanMcMullin Republican senators who today voted without justification to protect the leader of an attempted coup against the people have invited further assaults on the republic. They’ve betrayed their oaths and the nation and should be held accountable in 2022 and beyond for having done so.
NYT: One Legacy of Impeachment: The Most Complete Account So Far of Jan. 6 http://nyti.ms/3qqj37S
// Yet for all the heart-pounding narrative of that day presented on the Senate floor, what was also striking was how many questions remained unanswered.
WaPo, Greg Sargent: The massive GOP betrayal of our democracy requires a forceful Democratic response http://wapo.st/3ddlmXY
CNN, David Axelrod: This was no triumph for Trump http://cnn.it/3djuTN0 “[E]ven as the final chapter was known from the start, it was essential that the story of Trump’s brazen acts be told”
🐣 RT @tedlieu 57 United States Senators concluded President Trump was guilty of inciting an insurrection. The highest bipartisan vote to convict in US history. That’s a damning vote.
⋙ 🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 A president has never before received so many votes from his own party to convict in an impeachment trial. 7 Republicans.
🐣 RT @SpeakerPelosi The Congress and Country can take great pride in the House Impeachment Managers, who defended our Constitution & Democracy with a moving presentation demonstrating love of country and loyalty to our oath and the facts.
⋙ Speaker[.]gov: Pelosi Statement on Impeachment Trial of Donald Trump http://bit.ly/3u7k32W
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @WordswithSteph Thank you for the truth, @SpeakerPelosi: “It is so pathetic that Senator McConnell kept the Senate shut down so that the Senate could not receive the Article of Impeachment and has used that as his excuse for not voting to convict Donald Trump.” @TeamPelosi Text Block: https://twitter.com/WordswithSteph/status/1360732234370736132?s=20/photo/1
NYT, Alexander Burns: Republican Acquittal of Trump Is a Pivotal Moment for the Party http://nyti.ms/3tRNqGp
// The vote, signaling how thoroughly the party has come to be defined by the personality of one man, is likely to leave a blemish on the historical record.
🐣 RT @CBSNews McConnell, after voting to acquit, says “there is no question” that Trump is “practically and morally responsible for provoking” Capitol riot. He explains his vote by saying he decided the former president “is constitutionally not eligible for conviction” 💽 https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1360705708245864451?s=20/photo/1
// entire speech
💙 WaPo: Trump acquitted on impeachment charge of inciting deadly attack on the Capitol http://wapo.st/2Zdt6kH
🐣 As soon as this is over, my guess is Trump will declare he’s running in 2024 and start holding rallies
🐣 RT @tribelaw I’m in awe of the profound humanity & overwhelming decency of @RepRaskin’s story of his daughter Hannah’s concern for the innocent children of the violent insurrections. She takes after her father. Would that we all had her empathy and insight. It is her spirit that must prevail
⭕ 12 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 4
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @jentaub We have begun. It’s Day 4 of the Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. The defense is putting on their case. The first lawyer is Van Der Veen. 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1360274181510807556?s=20
🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar “Lord, infuse them with the spirit of nonpartisan patriotism” — Senate Chaplain Barry Black’s prayer begins the Trump defense portion of the #ImpeachmentTrial 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360275280775028740?s=20
⋙ 🔄 💙 🧵 RT @atrupar [Q&A] Lindsey Graham, Kevin Cramer, and Roger Marshall use an impeachment trial question to own the libs 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360337066215804930?s=20
✅ WaPo FactChecker: A running tally of Trump’s misleading impeachment defense http://wapo.st/3b03zRo
~~~~~~~~~~~
WaPo, Philip Bump: Once impeachment is over, the threat to Trump shifts to real courtrooms http://wapo.st/2ZflrlU
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote I said it before and I’ll say it again: senate republicans can vote to convict trump, or vote to convict themselves.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AWeissman_ The Senate is actually on trial now. Will its members be enablers of lawlessness and violate their own oaths of office, as Trump did?
💙 🧵 RT @jason_kint incredibly important to timeline. GOP Senator’s 1st person account which counters Trump’s counsel’s claims of hearsay. And confirm’s Trump’s knowledge of Pence being in danger ten minutes PRIOR to sending tweet attacking Pence for being unwilling to do something unconstitutional.
⋙⋙ 🧵 RT @ NEWS: Tuberville speaks to reporters just now and stands by account he gave to @burgessev on Wednesday ¤ “I said Mr President, they’ve taken the vice president out. They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go … probably the only guy in the world hung up on pres United States” 📌 https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1360372831868121091?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @jason_kint Extraordinary testimony from GOP member of congress. “He is not a blameless observer, he was rooting for them.” New details about Trump-McCarthy shouting match show Trump refused to call off the rioters
⋙⋙ CNN: New details about Trump-McCarthy shouting match show Trump refused to call off the rioters http://cnn.it/3rPNlRG
⋙ 🐣 RT @jason_kint And here is the statement from another GOP Member of Congress. I don’t know why @RepRaskin hasn’t called them to testify. They are acting with incredible courage , practically begging others to share their own details and the broader public isn’t aware of any of this. Text Block: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1360431687776292865?s=20/photo/1
// Statement by Rep Herrera Beutler ⇈
WaPo, Aaron Blake: 5 takeaways from Day 4 of Trump’s impeachment trial http://wapo.st/3aeJJm1
🐣 RT @jdawsey Pence’s team does not agree with the Trump lawyer’s assessment that Trump was concerned about Pence’s safety. Trump didn’t call him that day — or for five days after that. No one else on Trump’s team called as Pence was evacuated to one room & another, with screaming mob nearby.
WSJ, Peggy Noonan: A Vote to Acquit Trump Is a Vote for a Lie http://on.wsj.com/37c2jJJ
// And why didn’t his supporters in Congress go out on Jan. 6 and speak to the crowds, their people?
WaPo: Mounting evidence suggests Trump knew of danger to Pence when he attacked him as lacking ‘courage’ amid Capitol siege http://wapo.st/3jL5bST
🐣 RT @holmescnn A source close to former VP Pence tells @acosta that Trump’s legal team was not telling the truth when attorney Michael van der Veen said “at no point” did the then president know Pence was in danger on January 6th. ¤ Asked whether van der Veen was lying, the source said “yes.”
🐣 RT @MollyJongFast “fight to death” doesn’t sounds like a “primary challenge”
⋙ 🐣 RT @JakeTapper This was the context of “fight to the death” from Dec 26 tweet Text Block: https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1360381062262718467?s=20/photo/1
// @real Tweet
🐣 RT @renato_mariotti The Secret Service should make a public statement now regarding whether Trump or his staff were informed when Pence was in danger.
⋙ 🐣 RT @PaulBegala I worked with the Secret Service in the Clinton White House. It’s unimaginable that agents with VP Pence would not have informed their counterparts at the WH in real time that VP was in danger. They, in turn, would have informed the President. Trump almost certainly knew.
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Breaking on @MSNBC: Tommy Tuberville was just asked by reporters to repeat his account of his phone call with Trump on January 6. He said, “Mr. President. They’ve taken the Vice President out. They want me to get off the phone. I gotta go.”
🐣 RT @MarshallCohen Trump’s mindset on 1/6:
—When McCarthy begged him to call off the mob, he balked, saying, “these people are more upset about the election than you.”
—When Tuberville told him Pence was in danger, he urged Tuberville to give into rioters’ demands and delay certification.
🐣 RT @aliasvaughn Ohhh, it looks like the well has broken. Time to you know, treat this the way Trump lawyers asked for, like a criminal trial? And put McCarthy’s and Tuberville words officially in records.
‼️ ⋙ 🐣 RT @MarshallCohen During the attack, McCarthy told Trump the rioters were his supporters. Trump replied, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” McCarthy replied, “who the f*** do you think you are talking to?” (h/t @jamiegangel)
⋙⋙ CNN: New details about Trump-McCarthy shouting match show Trump refused to call off the rioters http://cnn.it/3rPNlRG
✅ WaPo FactChecker: A running tally of Trump’s misleading impeachment defense http://wapo.st/3b03zRo
✅ NYT: Trump’s defense made inaccurate claims about antifa, the Jan. 6 siege and impeachment. http://nyti.ms/3pg0W2X
🐣 RT @gtconway3d As someone who knows something about what happened 22 years ago, I can state unequivocally that there’s no equivalence and no comparison between Clinton’s lying about consensual sex in a civil case and Trump’s attempt to overturn constitutional democracy.
🐣 RT @digby57 And remember, they organizers were originally planning the rally for the days after the inauguration, modeled on the Women’s March in 2017. It was Trump and his people who changed the date to January 6th and that’s when they made it into a StopTheSteal rally. https://twitter.com/digby56/status/1360329095523880960?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 11 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 3
🔄 💙🧵 RT @jentaub 🇺🇸 It’s on. Day 3. The Trial of Donald Trump 2.0 continues at 12:04 p.m. on February 11, 2021 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1359911216588685317?s=20
// Defense
🔄 💙🧵 RT @atrupar The Thursday installment of Trump’s #ImpeachmentTrial begins with a Baked Alaska clip 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359914413709492232?s=20
◕ WaPo, Philip Bump: A year of election misinformation from Trump, visualized http://wapo.st/2LJ33OZ “Even today, three-quarters of Republicans falsely believe that there was widespread fraud in the election, according to polling from Quinnipiac University” ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1360149221647745026?s=20/photo/1
// chart: mention of election-related terms by Trump or Fox/Fox Business
TheAtlantic, David Frum: Trumpism Is Violence http://bit.ly/3jEvoCK
// The former president made violence integral to his political appeal from the beginning to the end of his tenure in office.
🐣 RT @BillKristol FWIW ¤ Reading a couple of tea leaves, adding rounded teaspoon of wishful thinking:
Likely guilty votes: Romney, Sasse, Toomey, Collins, Murkowski, Cassidy
Could vote guilty: McConnell, Shelby, Burr, Inhofe, Capito, Grassley, Portman, Cornyn, Tillis, Sullivan, Barasso, Hoeven ¤ 68-32
⋙ 🐣 Agree on likelys (true brave souls and/or rational thinkers)
On “coulds”: it will be all or none (CYA factor) 🤞
🐣 RT @nytmike A little more than a month after the Capitol siege, a fuller picture of the injuries suffered by police has emerged, showing how Jan. 6 resulted in one of the worst days of injuries for law enforcement in the U.S. since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
⋙ NYT: Officers’ Injuries, Including Concussions, Show Scope of Violence at Capitol Riot http://nyti.ms/2Nf0hl0
// The impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump has heightened attention on the rioters’ attacks on officers, some of which resulted in serious damage.
🐣 RT @TheTweetOfJohn As Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, a core source of original meaning, the framers “borrowed” the model from the English. And, as Raskin pointed out, every English impeachment during the lifetimes of the Founders was of a former official.
⋙ Politico, Jed Shugarman: Impeach an Ex-President? The Founders Were Clear: That’s How They Wanted It http://politi.co/3pdpN7p
// The Trump legal team is getting history wrong—and, oddly, the Senate GOP just voted against their own legal philosophy.
Politico, Jed Shugarman: Impeach an Ex-President? The Founders Were Clear: That’s How They Wanted It http://politi.co/3pdpN7p
// The Trump legal team is getting history wrong—and, oddly, the Senate GOP just voted against their own legal philosophy.
WaPo: Mounting evidence suggests Trump knew of danger to Pence when he attacked him as lacking ‘courage’ amid Capitol siege http://wapo.st/3jL5bST
NYT: Takeaways From Day 3 of Trump’s Impeachment Trial http://nyti.ms/3acvFK1
// The House managers concluded their case by asserting that the Jan. 6 violence wouldn’t have happened without former President Donald Trump and that his supporters believed he had invited their help.
🐣 RT @tribelaw If “conviction [is] out of reach, the House managers are aiming their arguments at two other audiences: the American people whose decision to deny Mr. Trump a second term was put at risk & historians who will one day render their own judgments.”
⋙ NYT: If Convicting Trump Is Out of Reach, Managers Seek a Verdict From the Public and History http://nyti.ms/3d1QCsU
// By Peter Baker; The House Democrats prosecuting former President Donald J. Trump may not win the Senate trial, but they are using it to make the searing images of havoc the inexpungible legacy of his presidency.
WaPo, AaronBlake: Four takeaways from Day 3 of Trump’s impeachment trial http://wapo.st/2Nhplbd
🐣 RT @LincolnsBible The GOP is a domestic terror party. ¤ It must be defeated in the next three national elections (at least) in order for our republic to survive as a democracy.
🐣 RT @NormOrnstein When I lost my son, I was in a fog for weeks, nearly paralyzed with grief. To imagine that @RepRaskin has not just gotten up every day, but has done this master class in constitutional law, philosophy, logic, patriotism & more with eloquence, force, passion…My God. What a hero.
🐣 RT @ChrisAlbertoLaw Dear @RepRaskin: ¤ Thank you for your leadership, dedication to marshaling the evidence, & your compelling presentation of that evidence against Donald Trump. ¤ You & your team demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt he plotted & intended to end America’s 244-year-old republic.
CNN: Five people associated with Proud Boys arrested for Capitol riot on conspiracy charges http://cnn.it/3tSFmVy
In a criminal complaint, an FBI agent described how the group “moved closely to each other” inside the Capitol on January 6 and wore pieces of fluorescent orange tape affixed to their clothing or gear. ¤ Some are accused of leading crowds of rioters as they pushed through multiple police lines and made their way through the Capitol grounds. They all wore tactical-style gear, including helmets and gloves. One had a wooden club or ax handle that was initially disguised as a flag.
🐣 RT @ What Jamie Raskin meant was, good luck living with your consciences after you vote to acquit this guy. You’re betraying everything this country has claimed to believe about itself all the way back to its founding.
⋙ Esquire, CharlesPPierce: Jamie Raskin Offered Republicans the Chance to Be Winter Soldiers—or Live With the Consequences http://bit.ly/3tY3fvh
// You’re betraying everything this country has claimed to believe about itself all the way back to its founding.
🐣 RT @DanRather Trump’s incitement of an insurrectionist mob didn’t begin on 1/6. It was months in the making, built atop a toxic foundation of white supremacy, false senses of victimhood, and anti-democratic tendencies that sadly has been rooted in American life since the nation’s founding.
🐣 RT @MSNBC Several GOP senators met with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell during an impeachment trial recess. ¤ The group included Sens. Thune, Cassidy, Murkowski, Romney, Moran, and Burr. […]
🐣 RT @burgessct Today’s closing by @RepRaskin masterfully left these five questions on the table for an answer from the defense in the #impeachment trial. https://twitter.com/burgessct/status/1359991736295063554?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DeanObeidallah “Justice Department says an Oath Keepers leader waited for Trump’s direction before Capitol attack” How much more proof is needed before Trump is indicted for crimes!
⋙ CNN: Justice Department says an Oath Keepers leader waited for Trump’s direction before Capitol attack http://cnn.it/3rIXKOP
🐣 RT @BillKristol “Never before in this country has a sitting president tried to steal an election to stay in power. Yes, it didn’t work…It could have been worse. Had the election been closer, had Republicans controlled the House…they might’ve actually pulled it off.”
⋙ The Bulwark, Tim Miller: Not My Party: Guilty, Guilty http://bit.ly/373Sa1O
// We’re three weeks deep in the Biden presidency. Trump has been dispatched to Mar-a-Lago, where he’s spending his days sitting around a Saddam-Hussein-style drawing room, feeling sad that he can’t hate tweet anymore.
⏳ WaPo, Philip Bump: Timeline: How Trump picked the rioters over his vice president http://wapo.st/3jR2Kyt
WSJ Editorial: The Trump Impeachment Evidence http://on.wsj.com/2MZzVnb “[T]he House impeachment managers this week are laying out a visceral case that the Capitol riot of Jan. 6 was a disgrace for which President Trump bears responsibility”
// He might be acquitted, but he won’t live down his disgraceful conduct.
⭕ 10 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 2
🔄 💙🐣🧵 RT @jentaub It’s on. Day 2 of the Trump Impeachment Trial 2.0. February 10, 2021. We will have a dinner break at 6 p.m. ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1359548695038087169?s=20
🔄 💙🐣🧵 RT @atrupar Raskin: “This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater. It’s more like like a case where the town fire chief, who’s paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire.”
🔄 💙 WaPo: See all the evidence presented in Trump’s impeachment trial http://wapo.st/3qeb1ii
TheGuardian: Twitter says Trump ban is permanent – even if he runs for office again http://bit.ly/3A540Ey
// Chief financial officer says ‘when you’re removed, you’re removed … our policies don’t allow people to come back’
NYT: Georgia Prosecutors Open Criminal Inquiry Into Trump’s Efforts to Subvert Election http://nyti.ms/3d5bRtK
TheAtlantic, David Frum: There Is No Defense—Only Complicity http://bit.ly/3jGb4ka
// Republican senators are shrinking before the eyes of the whole country.
💙 🧵 RT @kyledchnney TUBERVILLE tells reporters tonight that when Trump called him on Jan. 6, he informed the president that security had just taken Pence out of the chamber for safety. “I said ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go.” […]
⋙ 🐣 RT @ From what I can establish from the record:
-Trump spoke to Tuberville sometime between 2-2:15 (Deseret News)
-Pence was evacuated at 2:15pm, prompting Tuberville to relay this to Trump and end the call (Tuberville comment)
-Trump tweeted his attack against Pence at 2:24pm
⋙ 🐣 RT @ NEW: Sen. Tuberville’s claim that he informed Trump *directly* on Jan. 6 that Pence had just been evacuated by security is a new and potentially significant point on the timeline. ¤ Trump tweeted his attack on Pence around the time of that call.
⋙⋙ Politico: Tuberville says he informed Trump of Pence’s evacuation before rioters reached Senate http://politi.co/3rIRs1U
// It’s long been unclear precisely when Trump learned of the danger that Congress and his vice president faced.
NYT: Trump Justice Department Sought to Block Search of Giuliani Records http://nyti.ms/3a9c3GL
// Manhattan prosecutors had been prepared to seek a search warrant for electronic records related to powerful Ukrainians who had helped Rudolph Giuliani dig for dirt on the Biden family.
🐣 RT @ChrisMurpheyCT It’s always struck me as 100% deliberate that Trump made no plan for what the crowd was supposed to do when they got to the Capitol. There was no stage, no speeches, no instructions on what to do. So of course when they arrived, the mob did what Trump said and “fought like hell”
⋙🚫 🐣 🌎 RT @j2dumfounded Have you seen this? They had multiple events, including a Jericho March around the Capitol at noon, encircling it. https://twitter.com/j2dumfounded/status/1359906293213876224?s=20/photo/1
// where did this come from?
🐣 RT @TheLastWord .@SenWhitehouse joins @Lawrence to discuss how the Capitol riot was fueled by a network of Republican support and the possibility of “some connivance” to create a delay that gave the mob enough time to breach the Capitol. 💽 https://twitter.com/TheLastWord/status/1359711753114968064?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @jaketapper This tweet was from 2:24 pm ET Jan 6… ¤ The security camera footage of Pence and his family being whisked out of the Capitol by Secret Service that we saw for the first time today was from 2:26 pm ET https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1359635955389509638?s=20/photo/1
// Trump Tweet: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage … ”
🐣 RT @donie Many, many of videos the House impeachment managers are using as evidence today came from Parler. ¤ But we might not have seen them at all had it not been for @donk_enby.
⋙ CNN: How a quick-thinking computer programmer helped the case against Trump http://cnn.it/3a5ug7T
🐣 RT @HillaryClinton If Senate Republicans fail to convict Donald Trump, it won’t be because the facts were with him or his lawyers mounted a competent defense. It will be because the jury includes his co-conspirators.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom The anger I feel watching is only partly about morons overrunning the Capitol. It’s knowing there is a group of Republican senators saying “I don’t care what you see with your own eyes, I’m going to vote to acquit him because I like eating at restaurants in Washington.”
🐣 RT @kentnish Snowfall on Day 2 of #impeachment Part 2, where House prosecutors present dramatic new video of Capitol attack. (: @sarahdwire, @DavidLauter) #ImpeachmentTrial2 https://twitter.com/kentnish/status/1359686926027132932?s=20/photo/1
💽 WaPo: Previously unpublished video shows Pence, Romney, Schumer and others rushing to evacuate the Capitol http://wapo.st/3qbT03Q
🐣 RT @BillKristol We’re only part way through but I’ve seen enough to say this: All honor to the House impeachment managers and their staff, who, under great pressure, have had the coolness and capacity to create a trial record that tells the truth of January 6th to our own and future generations.
WaPo: House impeachment managers emphasize the danger to Pence and other top officials in harrowing retelling of Jan. 6 attack http://wapo.st/2Z4Vu8p
🐣 RT @kyledcheney TUBERVILLE tells reporters tonight that when Trump called him on Jan. 6, he informed the president that security had just taken Pence out of the chamber for safety. ¤ “I said ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go.”
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @kyledcheney Seems significant that a senator is acknowledging telling Trump *directly* that Pence was under threat, and Trump still didn’t say anything publicly about it.
NYT: Takeaways From Day 2 of Trump’s Impeachment Trial http://nyti.ms/2Z4KMPd
// Former President Donald J. Trump’s Twitter feed made a prominent appearance, and the House members prosecuting the case leaned on his words and those of his supporters to argue for conviction.
🐣 RT @RepSwalwell The mob, with flex cuffs and rioters in full military gear, was only a mere 58 steps away from Senators and staff. ¤ Down just one hallway. ¤ If the doors had been breached minutes earlier, imagine what the flex cuffs could have been used for.
💽 NYT: Impeachment Video Reveals a True American Horror Story http://nyti.ms/3rI1oZi
// Using never-before-seen footage from Jan. 6, the House impeachment managers wove video from the Capitol into a narrative of terror.
⭕ 9 Feb 2021 Impeachment #2: Day 1
💙 🧵 RT @atrupar Rep. Raskin’s opening impeachment trial statement: “Their argument is that if you commit an impeachable offense in your last few weeks in office, you do it with constitutional impunity.” 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359206921039974406?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @atrupar Here is the entire video timeline of the January 6 insurrection as presented by the House impeachment managers 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1359216739054190593?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT I have a feeling Trump’s 6pm tweet from January 6th (“Remember this day forever!”) is going to show up over and over again in this trial (the managers brought it up twice today). It’s essentially an admission of guilt.
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Castor and Schoen must be the most incompetent legal representation of any modern President, incumbent or otherwise.
NYT: 5 Takeaways From Day One of Trump’s Second Impeachment Trial http://nyti.ms/371y2xj
// Before senators could get started on the charge against former President Donald J. Trump, they spent a day debating whether they had the right to try a former president in the first place.
💽 MSNBC, TheReidout: Neal Katyal: Jamie Raskin gave ‘best oral argument I’ve ever heard’ in Trump impeachment trial http://on.msnbc.com/2MIWkoY
// House Impeachment manager Jamie Raskin gave ‘maybe the best oral argument I’ve ever heard,’ says Neal Katyal: “It was both head and heart.”
Vote on Contitutionality: 56/44: Bill Cassidy (LA), Susan Collins (ME), Murkowski, Mitt Romney (UT), Ben Sasse (NE), Pat Toomy (PA)
NYT, Peter Baker: The First Trial Seemed Abstract. This One Is a Visceral Reckoning Over Trump. http://nyti.ms/2Z3yZ3O
// At issue will be many aspects that defined Donald Trump’s presidency: his relentless assaults on truth, his fomenting of divisions, his shattering of norms and his undermining of an election.
Bloomberg: McConnell Signals to GOP Trump Impeachment Is a Conscience Vote http://bloom.bg/3tIe2tg
WaPo: 6 Republicans join Democrats in rejecting argument trial is unconstitutional http://wapo.st/3a3l8kg Bill Cassidy (LA) , Susan Collins (ME), Murkowski, Mitt Romney (UT), Ben Sasse (NE), Pat Toomey (PA)
// FP title: Senate votes to pursue Trump impeachment trial after declaring the proceedings constitutional
🐣 🖼 RT @joshscampbell I took this picture today inside the U.S. Capitol as the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump was getting underway. ¤ Physical and emotional scars of the deadly January 6th domestic terrorist attack remain. https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1359276656939122690?s=20/photo/1
// broken window
🐣 RT @chrrislhayes The argument is: there’s no proper procedure with which you can impeach a president for what he did so late in the term NO MATTER WHAT HE ACTUALLY DID. That’s the argument.
NBCNews: In impeachment trial, a clarifying moment for the GOP http://nbcnews.to/3a2RMCo
// Analysis: Across the political spectrum, the expected acquittal of Donald Trump foretells a future of right-wing populism for the GOP.
Romney was joined on the Republican side by Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, voted with Paul and the rest of the GOP, but said he did so only to force a debate on the constitutionality of the trial.
MSNBC Live Coverage:
● Nicolle Wallace on @MSNBC: Impervious to the truth; “Today was the day the GOP broke up with the Constitution.”
● Daniel Goldman: Schoen hard to follow; did not address disqualification clause; did not address that T impeached while in office
● Michael Steele: Republicans will pay a price for January 6th
● Brian Williams: Lawfirm of Meandering and Furious
● Ari Melber: Part My Cousin Vinny and Part Cheshire Cat; few serious questions addressed; but Senate has ruled: Senate does have jurisdiction
● Chuck Rosenberg: Political off-ramp; sole power to try all impeachment’s: dispiriting and disgusting
● Goldman: Democratic-led side dominated: public opinion still matters
● Jeremy Bash: Totally incoherent; defense of Donald Trump utterly collapsed; GOP will engage in jury nullification; “they killed a cop, Nicolle” biggest violation of oaths of office in our history
● John Heilemann: Public opinion could weigh in: puts future of party in danger; not hopeful they will see that writing on the wall
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ The Trump defense today is like a criminal defense summation that addresses anything and everything but the evidence.
RT @harrylittman This is a seriously wrong-headed argument, i.e he can still be prosecuted criminally. That is specifically for another purpose and another kind of transgression. The abuse of executive power by the one individual who holds it has a special unique remedy under the Constitution.
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman Thinking same thing…
⋙ 🐣 RT @NealKatyal I might have missed it, but have Trump’s lawyers really responded to the main argument of the House managers, which is that Trump was not a former official when he was impeached and when he acted? (The Judge Michael McConnell argument). We are almost 2 hours in.
🐣 RT @BarbMcQuade Article II provides for a mandatory penalty for conviction – removal. It does not in any way limit impeachment or trial to sitting officers. Article I says another remedy is disqualification from office. Hard to take lectures about textualism from this lawyer.
🐣 RT @JillWineBanks Trump lawyer argument re due process is absurd & insulting. The trial is where a defendant gets to confront witnesses against him & present his case — not when House votes impeachment which is equivalent of grand jury indictment where defendant has no role. That is due process!
🐣 RT @.Teri_Kanefield He is talking about the “impeachment of a private citizen.” ¤ Trump was impeached while in office for offenses committing while in office. There wasn’t time for a trial. ¤ He is bulldozing right over the facts and ignoring logic.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d This bill-of-attainder argument is beyond ridiculous.
Second Lawyer ⇈
🐣 RT @gtvonway3d This is making my head hurt
⋙ 🐣 from from Tweedlebumble to Tweedleblather
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom The president’s lawyer basically saying that if you continue with this trial there will be another Civil War
🐣 RT @davidfrum Schoen angry that the House managers used un-American concepts “experts” “research” “preparation” and “making points”
⋙ 🐣 also “radical” and “partisan” ~ ie trigger word salad
⋙⋙ 🐣 and “cancelled”
🐣 RT @marceelias Trump would have done better if he had just released the Kraken! 🐙
🐣 RT @bradheath President Trump’s lawyer says “the American people just spoke” by choosing a new administration, which is a pretty stark departure from Trump’s false claim that President Biden did not actually win the election.
🐣 RT @KatyTurNBC Trump source on Castor to @PeterAlexander @albamonica “This is about lowering the temperature from the Democrats’ emotionally-charged opening argument before dropping the hammer on the unconstitutional nature of this impeachment witch hunt. Very clear, deliberative strategy.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @jrubinblogger bahahahahahahahhahahahahhahahaha
🐣 RT @sfpelosi Bruce Castor just admitted that Donald Trump lost the election. ¤ Does Trump know that was in the script? ¤ #ImpeachmentTrial
🐣 RT @bradheath President Trump’s lawyer says “the American people just spoke” by choosing a new administration, which is a pretty stark departure from Trump’s false claim that President Biden did not actually win the election.
Trump’s first lawyer ⇊
🐣 RT @McBlondeLand Which one is Bruce Castor, the rape apologist lawyer or the mob lawyer?
🐣 RT @eliehonig Castor: “Congress shall make no law abridging… all of these things.” ¤ Words that shall ring through the ages.
🐣 RT @BrianKlaass Trump is not going to like his lawyer saying that the American people were smart enough to pick a new president if they disliked the old one – and that’s what “they just did.”
🐣 RT @ronfilipkowsky If Trump could tweet, Bruce Castor would have already been fired.
🐣 RT @eliehonig Kids: there’s a fine line between speaking naturally to an audience and straight-up winging it. Castor is demonstrating the dangers of the latter.
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman Has he mentioned the constitutional argument yet?? Isn’t that what this is supposed to be about?
🐣 RT @harrylittman “Nebraska is quite a judicial thinking place.”
🐣 RT @danpfeiffer I’m getting the sense the Trump Legal Team didn’t send their best
🐣 RT @AmyAThatcher I think Bruce Castor is a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
🐣 RT @BradMossEsq Oh my God, you do not wing it at the impeachment trial. You do not start rambling on and making comments about stories you vaguely recall and then end it with I don’t remember.
🐣 RT @maggieNYT I had this and she just…tweeted it out.
⋙ 🐣 RT @seungminkim If Trump still had his Twitter account, he may Tweet-fire this lawyer on the spot.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d This is really, really, really bad.
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 I don’t know what’s happening.
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Castor is a fitting choice — reminder of the other fourth-raters (being kind) that Trump hired to advise him for four years.
🐣 RT @maddow Ever have one of those nightmares where it’s your time to talk and everybody’s looking at you, but you haven’t prepared anything?
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump Oy, Trump’s impeachment lawyer. They’re not sending their best.
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump Oy, Trump’s impeachment lawyer. They’re not sending their best.
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump That video alone should be enough. The republicans ignore the evidence at their peril, and ours.
🐣 RT @mehdihasan This is a fantastic and very useful NPR resource and database on the Jan 6th attackers and arrests:
💙 🔄 ⋙ NPR: The Capitol Siege: The Arrested And Their Stories http://n.pr/3aLAl8Q
// More than 200 people have been charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. NPR is looking at the cases. Each provides clues to questions surrounding the attack.
DailyBeast, Matt Lewis: Real Conservatives Want the Senate to Convict Donald Trump http://bit.ly/3q4fe88
// I remember when the Republicans were the party of law and order. These senators should be ashamed of themselves.
🐣 RT @MeidasTouch #ConvictAndDisqualifyTrump #ConvictTrump 💽 https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1359188448670744577?s=20/photo/1
// We are taking on Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and any elected official or candidate up and down the ballot this cycle who supported the insurrection. Chip in at the link in our video to support our efforts.
NYT, Giovanni Russonello: Trump Isn’t the Only One on Trial. The Conservative Media Is, Too. http://nyti.ms/2MSsQVo
// The former president’s second impeachment trial begins oral arguments on Tuesday. But conservative media organizations face an even more consequential test in the weeks and mon
WaPo: Trump’s lawyers say he was immediately ‘horrified’ by the Capitol attack. Here’s what his allies and aides said really happened that day. http://wapo.st/2Lz7SKG
⭕ 8 Feb 2021
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Danielle Lupton: Biden Has a Narrow Window to Restore U.S. Credibility http://fam.ag/3axMorl
// The Damage to America’s Reputation Is Reparable—but Only If the New Administration Moves Fast
NYT, Giovanni Russonello: Trump Isn’t the Only One on Trial. The Conservative Media Is, Too. http://nyti.ms/2MSsQVo
// The former president’s second impeachment trial begins oral arguments on Tuesday. But conservative media organizations face an even more consequential test in the weeks and months ahead.
ABCNews: Russian statistics soar for virus-linked deaths in 2020 http://abcn.ws/3rFvkp9
// Russia’s updated statistics on coronavirus-linked deaths show that 162,429 people with COVID-19 died last year, a number much higher than previously reported by government officials
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote ZING! Biden will ask all but 2 trump era US attorneys to resign as early as Tuesday. Of the 2 remaining, one is working on the Hunter Biden investigation, & the other is Durham. Durham will stay on as special counsel but resign as US Atty in Connecticut.
⋙ CNN: DOJ to ask Trump-appointed US attorneys to resign http://cnn.it/3cU0lBq
🧵 RT @CheriJacobus I remember seeing GOP outcast, clownish Roger Stone in his wide-striped mobster suits on TV here & there in some association with Trump. But that was it. I think Ailes & O’Reilly played ball with him bcs they thought he was a clown and it’d be fun. Zucker was a different story 📌 https://twitter.com/CheriJacobus/status/1359015187341312000?s=20
💙 ≣ USNews: READ: House Impeachment Managers Respond to Trump Defense Memo [pdf] http://bit.ly/3p3YxZd 5p
↥ ↧
💙 📔 NYT: Read Trump’s Impeachment Defense Memo [pdf{ http://nyti.ms/3aOqpuZ 78p
// In a 78-page brief submitted to the Senate, former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers put forward their first sustained legal defense since Mr. Trump was impeached by the House for the second time.
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs “In the long run, unless the United States embraces a whole-of-society approach that can tackle extremist radicalization at its roots, it will continue to live with the repercussions of the violence it saw at the Capitol.”
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Cynthia Miller-Idress and David Koehler: A Plan to Beat Back the Far Right http://fam.ag/3a3ni3j
// 2/3/2021; Violent extremism in the United States demands a social response.
WaPo, Eugene Robinson: Why progressives should be celebrating Liz Cheney and Ben Sasse right now http://wapo.st/3tHvI8c “It is in everyone’s interest that the GOP become an actual political party again, rather than a cult dedicated … to ‘the weird worship of one dude’”
🧵 RT @RepAdamSchiff You’re going to hear a lot of bad faith arguments about impeachment.
Trump’s team will argue you can’t convict former officials or presidents.
But history shows otherwise! And the Founders disagreed, too.
Let’s turn to 18th Century Britain. (Stay with me, folks)
🚨🚨🚨 THREAD: 📌 https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/1358940270230982661?s=20
// highlights from musical Alexander Hamilton
🐣 RT @lawfare On Feb. 4, President Biden specified the organization and membership for his national security decision-making system—with changes that reflect the administration’s focus on science, global engagement, cybersecurity, and rule of law. ¤ Here’s John Bellinger:
⋙ Lawfare, John Bellinger: National Security Memorandum 2—What’s New in Biden’s NSC Structure? http://bit.ly/3q1GwMc
🐣 RT @CNNPolitics BREAKING: The Justice Department is expected to ask Trump-appointed US attorneys to resign, except two overseeing investigations ordered during his administration https://cnn.it/3jvRmYi
NYT, David D. Kirkpatrick and Mike McIntire: ‘Its Own Domestic Army’: How the G.O.P. Allied Itself With Militants http://nyti.ms/2MM34SQ
// Actions taken by paramilitary groups in Michigan last year, emboldened by President Donald J. Trump, signaled a profound shift in Republican politics and a national crisis in the making.
WaPo, Michael Gerson: The Framers weren’t fools http://wapo.st/2N5XQ4i “Think on this a moment. If only current officeholders can be impeached and convicted, only those officials who feel confident of Senate acquittal would choose to remain in office until the vote.”
// full title: Trump supporters want us to believe the Framers were fools
WaPo, Adam Kinzinger: My fellow Republicans, convicting Trump is necessary to save America http://wapo.st/39ZBH0f “If the GOP doesn’t take a stand, the chaos of the past few months, and the past four years, could quickly return”
WaPo, Ann Marimow and Tom Hamburger: It’s not a typical trial. Lawyers in the Trump impeachment case will argue big constitutional questions. http://wapo.st/3p3LKFS 144 constitutional law scholars weigh in
NYT: Georgia Officials Review Trump Phone Call as Scrutiny Intensifies http://nyti.ms/3tCVCKl “Former prosecutors said Mr. Trump’s calls might run afoul of at least three state laws”
// The office of Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has initiated a fact-finding inquiry into Donald Trump’s January phone call to Mr. Raffensperger pressuring him to “find” votes.
WaPo: U.S. rejoins U.N. Human Rights Council, reversing Trump-era policy http://wapo.st/3tEZN8j
🧵 RT @JYSexton All right. ¤ For people who want to know just how dangerous conspiracy theories like Qanon are, and want to know how and why we must defeat them, let’s talk about the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and what these paranoid appeals are capable of doing. ¤ 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/JYSexton/status/1358799962520379393?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Popish conspiracy theories would reach their fever pitch in 1688 as James II, a Catholic monarch, used his powers to make his Catholic son the heir to his thrown. ¤ It was a *sign* and power-hungry officials looking to gain advantage used conspiracy theories to attack. ¤ 5/
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Believing they were “saving their country from a conspiracy,” wealthy elites in England invited William of Orange, a Dutch Protestant, to invade their country. ¤ Follow this. To save their country they invited an outsider to invade it and take it over. ¤ 6/
⋙ 🐣 RT @JYSexton We’ve seen this paranoid framing time and time again. It’s the same thing as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s the New World Order. It’s the Deep State. ¤ It’s a “state within a state” theory that legitimizes violence, oppression, and coups. ¤ 11/
⋙ 🐣 RT @JYSexton What Fox News and the Right are peddling is a tradition of reactionary fearmongering. These “plots” and “crime syndicates” are the same thing that the powerful have been communicating for centuries now. ¤ It’s the same narrative and for the same purposes. ¤ 12/
⋙ 🐣 RT @ The point is this: we’re not dealing with some new novelty. We’re dealing with the dark side of humanity, a narrative/political tactic that has worked for centuries. ¤ This isn’t something to ignore, it’s something to understand, study, and counteract. ¤ 14/ …
💙 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Convict Trump. ¤ #SaveAmerica 💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1358777607723118612?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 7 Feb 2021
💙 DailyBeast, Dean Obeidallah: Forget Impeachment—Donald Trump Should Be Under Arrest http://bit.ly/3tAqrzi “Trump being charged with crimes is not some progressive fever drive. It’s what justice demands”
// The Senate needs to go about its obviously constitutional business. But I sure hope prosecutors in New York and Washington are going about theirs, too.
Donald J. Trump faces his impeachment trial in the Senate this week, and that is good and necessary. But he should already be facing criminal charges arising from his incitement of the deadly attack on our Capitol, plus federal campaign finance crimes he committed with his former fixer Michael Cohen. Remember “Individual 1”? (There’s also Trump’s possible crimes for intentionally lying to the public about the risks of COVID-19 because he believed it helped him politically.)
Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner explained to me that the delay in Trump being charged with felony level federal election crimes may only be temporary. Kirschner noted that the Southern District of New York prosecutors may “be waiting for Merrick Garland—Joe Biden’s Attorney General nominee—to get in place so they can begin to pull the trigger on indictments.” Let’s hope this is simply justice delayed, not denied.
Now let’s talk Trump’s crimes arising from the deadly insurrection. Given Trump’s conduct leading up to Jan. 6, his actions that day and the countless people who have stated they attacked the Capitol because Trump incited them, Trump should already be charged with the federal crime of “inciting an insurrection” and possibly “seditious conspiracy.”
The relevant part of the seditious conspiracy statute makes it a felony if two or more people agree to “use force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” In this instance, the crime occurred when Trump supporters—incited by Trump—delayed the execution of the federal law that mandated Congress meet on Jan. 6 at 1:00 that day to certify the electoral results.
In fact, Kirschner shared that, “I think that all of my friends and colleagues at the DC U.S. Attorney’s office are working night and day to build a seditious conspiracy case, and incitement to insurrection case against Donald Trump.” They should be.
I encourage people to read the “Statement of Facts” portion of the House impeachment managers’ brief filed Tuesday that lays out more than just the grounds to convict Trump in the impeachment trial—it makes a compelling case to charge Trump with at least insurrection. While the House managers, headed by Rep. Jamie Raskin, do not cite the federal statute for this felony given that the impeachment trial is not criminal, they lay out the roadmap for prosecutors to build a case.
One of the most important points they make is that Trump’s misconduct is not solely about the words of his January 6 speech before the attack. Instead, they argue in powerful detail that Trump laid the groundwork for the insurrection over a period of months beginning with his repeated comments during the campaign that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if this election is rigged.” Trump was priming his supporters to be on board with this concept if he lost the election.
From there, the House managers highlight Trump’s post-election lies about the election being “stolen” through his call for his most rabid supporters to gather in Washington, D.C.—not on any random day, but on the very day federal law mandated Congress meet to certify the election results.
The House managers’ brief leaves you with the sense that Trump radicalized some in his base —like ISIS does–with a non-stop drumbeat of lies and fiery rhetoric intended to incite them to the doorstep of violence. And finally, on Jan. 6, Trump pushed them through that door, activating them to use force to stop the certification.
In fact, the House managers—without invoking the word “radicalization”—lay out that very concept in this passage of their brief: “By the day of the rally, President Trump had spent months using his bully pulpit to insist that the Joint Session of Congress was the final act of a vast plot to destroy America.” They added, “As a result— and as had been widely reported—the crowd was armed, angry, and dangerous…Incited by President Trump, his mob attacked the Capitol.”
The House managers also emphasis that during the attack, numerous Trump supporters declared via livestream videos that they were there because Trump incited them. For example, they write, one “declared that ‘[o]ur president wants us here. We wait and take orders from our president.’ Yet another rioter yelled at police officers, ‘[w]e were invited here…by the President of the United States!’” …
WSJ, Chuck Cooper: The Constitution Doesn’t Bar Trump’s Impeachment Trial http://on.wsj.com/3jqM1BL “The senators who supported Mr. Paul’s motion should reconsider their view and judge the former president’s misconduct on the merits”
// Removal from office is best understood as akin to a ‘mandatory minimum’ sentence for a crime.
TheAtlantic, David Frum: Impeachment Is Working—Just Not as the Framers Expected http://bit.ly/3cRYvBc “He won’t be scotched. He will be marked. That will not be justice. It may be enough”
// The case against despair
… In 2020, Trump could at least count on support from a majority of Republicans. Not in 2021. This time, only 36 percent of Republicans agree that Trump did “nothing wrong,” down from 56 percent of Republicans who said so last time. ¤ Yes, Trump can probably still expect a second acquittal in 2021. But Trump has three main post-presidential goals, and the forthcoming trial will do severe and possibly lethal damage to all three.
Trump’s maximal post-presidential goal is to position himself for a comeback run in 2024. ¤ Failing that, Trump would like to demonstrate that—president or not—he remains the dominant force within the Republican Party, a leader surpassing all others. ¤ Failing even that, Trump would at a minimum like to prove that he remains a potent-enough figure to frighten away federal and state prosecutors from investigating his businesses for tax or bank fraud. ¤ The second impeachment in the House has already complicated these goals. The second trial in the Senate will complicate these goals further.
The political world is already witnessing demonstrations of Trump’s ebbing impunity within his own party. Ten Republicans voted in the House to impeach. Five Republicans voted in the Senate to proceed with the trial. Two-thirds of the House caucus rejected Trump’s urgings to remove Representative Liz Cheney from leadership for her vote to impeach. Republicans, sadly, are not willing to unite to repudiate Trump. But they are not uniting to exonerate him either.
In his legal briefs, Trump has argued that he was justified in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Senate Republicans may want to acquit Trump on technicalities. He will not consent to that. It’s his way to implicate everybody around him in his worst behavior. Will he compel Senate Republicans to disassociate themselves from him? Or will they succumb to the trap set by Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats, who are trying to identify all Republicans with the bigoted conspiracizing of QAnon and the violent sedition of January 6? The trial presents many hazards for both Trump and his party, and the odds are good that they will emerge from the trial exposed and weakened. …
A criminal trial is binary: guilty or not guilty, punishment or release. Politics offers a much wider range of outcomes. The Senate does not have to vote to disqualify Trump to destroy his future political prospects. It does not have to convict him on the impeachment charge to signal state and federal prosecutors that it’s safe to proceed against private-citizen Trump—that ex-president Trump has forfeited some large measure of the deference normally extended to former presidents. ¤ He won’t be scotched. He will be marked. That will not be justice. It may be enough.
NYT, Nicholas Fandos: Impeachment Case Aims to Marshal Outrage of Capitol Attack Against Trump http://nyti.ms/3aHDgPH “To have any chance of making an effective case, the managers believe, they must make clear it is Mr. Trump who is on trial, not his party”
// Armed with lessons from the last impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump, prosecutors plan a shorter, video-heavy presentation to confront Republicans with the fury they felt around the Capitol riot.
… [W]hen the trial opens on Tuesday at the very scene of the invasion, the prosecutors will try to force senators who lived through the deadly rampage as they met to formalize President Biden’s election victory to reckon with the totality of Mr. Trump’s monthslong drive to overturn the election and his failure to call off the assault.
“The story of the president’s actions is both riveting and horrifying,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the lead prosecutor, said in an interview. “We think that every American should be aware of what happened — that the reason he was impeached by the House and the reason he should be convicted and disqualified from holding future federal office is to make sure that such an attack on our democracy and Constitution never happens again.” …
Behind the scenes, Democrats are relying on many of the same lawyers and aides who helped assemble the 2020 case, including Susanne Sachsman Grooms from the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and Aaron Hiller, Arya Hariharan, Sarah Istel and Amy Rutkin from the Judiciary Committee. The House also temporarily called back Barry H. Berke, a seasoned New York defense lawyer, to serve as chief counsel and Joshua Matz, a constitutional expert.
Mr. Schiff said his team had tried to produce an “HBO mini-series” featuring clips of witness testimony to bring to life the esoteric plot about Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine. Mr. Raskin’s may appear more like a blockbuster action film.
“The more you document all the tragic events leading up to that day and the president’s misconduct on that day and the president’s reaction while people were being attacked that day, the more and more difficult you make it for any senator to hide behind those false constitutional fig leaves,” said Mr. Schiff, who has informally advised the managers.
To assemble the presentation, Mr. Raskin’s team has turned to the same outside firm that helped put together Mr. Schiff’s multimedia display. But Mr. Raskin is working with vastly richer material to tell a monthslong story of how he and his colleagues believe Mr. Trump seeded, gathered and provoked a mob to try to overturn his defeat.
There are clips and tweets of Mr. Trump from last summer, warning he would only lose if the election was “rigged” against him; clips and tweets of him claiming victory after his loss; and clips and tweets of state officials coming to the White House as he sought to “stop the steal.” There is audio of a call in which Mr. Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the votes needed to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory there; as well as presidential tweets and accounts by sympathetic lawmakers who say that once those efforts failed, Mr. Trump decisively turned his attention to the Jan. 6 meeting of Congress for one last stand.
At the center is footage of Mr. Trump, speaking outside the White House hours before the mob overtook the police and invaded the Capitol building. The managers’ pretrial brief suggests they are planning to juxtapose footage of Mr. Trump urging his supporters to “fight like hell” and march to the Capitol and confront Congress with videos posted from members of the crowd who can be heard processing his words in real time.
“Even with this trial, where senators themselves were witnesses, it’s very important to tell the whole story,” Mr. Schiff said. “This is not about a single day; it is about a course of conduct by a president to use his office to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power.”
But the proximity could also create complications. Several people familiar with the preparations said the managers were wary of saying anything that might implicate Republican lawmakers who echoed or entertained the president’s baseless claims of election fraud. To have any chance of making an effective case, the managers believe, they must make clear it is Mr. Trump who is on trial, not his party.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: On cusp of impeachment trial, court documents point to how Trump’s rhetoric fueled rioters who attacked Capitol http://wapo.st/3a0lQih “Evidence to bolster the Democratic case has already emerged in federal criminal cases filed against more than 185 people”
The question of what exactly motivated [Jessica Marie Watkins, an Ohio bartender and founder of a small, self-styled militia] and other alleged rioters — and when their plans took shape — will be among the central questions of Trump’s impeachment trial this week, when the Senate will consider whether to convict the former president on charges that he incited the crowd to attack the Capitol.
The nine House impeachment managers leading Trump’s prosecution made clear in an 80-page brief filed last week that they will argue that his role in inspiring the crowd to action began long before the 70-minute speech he gave that day. ¤ They assert that the violence was virtually inevitable after Trump spent months falsely claiming that the election had been stolen from him.
“He amplified these lies at every turn, seeking to convince supporters that they were victims of a massive electoral conspiracy that threatened the Nation’s continued existence,” the House impeachment managers wrote.
After refusing to take the “honorable path” and admit defeat in the election, they wrote, Trump “summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Evidence to bolster the Democratic case has already emerged in federal criminal cases filed against more than 185 people so far in the aftermath of the insurrection.
Trump’s pull on his supporters is a dominant theme. Court documents show that more than two dozen people charged in the attack specifically cited Trump and his calls to gather that day in describing on social media or in conversations with others why they decided to take action by coming to Washington.
Trump’s lawyers have denied that his attacks on the 2020 election can be proved false — or that his comments in the run-up to Jan. 6 or at his rally that day constituted incitement. ¤ “The 45th President exercised his First Amendment right under the Constitution to express his belief that the election results were suspect,” attorneys Bruce Castor Jr. and David Schoen wrote in a response to the trial summons.
Democrats hope to lay out a compelling case to the country of Trump’s responsibility for the insurrection.
They argue that they think Trump’s address on Jan. 6 could be shown to constitute “incitement” under criminal law — which the Supreme Court has held requires showing that speech was “directed” and “likely” to produce “imminent lawless action.”
On Sunday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who voted to impeach Trump, called the Senate trial only a “snapshot” and said Trump’s actions should be examined as part of ongoing criminal investigations.
“People will want to know exactly what the president was doing. They want to know, for example, whether the tweet he sent out calling Vice President Pence a coward while the attack was underway, whether that tweet, for example, was a premeditated effort to provoke violence,” she said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There are a lot of questions that have to be answered and there will be many, many criminal investigations looking at every aspect of this and everyone who was involved, as there should be.”
In the Senate, House impeachment managers will argue that regardless of the criminal investigation, Trump’s actions before, during and after the riot represent an assault on democracy that amounts to the kind of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that should cause a commander in chief to be convicted by the Senate under the Constitution and barred from holding public office again.
🐣 RT @AVindman One year ago today @YVindman and I were escorted off the White House grounds because we believe #HereRightMatters. Much has change for my family and me. I wouldn’t change a thing and have no regrets.
🧵 RT @sahilkapur Liz Cheney tells Fox News Sunday she won’t resign. “People have been lied to. The extent to which President Trump for months leading up to Jan. 6th spread the notion that the election had been stolen or that the election was rigged was a lie and people need to understand that.” 📌 https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1358480219502444544?s=20
🐣 RT @tribelaw Trump is trying to have it both ways. He says he didn’t really lose and so deserves to be treated as though he remains president. And he says because he’s no longer president the Senate can’t convict and disqualify him. Which is it, man? Just asking for a friend.
WaPo: GOP Rep. Liz Cheney says Trump ‘does not have a role as a leader of our party going forward’ http://wapo.st/36TclPX //➔ looks like she’s squaring off against MarQorie Taylor Qreen and Minority Leader Qevin McQarthy
⭕ 6 Feb 2021
WIRED, Jeff Golbeck: QAnon Followers Are at a Precarious Pivot Point http://bit.ly/3juPGyc “The process of de-cultification requires patience & suppressing justified anger, recriminations & frustration. It also may not work, but it is grounded in the best professional advice”
// Disillusioned after Biden was sworn in, conspiracy theorists could now be swayed back to reality by conservatives and family members—or toward darker fringes.
THE QANON CONSPIRACY theory, spread in large part through social media, was recently supported by a majority of Republican voters. It is, at its baseless and thoroughly debunked core, the idea that a cabal of Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic, baby-eating pedophiles is operating an international child-sex-trafficking ring from their positions of power. It has grown to encompass many other conspiracy theories, especially around Covid, vaccines, and the election. Donald Trump was held up as a cult-like savior and was the group’s main source of guidance.
Now that the Biden administration has begun, the prophecies of QAnon did not come to pass, and Trump has left for Mar-a-Lago, what’s next? Research into similar groups tells us that, if QAnon followers are to leave the world of conspiracy theories, they need a dignity-preserving path forward. Extremist groups are already working to fill the Q-shaped void by recruiting QAnon believers to their own causes, making it urgent that better alternatives step up. That requires understanding the needs and motives of QAnon followers and providing a viable “off-ramp” from the QAnon world view.
… Seeing patterns connecting Q’s posts to real events felt like discovering secret information. If Q, the anonymous alleged government insider whose information drops launched and fueled the conspiracy theory, posted a photo of a watch with a short comment, his followers would enhance the watch image to see the time and date, interpret what it could mean, connect any bits of text to previous Q posts, and then offer interpretations on the connections. Solving mysteries and the community support made them feel smart. It offered a sense of purpose and control in a time where those things were scarce.
… The failed prophecy, external evidence contradicting the internal narrative, and the resulting disillusionment and cynicism are all core elements necessary for people to abandon cults and conspiracy theories. We need to take advantage of this moment.
NYT: Pushing QAnon and Stolen Election Lies, Flynn Re-emerges http://nyti.ms/39WEjMx
// Recast by President Trump’s most ardent supporters as a MAGA martyr, Michael T. Flynn has embraced his role as the man who spent four years unjustly ensnared in the Russia investigation.
🐣 RT @tribelaw This side-by-side sequence speaks for itself. It’s a devastating demonstration of Trump’s role in fomenting and causing the insurrection of January 6:
💙 ⋙ 🐣 RT @nowthisnews Here’s how former Pres. Trump incited insurrection, step by step 💽 https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1357905104481886212?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 5 Feb 2021
RollingStone, Andy Kroll: Trump’s Impeachment Strategy Is Straight Out of the Pizzagate Conspiracy Playbook http://bit.ly/3aNaugN “Trump’s lawyers … employ the same tactic as the promoters of viral conspiracy theories do”
// By ignoring the facts and repeating lies about the 2020 election, Trump is going full conspiracy theorist to fight off an impeachment conviction
With his second impeachment trial set to begin next week, Trump’s hastily assembled legal team responded in writing this week to the article of impeachment filed against him for “willfully inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” The 14-page rebuttal by Trump’s lawyers hinges mostly on two arguments: That it’s unconstitutional to try a former president for impeachment, and that Trump’s lies about the election result, efforts to pressure state officials to change that result, and incendiary rhetoric on January 6th were government-protected speech. “Like all Americans, the 45th president is protected by the First Amendment,” lawyers Bruce Castor and David Schoen write in their response.
But buried in that rebuttal is still another line of defense, one the victims of viral conspiracy theories will recognize. In defense of Trump’s repeated and outlandish lies about the 2020 election result, the former president’s lawyers write:
“It is admitted that after the November election, the 45th President exercised his First Amendment right under the Constitution to express his belief that the election results were suspect, since with very few exceptions, under the convenient guise of Covid-19 pandemic “safeguards” states election laws and procedures were changed by local politicians or judges without the necessary approvals from state legislatures. Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.”
Focus on that last line: “Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.” In other words, there isn’t enough evidence to disprove the president’s wild and unsupported claims about the election being stolen, so therefore they’re true.
To be clear, there is ample evidence to back up the claim that 2020 was one of the most safe and secure elections in American history. More than 60 lawsuits were filed in state and federal court in the wake of the election by Trump’s campaign, his political allies, and the Republican Party, and Team Trump lost all but one of those cases. Judges nominated by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, including Trump himself, have roundly dismissed the allegations of fraud or corruption across the country for lack of standing and lack of evidence. As Judge Stephanos Bibas, who was appointed by Trump to a federal appeals court, wrote in a decision denying an appeal brought by Trump’s campaign: “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
Trump’s lawyers elide this body of evidence in their impeachment trial response. Instead, they employ the same tactic as the promoters of viral conspiracy theories do — arguing, in essence, that if you can’t fully disprove the president’s repeated claims about corrupt voting-machine companies, stolen votes, and corrupt public officials, then you can’t say they’re false.
Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami associate professor and expert on conspiracy theories, describes this as the classic defense of the conspiracy theorist. “This goes to the very heart of conspiracy theory epistemology,” Uscinski tells Rolling Stone.
Uscinski cites as an example the “birther” conspiracy theory about whether former president Barack Obama was born in the United States — a theory that Donald Trump championed for years on his way to winning the presidency. “People claimed Obama didn’t have an American birth certificate,” Uscinski says. “When he brought it out, they said it’s not the long-form birth certificate. When he brought that out, people said it’s a fake.” With powerful conspiracy theories, Uscinski stresses, “Unfalsifiability is baked into the theory.”
💽 CNN: Sasse’s message to Nebraska GOP as he faces censure: ‘Politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude’ http://cnn.it/2N0MvlI
Sasse’s comments come as the Republican Party at large grapples with warring factions at odds over whether to continue the party in Trump’s likeness or forge a new path veering from the former President’s legacy.
“January 6th is going to leave a scar,” Sasse said, referencing the date of the violent insurrection at the US Capitol, where rioters encouraged by Trump sought to overturn the results of the election. “For 220 years, one of the most beautiful things about America has been our peaceful transfer of power. But what Americans saw three weeks ago was ugly, shameful mob violence to disrupt a constitutionally mandated meeting of Congress to affirm that peaceful transfer of power.”
The resolution, posted by News Channel Nebraska Central, finds that Sasse “warrants and shall incur the penalty of CENSURE” to be imposed by the party on February 13. The state party censured Sasse in 2016 for not sufficiently supporting Trump, according to the senator’s office.
Taylor Sliva, Sasse campaign spokesman, said Thursday night that the committee hadn’t shared the resolution with them but that they had seen it in News Channel Nebraska Central.
“You are welcome to censure me again, but let’s be clear about why this is happening: It’s because I still believe — as you used to — that politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude,” Sasse said in the video. “The party could purge Trump skeptics, but I’d like to convince you that not only is this ‘civic cancer’ for the nation, it’s also terrible for our party.”
Sasse has been a vocal critic of the former President’s claims casting doubt on the election results’ veracity. In December, Sasse wrote on Facebook that he had been urging his Republican colleagues to “reject” objecting to the certification process of the Electoral College and then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, adding that talk of objecting to the process is a “dangerous ploy.”
“The president and his allies are playing with fire. They have been asking — first the courts, then state legislatures, now the Congress — to overturn the results of a presidential election,” Sasse said at the time. “They have unsuccessfully called on judges and are now calling on federal officeholders to invalidate millions and millions of votes. If you make big claims, you had better have the evidence. But the president doesn’t and neither do the institutional arsonist members of Congress who will object to the Electoral College vote.”
Sasse’s intra-state clash comes as the national Republican Party faces its own internal conflicts. On Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a lifelong ideological conservative, fought off a challenge to her leadership post from members of her own party after she voted to impeach Trump. ¤ At the same time, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a conspiracy theorist who thinks the GOP’s problem is that it lost the presidential election too gracefully, got a pass from Republican colleagues despite earlier promoting a slew of violent views and conspiracy theories. The full Democratic-led House voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments Thursday.
🐣 RT @RepKinzinger Truth bomb to GOP from Ben Sasse. https://youtu.be/-jCnUHNeTkg via @YouTube
⋙ @SenatorBenSasse Message to Nebraska GOP State Central Committee https://twitter.com/RepKinzinger/status/1357529032204689409?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TomJChicago BREAKING- Fox cancels Lou Dobbs’ TV show a day after voting software co Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox, Dobbs, Bartiromo & Pirro. Propaganda is expensive.
🐣 RT @TheTweetOfJohn Retired Adm. William McRaven argued that Russian President Vladimir Putin has outplayed the US and Russia is the greatest external security threat during a recent discussion of the challenges the new Biden administration faces.
⋙ BusinessInsider: Former Navy SEAL commander says Putin has outplayed the US and Russia is the greatest external http://bit.ly/2N4p9fm
// “Putin has outplayed us. He has played the great game better than anyone on the world stage,” McRaven said, calling the Russian president “dangerous.”
⭕ 4 Feb 2021
WaPo: House ejects Marjorie Taylor Greene from committees over extremist remarks http://wapo.st/3jjnEG9
🐣📊 RT @thehill NEW POLL: 64 percent of GOP voters say they would join a Trump-led new party http://hill.cm/PLCGD13
🐣 RT @atrupar Rep. Dean Phillips: “I’m here tonight to say to my brothers & sisters in Congress & all around our country, I’m sorry. For I’ve never understood, really understood, what privilege really means. It took a violent mob of insurrectionists & lightning-bolt moment in this very room.” 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1357488834397765635?s=20/photo/1
💙 📋 NYT: Arrested in Capitol Riot: Organized Militants and a Horde of Radicals http://nyti.ms/3jhMSVn
// By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Grace Ashford, Denise Lu, Eleanor Lutz, Alex Leeds Matthews and Karen Yourish
🐣 RT @AmoneyResists .@RashidaTlaib in tears on the House floor just now about the death threats she and her colleagues have received just for existing is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve heard in a long time. Shame on everyone who enables and incites these threats. 💽 https://twitter.com/AmoneyResists/status/1357500305718575105?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TeamPelosi If the Q fits.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheHill Pelosi issues statement blasting “cowardly” GOP leader “McCarthy (Q-CA)” http://hill.cm/a0hvCS1
🐣 RT @NatashaBertrand President Biden says he “made clear to President Putin, in a manner very different from my predecessor, that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions…are over. We will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia”
🐣 RT @DavidRosenTV VIDEO: @POTUS tells #VladimirPutin @KremlinRussia_E: “The days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions…are over.” 💽 https://twitter.com/JamesRosenTV/status/1357442350381948929?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Smartmatic files $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News over election fraud claims http://wapo.st/3tqUeuc
// Fox News Media hosts Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro were named, along with lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
🐣 RT @McFaul “She [Yulia Navalnaya] is incredibly courageous, strong, principled, articulate, and inspiring,” via @voxdotcom
⋙ Vox, Alex Ward: Alexei Navalny is going to prison. Can his movement to depose Vladimir Putin survive? http://bit.ly/
// It’s likely Navalny’s pro-democracy movement is in a bit of trouble.
⭕ 3 Feb 2021
ForeignAffairs, Cynthia Miller-Idress and David Koehler: A Plan to Beat Back the Far Right http://fam.ag/3a3ni3j
// 2/3/2021; Violent extremism in the United States demands a social response.
📊📋 NYT, Thomas Edsall: The QAnon Delusion Has Not Loosened Its Grip http://nyti.ms/3ayOWnO “Millions of Americans continue to actively participate in multiple conspiracy theories. Why?” ● Text Block: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1357599147575169024?s=20/photo/1
A Dec 30 NPR/Ipsos poll found that “recent misinformation, including false claims related to Covid-19 and QAnon, are gaining a foothold among some Americans.”
According to the survey, nearly a fifth of American adults, 17 percent, believe that “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics.” Almost a third “believe that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.” Even more, 39 percent, agree that “there is a deep state working to undermine President Trump.” …
The problem of keeping the extremist fringe at arm’s length has plagued the Republican Party for decades — dating back to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society — but nothing in recent American history has reached the crazed intensity of Donald Trump’s perseverating, mendacious insistence that he won a second term in November. That he is not alone — that millions continue to believe in his delusions — is terrifying.
WaPo: McCarthy moves to keep splintering GOP intact, with protection for both Cheney and Greene http://wapo.st/2YKQnKw
🌎 🐣 RT @SidKhurana Largest Educational Group by County, 2019. ¤ High School Graduate is the largest group in the vast majority of counties. College Graduate is #1 in more urban counties (plus Colorado) for the most part. Graduate Degree is #1 in many university counties. https://twitter.com/SidKhurana3607/status/1357139376480862209?s=20/photo/1
DailyBeast, Will Sommer: Proud Boys Dealt Another Blow as Feds Crack Down http://bit.ly/39PGfqh
// The Proud Boys’ former lawyer says he’s taking the name back.
NYT: In Rare Public Statement, Congressional Aides Call for Trump’s Conviction http://nyti.ms/3avuFzF
// More than 370 Democratic aides issued an unusual public appeal, notable because congressional staff members rarely publicly express their own views.
⋙ ≣ Letter: http://bit.ly/3aLIVV9
🐣 RT @BrentNYT Republicans are attacking voting rights – something they are very good at – in preparation to take back the Senate: via @NewYorker
⋙ NewYorker, Steve Collins: State Republican Leaders Are Rushing to Exploit Trump’s Big Lie http://bit.ly/2MuVmMN
// In diverse parts of the country, followers of the former President are attacking voting laws and systems, using his claims that the election was stolen to attack voting laws and systems
⭕ 2 Feb 2021
🐣 🌎 RT @_waleedshahid The United States has now been downgraded to a “flawed democracy” by The Economist. https://twitter.com/_waleedshahid/status/1356734186577682434?s=20/photo/1
⋙ TheEconomist: Global democracy has a very bad year http://econ.st/3oH7YO0
// The pandemic caused an unprecedented rollback of democratic freedoms in 2020
WSJ, Editorial: House Republican Reckoning http://on.wsj.com/3cBqK6X
// The fates of Reps. Cheney and Greene will suggest the GOP future.
💙 HouseJudiciary: Impeachment Managers File Trial Brief, Explain Senate’s Obligation to Hear Case against Donald Trump http://bit.ly/3aHFi2v [Summary with link to Trial Memorandom]
// The brief lays out the case for the conviction of former President Trump for “incitement of insurrection against the Republic he swore to protect.”
⋙ 📔 Trial Brief: Trial Memorandom of the United States House of Representatives in the Impeachment Trial of President Donald J Trump [pdf] http://bit.ly/3jiOVIM 80p
🐣 RT @AaronBlake Trump’s brief today: “It is denied that President Trump intended to interfere with the counting of Electoral votes.” ¤ Trump’s tweet in January: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.”
🐣 RT @Kasparov63 It’s hard to stand up to Putin, but it will only be harder tomorrow. The roadmap is clear. Sanction him and his cronies completely out of the free world. Stop funding his repression and his invasions and his murders. Support the rule of law and divest from dictatorship.
Politico: Austin ousts all Pentagon advisory board members as he roots out Trump appointees http://politi.co/2MrK0sU He “directed the immediate suspension of all committee operations while the Pentagon completes a ‘zero-based review’ of at least 42 defense advisory committees”
// The Trump administration booted several members of the advisory boards after losing the election and installed political operatives and loyalists in their place.
😅 RT @JuddLegum Trump’s formal answer to his impeachment starts off by misspelling “United States.” ¤ It goes downhill from there. https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1356678459989385218?s=20/photo/1
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Trump’s actions described as ‘a betrayal of historic proportions’ in trial brief filed by House impeachment managers http://wapo.st/3avvKqY
⭕ 1 Feb 2021
🔆 This❗️⋙ Politico: Trump pollster’s campaign autopsy paints damning picture of defeat http://politi.co/36xjPrq Losses among white voters, especially white men, were key to Trump’s loss
// The 27-page report pins Trump’s loss on voter perception that he was untrustworthy and disapproval of his pandemic performance.
🐣 RT @MSNBC “Lately all we’ve been talking about is darkness and division, trying to appeal more to the Proud Boys than the suburban moms and that’s a big problem,” Rep. Kinzinger says about the Republican Party, calling for an intervention within the GOP.
⋙ 💽 MSNBC, KatyTur: Rep. Kinzinger on the future of the Republican Party: ‘I hope it doesn’t mean a split, but it may’ http://on.msnbc.com/2YzR2hw
// Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois has said that Republicans need an intervention. He joins Katy Tur with more.
🐣 RT @sergenyt ProPublica & FRONTLINE identified 20 plus Boogaloo Bois or sympathizers who’ve served in the armed forces. In the past 18 months, 13 of them were arrested on charges from possession of illegal automatic weapons to the manufacture of explosives to murder.
⋙ ProPublica: The Boogaloo Bois Have Guns, Criminal Records and Military Training. Now They Want to Overthrow the Government. http://bit.ly/
// ProPublica and FRONTLINE have identified more than twenty members with ties to the armed forces.
🐣 RT @McFaul Oh My God. Listen to @katieporteroc. And never, ever again for one second try to diminish or excuse the horrific violence that Mr. Trump encouraged and inspired on January 6th.
⋙ 🐣 RT @justinbaragona Katie Porter recounts how she and AOC hid in her office during the Jan. 6 insurrectionist riot. ¤ “I’m a mom. I’m calm. I have everything we need. We can live for like a month in this office. And she said, ‘I hope I get to be a mom, I hope I don’t die today.'” 💽 https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1356458365124280320?s=20/photo/1
DefenseOne: The Boogaloo Bois Have Guns, Criminal Records and Military Training. Now They Want to Overthrow the Government. http://bit.ly/36yIXhQ
// ProPublica and Frontline have identified more than twenty members with ties to the armed forces.
🐣 RT @SecBlinken Excellent to speak with Foreign Minister @DmytroKuleba today and reaffirm our unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression, and commitment to advancing reforms vital to Ukraine’s success.
🐣 RT @chrislhayes People do realize that the Big Event that is promised in QAnon is the massive apprehension and execution of thousands of Democrats, right? It’s very literally the whole climax the movement is pushing for and expecting.
⋙ 🐣 RT @chrislhayes I mean: not just Democrats; also members of the Deep State and various and sundry celebrities who they believe are all members of the satanic child trafficking ring.
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @kurteichenwald It’s the political version of the End Times. Literally. That’s why it appeals so much to right wing evangelicals. – the evil ones are destroyed, the faithful flourish. Same old same old.
WaPo, Michael Gerson: Trumpism is American fascism http://wapo.st/3r8r2WM “Call this civic barbarism. Instead of promoting the values of responsible citizenship, Trump and his media enablers are elevating and blessing the very worst among us”
WaPo: As House GOP faces decision on its future, McConnell defends Cheney, rebukes Greene in rare set of statements http://wapo.st/3j7d2dj
“Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country,” McConnell said. “Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality. This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.”
Greene responded Monday night on Twitter. “The real cancer for the Republican Party is weak Republicans who only know how to lose gracefully,” she said. “This is why we are losing our country.”
In a separate statement, McConnell did name Cheney, describing the No. 3 House Republican as “a leader with deep convictions and the courage to act on them.”
“She is an important leader in our party and in our nation,” McConnell said in the statement, first reported by CNN. “I am grateful for her service and look forward to continuing to work with her on the crucial issues facing our nation.”
WaPo: One of Trump’s new lawyers declined to charge Bill Cosby. The other maintains Jeffrey Epstein was murdered. http://wapo.st/36xoWb4
WaPo: Kinzinger says Republicans need ‘an intervention’ to kick Trump habit http://wapo.st/3tkzeoP
// Rep Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)
Politico: Dems to deliver GOP ultimatum over Marjorie Taylor Greene http://politi.co/2LbBM7G //➔ my guess is having a floor vote might come as a relief to McCarthy, freeing him from the need to cross Trump
// They’re moving to strip the controversial Republican of her committee assignments.
AP: Trump names 2 lawyers to impeachment defense team http://bit.ly/2YLHoJ7 “The two representing Trump will be defense lawyer David Schoen, a frequent television legal commentator, and Bruce Castor, a former district attorney in Pennsylvania …”
NYT: As Trump Raked In Cash Denying His Loss, Little Went to Actual Legal Fight http://nyti.ms/39BGqoL
// The picture that emerged in new campaign finance reports was of Donald J. Trump waging a public relations effort to falsely argue that he had won the election rather than mounting a serious legal push.
🐣 RT @BillKristol “Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president…Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far.”
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: 77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election http://nyti.ms/3oD2fsu
// Hours after the United States voted, the president declared the election a fraud — a lie that unleashed a movement that would shatter democratic norms and upend the peaceful transfer of power.
// By Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg and Michael S. Schmidt
// Mr. Stockton, the bus-tour organizer, said that he had been surprised to learn that the protest would include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. That march — the prelude to the riot — had not been the plan before the White House became involved.
… [I]nterviews with central players, and documents including previously unreported emails, videos and social media posts scattered across the web, tell a more encompassing story of a more coordinated campaign.
Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency. …
[D]uring the campaign, Attorney General William P. Barr had echoed some of Mr. Trump’s complaints of voter fraud. But privately the president was chafing at Mr. Barr’s resistance to his more authoritarian impulses — including his idea to end birthright citizenship in a legally dubious pre-election executive order. And when Mr. Barr informed Mr. Trump in a tense Oval Office session that the Justice Department’s fraud investigations had run dry, the president dismissed the department as derelict before finding other officials there who would view things his way.
For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason. That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.
As traditional Republican donors withdrew, a new class of Trump-era benefactors rose to finance data analysts and sleuths to come up with fodder for the stolen-election narrative. Their ranks included the founder of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, and the former Overstock.com chief executive Patrick Byrne, who warned of “fake ballots” and voting-machine manipulation from China on One America News Network and Newsmax, which were finding ratings in their willingness to go further than Fox in embracing the fiction that Mr. Trump had won.
… Women for America First … had ties to Mr. Trump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons, among them Stephen K. Bannon and Michael T. Flynn
As it crossed the country spreading the new gospel of a stolen election in Trump-red buses, the group helped build an acutely Trumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and the “de-platformed” extremists and conspiracy theorists promoted on its home page — including the white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.
With each passing day the lie grew, finally managing to do what the political process and the courts would not: upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy
The Hammer and Scorecard story came together with disparate conspiracy theories about Dominion voting systems that had been kicking around on the left and the right, most forcefully on the Twitter feed of a Republican congressman from Arizona, Paul Gosar.
… Mr. McConnell knew that by [congratulating Biden], he would endanger his own overriding political goal — winning the two runoffs in Georgia and maintaining Republican control of the Senate, which would allow him to keep his power as majority leader. If he provoked Mr. Trump’s anger, he would almost certainly lose the president’s full support in Georgia.
… West Wing officials [Meadows, Kushner, Josh Holmes] had conveyed the same message: They would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short. Mr. Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat.
… [A postal worker’s] affidavit, it turned out, had been written with the assistance of the conservative media group Project Veritas, known for its deceptive tactics and ambush videos.
[On Dec 1] … [A]fter the president complained to Fox that the Justice Department was “missing in action,” Mr. Barr told The Associated Press that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome.”
… A truck driver on contract with the Postal Service was claiming that he had delivered many thousands of illegally filled-out ballots to Pennsylvania from a depot on Long Island. ¤ Federal investigators had determined that that one, too, was bunk.
… [W]ith the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, backing him, Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results, said a former senior official with knowledge about the meeting, a version of which was first reported by Axios. The allegations about manipulated voting machines were ridiculously false, he added; the lawyers propagating them, led by Mr. Giuliani, were “clowns.” ¤ … [B]efore Mr. Barr left the building, the president tweeted out the truck driver’s account …
Days later, that allegation was featured in a lawsuit with an extraordinary request: that the court decertify the Pennsylvania result and strip Mr. Biden of the state’s delegates — a call to potentially disenfranchise nearly seven million voters. …
Even after a recount in the tightest state, Georgia, found some 2,000 lost Trump votes, Mr. Biden led by nearly 12,000. And Mr. Giuliani’s arguments that the Trump campaign could prove Dominion voting machines illegally made the difference were summarily dismissed by Mr. Trump’s other lawyers, who were carefully tracking a recount of the machines’ paper receipts.
[Election lawyers] argued that in bending rules to make mail voting easier during the pandemic — extending deadlines, striking requirements for witness signatures — secretaries of state or state courts or election boards had improperly usurped their legislatures’ role. ¤ Yet … the suits failed in court after court across the country …
Mr. Giuliani and his allies were developing a new legal theory — that in crucial swing states, there was enough fraud, and there were enough inappropriate election-rule changes, to render their entire popular votes invalid. … As a result, the theory went, those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures would be within their constitutional rights to send slates of their choosing to the Electoral College. ¤ If the theory was short on legal or factual merit, it was rich in the sort of sensational claims …
Before Thanksgiving, a team of lawyers with close ties to the Trump campaign began planning a sweeping new lawsuit to carry that argument.
They would need to go directly to the Supreme Court, where, they believed, the conservative majority would be sympathetic to the president, who had appointed three of its members.
Only one type of lawyer can take a case filed by one state against another directly to the Supreme Court: a state attorney general. The president’s original election lawyers doubted that any attorney general would be willing to do so, according to one member of the team, speaking on the condition of anonymity. But Mr. Kobach and his colleagues were confident. ¤ The obvious choice to bring the suit was Ken Paxton of Texas, an ardent proponent of the president’s voter-fraud narrative …
Mr. Paxton filed his complaint with the Supreme Court. Mr. Joseph was listed as a special counsel, but the brief did not disclose that it had been written by outside parties.
The lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.
Some 126 Republican House members, including the caucus leader, Mr. McCarthy, signed on to the brief, which was followed by a separate brief from the president himself. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” Mr. Trump tweeted. Privately, he asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to argue the case.
At Mr. Trump’s urging, the Republican Attorneys General Association made one final play, asking Mr. Barr to back the suit. He refused. ¤ On Dec. 11, the court declined to hear the case, ruling that Texas had no right to challenge other states’ votes.
The [Dec 12] rally had been planned by Women for America First, which was quietly becoming the closest thing Mr. Trump had to a political organizing force, gathering his aggrieved supporters behind the lie of a stolen election. ¤ The group’s founder, Amy Kremer, had been one of the original Tea Party organizers, building the movement through cross-country bus tours. She had been among the earliest Trump supporters, forming a group called Women Vote Trump along with Ann Stone, ex-wife of the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone.
The group’s executive director was Ms. Kremer’s daughter, Kylie Jane Kremer, who recently worked on Sean Hannity’s radio show. Two organizers helping the effort, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, were close to Mr. Bannon, having worked at Breitbart … ¤ A onetime organizer for the hard-line Gun Owners of America, according to his LinkedIn page, Mr. Stockton had come to know members of the Three Percenters militia group. … For the Kremers, Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Stockton, the instrument of that fight would be a reprise of the Tea Party Express, a bus tour to enlist state and federal lawmakers in Mr. Trump’s effort to keep states from certifying results ahead of the Electoral College vote.
The group tapped new veins of financing, with sponsorships from Mr. Bannon’s “War Room,” which paid $5,000, and Mr. Lindell, who said he believed he gave $50,000. It helped the group lease the bus and paint it MAGA red, with a huge photo of Mr. Trump and the logos of MyPillow, “War Room” and other sponsors emblazoned on the sides. ¤ As they made their way across the country, they reached out to local elected officials and branches of the Republican National Committee. …
Early on, the “Trump March” website had included promotion for banned extremists and conspiracy theorists like the white supremacist Mr. Taylor, various QAnon “decoders” and the “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys, according to a version saved by the Internet Archive. (The promotion was taken down ahead of the bus tour).
There were early warning signs of the explosion to come.
… Mr. Trump was watching and, seeing the tour’s success, even helicoptered above the Dec. 12 rally on Marine One. But after the 12th, the group found itself in limbo — leading a restive movement without a clear destination.
At the White House, Mr. Trump was still searching for ways to nullify the results, soliciting advice from allies like Mr. Flynn, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.
On Dec. 18, he met with Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell in a four-hour session that started in the Oval Office and ended in the White House residence, where Swedish meatballs were served, Mr. Byrne later recalled.
With a team of “cybersleuths,” Mr. Byrne was working with Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell to develop and promote theories about Dominion and foreign interference. Earlier, Mr. Flynn had publicly raised the notion that the president should use martial law to force a revote in swing states.
The meeting descended into shouting as a group that included Mr. Cipollone, who had absorbed most of Mr. Trump’s frustrations for weeks as he tried to stop a number of legally questionable ideas, tried to dissuade the president from entertaining a range of options the visitors were proposing. “It was really damned close to fistfights,” Mr. Byrne recalled on the “Operation Freedom” YouTube show.
… [U]ltimately Mr. Trump agreed, at least for the moment, to focus on a different goal: blocking congressional certification of the results on Jan. 6. ¤ Mr. Meadows had connected the president to Mr. Martin, the former North Carolina justice, who had a radical interpretation of the Constitution: Vice President Mike Pence, he argued, had the power to stop the certification and throw out any results he deemed fraudulent.
Now, Women for America First had a purpose, too. Objectors were already lining up in the House. So the group planned a new bus tour, this one to travel from state to state helping to sway persuadable senators — 11 by their count. ¤ The cavalry “is coming, Mr. President,” Kylie Kremer tweeted to Mr. Trump on Dec. 19. ¤ This tour took on an edgier tone. Before heading out, the Kremers, Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Stockton visited the Tactical Response marksman training center in Nashville. … At the training center, Kylie Kremer and Ms. Lawrence taped an episode of Mr. [James] Yeager’s “Tactical Response” YouTube show, promoting their tour. They also documented the afternoon with a campy Facebook video of themselves cradling assault weapons and flanking Mr. Stockton, who narrated.
By the time the bus pulled into West Monroe, La., for a New Year’s Day stop to urge Senator John Kennedy to object to certification, Mr. Trump was making it clear to his followers that a rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6 was part of his plan. On Twitter, he promoted the event five times that day alone. ¤ The emcee of the Louisiana stop, the Tea Party activist James Lyle, announced that the next day’s event in Missouri was now going to be a thank-you — Senator Josh Hawley had just become the first senator to announce that he would object.
On Saturday, Jan. 2, Kylie Kremer posted a promotional video for Wednesday’s rally on Twitter, along with a message: “BE A PART OF HISTORY.” ¤ The president shared her post and wrote: “I’ll be there! Historic day.” ¤ Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production. After 12,000 miles of drumbeating through 44 stops in more than 20 states, they would be handing over their movement to the man whose grip on power it had been devised to maintain.
There were new donors, including the Publix supermarket heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli. She gave $300,000 in an arrangement coordinated through the internet conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who pledged $50,000 as well, The Wall Street Journal reported. ¤ New planners also joined the team, among them Caroline Wren, a former deputy to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Trump fund-raiser and partner of Donald Trump Jr. The former Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson was the liaison to the White House, a former administration official said. The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations.
For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office.
That Saturday, Mr. Trump had called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and pressed him, unsuccessfully, to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to win the state.
Mr. Barr had resigned in December. But behind the back of the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the president was plotting with the Justice Department’s acting civil division chief, Jeffrey Clark, and a Pennsylvania congressman named Scott Perry to pressure Georgia to invalidate its results, investigate Dominion and bring a new Supreme Court case challenging the entire election. The scheming came to an abrupt halt when Mr. Rosen, who would have been fired under the plan, assured the president that top department officials would resign en masse. ¤ That left the congressional certification as the main event.
When Mr. Hawley stepped forward, according to Republican senators, Mr. McConnell hoped at least to keep him isolated. ¤ But Mr. Cruz was working at cross-purposes, trying to conscript others to sign a letter laying out his circular logic: Because polling showed that Republicans’ “unprecedented allegations” of fraud had convinced two-thirds of their party that Mr. Biden had stolen the election, it was incumbent on Congress to at least delay certification and order a 10-day audit in the “disputed states.” Mr. Cruz, joined by 10 other objectors, released the letter on the Saturday after New Year’s.
It was coming down to a contest of wills within the Republican Party, and tens of thousands of Trump supporters were converging on Washington to send a message to those who might defy the president. ¤ The rally had taken on new branding, the March to Save America, and other groups were joining in, among them the Republican Attorneys General Association. Its policy wing, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, promoted the event in a robocall that said, “We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” according to a recording obtained by the progressive investigative group Documented.
Mr. Stockton said he was surprised to learn on the day of the rally that it would now include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Before the White House became involved, he said, the plan had been to stay at the Ellipse until the counting of state electoral slates was completed.
The president’s involvement also meant that some speakers from the original Women for America First lineup would be dropped from the main event. So, Mr. Stockton said, he arranged to have them speak the night before at a warm-up rally at Freedom Plaza.
That event had been planned by a sister group, the 80 Percent Coalition, founded by Cindy Chafian, a former organizer with Women for America First.
Defiantly, to a great roar from the plaza, Ms. Chafian cried, “I stand with the Proud Boys, because I’m tired of the lies,” and she praised other militant nationalist groups in the crowd, including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.
Mr. Trump took the stage at the Ellipse the next day shortly before 1 p.m., calling on the tens of thousands before him to carry his message to Republicans in the Capitol: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.”
As he spoke, some protesters, with Proud Boys helping take the lead, were already breaching the outer security perimeter around the Capitol. Inside, when Mr. Gosar stood to raise the first objection, to results in his home state of Arizona, several Republican lawmakers gave him a standing ovation. … Less than an hour later, the lawmakers would flee to a secure location as the mob streamed into the building. … …
On Jan. 15, Mr. Trump acquiesced to an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Lindell, who arrived with two sets of documents. One, provided by a lawyer he would not name, included a series of steps Mr. Trump could take, including “martial law if necessary.” The other, Mr. Lindell claimed in an interview the next day, was computer code indicating that China and other state actors had altered the election results — vetted by his own investigators after he found it online.
“I said: ‘Mr. President, I have great news. You won with 79 million votes, and Biden had 68 million,’” he recalled. (Mr. Biden had more than 80 million votes, to Mr. Trump’s 74 million; Homeland Security officials have rejected the allegations of foreign meddling.)
A couple of minutes later, Mr. Trump directed his national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, to escort Mr. Lindell upstairs, to Mr. Cipollone’s office. He told the MyPillow founder to come back afterward. ¤ After a perfunctory discussion, aides directed Mr. Lindell to the exit. “I say it loud, ‘I’m not leaving,’” he recalled telling them. He eventually left when an aide made it clear there would be no Oval Office follow-up. The president was done.
The violence at the Capitol, and Congress’s eventual certification of Mr. Biden’s victory that day, may have spelled the end of Mr. Trump’s postelection campaign. The same cannot be said about the political staying power, the grip on the Republican faithful, of the lie he set in motion. …
⭕ 31 Jan 2021
🐣 RT @BillKristol “Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president…Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far.”
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: 77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election http://nyti.ms/3oD2fsu
// Hours after the United States voted, the president declared the election a fraud — a lie that unleashed a movement that would shatter democratic norms and upend the peaceful transfer of power.
// By Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg and Michael S. Schmidt
⭕ 30 Jan 2021
Politico: Here’s What Happens to a Conspiracy-Driven Party http://politi.co/3ajSIBe “[T]he QAnon wing now threatens to push Republicans much closer to the fate of Know Nothing Party, even though they don’t know it”
// The modern GOP isn’t the first party to embrace huge conspiracies. But the lessons should be sobering.
ProPublica: Text Messages Show Top Trump Campaign Fundraiser’s Key Role Planning the Rally That Preceded the Siege http://bit.ly/2MtpBnb
// Caroline Wren, a Trump fundraiser, is listed as a “VIP Advisor” in a National Park Service permit for the Jan. 6th rally at the Ellipse. Text messages and a planning memo show the title downplays the active role she played in organizing the event.
🐣 RT @cnnbrk Five of Trump’s impeachment lawyers have stepped aside a little more than a week before his Senate trial in a disagreement over legal strategy, sources say
🔆 This❗️⋙ CNN: First on CNN: Trump’s impeachment defense team leaves less than two weeks before trial http://cnn.it/3pMFljT “Trump is clinging to his election fraud charade and suddenly finds himself without legal representation”
It was a dramatic development in the second impeachment trial for Trump, who has struggled to find lawyers willing to take his case. And now, with legal briefs due next week and a trial set to begin only days later, Trump is clinging to his election fraud charade and suddenly finds himself without legal representation.
Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier, who were expected to be two of the lead attorneys, are no longer on the team. A source familiar with the changes said it was a mutual decision for both to leave the legal team. As the lead attorney, Bowers assembled the team.
Josh Howard, a North Carolina attorney who was recently added to the team, has also left, according to another source familiar with the changes. Johnny Gasser and Greg Harris, from South Carolina, are no longer involved with the case, either. ¤ No other attorneys have announced they are working on Trump’s impeachment defense.
A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he’s left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The Lincoln Project’s legal response to the false and defamatory statements made by Rudy Giuliani. https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1355618315570393090?s=20/photo/1-3
WaPo: ‘Be ready to fight’: FBI probe of U.S. Capitol riot finds evidence detailing coordination of an assault http://wapo.st/3afSkUx
💙 Politico Mag, Michael Kruse: The Antipope of Mar-a-Lago http://politi.co/3t5TdYx
// What a medieval religious schism can teach us about Donald Trump’s unprecedented and radically antagonistic approach to the ex-presidency.
🐣 RT @EvanMcMullin I agree that the center-right needs a new political identity and home, fully committed to American values, truth, reason and democracy. It’s a work in progress.
⋙ 🐣 RT @LarrySabato The Republican Party is no longer salvageable—at least a sane center-right version the country needs as an alternative. I resisted accepting this for a long time. But Trump, Jan 6, Greene et al made me face it. Not sure what’s next & best, or how to get there. #RepublicanParty
WaPo: Ukraine stayed quiet during Trump-era pressures. Now it’s sharing some Giuliani tales. http://wapo.st/2YuNP2Q “Ukraine’s rebuff of [Giuliani’s] demands, said [former Zelensky aide] Novikov, was a victory in keeping the country out of U.S. affairs”
⭕ 29 Jan 2021
NYT, Shoshana Zuboff: The Coup We Are Not Talking About http://nyti.ms/39ASaYI “Dr. Zuboff, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, is the author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.’” Excellent #longread
// We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
// Dr. Zuboff, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, is the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”
Deaths of kings and peaceful transfers of power in democracies are critical moments that heighten society’s vulnerability. The norms and laws that guide these junctures are rightly treated with maximum gravity. Mr. Trump and his allies prosecuted an election-fraud disinformation campaign that ultimately translated into violence. It took direct aim at American democracy’s point of maximum institutional vulnerability and its most fundamental norms. As such, it qualifies as a form of epistemic terrorism, an extreme expression of epistemic chaos. Mr. Zuckerberg’s determination to lend his economic machine to the cause makes him an accessory to this assault.
Like baseball, everyday reality is an adventure that begins and ends at home base, where we are safe. No society can police everything all the time, least of all a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a deviation and what is normal. We venture out from the norm, but we know the difference between the outfield and home, the reality of everyday life. Without that, as we have now experienced, things fall apart. Democrats drinking blood? Sure, why not? Hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19? Right this way! Storm the Capitol and make Mr. Trump dictator? Yeah, we’ve got that!
Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree. Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue.
… The corrupt information that dominates the private square does not rise to the top of a free and fair competition of ideas. It wins in a rigged game. No democracy can survive this game.
Our susceptibility to the destruction of common sense reflects a young information civilization that has not yet found its footing in democracy. Unless we interrupt surveillance economics and revoke the license to steal that legitimates its antisocial operations, the other coup will continue to strengthen and produce fresh crises. What must be done now?
The United States and the world’s other liberal democracies have thus far failed to construct a coherent political vision of a digital century that advances democratic values, principles and government. While the Chinese have designed and deployed digital technologies to advance their system of authoritarian rule, the West has remained compromised and ambivalent.
This failure has left a void where democracy should be, and the dangerous result has been a two-decade drift toward private systems of surveillance and behavioral control outside the constraints of democratic governance. This is the road to the final stage of the epistemic coup. The result is that our democracies march naked into the third decade without the new charters of rights, legal frameworks and institutional forms necessary to ensure a digital future that is compatible with the aspirations of a democratic society.
We are still in the early days of an information civilization. The third decade is our opportunity to match the ingenuity and determination of our 20th-century forebears by building the foundations for a democratic digital century.
Democracy is under the kind of siege that only democracy can end. If we are to defeat the epistemic coup, then democracy must be the protagonist.
I offer three principles that can help guide these beginnings:
The democratic rule of law
… Antitrust arguments are important for two reasons: They signal that democracy is once again on the move, and they legitimate more regulatory attention to companies designated as market dominant. But when it comes to defeating the epistemic coup, the antitrust paradigm falls short. Here’s why.
[I]t took decades for lawmakers to finally address the real sources of harm by codifying new rights for workers and consumers. The National Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed the right to unionize while regulating the actions of employers, wasn’t enacted until 1935, 45 years after the Sherman Antitrust Act. We do not have 45 years — or 20 or 10 — to linger before we address the real harms of the epistemic coup and their causes.
There may be sound antitrust reasons to break up the big tech empires, but carving up Facebook or any of the others into the surveillance capitalist equivalents of Exxon, Chevron and Mobil would not shield us from the clear and present dangers of surveillance capitalism. Our time demands more.
New conditions summon new rights
A democratic information civilization cannot progress without new charters of epistemic rights that protect citizens from the massive-scale invasion and theft compelled by surveillance economics. During most of the modern age, citizens of democratic societies have regarded a person’s experience as inseparable from the individual — inalienable. It follows that the right to know about one’s experience has been considered elemental, bonded to each of us like a shadow. We each decide if and how our experience is shared, with whom and for what purpose. … [T]he once taken-for-granted right to know and to decide who knows about us must be codified in law and protected by democratic institutions, if it is to exist at all.
Unprecedented harms demand unprecedented solutions
… We need legal frameworks that interrupt and outlaw the massive-scale extraction of human experience. Laws that stop data collection would end surveillance capitalism’s illegitimate supply chains. The algorithms that recommend, microtarget and manipulate, and the millions of behavioral predictions pushed out by the second cannot exist without the trillions of data points fed to them each day.
Next, we need laws that tie data collection to fundamental rights and data use to public service, addressing the genuine needs of people and communities. Data is no longer the means of information warfare waged on the innocent.
[W]e [must] disrupt the financial incentives that reward surveillance economics. We can prohibit commercial practices that exert demand for rapacious data collection. Democratic societies have outlawed markets that trade in human organs and babies. Markets that trade in human beings were outlawed, even when they supported whole economies.
These principles are already shaping democratic action. The Federal Trade Commission initiated a study of social media and video-streaming companies less than a week after filing its case against Facebook and said it intended to “lift the hood” of internal operations “to carefully study their engines.” A statement by three commissioners took aim at tech companies “capable of surveilling and monetizing … our personal lives,” adding that “too much about the industry remains dangerously opaque.”
Two sentences often attributed to Justice Brandeis feature in the congressional subcommittee’s impressive antitrust report. “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” The statement so relevant to Brandeis’s time remains a pungent commentary on the old capitalism we know, but it ignores the new capitalism that knows us. Unless democracy revokes the license to steal [information] and challenges the fundamental economics and operations of commercial surveillance, the epistemic coup will weaken and eventually transform democracy itself. We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. We have a democratic information civilization to build, and there is no time to waste.
WaPo, Kathleen Parker: The GOP isn’t doomed. It’s dead. http://wapo.st/3j0Amt0
💙 WaPo, Matthew Dallek: Forcing out the fringe http://wapo.st/39yM0sb “Dallek, a historian at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, is at work on a book about the John Birch Society” 🖼 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1355784538111303689?s=20/photo/1
// Can Republicans exile their most toxic supporters? They’ve done it before.
// illustration: grey vs red elephants facing off
🐣 RT @CNN Former President George W. Bush is making it clear that he supports Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican in the House, who voted to impeach then-President Trump
⋙ CNN: George W. Bush to thank Dick Cheney, father of Liz Cheney, ‘for his daughter’s service’ http://cnn.it/2YqIrOe
WaPo, David Ignatius: The U.S. is finally catching up to the domestic terrorism threat http://wapo.st/3oBaJA5
WaPo, John Sipher: Piling up incriminating information about Trump’s Russian connections http://wapo.st/3otXMrT Review of: American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery By Craig Unger
// John Sipher worked for the CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years. He is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment.
One of the standard warnings attached to U.S. intelligence reports is that the source of a report intends “to influence as well as inform.” The caveat does not mean that the source’s reporting is wrong or should be discounted, but that the source also has an agenda. Craig Unger’s new book, “American Kompromat,” should be read with a similar understanding, for it opens with the presumption that former president Donald Trump is, as former CIA director Michael Hayden described him, “a clear and present danger.” Unger starts from the premise that Trump is a Kremlin asset and proceeds to advance the argument with great detail.
Unger is a veteran investigative journalist and writer, and “American Kompromat” is a follow-up to his 2018 book, “House of Trump, House of Putin,” in which he made the case for Russian collusion. “American Kompromat” can be read alongside others that examine Trump’s weak spot for Russia — including Greg Miller’s “The Apprentice,” Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s “Russian Roulette,” Luke Harding’s “Shadow State,” Tim Weiner’s “The Folly and the Glory,” and Seth Abramson’s “Proof of Collusion” — as well as books by insiders such as Peter Strzok, former FBI deputy assistant director of counterintelligence; Josh Campbell, a former FBI special agent and special assistant to then-Director James Comey; and Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI.
As the Trump administration came to a spectacular end, Unger must have felt the need to update his book continually. Day by day, Trump took actions that added to Unger’s thesis. In the closing weeks of his term, Trump sought to divert attention from a damaging Russian cyberhack, refused to concede Russian President Vladimir Putin’s poisoning of his leading political challenger and brazenly pardoned cronies who refused to testify in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. (Not to mention allegedly inciting the mob that violently overtook the Capitol.)
Unger outlines Trump’s decades-long relationships with Russian criminals and his willingness to abet the laundering of dirty money flowing from Moscow, and explains why Russian intelligence would find him an easy mark. The web of Trump’s damning connections and his actions as president suggest some sort of affinity for Putin.
According to Unger, there are indications that Trump was used as a conduit for Soviet covert messaging campaigns in the late 1980s. He made numerous visits to Russia where he was certainly watched, feted and cultivated. At the time, he publicly expressed thoughts that were far outside of mainstream Western opinion. For example, he complained that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was destroying the Soviet Union — suggesting perhaps relations with KGB elements that shared such a view. Unger cites former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, who served in Washington at the time, saying of Trump: “The guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This combination makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”
By compiling decades of Trump’s seedy ties, disturbing and consistent patterns of behavior, and unexplained contacts with Russian officials and criminals, Unger makes a strong case that Trump is probably a compromised trusted contact of Kremlin interests.
That said, it is not an argument meant to stand up to the scrutiny of a criminal court (that would require evidence hidden in Russian intelligence files). Instead, it is a counterintelligence case, a circumstantial compilation of patterns, relationships and logical inferences. Even though counterintelligence probes often do not lead to arrests, the stakes of such investigations may be of far more serious consequence. We have learned over the past several years that many of the most important firewalls in our democracy are not necessarily written in the legal code. It may not be a crime for a presidential candidate to seek to make money from a hostile foreign power and lie about it, but it is potentially a far more serious challenge to our system.
In short, Unger alleges that Trump’s long-standing ties to Russian organized crime, his lifestyle and his business practices made him uniquely vulnerable to blackmail and extortion by the country that is unarguably the best in the world at those dark arts. His campaign team — with its own unusual shady ties to Russia — was willing to work with a hostile foreign power and eager to accept material stolen from Americans. None went to the authorities to report the illicit contacts, and many of them were subsequently arrested. When the issue of Russian involvement surfaced publicly, every single one of them lied and covered up their actions. Trump then attacked the very institutions that could hold him to account and sought to obstruct investigations, eventually pardoning anyone who could provide evidence of wrongdoing. Even Trump’s most fervent supporters have been unable to provide an innocent explanation for why a domestic political campaign would need such deep engagement with a hostile foreign power.
Unger’s narrative of collusion relies on piling up any and all damning information he can muster. However, in some cases, the very volume of information undercuts the strength of his argument. Trump’s presidency was such a ruinous fiasco, it is tempting to keep adding inexplicable actions to the pile. However, the tangential material often confuses more than clarifies. Chapters on William Barr, the Catholic Opus Dei sect, Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein are interesting but do little to illuminate Trump’s perfidy. For example, Unger ties Barr to FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, suggesting that Hanssen was promoted while Barr was the attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration. Anyone with experience in government would be hard-pressed to explain how a mid-level FBI promotion of someone not yet suspected of a crime would be of interest to the attorney general.
Further, Unger relies on relatively few sources, and none with direct access to Trump or present-day Russia. Shvets and Oleg Kalugin, his sources on Russian intelligence methodology, were celebrated KGB officers but left Russia in the late 1980s and have no direct knowledge of Trump’s contacts with Russian officials. They provide interesting context and color, but Unger would have benefited from a wider variety of sources.
Trump’s election exposed a previously undetected flaw in our system of protecting national security secrets. A duly elected president cannot be denied a security clearance, yet the Republican Party nominated a candidate whose greed, lack of morals and relationship with criminal elements should have disqualified him for the lowest-level clearance, much less the highest office in the land. What Unger’s books have shown us is that the evidence was there for anyone willing to look. “American Kompromat” uncovers no secrets, nor does it reveal much that is new, but it reminds us that there is still much left to learn. We know that Trump was compromised, but we’re not sure exactly how.
American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery By Craig Unger
🐣 RT @thedailybeast BREAKING: Two Montana brothers accused of being among the first 10 people to storm the U.S. Capitol—before chasing a lone Black cop through the building and wreaking havoc inside the Senate chamber—have been charged. https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/1355181809940787201?s=20/photo/1
⋙ DailyBeast, Pilar Milendez: Montana Brothers Who Accosted Lone Black Cop During Capitol Riots Are Arrested http://bit.ly/3t2yB38
// Joshua and Jerod Hughes are accused of confronting Capitol Police cop Eugene Goodman, who heroically diverted the mob away from the Senate
🚫 🐣 RT @FlossObama Trump literally rallied people to attack the Capitol and we were perhaps two quick-thinking officers away from that situation being exponentially more tragic… and Republicans are now rallying in support of him again. The whole party is seditious.
// most perhaps, not all
🐣 RT @MollyJongFast Oy vey
⋙ 🧵 RT @ryanjreilly “We broke into the Capitol…we got inside, we did our part. We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the friggin’ brain but we didn’t find her.” — Dawn Bancroft, arrested in Pennsylvania today, along with Diana Santos-Smith. 📌 https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1355282121699565568?s=20/photo/1-2
Law&Crime: Pro-Trump Lawyer Lin Wood Says Georgia State Bar Told Him His Law License Is in Danger Unless He Takes Mental Health Exam http://bit.ly/3r3m4dZ Wood has appeared in rallies alongside Trump lawyer Sidney Powell
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Republican Ties to Extremist Groups Are Under Scrutiny http://nyti.ms/3j0wwA3
Named in article (alpha by state):
Mo Brooks (AL)
Andy Biggs (AZ)
Paul Gosar (AZ)
Lauren Bobert (CO)
Matt Gaetz (FL)
Marjorie Taylor Green (GA)
// A number of members of Congress have links to organizations and movements that played a role in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
🐣 RT @craigunger Must see: Watch me and Yuri Shvets, fmr KGB officer who is great source forAmerican Kompromat, on Narativ TV, telling for the 1st, straight from the horse’s mouth, how the KGB cultivated Donald Trump. Buy now: http://bit.ly/2Yo7txF @ZevShalev 💽 https://twitter.com/craigunger/status/1354826792247451649?s=20/photo/1
// 1/28/2021
⋙ American Kompromat. @CraigUnger’s new book reveals Trump’s KGB ties with former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, @lincolnsbible pscp.tv
↥ ↧
TheGuardian: ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy http://bit.ly/2NDzLlq “The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery”
// The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian
… Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.
Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.
Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”
He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”
⭕ 28 Jan 2021
WaPo, Karen Tumulty: The GOP struck a bad bargain. That’s how it got stuck with Marjorie Taylor Greene. http://wapo.st/2YogQgN //➔ “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside” ~ JFK
NYT, Paul Krugman: The G.O.P. Is in a Doom Loop of Bizarro http://nyti.ms/2Ypn2VD “If the Trump-incited Capitol insurrection didn’t snap the party back to sanity — and it didn’t — nothing will”
// But will it doom the rest of us, too?
🐣 RT @evanchill The Times’s Visual Investigations team obtained previously unpublished police bodycam video from an officer beaten by the Capitol mob on Jan. 6. It provides an officer’s perspective on the battle to defend an entryway where a rioter was crushed by the mob.
⋙ NYT: Body Camera Footage Shows Capitol Rioters Trampling Over Woman http://nyti.ms/2MDY9mn
// Video obtained by The Times provides a police officer’s view of the deadly battle to defend a key entryway from the surging mob.
As 34-year-old Rosanne Boyland lay dying on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6 after being crushed by a mob, fellow rioters were charging over her to attack police officers with crutches, a hockey stick and pepper spray, new police body camera footage shows.
Video obtained by The Times provides a previously unpublished view of the brutal fight between rioters and officers at a central entryway on the west side of the Capitol — the same one that President Biden used to descend to his inauguration ceremony two weeks later.
The footage shows how rioters, in their effort to attack the police, trampled on Ms. Boyland even as her friend, Justin Winchell, shouted that she was dying and needed help.
Federal prosecutors in Detroit played the video at a Jan. 25 court hearing in the case of Michael Joseph Foy, a Michigan man accused of attacking the officers with a hockey stick. The U.S. attorney’s office in Detroit provided the one minute and 20 second clip to The Times.
The footage appears to come from the body camera worn by one of four Metropolitan Police officers dragged out of the doorway and beaten by rioters during the hourslong battle. It begins at 4:26 p.m., just as officers have managed to push the mob out of the doorway. Inside, rioters had packed together in a dangerous crush in their attempt to force their way through the police and into the Capitol.
Seconds into the video, as rioters tumble over one another, a voice can be heard shouting, “Save her!” ¤ As rioters fall out of the doorway, Ms. Boyland is briefly visible in the video, and Mr. Winchell begins to scream, “She’s gonna die! She’s dead!”
“I need somebody!” Mr. Winchell shouts, turning to the crowd. Instead, a rioter behind him sprays a chemical irritant over his head toward the police.
A bearded rioter wearing a hat, brown jacket and University of Michigan sweatshirt then begins to move up the stairs toward the police. ¤ “Knock their masks off!” another rioter in a cowboy hat tells him.
The bearded rioter charges over Ms. Boyland and begins to grapple with the officer, grabbing his baton. At the same time, another rioter jabs the officer with a crutch. The officer is driven to the ground as the crowd cheers the attack.
A man in a hooded winter jacket, whom prosecutors say is Mr. Foy, is seen on the body camera footage advancing with his hockey stick and repeatedly swinging it down at the officers. Prosecutors allege in court documents that Mr. Foy, a former Marine, struck officers at least 10 times in 16 seconds.
“No! No!” Mr. Winchell screams, as the rioters swing at the police over Boyland’s body.
“I’ll kill you,” a rioter says to an officer, using an expletive, before grabbing the officer by his helmet and dragging him out of the doorway.
Mr. Winchell can again be heard screaming “Rosanne! Rosanne!”
After the first officer is dragged away, another rioter can be seen grabbing onto the leg of the fallen officer wearing the body camera. Then the footage ends. Other videos reviewed by The Times showed that rioters dragged the officer down the steps seconds later.
At around the same time, rioters dragged Ms. Boyland from the door and attempted but failed to resuscitate her. They then carried her back to the police battling rioters at the doorway, who moved her into the Capitol Rotunda, where paramedics eventually reached her. She was pronounced dead at a local hospital at 6:09 p.m., around an hour and a half later.
Mr. Foy faces multiple federal charges, including assaulting a police officer, and has been transferred from Detroit to Washington to face prosecution.
🐣 RT @AaronBlake This op-ed from fired Fox News political editor @ChrisStirewalt is something: ¤ He says this all “was partly a cynical, knowing effort by political operators and their hype men in the media to steal an election or at least get rich trying.”
⋙ LATimes: Op-Ed: I called Arizona for Biden on Fox News. Here’s what I learned http://lat.ms/3ataUsz
// fired by Fox for calling AZ first (and correctly); The news business operates in a marketplace that offers penalties for reporting the news but lots of rewards for indulging a consumer’s worst cravings.
💙 NYT, Michelle Goldberg: The First Post-Reagan Presidency http://nyti.ms/3iVayP9
// So far, Joe Biden has been surprisingly progressive.
⋙ See under Entire Articles: NYT Goldb Post-Reagan 1-28-2021
WaPo: Biden administration halts effort to install Trump loyalists on Pentagon advisory boards http://wapo.st/3oxH76F For some appointments, paperwork had not been completed, others serve “at the pleasure of the defense secretary”; a few have already been sworn in
🧵 RT @AshaRangappa_ THREAD. I had to take a little break from political Twitter to gather my thoughts on how the GOP is responding to impeachment. I find that in the face of gaslighting, it is useful to repeat things that we know to be true, and then assess the choices from there. To wit: 📌 https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1354964827429462021?s=20
2. TRUTH #1: Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. He could not accept this outcome. Because of his inability to accept this outcome, he manufactured a Big Lie that he *did* win the election, and put all of the official powers at his disposal to force this to be the case
3. TRUTH #2: As part of this effort, he attempted to 1) shakedown the Secretary of State of Georgia to manufacture 11,780 “extra” votes that would give him a victory in that state; 2) conspired with officials at DOJ to manufacture false cases of voter fraud in Georgia
4. and 3) rallied his supporters using the Big Lie to convene in Washington, D.C. to “fight” against Congress’ Electoral College certification. When this became a violent insurrection at the Capitol, he refused to use his power to either verbally disavow that insurrection or
5. use his official authority to permit the National Guard and other reinforcement mechanisms to protect the official and constitutional functions of a coequal branch of government. In so doing, he violated his oath of office.
6. TRUTH #3: His words and actions, in addition to his failure to act, resulted in the death of 5 people, including law enforcement officials, and the threat to the lives of members of Congress and his own Vice President.
7. TRUTH #4: If he had succeeded, it is unclear what state of functioning our democracy would be in at this moment.
8. TRUTH #5: There are members of Congress who subscribe to the Big Lie, and are effectively representing the interests of the domestic terrorists who invaded our Capitol in our democratic processes. https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1354970259262902275?s=20/photo/1
9. Reasonable people cannot disagree on the above Truths. The question is how whether and how Trump should be held accountable for #1-5. Impeachment is one option through which he can be held accountable, and specifically whether he should be barred from holding office again.
10. If Senators hide behind procedural arguments for why Trump’s actions cannot be adjudicated in an impeachment trial (on which the weight of experts agree is permitted), then they are avoiding, but not answering, the question of accountability
11. So the only questions to ask these people is: 1) Do you believe Trump should be held accountable for his actions? (yes or no) and 2) If not an impeachment, then how? (i.e., do they go on record as conceding that criminal prosecution is OK?)
12. Underlying both of these questions, of course, is the more fundamental question of: Do you disavow Trump’s Big Lie? Unless GOP are willing to go on record saying YES, then they are 1) saying the insurrection was justified and 2) Trump should not be held accountable, ever /END
P.S. I am a linear thinker and I think there is a nice graph/flowchart that can be made from the above if anyone is inclined to make it!
WaPo: Hostility between congressional Republicans and Democrats reaches new lows amid growing fears of violence http://wapo.st/3cm8b6w “‘The enemy is within the House of Representatives, … in addition to what is happening outside,’ Pelosi (D-Calif.) said”
⭕ 27 Jan 2021
NYT: U.S. faces heightened threats from violent domestic extremists after Capitol attack, Homeland Security says. http://nyti.ms/3t5W57x “The intelligence official involved with the bulletin [said] that the public warning should have been issued as early as November”
The warning contained in a “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” was a notable departure for a Department of Homeland Security accused of being reluctant during the Trump administration to publish intelligence reports or public warnings about the dangers posed by domestic extremists and white supremacist groups for fear of angering Mr. Trump, according to current and former homeland security officials.
Even after the Department of Homeland Security in September 2019 singled out white supremacists as a leading domestic terrorism threat, analysts and intelligence officials said their warnings were watered down, delayed or both. Former officials in the Trump administration have even said that White House officials sought to suppress the phrase “domestic terrorism.”
The intelligence official involved with the bulletin, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its findings, added that the public warning should have been issued as early as November, when Mr. Trump was making an escalating series of false accusations about the election, and that far-right groups continued to be galvanized by such false statements.
🐣 RT @nytopinion To dampen extremism, “advertisers should stop supporting networks that spread lies and hatred,” @NickKristof writes, “and cable companies should drop channels that persist in doing so.”
⋙ NYT, Nicholas Kristof: A Letter to My Conservative Friends http://nyti.ms/2YlBUEx “You’ve been hoodwinked, exploited & manipulated by con artists waving flags, casting lies & monetizing bigotry”
// Hold us accountable, but please do the same for the charlatans who deceive you, use you and cheat you.
🐣 RT @karissabe Mark Zuckerberg just said Facebook will permanently take political groups out of recommendations globally and is working on ways to reduce political content in News Feed bc “people don’t want politics and fighting to take over” their experience
🐣 RT @shannonrwatts 140 officers injured.
One officer dead from the attack; two from suicide.
Officers without helmets sustained brain injuries.
One officer has two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs.
One officer is going to lose his eye; one was stabbed with a metal fence stake.
[link to Cruz]
🐣 RT @kurtbardella The #Benghazi attack occurred on September 11, 2012.
3 years later, on October 15, 2015, @HillaryClinton testified before a GOP-controlled Congressional Committee for 11 hours.
3 weeks ago, our Capitol was under siege by domestic terrorists.
Republicans want us to move on.
WaPo: D.C. police sent 850 officers to the Capitol during insurrection, spent $8.8 million during week of Jan. 6 http://wapo.st/2MxmXg5 “This assault on the Capitol has exposed weaknesses in the security of the most secure city in the country” ~ Acting Police Chief Contee
Acting police chief Robert J. Contee III, in his opening statement Tuesday before a closed session of the House Appropriations Committee, also said for the first time that a D.C. police officer who had been at the riot committed suicide in the days that followed.
D.C. police sent about 850 officers, nearly one-quarter of its force, to help rescue the U.S. Capitol from the mob that broke in Jan. 6, and the department estimates it cost the District $8.8 million to secure the downtown during the week the insurrection occurred.
The chief cautioned that the $8.8 million cost is an estimate that is sure to change, and he said a more detailed financial accounting is forthcoming. He said police and prosecutors will be “engaged for years” investigating and trying insurgents.
Contee said many aspects of local policing will have to be revisited to confront new threats of domestic terrorism, including training that at present “neither anticipates nor prepares” officers for “hours of hand-to-hand combat.”
The chief also said the D.C. police force’s relationship with the myriad federal agencies in the District might be reexamined. “This assault on the Capitol has exposed weaknesses in the security of the most secure city in the country,” Contee told lawmakers.
He said federal and local agencies will now have to consider domestic terrorism as a serious threat, and “harden targets in the federal enclave.” That, Contee said, could make other buildings in the District “more likely targets.”
🐣 RT @WSJPolitics President Biden is expected to revamp the asylum system, after the Trump administration took steps to restrict access to humanitarian protection in the U.S.
⋙ WSJ: Biden to Rescind Curbs on Asylum Policy Enacted by Trump http://on.wsj.com/3adfavN
// President plans to use executive actions to end safe-third-country rule, ‘Remain in Mexico’ program
WaPo: Republicans back away from confronting Trump and his loyalists after the Capitol insurrection, embracing them instead http://wapo.st/2Yj76UU They “accommodate Trump’s most fervent supporters as they continue to champion the falsehood of widespread electoral fraud”
💙 WaPo: Self-styled militia members in three states began planning in November for recruits, weapons ahead of Capitol breach, U.S. alleges http://wapo.st/3t6zhV9 “[T]he group cited the perceived direction of President Donald Trump”
Three self-styled militia members charged in the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol began soliciting recruits for potential violence within days of the 2020 presidential election, later training in Ohio and North Carolina and organizing travel to Washington with a busload of comrades and a truck of weapons, U.S. authorities alleged Wednesday.
A four-count indictment returned in D.C. laid out fresh details and allegations against Jessica Marie Watkins, 38, and Donovan Ray Crowl, 50 — both of Woodstock, Ohio — and Thomas E. Caldwell, 66, of Berryville, Va. The three, all U.S. military veterans, are accused of conspiring to obstruct Congress and other counts, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Prosecutors have said Caldwell appears to have ties to the anti-government Oath Keepers extremist group — although his attorney said he is not a member. They also have alleged that the retired Navy lieutenant commander helped organize dozens of others who coordinated their movements as they “stormed the castle” to disrupt the confirmation of President Biden’s electoral college victory.
Real-time conversations recovered from a walkie-talkie-style app captured Watkins discussing a group of about 30 to 40 “sticking together and sticking to the plan” during the breach, according to court documents previously filed in the case.
In a 15-page indictment unsealed Wednesday, prosecutors revealed new allegations, accusing Watkins of contacting recruits on Nov. 9, six days after the election, for a “Basic Training” camp outside Columbus, Ohio, in early January so they would be “fighting fit by innaugeration.” Prosecutors also allege that Watkins participated in a “leadership only” conference call via an encrypted app, and that Caldwell arranged with another person bringing “at least one full bus 40+ people coming from N.C.” and weaponry ahead of Jan. 6.
Crowl, a former Marine mechanic, attended a training camp in December in North Carolina, while Caldwell hosted Watkins in Northern Virginia, charging papers said.
At one point, Caldwell wrote Watkins, “Don’t know what [Person One] is cooking up but I am hearing rumblings of another MAGA march 12 December. I don’t know what will happen but like you I am very worried about the future of our country . . . I believe we will have to get violent to stop this.” ¤ “You are my kinda person and we may have to fight next time,” Caldwell added.
Previous charging papers identified Person One as “Stewie,” a possible reference to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.
On Dec. 30, Caldwell messaged Watkins saying, “If [Person One] isn’t making plans, I’ll take charge myself, and get the ball rolling,” the indictment stated. On Jan. 2, Caldwell allegedly concluded, “I don’t know if [Person One] has even got out his call to arms, but its a little friggin late. This one we do on our own. This is one we are doing on our own.”
Caldwell allegedly told Watkins that the leader of another group, unnamed in the indictment but described in previous court filings as “Paul,” promised a busload of more than 40 and weaponry.
Paul “is too broken down to be on the ground all day and . . . he is committed to being the quick reaction force and bringing the tools if something goes to hell,” Caldwell said, according to the indictment. “That way the boys won’t have to schlep weps on the bus. He’ll bring them in his truck the day before.” …
In their planning, according to prosecutors, the group cited the perceived direction of President Donald Trump, embracing his false claims of election fraud and readying for a fight in apocalyptic terms.
“Trump wants all able-bodied Patriots to come” to the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, Watkins is quoted as saying on Dec. 29. ¤ “If Trump activates the Insurrection Act, I’d hate to miss it,” she added, according to the indictment.
Asked earlier by a recruit what to prepare for, Watkins allegedly wrote in November that if Biden became president, “our way of life as we know it is over. Our Republic would be over. Then it is our duty as Americans to fight, kill and die for our rights.”
Prosecutors previously detailed the group’s alleged communications over the walkie-talkie-style app Zello during the riot.
“You are executing citizen’s arrest. Arrest this assembly, we have probable cause for acts of treason, election fraud,” one man said as Watkins reported undergoing plastic bullet and tear-gas fire. ¤ “This is . . . everything we f—ing trained for!” an unknown man told Watkins, according to the court documents.
The new charges against the three were among eight indictments returned Wednesday by a grand jury against previously charged defendants. The indictments come one day after Acting U.S. Attorney Michael R. Sherwin said that investigators are turning their focus to whether militia groups and individuals in several states may have coordinated or planned ahead of time to commit criminal acts. Law enforcement officials have focused on the Oath Keepers, the nativist Proud Boys, and Three Percenters, another anti-government group that takes its name from the bogus claim that only 3 percent of the colonists supported the American Revolution against the British.
WaPo: Homeland security bulletin warns Americans about violence by grievance-fueled domestic extremists http://wapo.st/3ceoNNC
CNN: The Republican Party is at war with itself as it charts its post-Trump future http://cnn.it/2YkQMD2
LegalInformationInstitute (Cornell Law): 18 U.S. Code § 2384 – Seditious conspiracy http://bit.ly/3pAAX76 Text Block: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1354435558035107842?s=20/photo/1
18 U.S. Code § 2384 – Seditious conspiracy
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 808; July 24, 1956, ch. 678, § 1, 70 Stat. 623; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(N), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)
🐣 The Trump Admin had a year to put in place a national database for COVID-19 vaccine appointments and tracking or at least put in place standards for the data to be collected. They didn’t ~ meaning everyone’s doing their own in their own way. Not just states, but each distributor.
⋙ 🐣 I assumed that military logistics was doing this, but they stopped at shipping out the vaccines, with no attention given to point-of-care distribution.
🐣 ◕ RT @eyokley A third [35%] of Trump voters say they’d be interested in joining a “Patriot Party” led by Donald Trump, per our latest poll with @POLITICO https://twitter.com/eyokley/status/1354415926288986117?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 📊 MorningConsult Poll: Senate Republicans Signal Acquittal for Trump as His Standing Improves Among GOP Voters http://bit.ly/3ortGoW
// 75% of Republican voters said they’d disapprove of Trump’s conviction
● Almost half of Independents support Trump’s conviction https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1354426301617213448?s=20/photo/1
● Most Republican Voters want Trump to play big role in party, but not All Voters https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1354427160992342019?s=20/photo/1
// Note first chart in @eyokley tweet
🐣 RT @tribelaw It’s Holocaust Remembrance Day—the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp.
🐣 RT @kenroth “Alexei Navalny combines two qualities that Russians admire: a mordant sarcasm toward the country’s leaders and great personal bravery. Together, they make him the most potent political threat that President Vladimir Putin has ever faced.”
⋙ WaPo, David Ignatius: Even from prison, Navalny is the most potent political threat Putin has ever faced http://wapo.st/36emN4g In response to Navalny’s video, “Putin on Monday denied that he owned the ‘palace.’ But [Putin’s] aura of invulnerability has been cracked”
Alexei Navalny combines two qualities that Russians admire: a mordant sarcasm toward the country’s leaders and great personal bravery. Together, they make him the most potent political threat that President Vladimir Putin has ever faced.
Navalny’s latest riposte is a wickedly funny video posted Jan. 19 on YouTube, documenting the corruption that surrounds what he calls “Putin’s Palace,” a billion-dollar project on the Black Sea that includes mansions, vineyards, a private casino, even an underground hockey rink. The video alleges a network of payoffs for Putin’s friends and family, as well as for two girlfriends and their relatives.
The mocking video had been seen by more than 90 million people as of Tuesday. And its message of defiance helped bring thousands of protesters onto the streets last weekend in 100 Russian cities to protest Putin’s corrupt and authoritarian regime. Russian security forces arrested more than 3,000 protesters Saturday, and Putin on Monday denied that he owned the “palace.” But his aura of invulnerability has been cracked.
🐣 RT @HotlineJosh Portman adviser Corry Bliss: “If you want to spend all your time on FOX and be[ing] an asshole, there’s never been a better time to serve. But if you want to spend your time being thoughtful and getting shit done, there’s never been a worse time to serve”
⋙ NationalJournal: Mainstream Republicans already surrendering to Trumpism http://bit.ly/39mK1ah
// From opposing conviction in his impeachment trial to a surprise Senate Republican retirement, the GOP establishment anticipates a Trumpian future.
🚫 🧵 RT @bjrich_ #BREAKING: Trump appointee says Tuberville, RAGA director met with Trump family, top advisers on eve of Capitol attack via @BurkhalterEddie 📌 https://twitter.com/bjrich_/status/1354227754212974599?s=20
⋙ AlabamaReporter, Eddie Burkhalter: Trump appointee says Tuberville, RAGA director met with Trump family, top advisers on eve of Capitol attack http://bit.ly/3a7RNnx
// waiting for another source to confirm; RAGA = Republican AG AAssn; Tuberville, through a spokeswoman, said he did not attend the meeting with Trump on the eve of the deadly attack.
CNN, Marshall Cohen: ‘Blame Trump’ defense from alleged Capitol rioters dovetails with Democrats’ impeachment case http://cnn.it/3cecKzI “One by one, die-hard supporters of former President Donald Trump are now blaming him for their actions that day, after being charged”
🐣 RT @McFaul In one phone call readout w/ Putin, Biden & team clearly articulated their new Russia policy: (1) engage on mutual interests, (2) contain Putin’s belligerent actions & (3) speak up in defense of human rights. Rather brilliant:
⋙ WhiteHouse: Readout of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia http://bit.ly/3qNjDw6
// 1/26/2021
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Our new Secretary of State Tony Blinken is brilliant, experienced, and globally known and respected. Under the Trump/Pompeo disaster our allies were vilified and thug strongmen embraced. America is getting back to our values.
⋙ 🐣 RT @mitchellreports #TonyBlinken confirmed 78 to 22 by the Senate as Secretary of State inheriting a department hollowed out and demoralized by Mike Pompeo and former President Trump
⭕ 26 Jan 2021
🐣 RT @chrislhayes The central story of American politics right now is that one of the two parties is *radicalizing against democracy* in front of our eyes. There are tons of other stories as well, but they all come after that, I think.
CNN: Marjorie Taylor Greene indicated support for executing prominent Democrats in 2018 and 2019 before running for Congress http://cnn.it/3qWnOWt
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Duckworth: “At the 1st opportunity, Pres. Joe Biden called out Vladimir Putin for reportedly putting bounties on the heads of our brave servicemembers in Afghanistan. After more than 100 days of silence from Donald Trump, it’s a relief to have a Commander in Chief who cares.”
NYT: Man Charged With Threatening Congressman’s Family as Riot Raged http://nyti.ms/3ooEsw4
// Relatives of Hakeem Jeffries and George Stephanopoulos received threatening text messages as rioters stormed the Capitol, federal prosecutors said.
WaPo: Pentagon restricted commander of D.C. Guard ahead of Capitol riot http://wapo.st/3iRU4XZ but … it’s complicated
🐣 RT @CNN Members of Congress were left stunned in a briefing from law enforcement about their failure to prepare for the insurrection, two members who attended a House Appropriations Committee briefing say, with one saying it was “dumb luck” more people didn’t die
⋙ CNN: Democrats stunned by briefing on Capitol’s security before insurrection: ‘It was only by pure dumb luck’ more weren’t killed http://cnn.it/3pqZTOo
💙 🐣 RT @Lawrence The Senate did NOT vote on the constitutionality of the impeachment trial today. They voted only on whether to debate the constitutionality today. 45 voted to debate it immediately. 55 voted to not debate it today with the understanding that it will be debated in the trial.
🧵 RT @TheRickWilson 1/ A lot of DC groups where were ass-deep in the January 6th violent insurrection suddenly want to whitewash their role in funding and supporting it, and the people who made it happen. ¤ They’re upset to be publicly associated with the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, cop-killers, et al… 📌 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1354125939379216385?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson 2/ …but the operative word is *publicly*. They were all in, proud as peacocks until they got caught. I’m not talking about people like Trumpjugend Gauleiter Charlie Kirk or the Stop the Steal mooks. They’re just the scuzzy demimonde of Trump world.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TheRickWilson 3/ You start digging into the people who supported the Capitol attack rally and you’ll find a lot of big named groups. ¤ But when you get into the people who funded the Sedition Caucus in the House and Senate, the stakes get higher.
🐣 RT @starsandstripes U.S. authorities have opened case files on at least 400 people and expect to bring sedition charges against some “very soon” in the sprawling investigation of the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol, officials said.
⋙ StarsAndStripes: Prosecutors expect sedition charges in Capitol breach http://bit.ly/39mY7Z8
💙 🔲 💽 PBS: Trump’s American Carnage http://to.pbs.org/3t0c86U
// FRONTLINE traces Trump’s siege on his enemies, the media and even the leaders of his own party, who for years ignored the warning signs of what was to comRed:
🐣 RT @SenSchumer President Biden should declare a national emergency on the climate crisis. ¤ Donald Trump declared some fake emergency for his ineffective, wasteful wall. That wasn’t an emergency. ¤ If there was ever an emergency, the climate crisis is an emergency.
🐣 RT @Tovah1953 Two GOP congressmen, @RepGosar and @RepAndyBiggsAZ sought pardons for their connection to Capitol attack: Now why would they need Presidential Pardons???? Could this be a statement of guilt and complicity in the insurrection, eh?
⋙ Salon (1/20): Two GOP congressmen sought pardons for their connection to Capitol attack: report http://bit.ly/3cdlPJd
// 1/20/2021; Trump, still facing trial in the Senate, turned down House superfans’ requests after meeting with legal advisers
🐣 RT @Robert4787 The #Russian #hackers didn’t get in gradually, they got inside instantly by sneaking a malicious code into a #Software update pushed out to thousands of government agencies and private companies. #CyberSecurity #CyberAttack #securitybreach #CyberCrime
AP: Russian hack of US agencies exposed supply chain weaknesses http://bit.ly/3t1gJpA
🐣 RT @tribelaw Calling it the QAnon “theory” degrades the concept of “theory.” ¤ It’s like speaking of the Flat Earth “theory.” It’s a world view, and not one that can be falsified or verified. That’s what makes it so dangerous.
💙 🐣 RT @RepRiggleman Oregon GOP doubles down on #CapitolRiots False Flag, TX GOP says WE ARE THE STORM, Hawaii goes QAnon, KY GOP hits McConnell, Kemp under fire in GA, VA has QAnon gov front runner, Trump does robo calls for crazy Kelli in AZ, Sanders endorsed by Trump in AR, MI GOP after Rep Upton
// state GOP parties going haywire
🐣 RT @DeanObeidallah Listen closely to the deafening silence of GOP leaders NOT denouncing in one voice QAnon, The Proud Boys, militias and the 22% of GOPers (per polls) who supported the violent attack on the Capitol. Instead they defend Trump. Violence is now an accepted part of the GOP playbook.
🐣 RT @jimsciutto As I watch the events of the last several weeks, I keep remembering this prescient interview with DNI Clapper in 2016: “We pride ourselves on the institutions that have evolved over 100s of years & I do worry about the fragility of those institutions.”
⋙ CNN (2016): Intel chief Clapper worried about instability in the U.S. http://cnn.it/39fIeUh
// 7/29/2026
AP: ‘THIS IS ME’: Rioters flaunt involvement in Capitol siege http://bit.ly/2YcGx3M “Their total lack of concern over getting caught and their friends’ willingness to turn them in has helped authorities charge about 150 people as of Monday with federal crimes”
⭕ 25 Jan 2021
🐣 RT @SteveSchmidtSES There are a number of GOP state parties that are more accurately described as Q Parties. Oregon, California, Texas and Arizona are among them. Understanding what side controls what in the GOP civil war will be key to understanding and covering it.
🧵 RT @SteveSchmidtSES The January 6th vote is as irreconcilable for the GOP as was the Kansas/Nebraska act for the Whigs. It has broken the GOP in two. @mattgaetz has declared Trump as the forever leader of the Republican Party and more ominously “The America First Movement”. Like its ‘85 year old 📌 https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1353898734426402817?s=20
💙 🔆 This❗️⋙ TPM: The Capitol Mob Was Only The Finale Of Trump’s Conspiracy To Overturn The Election http://bit.ly/3plZXPF ¤ #longread 🖼 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1354067075770294274?s=20/photo/1
// Trump’s incitement of the Jan. 6 riot, which is now the subject of an impeachment trial, was just one part of his scheme to subvert democracy.
🐣 RT @ In this heavily researched piece, @UrbanAchievr argues that the warning signs for Jan. 6 were obvious and that “the GOP is too compromised by extremists to be trusted with political power any time soon.”
⋙ TheBulwark, Christian VanderBruck: Meet Trump’s Pro-Insurrection “Intellectuals” http://bit.ly/3pkhYOh
// We should have known January 6 was coming, because Trumpism’s “intellectual” wing called for it, for weeks.
For an example of this festering interest in violence, which is both anti-government and anti-police, consider a recent article by Claremont Institute fellow and Boston University professor emeritus Angelo Codevilla. Published just days before the November presidential election, “The Police and Us” argued that it was time for conservatives to start “hurting cops.”
Three days after votes were cast, conservative activist Ned Ryun (who ironically served as a member of Trump’s Advisory 1776 Commission), itemized a number of alleged election irregularities—“you’re telling me the semi-senile basement dweller won roughly 3 million more votes than Obama did in 2008?” “Look at Milwaukee and the statistical improbabilities of the Democratic votes there.”—before channeling Malcolm X to propose violence as a remedy for his grievances: channeling Malcolm X to propose violence as a remedy for his grievances:
Former Trump national security spokesman Michael Anton—best known for authoring the “Flight 93 election” essay analogizing Democrats to terrorists bent on destroying the republic—made a similar argument, suggesting hopefully that Trump supporters might be aroused to “rebellion” ¤ Anton, like Codevilla, is not a shitposter looking for milita-clicks. He’s one of Trumpism’s intellectuals.Pro-Trump conservatives and elected Republicans echoed and amplified such menacing calls over the next eight weeks, with a particular focus on legislators, state government officials, and judges who refused to help the president remain in power
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani endorsed threats against lawmakers who refused to help overturn the election results. “Sometimes it even requires being threatened,” Giuliani said about pressuring Michigan state lawmakers.
Freshman congressman Madison Cawthorn urged attendees at Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA to threaten their representatives as well.
“So, everybody, I’m telling you, I’m encouraging you, please get on the phone, call your congressman,” he said. “And feel free, you can lightly threaten them, and say, ‘You know what? If you don’t start supporting election integrity, I’m coming after you, Madison Cawthorn is coming after you. Everybody is coming after you.”
Representative Louie Gohmert told Newsmax that the Supreme Court’s refusal to overturn the election left Trump supporters no choice but to resort to violence:
Just days after Trump’s election loss, American Greatness contributor Chuck de Caro recalled the McMinn County War of 1946 (also known as the Battle of Athens) during which a group of two thousand veterans violently rebelled against corrupt local officials with automatic weapons, Molotov cocktails and dynamite, ultimately seizing ballot boxes implicated in a disputed election.
De Caro was explicit about the historical lesson he hoped to impart, suggesting that disappointed Trump supporters consider paramilitary action to combat perceived electoral malfeasance:
In broad strokes, this was the scenario that played out at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 as rioters disrupted Congress’s formal acceptance of Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Reprising the role of returning GI’s were groups like the far-right Oath Keepers militia, which recruits primarily among former military personnel.
Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn attracted widespread condemnation for advocating that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act in the weeks following the election and demanding a “re-vote” under military supervision. Fewer people noticed that Flynn also encouraged his followers on social media to donate to a group called the “1st Amendment Praetorian,” which describes itself as a “volunteer force of military, Law Enforcement & intel agency community professionals standing up to protect the 1st Amendment and those who use it.”
The co-founder of 1st Amendment Praetorian, a former Green Beret named Robert Patrick Lewis, also promoted the Battle of Athens narrative to his followers, while directly threatening Republican officials.
“Tar, feathers, pitchforks, torches and a railroad tie to carry them to the city line would go a long way right now. Or we can go Battle of Athens,” Lewis tweeted in response to a complaint about the Republican governors of Arizona and Georgia. “You should have one of your aides teach you a history lesson on the Battle of Athens,” he tweeted directly at Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona. “You’re skating on thin ice, buster.”
On the day of the insurrection, the official 1st Amendment Praetorian account—the same group Michael Flynn told Americans to support financially—tweeted “#WETHEPEOPLE OWN DC” over a picture showing that demonstrators had “breached the Capitol.” It wrote “Happy Warrior” above a photo of the shirtless “Q Shaman” Jacob Chansley inside the Capitol.
The attacks on police, the threats against legislators, the attempt to violently disrupt the democratic process: All were part of a militant narrative that pervaded right-wing discourse since—and even before—the 2020 election.
… [I]t’s important to note that the idea was for violence [even] if Trump won, and then violence when he lost. The violence is the constant. The violence is the point.
After Rep. Liz Cheney voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection, Wyoming state GOP chairman Frank Eathorne told Trump confidant Steve Bannon that his party was considering support for secession. “Many of these Western states have the ability to be self-reliant, and we’re keeping eyes on Texas too, and their consideration of possible secession,” he said on Bannon’s podcast.
The Texas GOP has also flirted with the idea. State party chairman Allen West, angered by the Supreme Court’s decision to summarily dismiss a petition backed by 18 states to throw out the election results, issued a press release suggesting that “perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution.”
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh also entered the secessionist fray, telling his audience that America is “trending toward secession” and that “there cannot be a peaceful coexistence” between the right and left.
Things have moved surprisingly quickly for a taboo subject that, in the modern era, has never been more than a plaything for cranks and purveyors of self-published race war fantasy fiction. …
“Trenchard” [pseudonym] predicts/wishes/pleasures-himself-with the idea that, if push comes to shove, today’s unionists would lack the fortitude to impose their will by force, because “there was no moral controversy that would come close to this kind of stark alternative; no higher ideal that would plausibly justify shedding the blood of fellow Americans.”
But this raises the question: What was the moral controversy for which founders of “Trenchard’s” new “United American Counties” were willing to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor? ¤ A vague opposition to “woke” politics and cancel culture? Anger over pronouns and bathrooms and drag queen story hour? Frustration with stalled Section 230 reform? ¤ Or is it simply personal allegiance to Donald J. Trump?
Who can say. But it is useful to recall that this culture was preparing for violence even if Trump had won. ¤ So maybe it’s not about anything other than hatred of their fellow Americans.
@TheLastWord Fmr. Sen. John Danforth tells @Lawrence that Sen. Josh Hawley is responsible for the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol because he “created an event…that would be the focal point for what turned out to be one of the darkest days in American history.” https://on.msnbc.com/3c7PpQl
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson So THAT explains the subliterate word vomit filling my email tonight.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Acyn Hannity is upset over Rick Wilson 💽 https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1353904699599151104?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: McConnell relents on Senate rules, signals power-sharing deal with Democrats http://wapo.st/2YbRum4 … “after two Democratic senators — [Manchin (WV) and Sinema (AZ)] — publicly reiterated their previously stated opposition to eliminating the filibuster”
McConnell on Monday said he was prepared to move forward on a deal “modeled on that [2001] precedent” after two Democratic senators — Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) — publicly reiterated their previously stated opposition to eliminating the filibuster. ¤ “They agree with President Biden’s and my view that no Senate majority should destroy the right of future minorities of both parties to help shape legislation,” he said.
Biden said in July that he’d “take a look” at eliminating the filibuster if Republicans became overly “obstreperous” but has otherwise been respectful of the traditions of the Senate, where he spent six terms before becoming vice president in 2009.
🐣 RT @RexChapman Mitch McConnell just folded. ¤ Thank you, Georgia… 💽 https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1353914846618791942?s=20/photo/1
// Chuck Schumer on Rachel Maddow: She says rules for committees will be the same as the last time there was a 50/50 split ~ but what is that?
💙 🔆 This❗️⋙ Politico: McConnell agrees to allow Senate power-sharing to move forward http://politi.co/2Mq4f9Q “McConnell backed down from his demand that any Senate power-sharing agreement include protections for the legislative filibuster” after Manchin and Sinema reassurances
// A fight over the filibuster had kept the Senate stalled.
⋙ 🐣 So, if McConnell tries to threaten to filibuster EVERYTHING Dems propose, as in the past, Manchin and Sinema have the option to change their minds. More power to the moderates, more options for Dems: more likely for big chunks of Biden agenda getting through
⋙ 🐣 But there’s this: “The ongoing negotiations have left Senate committee assignments in limbo.” Whut?!
📊 TheHill: Most in new poll support Trump impeachment, want Senate conviction http://bit.ly/3pf43Jc Monmouth Poll: 56% support impeachment; 52% support conviction (44% oppose)
// The survey released Monday from Monmouth University found that 56 percent said they supported the impeachment over Trump’s role in a deadly riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol earlier this month. Forty-two percent said they did not support his impeachment.” ¤ A slightly smaller majority — 52 percent — said they wanted the Senate to convict Trump, while 44 percent did not want to see a conviction.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Can confirm.
⋙ 🐣 RT @stuartpstevens Umm..@HawleyMO is asking if @ProjectLincoln has been in touch with Dems. No. But what he should really ask is how many of his staffers, disgusted by his betrayal, have been in touch with LP? You think they all signed up for sedition? The calls are coming from inside the house. twitter.com/projectlincoln…
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Josh Hawley is looking to blame everyone but himself. [Hawley Letter:] https://twitter.com/stuartpstevens/status/1353898685323599873?s=20/photo/1-2
💙 💽 JustSecurity: “Fight for Trump”: Video Evidence of Incitement at the Capitol http://bit.ly/36fAYps
↥ ↧
WaPo: House Democrats plan to focus impeachment trial on how rioters reacted to Trump’s remarks http://wapo.st/3qSC1Uc “One item of particular interest to impeachment managers is a 10-minute video released Monday by Just Security”
// … “an online forum hosted by the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, which shows how Trump’s words were heard and interpreted by those who ransacked the Capitol, according to the people familiar with the managers’ trial preparations”
🐣 It’s okay for some Democrats to be uncertain about the filibuster now. The point is to leave the option open to nuke it IF McConnell uses it to stop everything the Democrats want to get done. The option must remain open to use later. Or Dems will lose in 2022.
// reply to https://twitter.com/FlossObama/status/1353749812630482944?s=20
↥ ↧
WaPo, Greg Sargent: Mitch McConnell’s latest sabotage effort is a scam. He already showed us how. http://wapo.st/2NvCXzr //➔ McConnell has no intention of using the filibuster to assure bipartisanship; he wants to make Democrats fail so he can win back the Senate
// McConnell is exploiting a convention in political reporting that rewards his bad faith.
WaPo: Dominion voting machine firm sues Giuliani for more than $1.3 billion http://wapo.st/3cbJ86k
🐣 RT @MaxBoot Trump started the fire—and congressional Republicans provided the kindling by refusing to challenge his election lies. ¤ And now they say it’s too divisive to hold a political arsonist to account?
⋙ WaPo, Max Boot: It’s not just Trump on trial. It’s the whole Republican Party. http://wapo.st/3iJLgTU
🐣 RT @pbump Trump was impeached for the insurrection attempt. But in the months prior, he also repeatedly amplified false claims, tried to pressure county- and state-level officials, entertained a plot to overturn DOJ leadership and pushed Pence to act unilaterally.
⋙ WaPo, Philip Bump: What we know about Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election http://wapo.st/2YfFLTq Trump did a lot more than incite a riot to interfere with the election:
● Text Block: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1353793492670148610?s=20/photo/1
● Repeated claims and lawsuits focused on alleged fraud.
● Pressuring officials in Michigan about certifying the election results.
● Pressuring Michigan legislators to throw out his loss in the state.
● Calling the speaker of the Pennsylvania House to help reverse results.
● Pressuring leaders in Georgia and Arizona to overturn their states’ votes.
● Directly cajoling Georgia’s secretary of state to gin up a reason for throwing out the results.
● Entertaining a plot to oust the acting attorney general so that the Justice Department could allege fraud.
● Encouraging his vice president to ignore the Constitution.
🐣 RT @DemocracyDocket “The potential violations here – incitement to riot and seditious conspiracy – are among the most serious crimes in the U.S. Criminal Code. Seditious conspiracy is literally a crime against democracy itself. In addition, the facts here are especially egregious.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @DemocracyDocket 🚨ICYMI: @Accountable_Org requests formal ethics investigation of Rep. Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Biggs (R-AZ) and Rep. Cawthorn (R-NC) for their role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. ¤ Read the complaint👇
⋙⋙ DemocracyDocket: UPDATE: Watchdog Group Calls for Ethics Investigation into Conduct of Gosar, Biggs and Cawthorn http://bit.ly/3caa0nd
// “The group is asking the Office of Congressional Ethics to recommend expulsion of the three Members from the U.S. House of Representatives.”
DailyBeast, Matt Lewis: The GOP Found Their Backbone in Liz Cheney. Trumpists Want to Cancel Her. http://bit.ly/3iLVu6d
// What’s wrong with the GOP, No. 3,867: Cheney cast a brave vote. Her colleagues should be making her speaker. Instead, they want to demote her.
🐣 RT @VeraMBergen The DOJ Office of the Inspector General announces it’s opening an investigation into “whether any former or current DOJ official engaged in an improper attempt to have DOJ seek to alter the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election” http://bit.ly/3iMZnYs
⭕ 24 Jan 2021
NYT: Son Tipped Off F.B.I. About His Father, Who Is Charged in Capitol Riot http://nyti.ms/3cgxzuF //➔ his father threaten to kill him if he reported him to the police – but his son already had; he is 18
// “I put my emotions behind me to do what I thought was right,” said Jackson Reffitt, who weeks before the siege alerted the F.B.I. that his father was planning “something big.”
WaPo, Margaret Sullivan: Fox News is a hazard to our democracy. It’s time to take the fight to the Murdochs. Here’s how. http://wapo.st/2Y958pV
CNN, Marshall Cohen: Chronicling Trump’s 10 worst abuses of power http://cnn.it/3qPw2Q0
🐣 RT @VelshiMSNBC It was the telling and spreading of “a big lie” after defeat that led Hitler to power in post-WWI Germany. @TimothyDSnyder says the U.S. is now facing a challenge. We can keep telling ourselves lies, or we can do the right thing. Face the facts, get history right. #velshi 💽 https://twitter.com/VelshiMSNBC/status/1353445552487161856?s=20/photo/1
JustSecurity, Andrew Weissmann: Gaps in Trump’s Pardons Apply to Bannon Criminal Charges As Well http://bit.ly/3om1nbG
NYT: Trump Wants Back on Facebook. This Star-Studded Jury Might Let Him. http://nyti.ms/3ofp4Ci
// A new kind of corporate supercourt is looking for legitimacy.
🐣 RT @RepJayapal White supremacy is an issue as old as our nation. It needs to be taken seriously and domestic terrorists, like those who stormed the Capitol, need to be held accountable.
⋙ NPR: Biden Administration Announces Plans To Assess Domestic Violent Extremism http://n.pr/3pjVDAk
🐣 RT @WindsorMann “Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.” —Hannah Arendt
🐣 RT @danielsgoldman Trump’s attempt to cheat in the election led to Impeachment 1. When that failed, he then tried to steal the election, which has now led to Impeachment 2. The only way to ensure this lawless, authoritarian, anti-democratic conduct never happens again is to hold him accountable
⭕ 23 Jan 2021
🔆 This❗️⋙ WSJ: Trump Pressed Justice Department to Go Directly to Supreme Court to Overturn Election Results http://on.wsj.com/3a2n7DY
// The former president dropped the efforts to replace the acting attorney general after top DOJ officials agreed to resign en masse in protest if he succeeded, people familiar said
In his last weeks in office, former President Donald Trump considered moving to replace the acting attorney general with another official ready to pursue unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, and he pushed the Justice Department to ask the Supreme Court to invalidate President Biden’s victory, people familiar with the matter said.
Those efforts failed due to pushback from his own appointees in the Justice Department, who refused to file what they viewed as a legally baseless lawsuit in the Supreme Court. Later, other senior department officials threatened to resign en masse should Mr. Trump fire then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, according to several people familiar with the discussions.
Senior department officials, including Mr. Rosen, former Attorney General William Barr and former acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall refused to file the Supreme Court case, concluding that there was no basis to challenge the election outcome and that the federal government had no legal interest in whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden won the presidency, some of these people said. White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, also opposed Mr. Trump’s idea, which was promoted by his outside attorneys, these people said.
“He wanted us, the United States, to sue one or more of the states directly in the Supreme Court,” a former administration official said. “The pressure got really intense” after a lawsuit Texas filed in the Supreme Court against four states Mr. Biden won was dismissed on Dec. 11, the official said. An outside lawyer working for Mr. Trump drafted a brief the then-president wanted the Justice Department to file, people familiar with the matter said, but officials refused. …
Mr. Trump has defended his efforts to change the election results by alleging, without evidence, that there was widespread fraud as an attempt to “honor” the votes of those who supported him and ensure Americans “can have faith” in the electoral process. …
NYT: Pennsylvania Lawmaker Played Key Role in Trump’s Plot to Oust Acting Attorney General http://nyti.ms/3qM14bI “Representative Scott Perry…an outspoken Pennsylvania Republican, played a significant role in the crisis that played out at the top of the Justice Department”
// The congressman’s involvement underlined how far the former president was willing to go to overturn the election, and Democratic lawmakers have begun calling for investigations into those efforts.
Representative Scott Perry … an outspoken Pennsylvania Republican, played a significant role in the crisis that played out at the top of the Justice Department this month, when Mr. Trump considered firing the acting attorney general and backed down only after top department officials threatened to resign en masse.
🧵 RT @AVindman Stunning scenes from across Russia. Moscow & St. Petersburg aren’t representative of Russia, so too often events there don’t represent the views of the rest of the country. These protests are different: In the dead of winter, tens of thousands have come out in the streets. 📌 https://twitter.com/AVindman/status/1352990329528610822?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @AVindman […] The attempted assassination & confinement of Navalny have aroused deeper feelings. These protests seem to have legs. If Putin cracks down, which is his proclivity, he may rouse a movement so widespread that even his ruthlessly efficient security forces will find hard to control.
🐣 RT @PaulaChertok One Moscow protester told Reuters: “I’m tired of being afraid. I haven’t just turned up for myself and Navalny, but for my son because there is no future in this country.” NavalnyProtests #FreeNavalny #Navalny #FreeRussia
⋙ 🐣 RT @PaulaChertok #NavalnyProtests “one of the biggest unauthorised rallies for years”—Reuters reports protesters endured bitter cold, brutal beatings
🔥 40,000+ in Moscow
🔥 protests in 70 cities, towns across #Russia
🔥 1000+ arrests
🔥 Yulia Navalnaya @Navalny wife detained
⋙⋙ Reuters: Police arrest over 1,500 at Russia protests backing jailed Kremlin foe Navalny http://reut.rs/2MfGTE7
🐣 RT @McFaul Putin’s criminal police state at work. (But remember, they tell us, he is so popular and beloved by his people as a great leader!)
⋙ 🐣 RT @MBKhMedia Прорыв оцепления в Петербурге [Translated:] Breakthrough of the cordon in St. Petersburg
🐣 RT @brhodes Whatever Putin does makes Navalny more powerful.
⋙ 🐣 RT @maxseddon Two hours and hundreds of arrests later, there are still thousands of people stretching a mile in each direction in Moscow. This must be the biggest anti-Putin rally in years. People I spoke to weren’t necessarily political before, but what Russia did to Navalny infuriated them
🐣 RT @kasparov63 Let us raise our demands of the Biden admin higher than tweets and “serious concerns.” Putin loves to see those, as then he knows there won’t be action that threatens his money and power. Act or be complicit, period.
⋙ 🐣 RT @michaeldweiss Seems like Biden’s first big foreign policy test has arrived. Waiting to see if @jakejsullivan tweets about the protests in Russia and the crackdown on Navalny supporters, journalists and civil society activists.
⭕ 22 Jan 2021
🐣 RT @gtconway3d Here’s my 5022-word essay on why three or four Justice Department special prosecutor’s offices should be established to investigate—and if the evidence and their judgment supports it, to criminally charge—our newest ex-president.
💙 ⋙ WaPo, GT Conway III: Former president, private citizen and, perhaps, criminal defendant: Donald Trump’s new reality http://wapo.st/2KMuWp2 “What follows is a guide to how and why the case or cases, United States v. Donald John Trump, must be pursued”
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Evidence growing of how the deposed President secretly schemed from the White House to destroy our sacred American democracy.
🐣 RT @chrislhayes Honestly it really seems like there is an extremely compelling case for some kind of seditious conspiracy charge against Trump.
🐣 RT @vkaramurza Those of us who oppose Putin are not asking foreigners for money, political support or regime change. All we ask from the West is that it stay true to its values and stop enabling the Putin regime’s kleptocracy on a global scale.
⋙ WaPo, Vladimir Kara-Murza: Biden’s predecessors emboldened Putin. Here’s how he can get Russia right. http://wapo.st/
WaPo: Senate ends standoff, agrees to start Trump’s impeachment trial Feb. 9 http://wapo.st/3qHWkUk
🐣 RT @marceelias This is a very big deal. Most ethics complaints come from outside groups. Rarely do Senators to file against their colleagues. Here, 7 US Senators did the right thing and signed it. @SherrodBrown @SenWhitehouse @maziehirono @SenTinaSmith @SenBlumenthal @RonWyden @timkaine
⋙ 🐣 RT @DemocracyDocket 🚨ICYMI: Seven Senate Democrats have requested an ethics investigation into Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Read the full complaint filed with the Senate Committee on Ethics here👇
⋙⋙ DemocracyDocket 🚨UPDATE: Senate Democrats File Ethics Complaint Against Senators Cruz and Hawley http://bit.ly/363MbcG
🧵 RT @SteveSmithSES There is a profoundly important issue that is being grotesquely under covered in the media, particularly the business and tech media. It concerns the actions of 140 House Members led by @GOPLeader. Kevin McCarthy and 7 US Senators on the night of January 6, 2021. This should not […] https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1352842126627921920?s=20
🐣 RT @Sarahlongwell25 If Senate R’s aren’t willing to convict Trump, that means that inciting a deadly attack on the Capitol, installing stooges at DOJ to overturn an election, and strong-arming a SOS to find 11,780 votes, is not only 👍, but that the guy who did it should continue to run their party.
WaPo: Trump entertained plan to install an attorney general who would help him pursue baseless election fraud claims http://wapo.st/3pdrCC2
Then-President Donald Trump in early January entertained a plan to replace the acting attorney general with a different Justice Department lawyer who was more amenable to pursuing his unfounded claims of voter fraud, nearly touching off a crisis at the country’s premier federal law enforcement institution, people familiar with the matter said.
The plan — if enacted — would have pushed out Jeffrey Rosen as the acting attorney general and installed in his place Jeffrey Clark, whom Trump had appointed to lead the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division and who later would come to lead the Civil Division. Clark, then, could have taken steps to wield the Justice Department’s power to help keep Trump in office. But the president was ultimately dissuaded from moving forward after a high-stakes meeting with those involved, the people said.
The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive matter. The move was first reported by the New York Times. Legal analysts said it amounted to a disastrous attack on the Justice Department’s independence, and perhaps something worse.
“Before the insurrectionist assault on the US Capitol, there was an attempted coup at the Justice Dept. — fomented by the President of the United States,” former Justice Department official David Laufman wrote on Twitter.
Asked for a response to the article, a Trump adviser said, “President Trump has consistently argued that our justice system should be investigating the broader, rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for many years. Any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken.”
… Even former attorney general William P. Barr — who had been one of Trump’s most loyal and effective Cabinet secretaries — had publicly broken with the president on the issue of voter fraud, declaring publicly that investigators had found no evidence of substantial malfeasance that might affect the result of the election.
Barr’s statements angered Trump, who, along with his allies, had been waging a public campaign to get Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate election fraud. The men’s relationship was near a breaking point. [Durham, Hunter Biden etc]
… At some point, Rosen was informed Clark would replace him, and he pushed for a meeting with Trump in person, the people said. It was theoretically possible that, if Clark were installed, he could push for some type of challenge to the election results.
At the meeting were Trump, Clark and Rosen, along with Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general; Steven A. Engel, the head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, the people familiar with the matter said. The people said Rosen, Donoghue, Engel and Cipollone pushed against the idea of replacing Rosen, and warned of a mass resignation.
Cipollone, one person said, pushed hard against a letter Clark wanted to send to Georgia state legislators, which wrongly asserted the department was investigating accusations of fraud in their state and Biden’s win should be voided, insisting it was based on a shoddy claim.
“Pat pretty much saved Rosen’s job that day,” said one senior Trump White House official. ¤. Trump ultimately left Rosen in place.
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General http://nyti.ms/360Tjqn
// Trying to find another avenue to push his baseless election claims, Donald Trump considered installing a loyalist.
The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.
The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.
The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?
The answer was unanimous. They would resign. ¤ Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis. …
Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed [Acting AG] Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless. …
🐣 ◕ RT @ This is how undemocratic US Senate is:
-15 states with 38 million people elect 30 GOP senators
-California with 40 million people elects 2 Dems
-By 2040, 30% of America will elect 70 senators. 70% of America will elect only 30
This is how undemocratic US Senate is:
-15 states with 38 million people elect 30 GOP senators
-California with 40 million people elects 2 Dems
-By 2040, 30% of America will elect 70 senators. 70% of America will elect only 30 pic.twitter.com/nX43Oi0kdT
— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) January 22, 2021
🐣 RT @thehill Trump campaign had paid $2.7 million to organizers of rally ahead of Capitol riot: report http://hill.cm/LeZdkDW
🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “Saying Trump shouldn’t be tried because he left office is like saying you shouldn’t prosecute a murder because the victim’s already dead.” – @neal_katyal w/ @NicolleDWallace
🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “We have a real life autocratic movement… These cynical members are in a coalition that has mainstreamed the participation of the fascists and the white supremacists. Without question they are part of that coalition.” – @SteveSchmidtSES w/ @NicolleDWallace 💽 https://twitter.com/DeadlineWH/status/1352762146086674432?s=20/photo/1
🐣📋 RT @justinhendrix Here are the top 20 promoters of voter fraud disinformation on Twitter as per a data set released yesterday by @informor et al. More on the research here: http://bit.ly/3qJObim https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/1352709397164732416?s=20/photo/1
⭕ 21 Jan 2021
ForeignPolicy, KonstantinMcKenna: The 1776 Project Is a Desperate Search for the Right Enemies http://bit.ly/3iMBmTl
// Identity politics is painted as un-American—but historical patriots thought otherwise.
🐣 RT @danpfeiffer The fact that Mitch McConnell can use the filibuster to prevent the majority from taking control of the Senate is a pretty good argument against the filibuster.
🐣 RT @kasparov68 Facebook pages of Navalny and Khodorkovsky groups and supporters have been suspended. Even small accounts like the Free Russia Forum’s on Instagram have been blocked after thousands of fake complaints from new Kremlin bot accounts.
🐣 RT @tedlieu “In a Telegram post on Friday, [The Proud Boys] accused Mr. Trump of ‘instigating’ the events at the Capitol, adding that he then ‘washed his hands of it.'”
⋙ 🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 The Proud Boys now mock Trump: ¤ In dozens of conversations on social media, members of the far-right group are calling Trump a “shill” and “extraordinarily weak.” ¤ Members are urging supporters to stop attending protests held for Trump or the GOP.
⋙⋙ NYT: ‘A Total Failure’: The Proud Boys Now Mock Trump http://nyti.ms/3qM3Bmf
// Members of the far-right group, who were among Donald Trump’s staunchest fans, are calling him “weak” as more of them were charged for storming the U.S. Capitol.
WaPo: Biden administration to seek five-year extension on key nuclear arms treaty in first foray with Russia http://wapo.st/3p6kPdn “At the same time, his administration is preparing to impose new costs on Russia pending a newly requested intelligence assessment of its recent activities”
AP: Biden revokes Trump report promoting ‘patriotic education’ http://bit.ly/2KykJfC
President Joe Biden revoked a recent Trump administration report that aimed to promote “patriotic education” in schools but that historians mocked and rejected as political propaganda.
In an executive order signed on Wednesday in his first day in office, Biden disbanded Donald Trump’s presidential 1776 Commission and withdrew a report it released Monday. Trump established the group in September to rally support from white voters and as a response to The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which highlights the lasting consequences of slavery in America.
In its report, which Trump hoped would be used in classrooms across the nation, the commission glorifies the country’s founders, plays down America’s role in slavery, condemns the rise of progressive politics and argues that the civil rights movement ran afoul of the “lofty ideals” espoused by the Founding Fathers.
The panel, which included no professional historians of the United States, complained of “false and fashionable ideologies” that depict the country’s story as one of “oppression and victimhood.” Instead, it called for renewed efforts to foster “a brave and honest love for our country.”
Historians widely panned the report, saying it offers a false and outdated version of American history that ignores decades of research.
“It’s an insult to the whole enterprise of education. Education is supposed to help young people learn to think critically,” said David Blight, a Civil War historian at Yale University. “That report is a piece of right-wing propaganda.”
🔆 This❗️⋙ Axios, Jonathan Swan and Zachary Beau: THE SIEGE http://bit.ly/2NrdrLR Episode 8: The Final Episode of “Off The Rails” on the collapse of the Trump presidency
⋙ Axios: Off the rails: Behind Trump’s post-election meltdown http://bit.ly/39KmmPO
⭕ 20 Jan 2021 🕯Biden Inauguration🕯
💙 💽 Biden Inauguration https://twitter.com/BidenInaugural
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 What a beautiful and moving Biden-Harris inauguration. Decency. Competence. Experience. Honesty. Compassion. The rule of law. The charlatans and skanks are gone. Amanda Gorman speaks for all of us.
🐣 RT @DrTomMartinPhD It’s nice to have a president.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Toure It’s nice to have a President who reads the Presidential Daily Briefing.
Let me edit that…
It’s nice to have a President who reads.
🐣 RT @stuartpstevens Successful conventions & inaugurals are never easy. The Biden organization reimagined and recreated two of our most dominant political set pieces. Astounding achievement. All credit due to @adrienneelrod, @stefcutter. Will be studied and copied for long time.
🐣📋 RT @GlennKesslerWP The final count. Never would have believed this number was possible when we started four years ago. Text Block: https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/1351941827163787264?s=20/photo/1
// 30,573 false or misleading claims; Trump lies
⋙ WaPo: In four years, President Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims http://wapo.st/393jLSg
// The Fact Checker’s database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump while in office.
🐣 ♫ RT @BruceSpringsteen Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be the last
Tomorrow there’ll be sunshine
And all this darkness past
Big wheels roll through fields where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams
🐣 RT @ABC French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed the U.S. back into the Paris Climate Agreement as he sent congratulations to both Vice President Harris and President Biden on what he called a “most significant day for the American people.” https://abcn.ws/3sSYnHc Text Block: https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1352082515704610822?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: Army falsely denied Flynn’s brother was involved in key part of military response to Capitol riot http://wapo.st/39ODvrU
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Inside Biden’s Oval Office:
Busts of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy flank a fireplace.
Behind the Resolute desk is a bust of Cesar Chavez.
A painting of Benjamin Franklin is intended to represent Biden’s interest in following science.
WaPo: A look inside Biden’s Oval Office http://wapo.st/35YOXjg
// The oval office looks different now that President Biden is its occupant.
🐣 ♫ RT @therecount Here’s Lady Gaga’s stunning National Anthem in full. #InaugurationDay 💽 https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1351934023766056963?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @WillieGeist Chris Wallace just told the Fox News audience of President Biden’s speech: “I have been listening to these inaugural addresses since 1961, John F. Kennedy’s ‘Ask not.’ I thought this was the best inaugural address I ever heard.”
🐣 RT @LarryMillerTV CBS News: Eugene Goodman, the U.S Capitol Police Officer, seen leading rioters away from the Senate Chambers during the insurrection was PROMOTED. He’s now the Acting Deputy Sergeant of Arms. You’ll see him on the Presidential platform. He’s a DC native. Congrats, Sir! @wusa9
🐣 RT @LisbethMA QAnon people are going to struggle. Watkins is their leader and he’s throwing in the towel, admitting it’s over. There’s no “storm” coming. And 5 people died because of this garbage.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JessReports Ron Watkins pulls the plug. This will be absolutely crushing to QAnon believers: https://twitter.com/LisbethMA/status/1351956180160159745?s=20/photo/1
NYT, Kevin Roose: QAnon believers struggle with inauguration. http://nyti.ms/2M3YxdM
🐣 RT @cbouzy Oh boy… China just sanctioned Stephen Bannon, John Bolton, Robert O’Brien, Peter Navarro, Mike Pompeo, and several others!!! Whoopsie doodle!!!
⋙ Bloomberg: China Sanctions Trump Administration Figures Including Pompeo http://bloom.bg/3p3nAfH
// China announces decision to sanction 28 U.S. figures who it alleged to have severely violated China’s sovereignty, including officials in the Trump Administration
🐣 RT @duty2warn Donald Trump is now indictable.
🐣 RT @RebeccaBallhaus McConnell just fist-bumped Obama.
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Lincoln in 1861 inaugural speech: ¤ “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”
🐣 RT @Peter_Wehner What a beautiful, lovely, unifying and personal speech. It was masterful, and masterfully delivered. This was the speech America needed; and the day America needed.
🐣 RT @ByBrianBennett President Biden calls on Americans to reject lies. “Recent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson. There is truth and there are lies, *lies told for power and for profit.* Each of us has a duty,” Biden said, “to defend the truth and defeat the lies.”
🐣 RT @LeahMcElrath If you missed Poet Laureate @TheAmandaGorman reading her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” you can watch below. ¤ It’s worth your time. I promise. 💽 https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1351947334595334149?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Shayan86 Current mood in Q circles
“I just want to throw up”
“I’m so sick of the disinformation and false hope”
“What a waste of my life”
“I feel sick”
“Burning my flag”
“Game over”
“Where is the military”
“I’m just so confused”
“I’m just sick”
⋙ 🐣 RT @ @Shayan86 “It’s done and we were played”
“It’s over”
“It’s always tomorrow, next week, stop the BS”
“I’m literally cold sweat. I’m beyond buckled up”
“Now what? All lies and bullshit???”
So many people are getting a dose of reality today. If you know them, please offer suppoprt and help.
🐣 RT @oneunderscore__ Here’s how QAnon people think the next hour will go: ¤ Trump will announce through the Emergency Broadcasting System that The Storm has arrived. Dems will be rounded up and Trump will be declared president. Q supporters have bought CB radios for a blackout.
⋙ NBCNews, BenCollins: Increasingly militant ‘Parler refugees’ and anxious QAnon adherents prep for doomsday http://nbcnews.to/36123wu
// QAnon followers have become more divorced from reality since the Capitol riots as some are targeted by extremists who try to radicalize them further.
🐣 RT @Yamiche President Trump has left the White House for the last time. ¤ Note: He began his political career peddling the racist conspiracy theory that the first black president wasn’t born in the US. He ends his term with the first black and South Asian woman VP coming into the WH. Poetic.
🐣 RT @MaxBoot Trump was the worst President ever.
The most incompetent president ever.
The most corrupt president ever.
The most openly racist president in modern times.
The first president who refused to accept election loss.
The only president impeached twice.
⋙ WaPo, Max Boot: Trump was the worst president ever. But his failures set up Biden for success. http://wapo.st/3sGWtcm
// 1/19/2021
🐣 RT @oneunderscore__ Another QAnon deadline passes. Trump was supposed to at least refer to his grand takeover of the US in that speech. Didn’t happen, didn’t matter to Q supporters. They saw 17 flags behind him. Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. Goalposts moved until noon.
🐣 RT @kasparov63 Trump is gone. That such a creature became president, and even now has support, requires a reckoning with no time for celebration. Repudiate, rebuild, renew. Above all, remember, so it doesn’t happen again.
🐣 RT @ForTheRuleOfLaw Goodbye and good riddance. 💽 https://twitter.com/ForTheRuleOfLaw/status/1351874715732893696?s=20/photo/1
// peaceful transitions interspersed with scenes from Jan 6
🐣 RT @vanderleyen This new dawn in America is the moment we have been waiting for. ¤ Europe is ready for a new start with our oldest and most trusted partner. ¤ #EPplenary ¤ My address ¤ @Europarl_EN:
⋙ EuroCommission: Speech by President von der Leyen at the European Parliament Plenary on the inauguration of the new President of the U¤ and the current political situation http://bit.ly/38Yrb8Z “This day brings good news: The United States is back”
WaPo: Trump grants clemency to 143 people in late-night pardon blast http://wapo.st/3o0Wzbx
// article time-stamped Jan. 20, 2021 at 1:06 a.m. CST
🐣 RT @brhodes Behold the heart of corrupt darkness. And think about the guts it takes to release this right as Navalny is detained by Putin.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Annaafp Navalny team releases a jaw-dropping report about one of Putin’s residences, which they call the world’s most expensive palace. Located on the Black Sea coast, the secret residence has a casino and a hookah lounge complete with a vertical pole http://bit.ly/3irRUOF https://twitter.com/Annaafp/status/1351551005348032516?s=20/photo/1-2
⭕ 19 Jan 2021
DailyBeast, Rick Wilson (1/19): Trumpists, Here Are Your Terms of Surrender. Also, F*ck You. http://bit.ly/39fpswx “You can stop pretending that you respect him; his Twitter feed is dead. You’re safe now.”
// There’s no repairing the damage he’s done until you confess to the normalization and rationalizations that let him bring us to the edge of a conspiracy-driven insurrection.
Call for the expulsion, censure, or other consequences for the ringleaders in the Senate and House of the coup plot. ¤ You know their names, and let’s be honest; you won’t really miss them. Josh Hawley. Ted Cruz. Rick Scott. Cindy Hyde Smith. Tommy Tuberville. Matt Gaetz. Jim Jordan. Mo Brooks. Kevin McCarthy. Lauren Bobert. Marjorie Taylor-Greene. Devin Nunes.
Donald Trump will go down as the worst president in American history, having reached that height on the wings of dozens of enablers, toadies, and climbers who will not be forgotten or forgiven. Over and over you lied to yourselves, the media, and the country that Trump wasn’t something new and destructive.
He is, we know, a pernicious grotesque, a shambling mound dedicated to causing the most pain, division, and humiliation possible, and always trying to deliver it at scale. He is an embarrassment for the ages, a shame and a stain that will be hard to remove. He is the indefensible man, a sick, sad coda to a party, an era, and a nation that deserved better.
Confess it. Admit it. There’s no repairing the damage he’s done until you confess to the normalization and rationalizations that let him bring us to the edge of a conspiracy-driven insurrection. You can stop pretending that you respect him; his Twitter feed is dead. You’re safe now.
The alternative is brutal and simple: You can watch the GOP be swiftly rebranded as a party of terrorist violence and QAnon batshittery. You give in to the rising calls for political violence and revolution and you go the way of the Whigs.
🐣 RT @jpitney Eisenhower’s reputation improved as scholars learned more about him. With Trump, the opposite will take place. Researching his administration will be like uncovering toxic waste dumps.
NBCNews, Sam Liccardo: Trump’s second impeachment after Capitol riots isn’t enough. He needs to go to prison. http://nbcnews.to/3p3WDsf
// Political sanction did not deter the president from abusing his power again, nor should we believe it would deter anyone else. A criminal conviction will.
🐣 RT @bellingcat Less than 48 hours after his arrest in Russia, @Navalny releases a new, major, investigation into the corrupt money that funds Vladimir Putin’s excesses, including details of the massive palace complex he’s built for himself (with English subtitles)
💽 https://youtu.be/ipAnwilMncI
🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT This is a big, big deal. Thank you @JoeBiden and @ABlinken. This move will save lives and make America safer.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Cirincione “President-elect Biden has made clear that we will end our support for the Saudi war on Yemen,” @ABlinken tells @ChrisMurphyCT ¤ It cannot come too soon.
🔆 This❗️⋙ NYT: ‘This Kettle Is Set to Boil’: New Evidence Points to Riot Conspiracy http://nyti.ms/3bUTB5H
// While most arrests in the Capitol riot have been individuals, new charges accused three people tied to a right-wing militia of conspiring to commit violence.
🐣 RT @MSNBC “He sneaks out early tomorrow as the only president in living memory to face the legitimate prospect of post-presidential conviction,” @Maddow says. “Unequivocally and inarguably the worst president in American history, with what may literally may be the rap sheet to prove it.” 💽 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1351718060856664067?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RBReich We came close to tyranny. We’re not yet free of the threat. But starting noon tomorrow, we have a reprieve. We must use it to rebuild trust, strengthen democracy, fight racism, create good jobs. It may be our last chance.
🐣 RT @myfabulousfind1 This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can … reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah’ – Leonard Cohen
⋙ Kate McKinnon sings Hallelujah on @SNL (Dec 2016) ¤ https://youtu.be/BG-_ZDrypec
💽 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1351793996369174530?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NewsHour President-elect Joe Biden, future first lady Jill Biden, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and future second gentleman Douglas Emhoff honored the victims of COVID-19 at a memorial on the National Mall on Tuesday night. ¤ : Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images https://twitter.com/NewsHour/status/1351673803756236803?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @GovChristie And to be clear: those “other powerful people” weren’t trying to help President Trump. These senators put their own political futures and ambitions ahead of their country by knowingly pushing these lies about the election results. We have a right to expect more from US Senators
⋙ 🐣 RT @CSPAN .@senatemajldr on the U.S. Capitol Attack: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.” 💽 https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1351578782826721283?s=20/photo/1
TheAtlantic, Tim Naftali: The Worst President in History http://bit.ly/3sFn9dw
// Three particular failures secure Trump’s status as the worst chief executive ever to hold the office.
Politico: A big chunk of Trump’s 1776 report appears lifted from an author’s prior work http://politi.co/3bWnaUr
// The report was meant to be the definitive conservative rendering of U.S. history. But historians have slammed it as sloppy and slanted.
🐣 RT @clydehaberman From @nytimes, the complete list of Trump Twitter insults from 2015-21. https://twitter.com/ClydeHaberman/status/1351695568490409984?s=20/photo/1
⋙ NYT: The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021) http://nyti.ms/3qytKoo
🐣 RT @anneapplebaum Really important story. Fox’s Arizona call *only* mattered because it interfered with Trump’s plan to call the election that night and ‘stop the count.’ If Fox now regrets that, then they regret not helping him steal the election.
⋙ WaPo: Top Fox News managers depart amid Murdoch’s concerns over controversial Arizona election night projection http://wapo.st/3c8cnqH
WaPo: Trump’s final day: A diminished and aggrieved president stays out of public view before exit http://wapo.st/2LFmTec By Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey
🐣 RT @thehill Woman accused of trying to sell Pelosi laptop to Russians arrested http://hill.cm/fbC9XuQ
🐣 RT @TrumpRussiaTies SAG-AFTRA Board Finds “Probable Cause” To Expel Donald Trump, Pending Trial, On Charges He Violated Union’s Constitution ¤ This is BIG. It means he can’t start a media-…anything.
⋙ Deadline: SAG-AFTRA Board Finds “Probable Cause” To Expel Donald Trump, Pending Trial, On Charges He Violated Union’s Constitution http://bit.ly/3sHnqwv
// *Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
“Donald Trump attacked the values that this union holds most sacred – democracy, truth, respect for our fellow Americans of all races and faiths, and the sanctity of the free press,” Carteris said. “There’s a straight line from his wanton disregard for the truth to the attacks on journalists perpetrated by his followers.”
“Our most important role as a union is the protection of our members,” said White. “The unfortunate truth is, this individual’s words and actions over the past four years have presented actual harm to our broadcast journalist members. The board’s resolution addresses this effort to undermine freedom of the press and reaffirms the principles on which our democratic society rests, and which we must all work to protect and preserve.”
SAG-AFTRA, which represents thousands of broadcast journalists across the country, said that reports of intimidation and physical assaults against journalists “have escalated throughout Trump’s presidency.”
🐣 RT @TrumpRussiaTies SAG-AFTRA Board Finds “Probable Cause” To Expel Donald Trump, Pending Trial, On Charges He Violated Union’s Constitution ¤ This is BIG. It means he can’t start a media-…anything.
⋙ Deadline: SAG-AFTRA Board Finds “Probable Cause” To Expel Donald Trump, Pending Trial, On Charges He Violated Union’s Constitution http://bit.ly/3sHnqwv
// *Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
🐣 RT @jmeacham From the 25th Psalm, appointed for Evening Prayer today:
“Lead me forth in thy truth…* for thou art the God of my salvation; in thee hath been my hope all the day long.
Call to remembrance, O LORD, thy tender mercies, * and thy loving-kindnesses, which have been ever of old.”
🐣 RT @oneunderscore_ [Ben Collins, NBC] QAnon people are 100% all in on Trump staying in office and starting a coup tomorrow. One Q forum is banning dissent. ¤ “ANY dooming or negative comments pertaining to current situation will result in removal and ban if repeated.” ¤ No idea how they will cope with reality tomorrow.
⋙ 🐣 RT @oneunderscore_ I really do not know what’s going to happen to these QAnon people tomorrow. They have drawn extremely, unprecedentedly hard lines. ¤ They are positive Trump is taking over the country by force during the Inauguration. That’s all they have left.
⋙⋙ 🐣 https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1351707729929375744?s=20/photo/1
// Suicide Prevention Hotline
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC At the end of “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), Auntie Em says to Dorothy, “There, there, lie quiet now. You just had a bad dream.” https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC/status/1351674561876652033?s=20/photo/1
PBS, Frontline: Taking Office in a Time of Crisis: 16 Documentaries on Key Issues Biden Inherits http://to.pbs.org/2M8Q5d3
🐣 RT @nytimes Senator Mitch McConnell said publicly for the first time that the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol were “provoked by the president.” https://nyti.ms/3bUClxu 💽 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1351630542236692481?s=20/photo/1
↥ ↧
⋙ 🐣 on CNN, Erin Burnett: Senator Richard Blumenthal: McConnell’s “and other powerful people” likely means ‘probably Hawley and Cruz’
🐣 RT @mitchellreports President Trump just declassified secret documents from Operation Crossfire Hurricane the FBI op that led to the Russia probe. After FBI objected he agreed to some redactions. Is this why he installed political acolyte Michael Ellis today to be NSA general counsel?
🐣 RT @SpeakerPelosi As we mourn the tragic milestone of 400,000 American lives lost to the coronavirus, we must come together to move past the failed Trump response to crush the virus and deliver robust, real relief now. https://speaker.gov/newsroom/11921 https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1351672536870907906?s=20/photo/1
🐣 💽 RT @Acosta Trump farewell video has been posted. https://youtu.be/6h5_d3DUdR4
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Self-styled militia members planned on storming the U.S. Capitol days in advance of Jan. 6 attack, court documents say http://wapo.st/2Maluw4 “Participants both anticipated violence and continued to act in concert after the break-in”
Self-styled militia members from Virginia, Ohio and other states made plans to storm the U.S. Capitol days in advance of the Jan. 6 attack, and then communicated in real time as they breached the building on opposite sides and talked about hunting for lawmakers, according to new court documents filed Tuesday.
U.S. authorities charged an apparent Oath Keeper leader, Thomas Edward Caldwell, 66, of Clarke County, Va., in the attack, alleging that the U.S. Navy veteran helped organize a ring of what became 30 or 40 people who “stormed the castle” to disrupt the electoral vote confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
“We have about 30-40 of us. We are sticking together and sticking to the plan,” co-defendant Jessica Watkins, 38, a U.S. Army veteran, said while the breach was underway, according to court documents unsealed Tuesday.
“You are executing citizen’s arrest. Arrest this assembly, we have probable cause for acts of treason, election fraud,” a man replied, according to communications recovered from her phone, the FBI alleged.
“We are in the main dome right now. We are rocking it. They are throwing grenades, they are fricking shooting people with paint balls. But we are in here,” a woman believed to be Watkins said, according to court documents.
A man then responds, “Get it, Jess,” adding, “This is … everything we f——trained for!”
The extraordinary real-time narration of parts of the assault on the Capitol came as investigators made public new details of events in unsealed conspiracy charges in which thousands of pro-Trump supporters forced the evacuation of lawmakers and triggered violence that left five people dead.
FBI charging papers against Caldwell, Watkins and a third man, former U.S. Marine Donovan Crowl, 50, allege that Caldwell and others coordinated in advance to disrupt Congress, scouted for lodging and recruited Oath Keepers members from North Carolina and like-minded groups from the Shenandoah Valley. Participants both anticipated violence and continued to act in concert after the break-in, investigators said in court documents.
Federal prosecutors in Washington have charged more than 100 defendants in the past 13 days. But arrests this weekend of several people with alleged ties to extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and Three Percenters, have offered evidence that the riot was not an entirely impulsive outburst of violence but an event instigated or exploited by organized groups. Hours of video posted on social media and pored over by investigators have focused on individuals in military-style gear moving together.
“This is the first step toward identifying and understanding that there was some type of concerted conspiracy here,” said one senior official with the U.S. atttorney’s office for Washington D.C., which is leading the investigation.
“Whether everyone else just happened to be there and got caught up in the moment, or if this is just the tip of the iceberg, how much this will grow at this point I can’t tell you, but we are continuing to investigate aggressively,” the official said, asking for anonymity to discuss a pending investigation.
In charging papers, the FBI said during the Capital riot, Caldwell received Facebook messages from unspecified senders updating him of the location of lawmakers. When he posted a one-word message, “Inside,” he received exhortations and directions describing tunnels, doors and hallways, the FBI said.
Another message read, “All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in. Turn on gas,” the FBI added. [… more … ]
⭕ 18 Jan 2021
NYT: Trump Weighed Naming Election Conspiracy Theorist as Special Counsel http://nyti.ms/3mzWs5U
// President Trump has been in contact with Sidney Powell in recent days, even though his campaign last month sought to distance itself from her as she aired baseless claims about Dominion Voting Systems machines.
Trump on Friday discussed naming Sidney Powell, who as a lawyer for his campaign team unleashed conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States, to be a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud, according to two people briefed on the discussion. ¤ It was unclear if Mr. Trump will move ahead with such a plan.
Most of his advisers opposed the idea, two of the people briefed on the discussion said, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer. In recent days Mr. Giuliani has sought to have the Department of Homeland Security join the campaign’s efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the election.
The White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed, which went beyond the special counsel idea, those briefed on the meeting said.
Mr. Cipollone told Mr. Trump there was no constitutional authority for what was being discussed, one of the people briefed on the meeting said. Other advisers from the White House and the Trump campaign delivered the same message throughout the meeting, which stretched on for a long period of time.
🐣 RT @SpeakerPelosi The attempt to install an unqualified Trump loyalist as NSA General Counsel just 72 hours prior to the start of a new Administration is highly irregular and highly suspect. This placement should not move forward.
WaPo: QAnon adherents discussed posing as National Guard to try to infiltrate inauguration, according to FBI intelligence briefing http://wapo.st/3inpBkk
WaPo, Michael Gerson: A fresh start for Republicans can come only if they abandon authoritarian populism http://wapo.st/39NWpii
In his book “Orthodoxy,” G.K. Chesterton made the point that you can’t paint a fence post white once and think the job is done. “If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again.” No great human institution can simply endure. It must be continually re-founded through the reassertion of its core ideals. And why is this? Because, Chesterton argued, human beings are “naturally backsliders” and human virtue, if left alone, will “rust or rot.”
In the United States, our core political commitment is to a system of self-government based on the rule of law and the protection of the rights of political minorities. This is a different view of politics than many Americans now hold. They think the main purpose of politics is to vanquish some grave evil or defeat ruthless enemies. This is a temptation on left and right, but it has metastasized on the right. Many right-wing populists believe that they are fighting conspiratorial globalists, or child molesters, or oppressive secularists, or “woke” elitists, or the “deep state.” If this is their defining purpose, then constitutional processes are actually obstacles to effective action. A strongman would be more efficient.
This conception of politics is badly and dangerously mistaken. The primary purpose of the American form of government is not to defeat evil; it is to allow people of diverse views and backgrounds to live in peace with one another and find common purpose. That practical arrangement is also a moral commitment. We have a patriotic passion for constitutional procedure — to honor the principle of equal rights and to prevent the exercise of abusive power.
Too many political leaders — most notably in the Republican Party — have allowed these ideals to rust and rot. They have accommodated illiberalism out of selfish interest or abject fear. And this failure has associated people and causes they care about with some of the worst human beings in America. The refusal to defend procedural democracy has put economic conservatives in the same political movement as neo-Confederate thugs. It has placed pro-life Catholics and evangelicals under the same political banner as QAnon and the Proud Boys. Can traditional conservatives not see the massive reputational damage to their deepest beliefs?
For the sake of their party, their ideology and their country, it is essential for elected Republicans to publicly and dramatically distance themselves from authoritarian populism. This means repudiating the lie of a stolen election. This means supporting the Senate conviction of a justly impeached president and ensuring he can never run for office again. This means giving our new president room to govern in the midst of a deadly health crisis.
For Republicans, a fresh start is made possible only by a renewed commitment to democratic ideals.
😅 RT @KatieJohnson214 #BeGone ¤ “Maga ship sunked with everyone on board”! 💽 https://twitter.com/KatieJohnson214/status/1351309258260963331?s=20/photo/1
// Trump dancing on sinking ship
🐣 RT @WUSA9 The U.S. Capitol building is prepared for #InaugurationDay ceremonies for President-elect Joe Biden as the “Field of Flags” is illuminated on the ground on the National Mall on Monday. The flags represent all 50 states and the nation’s territories. http://bit.ly/38SqxtN 🖼 https://twitter.com/wusa9/status/1351328376808726531?s=20/photo/1-3
🐣 RT @ryanstruyk Career approval ratings via ABC/Post polls:
71% Kennedy
65% Eisenhower
65% Roosevelt
63% HW Bush
57% Clinton
56% Johnson
56% Reagan
51% W Bush
50% Obama
49% Nixon
48% Ford
47% Truman
46% Carter
40% Trump
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote I wonder how all the “Russia hoax” morons square this with their idiot selves.
⋙ 🐣 RT @dtemkin Parler is back up, and being hosted by “DDOS GUARD” out of Russia. If that’s not an obvious sign of its malfeasance, there’s nothing else that could possibly be shown to convince you. https://twitter.com/dtemkin/status/1351240721261584385?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @BarackObama If anyone had a right to question whether our democracy was worth redeeming, it was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Because in the face of billy clubs and lynchings, poll taxes and literacy tests, he never gave in to violence, never waved a traitorous flag or gave up on our country. https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1351175956992548870?s=20/photo/1
// 🖼 photo of Obama at MLK memorial
WaPo, Paul Waldman: Twitter’s Trump ban is even more important than you thought http://wapo.st/3p0Vkue “‘Twitter is the space for political and media elites,’… Facebook has many more users, but journalists are on Twitter constantly”
🧵 RT @davetroy So let’s talk about Parler. Where did it come from? Founder John Matze met his now wife, Alina Mukhutdinova, in May 15, 2016 in Las Vegas. Alina is from Kazan, Russia. She was on a two week road trip “vacation” across the USA with a friend. 📌 https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1327253991936454663?s=20
// 11/13/2020
🐣 RT @davetroy first several thousand accounts on Parler shows that it is the usual Russia aligned operatives that we in this space have tracked for years. This is a large scale op aligned with Russian interests. https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1327271037847867395?s=20/photo/1
// Parler Russia Parler
TheGuardian, Brendan O’Connor: The Capitol riot wasn’t a fringe ‘uprising’. It was enabled by very deep pockets http://bit.ly/3qx66bW Center for National Policy, Judicial Crisis Network, Republican Attorneys General Association, Rule of Law Defense Fund & more listed
// That siege was just one battle in a decades-long assault on democracy, funded by billionaire donors and corporate interests
⭕ 17 Jan 2021
🐣 RT @howardfineman Is there any doubt at this point that #IvanaTrump was telling the truth when she alleged in her divorce papers that her then-husband Donald had a copy of Hitler’s speeches on his night table?
⋙ TheIndependent, Benjamin Kentish (2017): Donald Trump ‘kept book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches in his bedside cabinet’ http://bit.ly/3ize4i5 Marty Davis from Paramount:”I did give him a book about Hitler. But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf”
// 3/20/2017; In a 1990 interview, the billionaire businessman admitted to owning Nazi leader’s ‘Mein Kampf’ but said he had would never read speeches
🧵 RT @shannonwatts Prosecutors have charged a Colorado insurrectionist and so-called “militia” member Robert Gieswein for being at the riot at the Capitol. ¤ And … here he is in a photo taken in front of Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert’s bar, Shooter’s Grill. #coleg [link] 📌 https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1351005437009797123?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ Here’s Rep. Lauren Boebert saying she had *constituents* outside the Capitol – a couple of hours after she tweeted “1776” and just before the Capitol rioters broke into the building. #coleg 💽 https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1351006497485025286?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @RadioFreeTom Reading this piece from last summer by @normative, I realize that there is a parallel here between Qanon’s “Storm” and the Cold War cults that sprang up at various times, but especially in the 70s and the 80s. Bear with me. /1 📌 https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1351011133264719875?s=20
WaPo, Margaret Sullivan: Three ways the media can vanquish the Big Lie that will linger even after Trump is gone http://wapo.st/2Ne0Vzg 1. No shorthand: Say what the Big Lie is, 2. No both-siderism, 3. “Learn the science about how people absorb truthful information”
🐣 RT @MarkSZaidEsq Good thread on reality
⋙ 🧵 RT @oneunderscore_ [Ben Collins NBC] Over the last few years, I kept in touch with some QAnon supporters through DMs, checking in on them to see if they’d ever come out of it when their next doomsday came and went. ¤ They’d typically first message me calling me a Satanic pedophile. I’d ignore it and ask questions. 📌 https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1350890475323060225?s=20
⋙ 🐣 This reminds me of the “Great Awakening” in the U.S. in the 19th Century. Perhaps spurred by repeated boom-bust cycles, “prophets” were everywhere, some really wild. Some went on to be established denominations, which the US has most. Striking contrast w Europe.
⋙ See http://amzn.to/35RTdBn
🐣 RT @sbg1 [Susan Glasser] This is such an important piece. Trump incited the riot at a rally planned and executed by his staff.
⋙ 🧵 RT @lrozen The AP’s review found at least 3 Trump campaign aides named on the permit for the Jan. 6 event. Megan Powers was listed as one of two operations managers for the Jan. 6 event, and her LinkedIn profile says she was the Trump campaign’s director of operations into January 2021. 📌 https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/1350912367597649920?s=20
⋙⋙ 🚫🐣 key timeline issues: did Trump know when he said ‘Pence must come through’ that Pence wouldn’t/hadn’t and waited until they were at the Capitol to send the tweet that Pence ‘didn’t have the courage’
🔆 This❗️⋙ AP: Records: Trump allies behind rally that ignited Capitol riot http://bit.ly/2XPjsnr “Members of President Donald Trump’s failed presidential campaign played key roles in orchestrating the Washington rally that spawned a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol”
Members of President Donald Trump’s failed presidential campaign played key roles in orchestrating the Washington rally that spawned a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to an Associated Press review of records, undercutting claims the event was the brainchild of the president’s grassroots supporters.
A pro-Trump nonprofit group called Women for America First hosted the “Save America Rally” on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse, an oval-shaped, federally owned patch of land near the White House. But an attachment to the National Park Service public gathering permit granted to the group lists more than half a dozen people in staff positions for the event who just weeks earlier had been paid thousands of dollars by Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. Other staff scheduled to be “on site” during the demonstration have close ties to the White House.
⋙ [Amy Kremer, listed as the group’s president on records filed with Virginia’s state corporation commission as the group’s president: “I know nothink ‼️”]The riot at the Capitol, incited by Trump’s comments before and during his speech at the Ellipse, has led to a reckoning unprecedented in American history. The president told the crowd to march to the Capitol and that “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”
In a statement, the president’s reelection campaign said it “did not organize, operate or finance the event.” No campaign staff members were involved in the organization or operation of the rally, according to the statement. It said that if any former employees or independent contractors for the campaign took part, “they did not do so at the direction of the Trump campaign.”
At least one was working for the Trump campaign this month. Megan Powers was listed as one of two operations managers for the Jan. 6 event, and her LinkedIn profile says she was the Trump campaign’s director of operations into January 2021. She did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The AP’s review found at least three of the Trump campaign aides named on the permit rushed to obscure their connections to the demonstration. They deactivated or locked down their social media profiles, removed tweets that referenced the rally and blocked a reporter who asked questions.
Caroline Wren, a veteran GOP fundraiser, is named as a “VIP Advisor” on an attachment to the permit that Women for America First provided to the agency. Between mid-March and mid-November, Donald J. Trump for President Inc. paid Wren $20,000 a month, according to Federal Election Commission records. During the campaign, she was a national finance consultant for Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee between the president’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee.
Maggie Mulvaney, a niece of former top Trump aide Mick Mulvaney, is listed on the permit attachment as the “VIP Lead.” She worked as director of finance operations for the Trump campaign, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The AP reviewed social media posts, voter registrations, court files and other public records for more than 120 people either facing criminal charges related to the Jan. 6 unrest or who, going maskless during the pandemic, were later identified through photographs and videos taken during the melee.
The review found the crowd was overwhelmingly made up of longtime Trump supporters, including Republican Party officials, GOP political donors, far-right militants, white supremacists, off-duty police, members of the military and adherents of the QAnon myth that the government is secretly controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophile cannibals.
Trump’s incendiary remarks at the Jan. 6 rally culminated a two-day series of events in Washington, organized by a coalition of the president’s supporters who echoed his baseless accusations that the election had been stolen from him. A website, MarchtoSaveAmerica.com, sprung up to promote the pro-Trump events and alerted followers, “At 1 PM, we protest at US Capitol.” The website has been deactivated.
Another website, TrumpMarch.com shows a fist-raised Trump pictured on the front of a red, white and blue tour bus emblazoned with the words, “Powered by Women for America First.” The logo for the bedding company “My Pillow” is also prominent. Mike Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow, is an ardent Trump supporter who’s falsely claimed Trump didn’t lose the election to Biden and will serve another four-year term as president.
Kimberly Fletcher, the Moms for America president, said she wasn’t aware the Trump campaign had a role in the rally at the Ellipse until around New Year’s Day. While she didn’t work directly with the campaign, Fletcher did notice a shift in who was involved in the rally and who would be speaking. ¤ “When I got there and I saw the size of the stage and everything, I’m like, ‘Wow, we couldn’t possibly have afforded that,’” she said. “It was a big stage. It was a very professional stage. I don’t know who was in the background or who put it together or anything.”
In addition to the large stage, the rally on the Ellipse featured a sophisticated sound system and at least three Jumbotron-style screens projecting the president’s image to the crowd. Videos posted online show Trump and his family in a nearby private tent watching the rally on several monitors as music blared in the background.
Justin Caporale is listed on the Women for America First paperwork as the event’s project manager. He’s identified as a partner with Event Strategies Inc., a management and production company. Caporale, formerly a top aide to first lady Melania Trump, was on the Trump campaign payroll for most of 2020 …
Tim Unes, the founder and president of Event Strategies, was the “stage manager” for the Jan. 6 rally, according to the permit paperwork. Unes has longstanding ties to Trump, a connection he highlights on his company’s website. Trump’s presidential campaign paid Event Strategies $1.3 million in 2020 for “audio visual services,” according to the campaign finance records.
Another person with close ties to the Trump administration, Hannah Salem, was the rally’s “operations manager for logistics and communications,” according to the permit paperwork. In 2017, she took a hiatus from the consulting firm she founded and spent three years as senior White House press aide, “executing the media strategy for President Trump’s most high-profile events,” according to her company bio and LinkedIn profile.
WaPo: FBI moves on alleged members of extremist groups Oath Keepers, Three Percenters http://wapo.st/35RN4Fj
🐣 RT @McFaul Strong statement from the incoming @JoeBiden administration on @navalny .
⋙ 🐣 RT @jakejsullivan Mr. Navalny should be immediately released, and the perpetrators of the outrageous attack on his life must be held accountable. The Kremlin’s attacks on Mr. Navalny are not just a violation of human rights, but an affront to the Russian people who want their voices heard.
💽 NewYorker: A Reporter’s Footage from Inside the Capitol Siege http://bit.ly/3bNu12B
// 1/17/2021
↥ ↧
💙 NewYorker, Luke Morgelson: Among the Insurrectionists at the Capitol http://bit.ly/35N6xGU
// 1/15/2021; The Capitol was breached by Trump supporters who had been declaring, at rally after rally, that they would go to violent lengths to keep the President in power. A chronicle of an attack foretold.
⋙ See under Entire Articles: NYkr The Storm 1-15-2021
NYT, Astead Herndon: How Republicans Are Warping Reality Around the Capitol Attack http://nyti.ms/38NWPpL
// Loyalists to President Trump are increasingly relying on conspiracy theories and misinformation, drawing false equivalence with last summer’s racial protests and blaming outside agitators.
⭕ 16 Jan 2021
🧵 RT @JuliusGoat All the bizarre and horrifying things he did are going to come back to us at random moments like half-remembered scraps of dreams. 📌 https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1350453019956158469?s=20
// Trump’s most cringe-worthy moments
WaPo: Pompeo’s last-minute actions on foreign policy will complicate Biden’s plans for a new direction http://wapo.st/2LFPqQD
💙 🐣 RT @Alyssa_Millano THIS IS WORTH YOUR TIME. ¤ Please watch. Please share. ¤ Thank you, @thematthewcooke. 💽 https://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/1350691893789696001?s=20/photo/1
// addressed to Republicans; need for deprogramming wake-up call
🐣 RT @propublica The warnings of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol were everywhere — perhaps not entirely specific about the planned time and exact location of an assault on the Capitol, but enough to clue in law enforcement about the potential for civil unrest.
⋙ ProPublica (1/7): Capitol Rioters Planned for Weeks in Plain Sight. The Police Weren’t Ready. http://bit.ly/3sudZAC
// 1/7/2021; Insurrectionists made no effort to hide their intentions, but law enforcement protecting Congress was caught flat-footed.
🐣 RT @Susan_Hennessey At this point, no one should extend this selection process the benefit of the doubt. By all indication, the Trump admin is violating civil service rules and politicizing an apolitical role. If Ellis is installed tonight, Biden should remove him on Day One.
⋙ WaPo: Acting defense secretary orders NSA director to immediately install former GOP operative as the agency’s top lawyer http://wapo.st/3qsSPkB
// “[Michael] Ellis previously was chief counsel to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a staunch Trump supporter and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee”
🐣 RT @ddale8 Sharpiegate. Michigan Man of the Year. Deadly nonsense about the virus and the election. The smearing of Ilhan Omar. The burly crying men. Windmill cancer. Veterans Choice. ¤ The most notable lies of the Trump presidency, and what they tell us about him:
⋙ CNN, Daniel Dale: The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump’s presidency http://cnn.it/35NreCM
💽 WaPo: 41 minutes of fear: A video timeline from inside the Capitol siege http://wapo.st/2LFnyvZ
🐣 RT @NewYorker What’s required in the aftermath of the insurrection is a way to punish Donald Trump for his sedition, make sure he can’t run for President again, and deprive him of the attention he so craves, @JohnCassidy writes.
⋙ NewYorker, John Cassidy: Trump Can’t Be Allowed to Escape Justice Yet Again http://bit.ly/2XPtcOK
// 1/11/2021; Despite all the outrage sparked by last week’s riot, the President has grounds for believing that he won’t receive any immediate punishment
🧵 😅 RT @jules_su Since Trump’s almost out of office, I figured this would be a fun time to remind everyone of the weirdest & dumbest sh*t our failed dictator did in the last four years that we totally forgot about. ¤ Starting with a classic: ¤ STARING DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN DURING A SOLAR ECLIPSE 📌 https://twitter.com/jules_su/status/1348879180658860032?s=20
🚫🐣 RT @donwinslow I was contacted by someone who I’ve confirmed works at The Capitol who told me the following: ¤ Laura Boebert gave a “tour” on the 5th even though she’s denying it.
🐣 RT @rulajebreal On his first day in office alone, President Biden will rescind the #MuslimBan on Muslim countries, rejoin Paris climate accord, extend pandemic limits on evictions & student loan payments, & order agencies to reunite kids kidnapped from families at border.
⋙ NYT: Biden Seeks Quick Start With Executive Actions and Aggressive Legislation http://nyti.ms/2XJydZ4
// In an effort to mark a clean break from the Trump era, the president-elect plans to roll out dozens of executive orders in his first 10 days on top of a big stimulus plan and an expansive immigration bill.
🐣 RT @TheAmerican22 Ret. Lt. General Russell Honore will conduct a security investigation into the Capitol attack. If you were involved, you best find an attorney. If you know anything about Lt. General Honore, then you know the 100% truth will come out. Perpetrators will be found!
🐣 RT @CNN Capitol Police arrested a man in downtown Washington with a loaded handgun, more than 500 rounds of ammunition and fake inaugural credentials, police say https://cnn.it/2LDewzD
WaPo: Off-duty police were part of the Capitol mob. Now police are turning in their own. http://wapo.st/3nP24d5
🐣 RT @AmbJohnBolton Trump’s tenure would have dismayed the Founding Fathers – most tragically when he incited a mob to disrupt Congress from fulfilling its constitutional responsibility to certify the 2020 election. How did it come to this? More by me in @globeandmail
⋙ Globe&Mail, John Bolton: Opinion: Trump has caused the Republican Party great damage. Here’s what conservatives should do http://team.ca/39vQqi0
// Trump had no philosophy, no principles and no plan to govern, and yet the GOP supported his rise to power – with distastrous consequences.
DailyBeast, Christopher Ketcham: The Boogaloos Are Pitching a Big Tent for Far-Right Violence http://bit.ly/38OFZav “No longer can we laugh at this nightmare vision”
// Future oppressors are often viewed as bumbling idiots. But if we are too complacent, hindsight may show us to be the fools, blind to the threat
In the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol Building in D.C., right-wing militia groups and allied Trump supporters are planning something bigger for the week of Jan. 17, in the lead-up to the inauguration of Joe Biden. A widely disseminated online poster calls for an “armed march on Capitol Hill and all state capitols.”
What might unfold is anyone’s guess. Even prior to the Jan. 6 insurrection, the FBI, as early as Dec. 29, had been apprised by confidential informants that, starting on Jan. 17, a “militant antigovernment movement” called the Boogaloo promised “armed, anti-government actions leading to a civil war.” The National Counterterrorism Center and Department of Homeland Security this week issued a bulletin that “domestic violent extremists” and “boogaloo adherents” intending to trigger a race war “may exploit the aftermath of the Capitol breach by conducting attacks to destabilize and force a climactic conflict in the United States.”
If you haven’t heard of the Boogaloo and their “accelerationist” intentions for the destruction and rebirth of this country in the crucible of civil war, you’re not alone. When in 2019 my friend Jeff Schwilk, a photographer and investigative journalist, approached me to edit a book about neofascists, Nazis, white supremacists, right-wing militias and how Trumpism had served to unite them, I laughed my head off when he described the trappings of the Boogaloo Boys: that they wore Hawaiian shirts under their body armor as a mark of solidarity at protests and marches; that they flew a variant of a Nazi war flag that symbolized a mythic nation called Kekistan; that they had taken on as mascot, maybe sort of as a joke, an internet meme called Pepe the Frog in honor of the Egyptian god of chaos and darkness, the frog-humanoid Kek. This is a movement that deliberately makes itself look comical in order to attract meme-poisoned teenagers with an “aesthetic of violence,” while outwardly downplaying the threat it poses.
The joke’s on me, of course. Members of the Boogaloo have been tied to law enforcement and the military and have trumpeted their involvement in the murder of law enforcement officers; were tied to the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; and were among the seditious mob that stormed the Capitol Building. As Schwilk observed in the book that he and I put together, Unflattering Photos of Fascists: Authoritarianism in Trump’s America …
However online and mimetic and ideologically incoherent the Boogaloo may be, says Schwilk, they are at the same time functioning as a kind of big tent of the extreme right with members who might also be Proud Boy street thugs, or Three Percent militia, or retired cops turned Oath Keeper, or white power fanatics (think Aryan Nations), or hard-right Christian militants (think Patriot Prayer), or QAnon crazies, or simply MAGA meatheads with guns.
COVID lockdowns and mask ordinances opportunized the expansion of the Boogaloo tent to include right-wing “plandemic” paranoiacs, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. Quite suddenly, there was a cross-over of hardcore neofascist white supremacists with Fox News-watching Trump voters who were being radicalized and finding common cause with the accelerationists.
Whether at Trump rallies, “freedom” marches, Second Amendment celebrations, or lockdown and mask protests, you can literally see the groups merging together in many of Schwilks’ photos. Whatever nominal flag people are there under, they seem increasingly to embrace extremist ideology.
When the second civil war explodes, as they imagine that it will, many members of all these groups–call them the Trumpenvolk–expect to coalesce while “the enemies of the right,” as Schwilk explains, are “exterminated by death squads clad in Hawaiian shirts.” ¤ No longer can we laugh at this nightmare vision.
⭕ 15 Jan 2021
WaPo: Off-duty police were part of the Capitol mob. Now police are turning in their own. http://wapo.st/3nP24d5
WaPo: Identifying far-right symbols that appeared at the U.S. Capitol riot http://wapo.st/2XMhg02
🐣 RT @DeanObeidallah 20,000 national guard troops are protecting the Capitol from Donald trump’s militia. This is where we are as a nation thanks to Fascist trump.
NYT, David Brooks: Trump Ignites a War Within the Church http://nyti.ms/38Qyr6M “One core feature of Trumpism is that it forces you to betray every other commitment you might have: to the truth, moral character, the Sermon on the Mount, conservative principles, the Constitution”
// After a week of Trumpist mayhem, white evangelicals wrestle with what they’ve become.
🐣 RT @brhodes Trump, Kushner and their circle will walk out of government knowing a tremendous amount of very classified and very valuable information. Does anyone really think they won’t try to monetize that knowledge?
🐣 RT @GlennKesslerWP Quite striking from the former deputy DNI for Trump who briefed him dozens of times —-> Sue Gordon: Trump’s intelligence briefings should stop once he leaves office – The Washington Post
⋙ WaPo, Susan Gordon: A former president Trump won’t ‘need to know.’ Cut off his intelligence. http://wapo.st/3ikPxNC
ABCNews: Longtime Trump advisers connected to groups behind rally that led to Capitol attack http://abcn.ws/3bINyRH
// Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn all promoted the Jan. 6 rally.
🐣 RT @liamstack “If it wasn’t my job I would do it for free. It was absolutely my pleasure to crush a white nationalist insurrection,” he said. “And we’ll do it as many times as it takes.” 💽 https://twitter.com/liamstack/status/1350271918168006657?s=20/photo/1
// Daniel Hodges, DC police officer crushed in door
🐣 RT @ScottyinCo I don’t want to hear a fucking thing about Biden’s $1.9 trillion dollars after Trump added 6 trillion to our deficit, every billionaire skated out of fair taxes, $300m in golf trips, Pompeo’s Christmas party, Javanka’s 3k a month shitter detail and Melanie’s rose garden rape.
CNN, Brian Stelter: Fox News Channel’s ratings have sagged ever since Election Day. And CNN’s ratings have surged to historic levels http://cnn.it/3qq2yIp ‘This month to date, CNN has avgd 2.08M viewers throughout the day; MSNBC has avgd 1.74M; and Fox has avgd 1.41M’
🐣 RT @peterwsinger “Telegram was the fifth most-downloaded app in the United States, compared with its previous ranking of 110th before the Capitol attack, according to app research firm App Annie. Signal, another encrypted chat app, was No. 1, up from its ranking of 750”
⋙ WaPo: Far-right groups move online conversations from social media to chat apps — and out of view of law enforcement http://wapo.st/
// Telegram is surging as Parler went offline and the backlash against Twitter and Facebook grew.
🐣 RT @JerryWillResist GOP congressman Pete Sessions deletes tweet to Stop the steal. He Tweeted “Had a great meeting today with folks from “Stop the Steal” at our nation’s Capitol. I encouraged them to keep fighting and assured them I look forward to doing MY duty on January 6
// 1/15/2021
⋙ RawStory, Sarah Burris: GOP congressman deletes tweet saying he met with ‘Stop The Steal’ and told them to ‘keep fighting http://bit.ly/2LBTMIy
// 1/11/2021
🐣 RT @BillKristol “Spreading disinformation…has real world consequences. Many media property owners have as much responsibility for this as the elected officials who know the truth but choose instead to propagate lies.” [ ~ James Murdoch]
⋙ CNN: James Murdoch criticizes ‘media property owners’ who have ‘unleashed insidious’ forces with election denialism claims http://cnn.it/2XMyXwC
⋙⋙ 🐣 the “second son” who no longer has a voice at Fox, sadly; his brother Lachlan is the heir apparent
🐣 RT @gregpmiller How big a problem does US mil have with violent extremists? Of the 72 people arrested so far in connection to Capitol siege, 11 had military background. @GregJaffe @DanLamothe @JulieATate
⋙ WaPo: Conspiracy theories and a call for patriots ensnare military veterans at the Capitol http://wapo.st/2LsBDwT
NYT: Atlanta Prosecutor Appears to Move Closer to Trump Inquiry http://nyti.ms/38Kji77
// The Fulton County district attorney is weighing an inquiry into possible election interference and is said to be considering hiring an outside counsel.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Capitol Police intelligence report warned three days before attack that ‘Congress itself’ could be targeted http://wapo.st/35JKh0N //➔ but the FBI couldn’t decide if the internet buzz was “aspirational” only and so withheld its report?
In a 12-page report on Jan. 3, the intelligence unit for the congressional police force described how thousands of enraged protesters, egged on by Trump and flanked by white supremacists and extreme militia groups, were likely to stream into Washington armed for battle. ¤ This time, the focus of their ire was members of Congress, the report said.
“Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election,” according to the memo, portions of which were obtained by The Washington Post. “This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent. Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th.”
The internal report — which does not appear to have been shared widely with other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI — was among a number of flags that security experts say should have alerted officials to the high security risks on Jan. 6.
A day before the attack, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit warning that some extremists were preparing to travel to Washington and threatening to commit violence and “war.” And dozens of people on a terrorist watch list were in Washington that day, including many suspected white supremacists, as The Post previously reported.
Two people familiar with the Capitol Police intelligence memo, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe security preparations, said the report was conveyed to all Capitol Police command staff by the intelligence unit’s director, Jack Donohue. Another law enforcement official said the report prompted the Capitol Police chief to seek the emergency activation of the National Guard and led the department to place its perimeter barricades farther from the Capitol than during past events.
Former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund, who resigned in the wake of the siege, said in an interview Friday that it would be inappropriate to publicly discuss an internal intelligence memo, given its sensitive nature and the risk of revealing sources and methods. But he said he was familiar with the department’s intelligence reports, which he said guided security planning.
Sund previously told The Post in an interview Sunday that in the days immediately preceding the attack, he grew concerned that additional security measures were needed. He asked top congressional security officials for permission to declare an emergency and activate the National Guard, a request he said they rebuffed.
“We looked at the intelligence,” he said. “We knew we would have large crowds, the potential for some violent altercations. I had nothing indicating we would have a large mob seize the Capitol.”
The memo concluded that Jan. 6 was shaping up to potentially be a perfect storm of danger, because of the size of the expected crowds, the urgency of the group’s mission, the call for demonstrators to bring lethal weapons, the location of the two largest protests in close proximity to the Capitol grounds and the fact that “both have been promoted by President Trump himself.”
“The Stop the Steal protest in particular does not have a permit, but several high profile speakers, including Members of Congress are expected to speak at the event,” the document stated. “This combined with Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members and others who actively promote violence, may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike.” ¤ Two people familiar with the report said it was not shared widely outside the police force.
On Jan. 4, the day after the intelligence unit shared its warning and conclusions with more than a dozen Capitol Police command staff members, Sund said he asked the Senate and House sergeants at arms for permission to put the National Guard on emergency standby.
Sund said House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving and Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger rejected that idea and suggested that he instead informally seek out his Guard contacts, asking them to “lean forward” and be on alert in case Capitol Police needed their help.
On the day of the attack, Sund said he urgently renewed the request for emergency National Guard support after a mob broke through the Capitol barricades around 1 p.m. The minutes ticked by as the sergeants at arms sought approval from congressional leadership. ¤ The initial wave of the military reinforcements would not arrive for more than four hours — at 5:40 p.m.
The Capitol Police intelligence report was a collaborative product of its intelligence division, led by Donohue, a national expert on the rise of radicalization and violence among extremist groups and domestic terrorists who was recently hired by the department.
In July 2020, Donohue testified before the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism about how social media was being used to radicalize and foment violence in right-wing and left-wing extremist groups. He warned about the increasingly incendiary nature of events billed as free-speech protests and extremists’ attempts to harm government officials and police in their calls for insurrection. …
Meanwhile, a separate FBI internal report prepared the day before the attack by a field office in Norfolk described an online thread that indicating extremists were planning to travel to D.C. for “war.”
Officials said FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen were not briefed on the document in particular because it was considered a raw intelligence product, and investigators had not identified those responsible for the posts. But, the officials said, Wray was briefed in advance more broadly regarding online chatter about violence, as well as information that the FBI’s sources were relaying about possible extremists intending to travel to the Capitol.
Officials have said FBI agents visited some of those extremists to discourage them from traveling. But the bureau did not take other steps — such as issuing a formal threat assessment to law enforcement — that might have raised the level of alarm.
FBI officials have said it is difficult to distinguish cheap talk from actual threats online, where the volume of incendiary posts is astronomical. ¤ “One of the real challenges in this space is trying to distinguish what’s aspirational vs. what’s intentional,” Wray said at a briefing Thursday.
🐣 RT @thenewsoncnbc President-elect Biden says that the coronavirus vaccine rollout in the U.S. has been a “dismal failure” so far. Now, some state governors are accusing the government of lying about vaccine reserves. @megtirrell reports. http://cnb.cx/35M3a33
🐣 RT @TheTweetOfGod The inquiry follows reporting that an arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) sent out robocalls urging supporters to go to the Capitol and “fight” Congress over Trump’s election-fraud conspiracy theories.
⋙ Law&Crime, Adam Klasfeld: Senator Ron Wyden, Soon-to-Be Finance Committee Chair, Urges IRS to Probe Charities’ Role in Inciting U.S. Capitol Insurrection http://bit.ly/3ipE1Aw
WaPo, Philip Bump: The false comparison between last summer’s protests and what happened at the Capitol http://wapo.st/3bR7sKe
● The intent of the Jan. 6 protest was far more nefarious
● The Capitol riots stemmed from a lie
● The encouragement of political leaders was not the same
● Hundreds of peaceful protests happened last summer. One violent protest happened last
week
● Whataboutism isn’t an excuse
🧵 RT @maggieNYT I got a bit more information about the Lindell meeting. It was a brief meeting, Trump sent him upstairs to the WH counsel’s office to be escorted by an admin official sitting next to Lindell in the meeting. That official, according to another official, was Robert O’Brien. 📌 https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1350249367605813250?s=20
🐣 RT @ZcohenCNN MyPillow CEO’s notes visible as he entered the West Wing today showed a suggestion to replace CIA director Haspel w/ current acting Pentagon chief of staff. But multiple sources tell me, @vmsalama & @kaitlancollins it was not the first time this idea was broached inside the WH.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ZcohenCNN Multiple options were discussed, including firing Haspel’s deputy Vaughn Bishop & replacing him w/ Patel, which they believed would force Haspel to quit, & also firing both & making Patel acting director.
⋙⋙ CNN: MyPillow CEO hints at scrapped plan to replace CIA director with Trump loyalist http://cnn.it/3swrGPq
🐣 RT @lrozen “Trump ended the brief meeting by directing Lindell to go upstairs to the office of WH counsel Pat A. Cipollone. Lindell said he showed them material but was sent back downstairs to wait awhile longer. ¤ Officials seemed ‘disinterested’ in what he had to say, Lindell said.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @saddamscribe Photos Capture Notes From My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell’s White House Visit: One image reveals that ‘martial law’ is written in those notes, though Lindell — a conspiracy theorist — denied it, saying it’s ‘fake news.’ – The New York Times
⋙⋙ NYT: Photos capture notes from Trump ally leaving the White House on Friday. http://nyti.ms/2Nd6v53
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Republicans who talk about the need to unite should be asked about the man who helped fuel an insurrection inviting the MyPillow Guy, who just happens to have a document referencing the Insurrection Act and martial law, to the White House.
🐣 RT @johnkruzel MyPillow guy’s recent schedule:
1/5: Share 8kun document openly calling for war (@oneunderscore__ )
1/6: Run ads during Trump rally that morphed into deadly insurrection
1/15: Visit WH holding notes w/ apparent reference to “Insurrection Act,” “martial law” (@jabinbotsford)
MyPillow guy's recent schedule:
1/5: Share 8kun document openly calling for war (@oneunderscore__ )
1/6: Run ads during Trump rally that morphed into deadly insurrection
1/15: Visit WH holding notes w/ apparent reference to "Insurrection Act," "martial law" (@jabinbotsford) pic.twitter.com/BKs5xhsdXm
— John Kruzel (@johnkruzel) January 15, 2021
🐣 RT @CNNPolitics Justice Department prosecutors have formally walked back their assertion in a court filing that said Capitol rioters sought to “capture and assassinate elected officials” https://cnn.it/3bFI5eB
🐣 🌎 RT @aseitzwald This is basically all of downtown DC. Green is restricted to local business and residents only, red is no go. https://twitter.com/aseitzwald/status/1350179631228477450?s=20/photo/1
😅 RT @ColinPClarke Why are we kidding ourselves? ¤ We all knew this presidency would come down to the My Pillow Guy and Trump together in the bunker. ¤ I never believed in destiny before, but…
↥ ↧
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo, Philip Bump: A pillow salesman apparently has some ideas about declaring martial law http://wapo.st/38MQFGi Mike Lindell headed into the WH with an alarming set of notes: The Post’s Jabin Botsford captured an image //➔ 25th Amendment NOW‼️
🚫🐣 RT @ Reup, on Rudy texts. Unless texts are fake, they appear to confirm he was in direct contact w/James Sullivan, Proud Boys affiliate. ¤ They do NOT, however, tie him to Kash Patel. @kyledcheney believes “Kash” reference is instead to convicted gang member.
↥ ↧
🚫🐣 RT @MapleBalsamic 1/ John Sullivan, aka “activist John” was rejected by the BLM and anti-fascist communities last year for being violent, chaotic, self-serving, and having ties to the far right. His bro James is closely tied to the proud boys and started a group for “patriots” who
⋙ 🐣 RT @MapleBalsamic 2/ support trump. John was seen in the Capitol during the insurrection & both brothers have been arrested at this point for this. Giuliani’s text is saying he’s working with Kash Patel, who was appointed to the dept of defense in Nov 2020, to get the insurrection pinned on John
// speculative; Rudy tweet: https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1350106404024176644?s=20/photo/1
📊 Pew Poll: Trump Departs With Lowest-Ever Job Mark http://pewrsr.ch/3iiQ2I0 This poll was done 1/8-12/2021
// Full title: Biden Begins Presidency With Positive Ratings; Trump Departs With Lowest-Ever Job Mark
// 68% of public does not want Trump to remain a major political figure in the future
● ‘How would you rate Biden/Trump since the election?’ https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1350137155457331203?s=20/photo/1
● 68% do NOT want Trump to remain a political figure https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1350140141042597889?s=20/photo/1
● 60% of Republicans approve of Trump, down 25% https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1350143242604568578?s=20/photo/1
● 75% think Trump responsible for violence (52% of GOP) https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1350145884378554369?s=20/photo/1
● About 60% of GOP think Trump won and want him active in politics https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1350148564102631429?s=20/photo/1
● Most Americans “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s performance https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1350151003660804100?s=20/photo/1
// by demographic group: gender, race, education
🐣 RT @amandacarpenter Everyone who encouraged and gave cover to the big election lie are responsible for leading people astray.
⋙ TheBulwark, Jonathan Last: This Cult Is Ruining People’s Lives http://bit.ly/2XWcPA1
// How the Republican party failed Christine Priola.
🐣 RT @marceelias What about his Elite Strike Force of Kraken, Crazy and Traffic Court Lawyer?
⋙ Bloomberg: Trump Struggles to Find Lawyers as Impeachment Trial Nears http://bloom.bg/39z1bQW
// President Donald Trump, on the eve of facing a historic second impeachment trial for inciting the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol
🐣 RT @SteveSchmidtSES Appalling and frightening. We must face this and not look away. This needs to be defeated. This insurrection must be punished. There must be accountability. This movement must be crushed. It is unamerican, autocratic and racist.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ThePlumLineGS The new Post poll has some awful findings among Republicans:
51% say GOP leaders didn’t go far enough in nullifying election
56% say Trump bears zero blame for the insurrection
66% say he has acted responsibly
Behold the GOP’s authoritarian core:
⋙⋙ WaPo, Greg Sargent: Trump’s GOP has an ugly authoritarian core. A new poll exposes it. http://wapo.st/35Kh99I
🐣 RT @Acosta Pelosi announces @ltgrusselhonore will lead investigation into Capitol security after last week’s siege.
🐣 RT @AliVelshi BREAKING: Federal prosecutor say Jacob Chansley, also known as Jacob Angelii, who was wearing horns, a fur headdress, & face paint during the Capitol attack, intended to capture & assassinate members of Congress, & that he wants to return to DC for the inauguration.
WaPo: How the rioters who stormed the Capitol came dangerously close to Pence http://wapo.st/2N96lLS “The potential exposure of the vice president underscores how law enforcement agencies struggled to manage the rapidly expanding crisis in real time”
🐣 RT @7im New from the federal government: “the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials.”
⋙ RollingStone, Tim Dickinson: QAnon Shaman’s Alleged Note to Mike Pence: ‘It’s Only a Matter of Time, Justice is Coming’ http://bit.ly/2LQTpcQ
// A new federal court brief describes Jacob Anthony Chansley — aka Jake Angeli — as “the most prominent symbol of a violent insurrection that attempted to overthrow the United States Government”
🐣 RT @WSJ President Trump has lost the ability to easily communicate with roughly 150 million followers and subscribers due to recent blocks. Here’s the breakdown of how social-media platform shrank his reach.
⋙ WSJ: How Twitter, Facebook Shrank President Trump’s Social Reach http://on.wsj.com/ 2Lrk5Bh
// When President Trump was blocked from posting to major social networks, he lost direct broadcast channels to roughly 150 million followers and subscribers.
WaPo: Inspectors general of several federal agencies open sweeping review of security, intelligence surrounding Capitol attack http://wapo.st/38IyuSi The IGs for the departments of Justice, Defense, Interior and Homeland Security will investigate response on Jan 6
// “Internal investigators for the departments of Justice, Defense, Interior and Homeland Security how security officials prepared for and responded to the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6”
🐣 📊 RT @ New @ABCNews/WaPo poll finds nearly 7 in 10 [of all Americans] think Republicans should lead the party in a different direction. http://abcn.ws/38HU35n
// so do 33% of Republicans; vs 13% of Republicans in 2018
TheGuardian, Lois Beckett: 100 days of warning: inside the Boogaloo killings of US law enforcement http://bit.ly/35Jn1Qy
// Extremism experts warned that the anti-government movement was planning attacks online. Why didn’t Facebook act?
AP: Capitol rioters included highly trained ex-military and cops http://bit.ly/2XFEDbp
⭕ 14 Jan 2021
TheGuardian, Lois Beckett: 100 days of warning: inside the Boogaloo killings of US law enforcement http://bit.ly/35Jn1Qy
// Extremism experts warned that the anti-government movement was planning attacks online. Why didn’t Facebook act?
💙 🧵 RT @HerreraBeutler In conversations w/residents about this week’s impeachment vote, some are unclear on what transpired before & during that involved President Trump. ¤ Here are the indisputable and publicly available facts 📌 https://twitter.com/HerreraBeutler/status/1349959275922206721?s=20
🐣 RT @christoq Rick Wilson is letting it fly now. ¤ “They act as if they’ve been oppressed somehow, that the world is against them somehow. Well guess what? Twitter and Facebook aren’t banning you because you’re a conservative, they’re banning you because you suck, because you say evil shit!” 💽 https://twitter.com/christoq/status/1349990920322600960?s=20/photo/1
CNN, Daniel Black: The Capitol attack was White supremacy, plain and simple http://cnn.it/3oHqczA
🐣 RT @JohnWDean The Republican Party is on trial in the US Senate. Trump’s been convicted by rational Americans. So far, it appears an estimated half of those who voted for him think he’s guilty. (Luntz focus group 1/7.) The Senate GOP can end Trump’s influence and it is long past time to do so!
🐣 RT @DavidBegnaud Chilling: @DCPoliceDept officer Michael Fanone said on CNN that rioters went for his gun, saying “Kill him with his own gun”. ¤ He told CNN, “It was all about self preservation…I “appealed to their humanity…I just remember yelling out I have kids” 💽 https://twitter.com/DavidBegnaud/status/1349933583964639232?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @joshgerstein UPDATE: FBI in Little Rock, Ark. says agents have arrested Peter Stager, charged with repeatedly striking a Metro DC police officer with American flag-bearing flagpole during the Capitol Riot. Doc: https://bit.ly/35JUiLl Earlier:
⋙ Politico: FBI director says 100 arrests to date from Capitol riots http://politi.co/39D6fnr
// Christopher Wray also said law enforcement was monitoring “an extensive amount of concerning online chatter” ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
🐣 RT @JakeTapper What happened last week was horrific. Five dead that day, two subsequent suicides. Pay attention to the people trying to change the subject and ask yourselves why. Might it be because they bear some responsibility and want to avoid consequences?
⋙ 🐣 RT @JakeTapper A week ago MAGA terrorists, incited by Trump, his son, his lawyer, and months of lies by far too many folks in the GOP and media, tried to stop the Constitutional election process through a terrorist attack on the Capitol. 5 were killed. They are now trying to change the subject.
🐣 RT @BryanDBender “What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? …An uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Cleveland City Club, April 5, 1968.
💙 🧵 RT @Cleavon_MD I’m an Iraq War vet & ER doctor on the frontlines of the pandemic in NYC and Arizona. My colleagues and I have seen countless people die from COVID who should be ALIVE. Trump dances on the graves of Americans that didn’t have to die #TrumpGraveDancer https://twitter.com/Cleavon_MD/status/1316217799082041345?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @ As an ER doctor that has lost 3 colleagues and a 27 y.o. cousin to the virus, let me RECAP 42 WAYS Trump failed America during the pandemic! ¤ 1. Months before the pandemic, Trump cut the number of CDC experts in China from 47 to 14.
🐣 RT @duty2warn Lots of talk about accountability. We think it is absolutely a prerequisite to healing. But the word needs a modifier. This wasn’t jaywalking. It was sedition. It was almost a massacre. We need proportionate accountability. We need expulsions.
CNN: Trump explodes at Nixon comparisons as he prepares to leave office http://cnn.it/35JxBa9
// In his final days in office, President Donald Trump has found the parts of the job he loved replaced by cold legal warnings, forced video addresses and a shrinking circle of downtrodden aides, all anxiously wondering what life will be like after noon on January 20.
As one of their final acts, Trump’s team is working to organize a crowd to see him off on the morning of Biden’s inauguration, when he plans to depart Washington while still president and is expecting a major send-off. Even though some of his allies had encouraged him to attend Biden’s inauguration, and Trump quizzed his circle on whether he should, few ever expected him to participate in the swearing-in of his successor.
CNN: Trump explodes at Nixon comparisons as he prepares to leave office http://cnn.it/35JxBa9
// In his final days in office, President Donald Trump has found the parts of the job he loved replaced by cold legal warnings, forced video addresses and a shrinking circle of downtrodden aides, all anxiously wondering what life will be like after noon on January 20.
💙 🧵 RT @RadioFreeTom Watching footage of the Loser Sturm overrunning the Capitol during the Beer Belly Putsch, I am struck again by how much of what plagues us is an addiction to the narcissistic idea that everyone is the most important person ever, that everyone should be the boss of everything. /1 📌 https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1349868097914740737?s=20
The raging narcissism, particularly of the cosplaying men who now deny that they wanted no part of any of the seditious stuff, is striking. Men who have a huge reserve of self regard that does not extend to shaving or wearing a clean shirt or other basic signs of adulthood. /2
These are people – again, especially the men – trapped in the eternal drama of adolescence. They are creatures of a leisure society, bored by the ordinariness of life, angry that the world is not more interesting and that others refuse to pay them their heroic due. /3
As Eric Hoffer noted – h/t
@WindsorMann
– this is the fetid breeding ground of extremism: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves…Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless.” /4Even in 1951, Hoffer knew the danger of society of bored children: “There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.”
This, not rights or freedom, was what the past years of Trumpism are about. /5There is no seriousness here, no sense of injustice, no actual injury to rights. Merely the aggrieved boredom of men (and some women) who never learned that life is not ceaselessly interesting and dramatic. That life, even the best life, is boring and repetitive on most days. /6
This is why the legal and *social* response should swift and clear. To remind people that life is not a TV show. It is not Twitter dunks and Facebook memes. To show that hurting other people out of boredom and childish narcissism has real consequences. /7
People who want to be heroes seem to have no patience with a normal workplace or the self-disciple involved in showing up and doing your best no matter what the job is. After all, Thor and Captain America didn’t have to listen to their supervisor. /8
But life is heroic exactly when it is not dramatic. Taking care of your loved ones, looking after a sick friend, letting someone go ahead of you at a stop sign, hold the door for someone at a store. Adults know this. Stunted, selfish, undisciplined, stupid adolescents do not. /9
I am exhausted by turning on the news and realizing that the blessings of life in a liberal democracy have also produced a stubborn knot of bored children who think guns and flags and dumb slogans will give their lives meaning. /10
All I can do is suggest to other people in this society to treat these brutal, overgrown adolescents with as much distance as possible. To show them, by example, what stoicism and seriousness look like. To be the adults.
I know it’s hard. I’m not consistent about it myself. /11But amidst all the calls for unity, it’s important to remember that unity and understanding can only happen between adults who agree to live peaceably. The people who defended sedition – and especially those who instigated it – are not those people. Those are armed toddlers. /12
I don’t know what will change us. I sometimes think that a bit of social pressure on a man to wash his face in the morning and to dress differently from his pre-teen son might help. Other days, I think that nothing will work and pure, vulgar decadence will just end us. /13
And don’t get me wrong: I don’t underestimate the danger these people pose. They have threatened me directly and many other people I know. But there’s not much you can do about that. But I don’t have to pretend that “dangerous” means “serious and worthy of respect.” /14
So maybe, now and then, we should all ask ourselves if we’re taking things seriously enough – and if they are the *right* things to be taken seriously. And whether we are setting that example for others around us. Again, not sure I do that enough myself. /15
None of this means not to be light-hearted. I am, so often, utterly immature and unserious. (Except I’m right about Led Zeppelin.) But when it comes to living as an American, I hope I am as serious as can be. It’s something we can all do. And we can insist on it from others. /16x
🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger Biden’s team is balanced, deeply experienced, competent and committed to putting “Justice” back in DOJ. Americans got the reassurance they needed after Wed’s deeply unsettling violence and mayhem. Yes, we really are moving toward an infinitely better DOJ
⋙ WaPo, Jennifer Rubin: Joe Biden’s nominees will put ‘Justice’ back in the Justice Department http://wapo.st/3nKvhpB
🐣 RT @DanLaMothe “We got to hold this door” ¤ The Capitol riot, in the words of D.C. police Via @phscoop
⋙ WaPo: How battered D.C. police made a stand against the Capitol mob http://wapo.st/2LTXMnj
// D.C. officers describe being battered by flagpoles, beaten with their own clubs and choked by bear spray as they fought to defend the U.S. Capitol
🐣 RT @Reuters At least 50 elected officials and others in public sector jobs are facing internal inquiries or investigations that, in some cases, have resulted in temporary suspensions pending investigations, based on @Reuters examination of public statements, news reports and video footage https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1349742191338545152?s=20/photo/1-3
WaPo: Far-right groups make plans for protests and assaults before and after Inauguration Day http://wapo.st/3snWeD0 “FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told reporters that officials were monitoring ‘an extensive amount of concerning online chatter’”
🧵 RT @ZoeTillman A hearing is about to start on whether Cleveland Meredith, charged with threatening to kill Nancy Pelosi and bringing guns + ammo to DC (see: https://buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/man-threatened-kill-nancy-pelosi…) should be kept in custody. He’s arguing for release, govt is arguing to keep him behind bars. Stay tuned. 📌 https://twitter.com/ZoeTillman/status/1349806513972502541?s=20
⋙⋙ BuzzfeedNews: A Man Allegedly Threatened To Kill Nancy Pelosi And Drove To DC With A “Shit Ton” Of Ammunition http://bit.ly/
// Prosecutors say Cleveland Meredith Jr. drove from Colorado to DC and threatened to kill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on live television.
⋙ 🐣 […] RT @ZoeTillman NEW: A man charged with threatening to kill Nancy Pelosi and bringing multiple guns to DC last week will be kept in custody pending trial. He’d arrived too late to join the Capitol insurrection because of car trouble, according to the govt.
⋙⋙ BuzzfeedNews: A Man Charged With Threatening To Kill Nancy Pelosi Will Be Kept In Custody While His Case Is Pending http://bit.ly/2XFLNwv
// The defendant brought multiple firearms to Washington but arrived too late in the day to join the Capitol insurrection, according to charging papers.
🐣 RT @emptywheel Presidential speech is not like private citizen speech. If you can fire the Secretary of State or pardon a co-conspirator with a tweet, then your calls for violence, too, must be deemed operative.
WaPo: Dozens of people on FBI terrorist watch list came to D.C. the day of Capitol riot http://wapo.st/3qpxTL5 “The majority of the watchlisted individuals in Washington that day are suspected white supremacists”
⭕ 13 Jan 2021
WaPo: McConnell breaks with Trump, says he’ll consider convicting him in Senate trial http://wapo.st/2Ln10Ab
🐣 RT @senatemajldr My full statement on the next seven days and the Senate schedule: https://twitter.com/senatemajldr/status/1349476803514146819?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Under Heavy Pressure, Trump Releases Video Condemning Capitol Siege http://nyti.ms/3smDVhB by Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt
// The video was made public after President Trump was impeached a second time and after he told his supporters in the hours following the start of the riot last week that “we love you.”
🧵 RT @jack I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct? 📌 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690?s=20
WaPo, Philip Bump: A House Republican wanted proof of incitement. Here are four rioters who came to D.C. because of Trump. http://wapo.st/39upvDx
🐣 RT @ybarrap GOP kept saying, “Whatabout last summer?” ¤ Well, let’s talk about that. ¤ Boogaloo, Proud Boys, Incels, & others were the RWNJs that the DoJ found were the predominant threat at those events. ¤ NOT Antifa et al. ¤ This should be a major point in the punishment phase. ¤ #RemoveThemAll
💙 ⋙ 🐣 📋 Rightwing saboteur provocateurs among BLM Protests: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1349545143636996096?s=20/photo/1-4
🐣 RT @WhiteHouse 💽 https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1349492130578919425?s=20/photo/1
// Trump video denouncing violence
🐣 RT @politico Nancy Pelosi signed an article of impeachment against President Trump this evening, a ceremonial step that precedes the article being sent to the Senate http://politi.co/2XQtCV7 💽 https://twitter.com/politico/status/1349509004343603202?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @nycsouthpaw After airing her suspicions yesterday, Rep. Sherrill writes to request an investigation of House Republicans’ complicity in the January 6th attacks. Katherine Clark and Frank Pallone sign on as well. https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1349480286824919045?s=20/photo/1-2
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: House impeaches Trump with 10 Republicans joining, but Senate plans unclear http://wapo.st/3nNWNTi
🐣 RT @davidmarco Stop calling these zip ties. They are 27-inch nylon tactical restraints. Zip ties are used for arts and crafts, gardening. Nylon tactical restraints are used to immobilize large amounts of prisoners or hostages. https://twitter.com/DavidMarkoMiami/status/1349302316348952577?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @pbump To be very clear: Trump’s role in last week’s violence is not centered on the speech he gave that morning. It follows from months of coddling fringe actors and months of insistences that the election would be stolen and months of claims that it was.
⋙ WaPo, Philip Bump: Trump’s actions that led to the violence at the Capitol began months ago http://wapo.st/3spE17U
🐣 RT @chrislhayes The safest bet for future predictions, I’ve learned, is things will muddle along, growing ever closer to doom, no one will course correct, and even as things around us crumble, the Breaking Point will always appear to be yet another half length away.
🐣 RT @kasparov63 Republicans calling for unity can’t even unite on reality. Ask them who won the election. Ask them who attacked the Capitol. If they can’t answer correctly, they are liars or fools or both.
💙 ⋙ CNN, Garry Kasparov: What happens next http://cnn.it/2N5sQS1
// 1/12/2021
🐣 RT @ABCNewsLive “Every one of us in this room right now could have died,” @RepRaskin says, warning of future threats. ¤ “It’s a bit much to be hearing that these people would not be trying to destroy our government and kill us if we just weren’t so mean to them.” http://abcn.ws/3oF4kFa
🐣 RT @ABC House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy: “Some say the riots were caused by Antifa. There is absolutely no evidence of that. And conservatives should be the first to say so.” https://abcn.ws/39JoSGn
💙 🧵 RT @atrupar Pelosi: “The President of the United States incited this insurrection, this armed rebellion, against our common country. He must go. He is a clear and present danger to the nation that we all love.” 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1349409668976807936?s=20
💙 🧵 RT @atrupar Rep. Jim McGovern (D): “We are debating this historic measure at an actual crime scene and we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for POTUS … the signal [of Trump’s speech last Wednesday] was unmistakable: these thugs should stage a coup so Donald Trump could hang on to power.” 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1349362831146291201?s=20
// House Impeachment Hearings
◕ ADL: Murder and Extremism in the US in 2019 http://bit.ly/35Dl4oH ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1349424302874103809?s=20/photo/1
// Almost all right wing white supremacists
🐣 RT @MollyMcKew House is getting pretty wild. People worried about concealed weapons, everyone done with conspiracist wackadoos supporting insurrection, members openly accusing other members of aiding the insurgents.
⋙ 🐣 RT @willsommer QAnon backer Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene gets called “literal QAnon lady” by fellow freshman GOP Rep. Nancy Mace in Capitol riot fight. [Axios link]
⭕ 12 Jan 2021
TheIndependent, Andrew Feinberg [UK] (1/12): White House insiders say Trump knew what was about to happen at the Capitol — because of his social media guru Dan Scavino http://bit.ly/3akE8tx Scavino is “the president’s online eyes and ears”
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs Authorities in both public and private sectors ignored the spread of dangerous ideas on the Internet and the growing networks of radicalized Americans, writes @wiczipedia. After the storming of the Capitol, these online trends are now impossible to ignore.
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Nina Jankowicz: The Day the Internet Came for Them http://fam.ag/3bT0Nzl
// Washington wakes up to the dark reality of online disinformation.
WaPo: Trump defiant and unapologetic about his role in inciting Capitol mob attack http://wapo.st/38Exj69
💙 ≣ Politico: Read Liz Cheney’s full statement in support of Trump’s impeachment http://politi.co/2K9hMSv
// The Wyoming Republican is the third-highest ranking leader in the House GOP conference.
“On January 6, 2021 a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol to obstruct the process of our democracy and stop the counting of presidential electoral votes. This insurrection caused injury, death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.
“Much more will become clear in coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.
“I will vote to impeach the President.”
WSJ, Jason Riley: This Time, Trump’s Impeachment Is Warranted http://on.wsj.com/3qly1eR “Even after the carnage that ensued, a large majority of Republicans in the House, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, voted to … challenge the election results. For shame”
// Republicans should worry more about what’s right for the country than their own electoral futures.
🧵 RT @TimothyDSnyder 1/10. The claim that Trump won the election is a Big Lie. 📌 https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1349046338927919105?s=20
⋙ 🐣 📋 RT @prc4aam https://twitter.com/prc4aam/status/1349062382291709955?s=20/photo/1
// list: Timothy Snyder: The Big Lie
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw Top Republican aide on House Armed Services Committee Jason Schmid resigns. ¤ His blistering letter calls out congressional Republicans who propelled “poisonous lie” that election was illegitimate who now fail to “rebuke these insurrectionists” #CountryOverParty https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1349064363500589058?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheAtlantic Removing Trump from office a week early would emphasize to his supporters that he is losing, @juliettekayyem writes: “Recruitment is easier for a winning team.”
⋙ TheAtlantic: How MAGA Extremism Ends http://bit.ly/3bzeG5z
// If Trump keeps losing, the risk of future violence will abate.
NYT: McConnell Privately Backs Impeachment as House Moves to Charge Trump http://nyti.ms/3nFW9qw
// The House formally called on Vice President Mike Pence to move to wrest power from the president, as Republican support built for impeaching him of inciting violence against the nation.
WaPo: Secret Service launches massive security operation to protect Biden inauguration http://wapo.st/3sjxLPh
🐣 RT @olgaNYC1211 Why is the Acting AG going on YouTube to deliver his message after missing today’s press conference? Is this the new method of speaking with Americans about a terrorist attack we faced and imminent threats we continue to face. I can’t wait to have a real administration again
⋙ https://youtu.be/IxvpKgA0-Wg
NYT: Manhunt Intensifies as Authorities Warn Some Rioters May Face Sedition Charges http://nyti.ms/3qj7xKG
// Evidence emerged that top officials, including at the F.B.I., had warnings about violence before the riot at the Capitol.
NYT: Pence Reached His Limit With Trump. It Wasn’t Pretty. http://nyti.ms/3qf8kfY
// After four years of tongue-biting silence that critics say enabled the president’s worst instincts, the vice president would not yield to the pressure and name-calling from his boss.
🐣 RT @AshaRangappa_ McConnell is a member of the Gang of 8 which means he is getting way more info than any of us and his conclusion (already) is apparently to run as fast and far as possible from this 💩 show. So.
🐣 RT @justinhendrix An account of one of the videos uploaded by President Trump to YouTube that was removed and prompted the platform to remove his account.
⋙ 🐣 RT @MikeElgan I saw one. It was bonkers. The basic message was that God wants you go to out on January 20 and save America. Be fearless. Your whole life has been leading up to this one day. Have zero fear because God is on your side. ¤ That kind of thing.
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Speaker Pelosi tonight: “Incitement to insurrection. Treasonous activity. If you are associating yourself with that as the proper execution of the president’s duties, you are associating yourself with sedition and treason.”
🐣 RT @pdberger The rioters—some carrying nooses, bats, pipes, chemical irritants and zip ties—were feet or seconds away from the lawmakers they sought to confront, hoping to stop them from ratifying the election of Democrat Joe Biden.
⋙ WSJ: Lawmakers Were Feet and Seconds Away From Confrontation With the Mob in the Capitol http://on.wsj.com/
// The rioters shouted they were searching for lawmakers; some made a narrow escape
🐣 RT @RobGeorge In the Senate, Donald Trump has 99 problems and a Mitch is one.
🐣📋 RT @GoAngelo I think the scale to which Fox News helped create the climate that led to the insurrection is being a bit under appreciated. ¤ In just a 9 day period in November, Fox News directly challenged the election results nearly 600 times. That pattern continued. [mmfa:] https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1349070505106665473?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ruthbenghiat Never forget: this was a coup attempt- necessarily an inside job since a “self-coup.” Scores of elected officials nearly died.
⋙ 🐣 RT @AshaRangappa_ Seeing the reporting that Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill stating that some of her colleagues gave some of the insurrectionists a “recon” tour the day before, which reminded me of reporting as it was going on that sources close to the WH were IN TOUCH WITH THE RIOTERS IN REAL TIME […]
🐣 Journalists: Trump’s new title after Jan 20, 2021 should be: ¤ “Disgraced ex-President” ¤ You’re welcome.
🐣 RT @jallepap If this is true, these members must be expelled and prosecuted for their roles in the January 6th seditious conspiracy. ¤ Mikie Sherrill claims Congress members gave ‘reconnaissance’ tours day before Capitol raid … via @northjersey
⋙ NorthJersey: Mikie Sherrill claims Congress members gave ‘reconnaissance’ tours day before Capitol raid http://njersy.co/3slRDB5
🐣 RT @Zaknafein The QAnon nuts kept bragging that they would release the Kraken, but what they’ve actually managed to do is awaken the Leviathan. https://twitter.com/ZaknafeinDC/status/1348966060729528320?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ReutersZengele What a way to bookend the Trump presidency ….
⋙ 🐣 Pussy (n.) ~
how it started: “grab ‘em by … ”
how it’s going: “you can go down in history as … ”
🐣 RT @maddow “1. Trump incites violence.
“2. Lawmakers prepare to impeach Trump for inciting violence.
“3. Trump says Democrats will be responsible for inciting violence by holding him accountable for inciting violence.” [link]
🐣 RT @CindyOtis_ The good(?) news is that details about chartered buses, meeting places, and organizers were all listed on the many Facebook event pages organizing group travel.
⋙ 🐣 RT @NBCNews BREAKING: “We’re looking at and treating this just like a significant international counterterrorism or counterintelligence operation,” US attorney in DC Sherwin says. ¤ “We’re looking at everything: Money, travel records, looking at disposition, movement, communication records.”
🐣 RT @yashar In a phone call with Mike Pence, Trump told him: ¤ “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.” @maggieNYT @peterbakernyt @anniekarni report
⋙ NYT: Pence Reached His Limit With Trump. It Wasn’t Pretty. http://nyti.ms/3qf8kfY
// After four years of tongue-biting silence that critics say enabled the president’s worst instincts, the vice president would not yield to the pressure and name-calling from his boss.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Pence won’t invoke the 25th amendment. Doesn’t say anything against impeachment. Has he spoken to any of his former House colleagues? Letter: https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1349167180567482378?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ 🐣 RT @UROCKlive1 BREAKING: Pelosi names impeachment managers.
Jamie Raskin
Diana DeGette
David Cicilline
Joaquin Castro
Eric Swalwell
Ted Lieu
Stacey Plaskett
Joe Neguse
Madeleine Dean
[link] https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1349166788953600000?s=20
🐣 RT @DeadlineWH “[Trump’s] brand is destroyed forever. You cannot do business without any type of partners… When you think about the logo of Trump’s business at this point, it’s those people storming the Capitol” – @DonnyDeutsch w/ @NicolleDWallace
🐣 RT @WSJ The FBI has opened more than 160 case files in connection with the Capitol riot, officials said. Members of the mob could face seditious conspiracy charges. [link] https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1349096434600210433?s=20
NBCNews: In part due to free speech worries, FBI never issued intel bulletin about possible Capitol violence http://nbcnews.to/39syR2l
// The lack of an intel bulletin left agencies like the Capitol Police without the full picture of what the FBI had learned about what extremists were saying.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson “Did you see what Trump tweeted?” said no one, ever again.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: FBI report warned of ‘war’ at Capitol, contradicting claims there was no indication of looming violence http://wapo.st/3bvRl4Q
🐣 RT @UROCKlive1 “Nice country you got there … it’d be a shame if something happened to it.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @rebeccaballhaus Trump says that impeaching him for inciting violence at the Capitol last week would be “very dangerous for the U.S.A” because of the violence at the Capitol last week.
⋙⋙ WSJ: Trump Defends Conduct, Attacks Democrats at First Post-Riot Event http://on.wsj.com/3i5lZDs
// At border wall in Texas, president takes aim at House move to impeach him over his supporters’ violence at Capitol
🐣 RT @JoshuaMatz The final paragraph of the House Judiciary Committee impeachment report is absolutely devastating. ¤ Stop what you’re doing and read it. https://twitter.com/JoshuaMatz8/status/1349139105460981763?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @DavidPriess Why, yes—the Judiciary Committee’s just-released report supporting the article of impeachment *does* cite the recent “Can Trump Be Stopped?” Lawfare article by @JackLGoldsmith and me. ¤ Thanks, Jack, for your wisdom in suggesting that we craft this article quickly.
⋙ 🐣 RT @maggieNYT This just in on the impeachment front
⋙⋙ 🐣📔 RT @diakopter Judiciary Committee Impeachment Materials PDF download http://bit.ly/3oIqFBu
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Fully agree. These three are intelligent and experienced Republican Congressmen. They personally led a Trump inspired coup against the Constitution and the election. Their motivation was cynical self gain. Shameful behavior.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln This is your coup. 💽 https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/1349058965372506118?s=20/photo/1
// singles out (Trump), Cruz, Hawley, Kevin McCarthy House Minority Leader
Reuters: In rare joint message, top U.S. military leaders condemn Capitol riot http://reut.rs/3nBYmUc “‘The rights of freedom of speech and assembly do not give anyone the right to resort to violence, sedition and insurrection,’ the memo, obtained by Reuters, said”
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @DanLaMothe The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leaders of each branch of the U.S. military, weigh in on the insurrection at the Capitol in this new memo: https://twitter.com/DanLamothe/status/1349102637778669569?s=20/photo/1-2
🐣 RT @JayRouseDC The GOP purged millions from the voter rolls, tried everything to suppress the vote, including wrecking the USPS, still got beaten badly (7 million votes and 4%) and still claim they won. Not just a “Big Lie” it’s delusional
🐣 ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1349133881744744448?s=20/photo/1
// Beavis and Butthead
TheHill: Joint Chiefs denounce ‘sedition and insurrection’ of Capitol attack http://bit.ly/39q5Ep1
🐣 RT @DanRather The hypocrisy of the Trump thuggery can be epitomized by a seditious rioter beating a police officer at the Capitol with an American flag. It was never about the flag, or “blue lives matter.” These were mere props in a movement fueled by power, injustice, and racism.
🐣 RT @mikememoli . @RepLizCheney makes it official, says she’ll vote to impeach President Trump. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
🐣 RT @Amy_Siskind Let’s face it folks: the FBI and DOJ just told us this was a conspiracy of sedition. McConnell didn’t find a soul or conscience. He knows there’s some bad shit about to come out about Republican lawmakers’ involvement in what almost became a bloody massacre of Congress.
WaPo: Justice Dept investigating sedition and conspiracy charges & any terror links to violent storming of US Capitol http://wapo.st/2LLdlh4 “The [DOJ] & FBI have created a sedition & conspiracy task force to pursue charges against participants in the storming of the US Capitol”
🐣 RT @jimsciutto Nothing has changed. He is not taking responsibility. He is deflecting. He is quoting “many people” saying his comments were just fine. He is accusing others of worse.
🐣 📋 RT @BradyBuzz This is urgent. ¤ We joined 70 organizations in sending a letter to Congress urging members to vote immediately to impeach President Trump for creating and inciting the violent January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol. ¤ We must stem further violence. #RemoveTrumpNow https://twitter.com/bradybuzz/status/1349025389264465923?s=20/photo/1-3
🐣 RT @atrupar Trump on impeachment: “For Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to continue on this path, I think it’s causing tremendous danger to our county and it’s causing tremendous anger. I want no violence.” 💽 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1349018177624289282?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Punchbowl News: Ted Cruz’s communications director announced she was leaving his staff on Monday, fallout from Cruz’s quest to overturn the election results.
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Punchbowl News: “House Republicans are bracing for between ten and 20 of their GOP colleagues to vote to impeach Donald Trump — a hugely embarrassing rebuke for the president at the end of his tumultuous term.”
🐣 RT @CityofAlamo The City of Alamo’s City Commission and City Administration has NOT been officially contacted regarding this visit and therefore, have NO DETAILS regarding his itinerary. https://twitter.com/CityofAlamo/status/1348750304330838018?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw No remorse. ¤ Adds to the case for impeachment and disqualification from future office.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Jordanfabian Asked whether he bears responsibility for the storming of the Capito, Trump told reporters at JBA his speech on the Ellipse was “totally appropriate”
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @EGallion27 So zero remorse and zero accountability. If he feels this was totally appropriate that means he’s got no problem doing it again. That alone makes it a MUST that he be removed immediately he could incite a riot today at the Alamo
🐣 RT @swin24 From the weekend: Trump “’literally yelled’ the words, ‘I’M NOT GOING TO RESIGN,’ before launching into a tirade about how Democratic lawmakers will regret their push to impeach him a second time, & that they are hurting ‘the country’ by doing so.”
⋙⋙ DailyBeast: Stewing in the White House, Trump Plots a Boastful Media Tour and Screams ‘I’m Not Going to Resign’ http://bit.ly/3i2Ns8M
// Sources say Trump has made comments that gave no indication he was worried about leaving early or being removed.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ChrisSheridan34 BREAKING: Trump spoke to the media while departing for Alamo, Texas. He says impeachment is a “continuation of the greatest witch hunt in the history of politics…I think it’s causing tremendous anger.”
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ChrisSheridan34 Also adds, “we want no violence”, according to White House pool reporter, @noahjrobertson
🐣 RT @MSNBC @HayesBrown: After the Capitol riot, Republicans need to atone for spreading Pres. Trump’s voter fraud lies.
⋙ MSNBC, Hayes Brown: The GOP owes America an apology http://on.msnbc.com/2XvzL8Q
// Where’s the mea culpa from GOP officials?
💙 ⏳ NYT: How a Presidential Rally Turned Into a Capitol Rampage: Timeline http://nyti.ms/3qg4pQ6
// When President Trump railed against the election results from a stage near the White House on Wednesday, his loyalists were already gathering at the Capitol. Soon, they would storm it. We analyzed a crucial two-hour period to reconstruct how a rally gave way to a mob that nearly came face to face with Congress.
DailyBeast, Nico Hines: Rudy Giuliani Ally Sanctioned for Russian Influence Operation Against the U.S. http://bit.ly/2MSmrt3
// Former diplomat Andrii Telizhenko becomes the second of Giuliani’s Ukraine “scandal” team to be named by the U.S. government as part of a Kremlin influence campaign.
🧵 RT @themaxburns It is difficult to overstate the clear and present threat to American government if the Pentagon isn’t sure it can trust our own soldiers to carry out their oaths. 📌 https://twitter.com/themaxburns/status/1348882393806069760?s=20
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @hugolowell Department of Defense says they will review troops deployed to Biden inauguration to ensure they don’t have sympathies to domestic terrorists — meaning the US govt is now trying to prevent a military coup.
⋙ 🐣 RT @themaxburns It’s also a completely unsustainable tension. President Biden and the rest of the government can’t conduct four years of business while looking over their shoulder for a potential Q-radicalized Secret Service agent convinced Biden is drinking baby blood. It must be addressed.
⋙ 🐣 RT @themaxburns It’s not my intention to scare anyone, at least not more than you should be scared about anti-government radicalization in the military. But it drives home that Biden SecDef nominee Lloyd Austin will have a lot of very critical force readiness work to do over a very short time.
🐣 RT @MEPFuller Hey, I know it’s late, but Democrats had an extremely concerning briefing tonight where Capitol Police detailed three different potentially gruesome plots. ¤ One involves encircling the Capitol and assassinating Democrats on their way into the building.
🚫 ⋙ HuffPo, Matt Fuller: House Democrats Briefed On 3 Terrifying Plots To Overthrow Government http://bit.ly/3q9gJkU
// to not disseminate; One plot includes surrounding the Capitol and murdering Democrats to allow Republicans to take control of the government.
⭕ 11 Jan 2021
NYT (1/11): How White Evangelical Christians Fused With Trump Extremism http://nyti.ms/3oSQZZX
// A potent mix of grievance and religious fervor has turbocharged the support among Trump loyalists, many of whom describe themselves as participants in a kind of holy war.
NewYorker, John Cassidy: Trump Can’t Be Allowed to Escape Justice Yet Again http://bit.ly/2XPtcOK
// 1/11/2021; Despite all the outrage sparked by last week’s riot, the President has grounds for believing that he won’t receive any immediate punishment
🐣 RT @JerryWillResist GOP congressman Pete Sessions deletes tweet to Stop the steal. He Tweeted “Had a great meeting today with folks from “Stop the Steal” at our nation’s Capitol. I encouraged them to keep fighting and assured them I look forward to doing MY duty on January 6
// 1/15/2021
⋙ RawStory, Sarah Burris: GOP congressman deletes tweet saying he met with ‘Stop The Steal’ and told them to ‘keep fighting http://bit.ly/2LBTMIy
// 1/11/2021
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs “The United States is not nearly as unique as many Americans believe, including when it comes to the threat of democratic backsliding. What has happened should put an end to the notion of American exceptionalism.”
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Richard Haass: Present at the Destruction http://fam.ag/35zpOLY
// Trump’s final act has accelerated the onset of a post-American world.
🐣 RT @ryangrim The Office of Congressional Ethics is looking into connections between Jan. 6 organizer Ali Alexander and Rep. Andy Biggs, chair of the Freedom Caucus, as well as Reps. Paul Gosar and Mo Brooks, sources tell me and @aidachavez
⋙ TheIntercept: Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Biggs Helped Plan January 6 Event, Lead Organizer Says http://bit.ly/3ii3Get
NYT, Paul Krugman: This Putsch Was Decades in the Making http://nyti.ms/35yfeop
// G.O.P. cynics have been coddling crazies for a long time.
🐣 RT @john_sipher “You’ll hear Republicans like the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, talk about the need for healing. Fine. But this sort of healing first requires cauterizing the wound. It’s called impeachment. Republicans mustn’t shrink from it.”
⋙ NYT, Bret Stephens: Only Impeachment Can Save Republicans http://nyti.ms/35wAvyS
// If the G.O.P. doesn’t turn on Trump now, it will be tainted and crippled for years.
🧵 RT @RCdeWinter In an email from @ChrisMurphyCT Read it. All of it,“The first thing that seemed wrong was how fast the Republican floor staffer was moving toward Senator Chuck Grassley. 📌 https://twitter.com/RCdeWinter/status/1348803145015697419?s=20
🐣📋 RT @katestarbird … And here’s our list of accounts that were influential (>1000 retweets) in spreading >10 different “incidents” or false narratives about voter fraud (from falsely framed narratives around discarded mail-in ballots to SharpieGate to Dominion): https://twitter.com/katestarbird/status/1347572962317144065?s=20/photo/1
// influencer voter fraud claims
≣ NYT: Read the Article of Impeachment http://nyti.ms/39DPMPV
NYT Editorial: Impeach Trump Again http://nyti.ms/3i5Z7DV “In the end, the driving force behind the lies, the chaos and the bloodshed of the past few days and weeks is Mr. Trump”
// It is a dark day for the nation when the president’s behavior forces Congress to hold him accountable.
🧵 RT @Supermansings Found online: ¤ Huge numbers of our population believe in a complete alternate reality. Alternate facts as it were. ¤ But just as intensely as I believe they are deluded, they think I am the one who is deluded. So how can I be confident in my perception? Here’s a tip: 1/x 📌 https://twitter.com/Supermansings/status/1348854307001692166?s=20
// look to see if there are Nazis
🐣 RT @realcpaz I found this piece from Joe Biden’s CIA pick William Burns to be particularly thought-provoking last year:@TheAtlantic
💙 ⋙ TheAtlantic, William Burns (Jul 2020): The United States Needs a New Foreign Policy http://bit.ly/3ibElmb
// 7/14/2020; The global order is crumbling, domestic renewal is urgent, and America must reinvent its role in the world; “Contributing writer at The Atlantic and President of the Carnegie Endowment”
🐣 RT @UROCKlive1 [K’s Ghost] QAnon congresswoman faces calls for arrest after live-tweeting Nancy Pelosi’s location to rioters ¤ The dangerous nut-case does not belong in Congress.
⋙ 🐣 RawStory: QAnon congresswoman faces calls for arrest after live-tweeting Nancy Pelosi’s location to rioters http://bit.ly/3qg1jez
// Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), a gun-toting supporter of the QAnon movement, is facing backlash after she was accused of live-tweeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) location during the attack on Capitol Hill last week
🐣 RT @RCdeWinter Because our integrity as a country has once again been attacked I am going to post this thread once more to put the identities of the people who support #Trump & his seditious minions in front of your faces again. This is #NotMyAmerica, and it shouldn’t be yours, either.
💙 ⋙ 🧵 RT @RCdeWinter I’m going to tweet photos of some of the people who support @realDonaldTrump and the rest of this #IllegitimateRegime. Just to let the world know the company his oh-so-Christian and other supporters keep. ¤ Be afraid. Then #FightBack All credit to photographer @petersonpixs/@NYMag 📌 https://twitter.com/RCdeWinter/status/1318009146621513737?s=20
// 10/18/2020
🐣 RT @pbump One-quarter of Trump’s tweets from Election Day to Jan. 6 were misinformation about the election. Whatever else he did, it was those lies and others like them that led to the violence.
⋙ WaPo, Philip Bump: Questions of culpability for the Capitol violence must start with Trump’s lies about fraud http://wapo.st/38z7fJD
// Jan. 6 was the finale of a year of specific misinformation.
🐣 RT @marceelias “Ten major companies so far, including some of the biggest corporate givers in politics, have decided to withhold contributions to Republican lawmakers who objected to the certification of the Electoral College votes.”
⋙ Politico: Business titans pull back from GOP after Capitol insurrection http://politi.co/3bx81cm
// The split between the GOP and business is widening after some Republicans voted against Electoral College certification after last week’s riot.
🐣 RT @nickmmark “The great mistake of the Trump years has been not realizing that a thing, or a person, can be both ludicrous and dangerous… The crowd that tried to mug democracy was both cosplaying insurrection & genuinely committing it.” ¤ It seems only luck & bravery prevented a bloodbath.
⋙ NYT, James Poniewozik: The Attack on the Capitol Was Even Worse Than It Looked http://nyti.ms/3oGaJQk
// As new and more graphic videos of the mayhem emerged on social media and TV, the enormity of what happened only deepened.
TheHill: Former Trump official Fiona Hill: “President’s actions have put us on the brink of civil war” http://hill.cm/Pttz4lu
🧵 RT @justinbaragona Both CNN and MSNBC beat Fox News across the board in ratings on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Prior to that, according to Nielsen, the last time Fox News lost to both networks in total viewers was over 20 years ago, on 9/24/2000. 📌 https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1348767557570990083?s=20 […]
⋙ 🐣 RT @justinbaragona Anyway, the ratings shift was almost certainly due to real-time interest over the Capitol riots as viewers flocked to CNN and MSNBC to get live news coverage. ¤ Now, does this bode well for Fox’s new opinion-centric weekday lineup they announced today? I guess we’ll see.
🐣 RT @PhilipRucker President didn’t want to turn away from the TV to answer their cries for help
⋙ 🐣 RT @PostRoz Kevin McCarthy appealed to Jared Kushner. Lindsey Graham called Ivanka. Kellyanne Conway called an aide at the president’s side. All begging him to calm his rioters. But the president was too entranced by the tv. By @AshleyRParker @jdawsey1 @PhilipRucker
⋙⋙ WaPo: Six hours of paralysis: Inside Trump’s failure to act after a mob stormed the Capitol http://wapo.st/3i5yS09
[Trump] returned to the White House, where at 2:24 p.m. he tapped out a furious tweet railing against Vice President Pence, who in a letter earlier in the day had made clear that he planned to fulfill his constitutional duties and certify President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris as the winners of the 2020 electoral college vote.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” he wrote. “USA demands the truth!”
By then, West Wing staffers monitoring initial videos of the protesters on TV and social media were already worried that the situation was escalating and felt that Trump’s tweet attacking Pence was unhelpful.
Trump aides did three takes of the video and chose the most palatable option — despite some West Wing consternation that the president had called the violent protesters “very special.”
“This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said in the video, released shortly after 4 p.m. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home, and go home in peace.”
At 6:01 p.m., Trump blasted out yet another tweet, which Twitter quickly deleted and which many in his orbit were particularly furious about, fearing he was further inflaming the still-tense situation.
“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” Trump wrote. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
[A]t 6:14 p.m., a perimeter was finally established around the Capitol. About 8 p.m., more than six hours after the initial breach, the Capitol was declared secure.
The following evening, on Thursday, Trump released another video, the closest advisers say he is likely to come to a concession speech.
“Congress has certified the results: A new administration will be inaugurated on January 20th,” Trump said in the video. “My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly, and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation.”
His calls for healing and reconciliation were more than a day too late, many aides said. Yet as Trump watched the media coverage of his video, he grew angry. ¤ The president said he wished he hadn’t done it, a senior White House official said, because he feared that the calming words made him look weak.
🐣 RT @MollyJongFast It’s a tell
⋙ 🐣 RT @StevenDennis Twitter announces it deleted *70,000* accounts that were primarily sharing QAnon content at scale. ¤ If you’ve lost a lot of followers, it might just be you had a lot of Q-ers in your midst.
// I only lost a 2-4 of ~4370
🐣 RT @MSNBC “These people are still generally out there and they went to fulfill this mission, especially the QAnon people — they went to go execute members of Congress to see ‘The Great Storm’ realized — and now most of them are back at home doing who knows what,” @brandyzadrozny says. 💽 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1348808932177956864?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @PoliticoMag “I’ve been studying authoritarian regimes for three decades, and I know the signs of a coup when I see them,” writes former Trump administration official Fiona Hill
🔆 This❗️⋙ PoliticoMag, Fiona Hill: Yes, It Was a Coup. Here’s Why. http://politi.co/3qd6Jas
// What Trump tried is called a “self-coup,” and he did it in slow motion and in plain sight.
// “Fiona Hill served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. She is currently a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution.” She offered riveting testimony during the first Impeachment hearings.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: Democrats now have the votes to impeach Trump — again http://wapo.st/38AtqiT
💙 🐣 RT @BobMcElvaine Wow! The Lincoln Project gets it exactly right. Spread it widely. #TrumpInsurrection #TrumpCoupAttempt 💽 https://twitter.com/BobMcElvaine/status/1346976741852590080?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @tedlieu Inciting an insurrection, 18 U.S. Code § 2383, is a felony. ¤ No one is above the law. Not the President, not the President’s attorney, and not any Member of Congress. ¤ The @FBI should investigate anyone who may have violated 18 U.S. Code § 2383, including Members of Congress.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ I urge every American to watch and RETWEET this video of what top Trump ally Mo Brooks told the mob just before the insurrection. ¤ Think about what happened on 1/6, listen to his words carefully, and ask yourself why he hasn’t been arrested for incitement. 💽 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1348694059951546369?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @TheBeatWithAri “Blue lives matter to this group until it doesn’t. They’re the party of law and order until they don’t like the law and they don’t like the order.” @dgibber123on the pro-Trump rioters who stormed Capitol Hill
🐣 RT @sciam The psychology behind Trump’s destructive behavior, what drives some of his followers—and how to free people from his grip when this damaging presidency ends.
⋙ ★ SciAm, Bandy Lee: The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists http://bit.ly/3nJ212F
// Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee explains the outgoing president’s pathological appeal and how to wean people from it
CNN: Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf resigns http://cnn.it/3oCXNdQ
CNN: FBI warns ‘armed protests’ being planned at all 50 state capitols and in Washington DC http://cnn.it/3nydP7t
🐣 RT @joshmargolin New: @FBI now reports in a bulletin “Armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols from 16 January through at least 20 January, and at the US Capitol from 17 January through 20 January,” @AaronKatersky reports.
🐣 RT @sfpelosi Madam Speaker has the votes. The House will #ImpeachTrump for his deadly coup attempt at the Capitol. The question for every American – and every corporate entity that funds politics – is whether you are for justice or sedition. Choose wisely.
🐣 RT @starsandstripes Multiple veterans and service members are being investigated for their roles in the mob takeover of the U.S. Capitol building Wednesday, and at least two national veterans organizations want to ensure they’re not on their membership lists.
⋙ Stars&Stripes: National veterans groups plan to purge members found guilty in Capitol attack http://bit.ly/2XIyviZ
🔆 This❗️⋙ RT @tedlieu The Article of Impeachment: Incitement to Insurrection, drafted by Rep @davidcicilline, @RepRaskin, me & @HouseJudiciary staff, has now been formally introduced at the House pro forma session today. ≣ Text Block: https://twitter.com/tedlieu/status/1348666087869616139?s=20/photo/1-4
🐣 RT @EmmaKinery Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino’s employer, Cumulus Media, has told its on-air personalities to stop suggesting that the election was stolen from President Trump — or face termination “immediately”
⋙ WaPo: Talk-radio owner orders conservative hosts to temper election fraud rhetoric http://wapo.st/3ozg9MR
🐣 RT @jiveDurkey Dem. Sen. Whitehouse (Judiciary): “The Senate Ethics Committee must consider the expulsion, or censure and punishment, of Senators Cruz, Hawley… Because of massive potential conflict of interest, Senators Cruz, Hawley, and Johnson need to be off all relevant committees.”
🐣 RT @djrothkopf This is a powerful, valuable essential tool from @Just_Security. It is a scathing indictment and should be required reading on Capitol Hill. Incitement Timeline: Year of Trump’s Actions Leading to the Attack on the Capitol via @just_security
⋙ JustSecurity: Incitement Timeline: Year of Trump’s Actions Leading to the Attack on the Capitol http://bit.ly/2MVzrOH
🐣 RT @JTHVerhovek Biden announces “America United” as his inaugural theme ¤ His first post-inauguration event will be a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery with Presidents Bush, Clinton and Obama https://twitter.com/JTHVerhovek/status/1348636761694597126?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @RTMannJr Trump could not incite his mob to attack the US Capitol without a Big Lie. That lie was that the election was stolen from him. For that lie to have currency and power, Trump needed leaders to promote his lie or be unwilling to tell the people the truth. He need collaborators. /1 📌 https://twitter.com/RTMannJr/status/1348634450792505348?s=20
🐣 RT @AmericaDialogue 14TH AMENDMENT ¤ Section 3
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress,or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same,or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
🐣 Like having a phantom limb, I can’t help but imagine Trump’s reaction each time I see some news that would make him go ballistic and tweet crazy stuff. ¤ Doctor — how long will this PTSD last?
⭕ 10 Jan 2021
🐣 RT @MSNBC Sen. Toomey joins calls from a handful of his GOP colleagues for President Trump to resign for “recruiting thousands of Americans” and “inciting them to attack the Capitol building” last week.
⋙ 💽 NBCNews, MeetThePress: GOP Sen. Pat Toomey calls on Trump to resign http://nbcnews.to/2LBQDrZ
// The Pennsylvania senator says there’s not enough time to impeach the president for his role in Wednesday’s Capital riot.
🐣 RT @SpeakerPelosi The person who is running the Executive Branch of our government is deranged, unhinged, and dangerous. @60Minutes 💽 https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1348464238772297731?s=20/photo/1
🔄 🧵 RT @andrewkimmel Thread on some of those arrested. […] 📌 https://twitter.com/andrewkimmel/status/1348454579348799492?s=20
🐣 RT @gtconway3d And don’t forget this attack on Pence at 2:24 pm, after Trump’s mob had broken into the Capitol. https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1348291739426172931?s=20/photo/1
// Trump’s Pence tweet
⋙ 🐣 RT @philiprucker To recap:
-Trump pressured Pence to subvert the vote, which VP can’t do
-Trump told his supporters to march on the Capitol, where Pence was doing his constitutional duty
-They chanted “Hang Mike Pence”
-Trump hasn’t spoken to Pence, nor condemned the chants for his assassination
DailyBeast, Will Sommer: ‘Stop the Steal’ Organizer in Hiding After Denying Blame for Riot http://bit.ly/2MREnEi “He was invited to the White House for Trump’s ‘Social Media Summit’ with various right-wing internet figures”
// On Sunday night, Twitter banned Ali Alexander’s personal account and an account for “Stop the Steal.”
🚫 🧵 RT @kelly2277 [VentureCapital]] 🔥 WHOA 🔥 ¤ Howard Liebengood, (the Capitol police officer that just died from suicide) father was associated with Paul Manafort. Manafort’s company, Event Strategies, was involved with the planning of the Trump Rally at the Capitol… stay w me… 📌 https://twitter.com/kelly2277/status/1348394949713289219?s=20
Forbes: These Are The 25 Businesses Quietly Paying Trump $115 Million Each Year http://bit.ly/2LlJagD
🐣 A Trump trip to Alamo, TX is hardly a coincidence and would be inflammatory, another incitement. Can HE be put on the “no-fly” list? He’s leading an insurgency. @FBI
🐣 RT @EvanMcMullin Watch Trump’s thugs pull a Capitol Police officer down and beat him to death. Makes me furious. I never want to hear again from these people how “blue lives matter.” To them, no life matters.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Bellingcat The clip, which some may find disturbing, shows the moment where a protester wearing a black, red and white cap climbs over the railing near the door, appears to pull an officer towards him, then drags him down onto the ground then down the steps by the back of his helmet. 💽 https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1348288680474128384?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @Bellingcat The full video the clip is from can be found here, and occurs around 2:48. It’s important to note we have not yet confirmed if this is Officer Sicknick. https://instagram.com/p/CJxPQcXgq6H/
🐣 RT @EvanMcMullin I never want to hear again about how Trump “conservatism” is pro-life. You condone torture. You put kids in cages and orphan them. You ignore the poor. You let hundreds of thousands of Americans die in a pandemic. You won’t say black lives matter. You kill cops.
🐣 RT @joshtpm I gotta little carried away and I treasoned.
Politico, John Harris: Trump’s Effort To Overturn the Election Should Be Investigated Like 9/11 http://politi.co/39iruL4 Harris is the founding editor of Politico
// We need a credible and comprehensive record of one of the most dangerous presidential transitions in history.
🐣 RT @EricHolder Be wary of “unity” calls that are designed to excuse, obscure the conduct of people who must be held responsible. There can’t be real unity without accountability. We need instead a coalition of people committed to American Renewal-to rebuild what the past 4 years have damaged.
🐣 RT @Amy_Siskind .@CNN reporting Pelosi plans to offer up a resolution in the morning to give Pence 24 hours to invoke the 25th Amendment. If he does not, the House will proceed with impeachment on Tuesday morning.
🐣 RT @donwinslow NEW! #AnatomyofCapitolAttack TURN SOUND ON! ¤ I submit this video as evidence in the Impeachment of Donald Trump. ¤ Donald Trump engaged in “violent, deadly and seditious acts” which betrayed his trust as President and endangered the security of the United States. 💽 https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1348293638648782851?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @Susan_Hennessey Take the time to read through this thread of affidavits about what the terrorists who besieged the US Capitol intended to do and their weapons. People do not fully appreciate how close this came to being a mass casualty event. Every person in that building is lucky to be alive. /photo/1
⋙ 🧵 RT @SeamusHughes And so it begins with 18:1752(a)(1), 18:115(a)(1)(A) and 40:5104(e)(2). Story TK 📌 https://twitter.com/SeamusHughes/status/1347267669494554624?s=20
🐣 RT @brhodes It’s hard to think of anything more offensive in the last 4 years than the same Republicans who incited insurrection against American democracy hiding behind calls for “unity.” It’s actually more offensive than anything Trump has said since the terrorist attack on the Capitol
⭕ 9 Jan 2021
WaPo: A mob insurrection stoked by false claims of election fraud and promises of violent restoration http://wapo.st/3nr3Tgc
💽 RollingStone, Peter Wade: Chris Hayes Exposes Dark Underbelly of Capitol Riots With New Footage http://bit.ly/39cSgV2
// “There was something way, way darker, more violent, more sinister, and more organized happening in that Capitol on Wednesday, and it’s time we see it clearly,” the MSNBC host said
🐣 RT @Olivianuzzi Officer Brian Sicknick was a veteran and thoughtful critic of the wars he served in. In 2016, he was a Trump supporter. Read this anecdote from a former Pelosi staffer who knew him. This is who the mob Trump incited killed. [link] Text Block: https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi/status/1348119081346600960?s=20/photo/1-2
🐣 RT @AshaRangappa_ They don’t want impeachment because it will force them to go on record on Trump’s incitement. They know that there’s very, very bad stuff that will come out in the coming weeks and months about what was going on behind the scenes, and their vote is going to haunt them politically
WaPo, Lawrence Tribe and Joshua Matz: Yes, Congress should impeach Trump before he leaves office http://wapo.st/38smsfJ
🐣 RT @Olivianuzzi Fucking disgusting. What would this mob had done if they’d found her? Text Block: https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi/status/1348108485851049984?s=20/photo/1
// “Where’s Nancy?”
⋙ WaPo: Inside the Capitol siege: How barricaded lawmakers and aides sounded urgent pleas for help as police lost control http://wapo.st/3s6i125
🐣 RT @slpng_giants CONFIRMED: @paypal and @venmo have banned Ali Alexander, one of the organizers of Tuesday’s insurrection.
⋙ 🐣 RT @parlertakes PayPal and Venmo have stopped providing services to Ali. Text Block: https://twitter.com/parlertakes/status/1348137926589235200?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @craigunger Maybe for now. But failed coup attempts–the Beer Hall putsch, the August ’91 coup against Gorbachev–sometimes signal the beginning, not the end.
⋙ 🐣 RT @SenWhitehouse Business community toleration of Trump is shot — NAM called for 25th!! WSJ has turned on him. No company can be associated with Wednesday. Trump mob’s violence against police exploded Republican law and order message. Maybe at last the spell is broken.
🐣 RT @JesseDamiani Oh my God. In new footage from Jan. 6, this line of men moves as a unit up the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building. ¤ These aren’t just upset civilians. This is a militia conducting a premeditated operation. 💽 https://twitter.com/JesseDamiani/status/1348140297205780482?s=20/photo/1
🧵 RT @themaxburns It is quickly becoming clear that senior figures in our government–and in the White House–not only supported the idea and goals of the January 6 terrorists, but provided material support, funding, and operational intelligence. ¤ It got as far as holding the Guard in barracks. 📌 https://twitter.com/themaxburns/status/1348034917679190023?s=20
🐣 RT @OliviaTroye I don’t know who needs to hear this…But, you can do this. @VP Others will follow. You’ve already been voted off his island. There’s no coming back. @Mike_Pence Do the right thing for our country. The entire world is watching. #25thAmendmentNow
// his former aide
🐣 RT @zachsdorfman Big story from @RobbieGramer @JackDetsch on a “dissent cable” at State on the 25th Amendment. ¤ They landed a copy of the whole cable—it is well worth reading in full. This will enter the history books.
⋙ ForeignPolicy: Group of State Department Officials Call for Consultations on Trump’s Removal http://bit.ly/2Lw2k3f
// Second dissent cable directed at Pompeo also rebukes the secretary of state for not forcefully condemning the president.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw […] http://bit.ly/3ntXvVp text: https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1348058307622277125?s=20/photo/1-4
🐣 RT @jaketapper Hate Organizations involved in the U.S. Capitol Riots per this report:
Proud Boys; American Nationalist Party; American Guard; New Jersey European Heritage Association (White Supremacists)
Oathkeepers (anti Government)
Nick Fuentes and “Groyper Army”; [*]
NSC131 (Neo Nazi)
⋙ NCRI: 1/9/21 – NCRI ASSESSMENT OF THE CAPITOL RIOTS http://bit.ly/3hZhZEf
// Violent Actors and Ideologies Behind the Events of January 6, 2020
*The Groyper movement has been described as white nationalist, homophobic, antisemitic, and an attempt to rebrand the alt-right movement [Wikipedia]
🐣 RT @Reuters Pence to attend Biden’s inauguration, official says http://reut.rs/3orc7pQ
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote BREAKING: @VP has not ruled out the 25th amendment, but apparently something WORSE needs to happen?
⋙ 🐣 RT @ShimonPro Vice President Pence has not ruled out an effort to invoke the 25th amendment and wants to preserve it as an option in case Trump becomes more unstable, a source close to the VP says. @Acosta
NYT, Timothy Snyder: The American Abyss http://nyti.ms/3bq5q3y Trump “never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version”
// A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next
Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.
Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.
… It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.
Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.
Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself. …
In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.”
The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.
On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people.
It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be suffering or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color.
The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.
When Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to challenge the Electoral College vote, he invoked the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the presidential election of 1876. Commentators pointed out that this was no relevant precedent, since back then there really were serious voter irregularities and there really was a stalemate in Congress. For African-Americans, however, the seemingly gratuitous reference led somewhere else. The Compromise of 1877 — in which Rutherford B. Hayes would have the presidency, provided that he withdrew federal power from the South — was the very arrangement whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for the better part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism so far. …
… Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it. …
In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.
At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.
Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.
Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. … Trump could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but he was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. …
The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?
The breakers and the gamers … saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s supporters but by his opponents. …
Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way.
As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.
… For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.
Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia.
Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination.
When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?
To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the election.
America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.
🐣 RT @BillKristol “The impeachment process is the correct procedure for the situation in which we find ourselves—with a president whose actions merit his removal. Impeachment is how the Framers intended Congress punish a president’s crimes, malfeasance, or immorality.”
⋙ TheBulwark, David Head: Use Impeachment, Not the 25th Amendment, to Remove Trump http://bit.ly/3sdKDGK
// The amendment was not intended for this purpose, and could worsen the current instability.
🐣 RT @samstein I think it’s now objectively true that the president, in his actions and rhetoric, has markedly endangered his own Vice President.
🐣 RT @svdate Are people forgetting the goal of what happened? ¤ It was to intimidate the VP and “weak” Republicans into overturning the election so Trump could remain in power. ¤ As what? Not president. That’s not what we call losers of elections. ¤ Trump wanted a coup. Plain and simple.
🐣 RT @BillKristol “Numerous researchers cited a Trump tweet urging supporters to come to Washignton on Wednesday, the day of the presidential vote certification in Congress, that said, ‘Be there, will be wild!’”
⋙ WaPo: Capitol siege was planned online. Trump supporters now planning the next one http://wapo.st/39lwzC8
// Twitter cited dangerous talk and online planning in banning Trump’s account
🐣 In case you don’t know it, the @FBI online tip site is a mess and needs a major redesign and user-friendly interface. I’ve designed dozens of sites and this one is really awful.
🐣 RT @DefTechPat Correlation is not causation…. but it is creepy AF
💙 ⋙ 🐣 RT @mhmck A tie-in between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the insurrection in the United States. Serhiy Dybynyn is an infowarrior for Inter TV, nominally owned by fugitive oligarch Firtash but beneficially owned by Putin pal Medvedchuk. Donetsk airport (left) was destroyed by RU forces. https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1347880970435895301?s=20/photo/1-2
// guy who looks like guy at Capitol ID’d as Serhiy Dybynyn, alongside Q leader who wears horns ~ seems to be look-a-likes, but need facial identification
🐣 RT @Mediaite Parler Says It Has Removed Lin Wood’s Posts Calling For Mike Pence to Be Executed [link] https://twitter.com/Mediaite/status/1347998490006319104?s=20
WaPo: ‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction http://wapo.st/38tUosk
🐣 RT @frontlinepbs The Capitol rioters had planned online for weeks in plain sight, raising questions about why the police presence was so easily overwhelmed. In collaboration with @propublica.https://to.pbs.org/38vbKoG 💽 https://twitter.com/frontlinepbs/status/1347955948812464128?s=20/photo/1
TheAtlantic, Elaine Godfrey: It Was Supposed to Be So Much Worse http://bit.ly/38vtwbr
// And the threat to the U.S. government hasn’t passed.
Before the protest, pro-Trump radicals had posted online about their intentions to kill Vice President Mike Pence. They brought zip ties and wore Kevlar vests. Rioters erected a wooden gallows next to the Capitol Reflecting Pool, and police discovered two pipe bombs on Capitol Hill.
… It was easy to miss them with all the coverage of the costumes and poop-smearing and poses struck in Statuary Hall, but they were there, these military-styled men, carrying blunt instruments and fistfuls of zip ties, better known as flex cuffs, capable of restraining hostages. At least one was an Air Force combat veteran, The New Yorker reported. They seemed to act with purpose and knew their way around the Capitol. One carried a semiautomatic weapon and 11 Molotov cocktails. Later, police officers found the two pipe bombs. The devices were outside the buildings housing the Democratic and Republican National Committees, just blocks from the Capitol. Federal agents discovered a truck full of rifles, shotguns, and bomb-making supplies parked outside the RNC headquarters.
“We are lucky, more than anything else, there wasn’t a large death toll,” Peter Simi, an expert on extremist groups at Chapman University, told me. “It could have been far, far worse.” ¤ Rioters could have set off these bombs, used the flex cuffs to take lawmakers hostage, or set up a kind of kangaroo court for the politicians they consider to be traitors to the MAGA cause, Simi said. “The idea of taking folks who have committed treason prisoner, those are ideas that are widely circulating in [far-right] circles,” he said. “All the Democratic lawmakers and any of the Republicans that have criticized Trump or not fully supported Trump would be eligible.” A Reuters photographer on the scene said he heard at least three different rioters say they wanted to find and hang Pence, who supported certifying the results of the election.
Some of the rioters were well-known extremists or members of radical groups. Members of the Proud Boys, a group of self-described “Western chauvinists” who have participated in violent street rallies over the past year, attended the riot this week. Other attendees included a white-nationalist social-media personality known as Baked Alaska; at least one neo-Nazi group; and a QAnon adherent named Jake Angeli, who was dressed in an animal pelt and horns, the Daily Beast reports. The man who put his feet up on a desk in Pelosi’s office was Richard Barnett, who’d previously called himself a white nationalist and written on Facebook that he was prepared to die violently. Some of the far-right insurrectionists live-streamed the Capitol invasion on a fringe gaming website.
On sites such as TheDonald.Win and Parler, Trump supporters had been plotting the attack for weeks, promising violence if Congress didn’t overturn the results of the presidential election. They discussed the weapons they would bring and brainstormed which lawmakers they would hang first. “I’m thinking it will be literal war on that day,” one commenter posted on TheDonald’s forum last month, according to the Daily Beast. “Where we’ll storm offices and physically remove and even kill all the D.C. traitors and reclaim the country.”
Law enforcement is preparing for future violence. This week, the Army announced that it will deploy 6,000 National Guard troops for Joe Biden’s inauguration. But far-right extremists are not deterred—far from it. They are already reportedly plotting more rallies, including a return to Washington, D.C., before or on the inauguration, this time with more guns. For many Trump rally-goers, the events at the Capitol on Wednesday may be the “spark” that radicalizes them, Simi told me—or further radicalizes others. Among neo-Nazis on the Telegram app, “there’s been a real hailing of the predominantly MAGA crowd” that stormed the Capitol, he said. “They’re saying, ‘The lemmings are starting to see the light. Our ranks are growing.’”
TheAtlantic, Ron Brownstein: The Deadly Consequences of Apocalyptic Rhetoric http://bit.ly/38y9HjX
// The Capitol riot showed how the ominous tenor of contemporary Republican messaging could be fueling white conservatives’ extremism.
🐣 RT @MalcolmNance FLASH WARNING: @tapstri is identifying RW extremists forums of exMilitary Oathkeepers & Boogaloo bois discussing armed attacks on HQs & offices of major tech companies servers & NEWSMEDIA newsrooms w/ intent to destroy their systems & endanger personnel. #IncreaseYourSecurity
😅 RT @brianklaas I am in favor of Mike Pence becoming president today and staying in power for precisely one Scaramucci.
🐣 RT @donwinslow Everything about the attack on the U.S. capitol was coordinated.
🐣 RT @MarkJacob16 In 1923, Adolf Hitler led a failed coup. He was treated leniently. Germany moved on.
A decade later, he was dictator, and the worst disaster in the history of the civilized world ensued.
In 2021, when the president of the United States leads a failed coup, we must not move on.
🐣 RT @RighteousBabe4 Here’s that pic with the orange hats. Orange. Stop the steal. Color.
⋙ 🐣 RT @DesiotoHB Looks like there’s a DieHard-branded apparel line (yep, the battery brand). Didn’t see this label on any of these gents, but perhaps it’s just folded under .. https://twitter.com/RighteousBabe4/status/1347847129465839617?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 My home state of Washington. An educated physician. Joined a criminal mob with joy to illegally shut down Congress. Trump is her LEADER. She believes. We have some tough years ahead to get back to the rule of law. These are dangerous times.
⋙ 🐣 RT @Cleavon_MD Meet Dr. Tammy Towers Parry a Family Medicine Doctor in Seattle, WA, “We just stormed the Capitol.. it’s the least we can do, so God Bless America. Joe Biden did not win. He’s hopefully going to prison” 💽 https://twitter.com/Cleavon_MD/status/1347598242809139208?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs The events in the United States on January 6 demonstrated that democracies are self-correcting and resilient because they vest power in institutions, not in rulers. The display should not make the world’s autocrats rest any easier, argues @DCTwining
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Daniel Twining: The U.S. Struggle Proves That Democracy Is Priceless http://fam.ag/3i1evkH
// Authoritarians abroad should take no comfort from the Capital siege.
TheIndependent [UK]: Sacha Baron Cohen calls Trump’s Twitter ban ‘most important moment in history of social media’ http://bit.ly/2Lhgvt5
🐣 RT @RFERL A gift for the Kremlin? A tool for Russia’s opposition? How turmoil in Washington, D.C. is being perceived among some of Russia’s political classes. By
@Mike_Eckel
⋙ RFERL: Gloating, Shock, And Sadness In Russia At U.S. Capitol Chaos http://bit.ly/3pVFiBQ
// A gift for the Kremlin? A tool for the Russia’s opposition? How turmoil in Washington, D.C. is being perceived among some of Russia’s political classes.
⭕ 8 Jan 2021
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews Trump had just delivered the biggest parting gift to the Kremlin by inciting a violent insurrection. ¤ “The storefront is shattered. It will be patched up, but the most valuable thing was stolen from the display: trust in American democratic institutions.”
⋙ DailyBeast: Putin Gleeful After Trumpsters’ Violent Insurrection http://bit.ly/35snOVT
// Bemoaning Biden’s election, Russian state media talking heads consoled themselves with the thought that Trump fatally undermined democracy on his way out.
🐣 RT @BernieSanders Some people ask: Why would you impeach and convict a president who has only a few days left in office? The answer: Precedent. It must be made clear that no president, now or in the future, can lead an insurrection against the U.S. government.
🐣 RT @tedlieu Watch the below video. If Impeachment is not used to address this traitorous sedition, then what the hell is it for?
⋙ 🐣 RT @votevets He gave the order, minutes before, to go to the Capitol.
He incited insurrection.
This is the very definition of sedition.
Donald Trump is an ACTIVE THREAT against the United States of America and MUST be removed. 🇺🇸 #TraitorTrump #25thAmendment #ImpeachAndRemove 💽 https://twitter.com/votevets/status/1347546998271049729?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Twitter statement: “Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.”
⋙ [statement on Trump ban]
🐣 RT @BlackCatUnloads This morning Nancy Pelosi spoke to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike.
‼️ 🐣 RT @ChrisMurphyCT This is what they were talking about leading up to the assault. And that’s why we have to take so seriously the likelihood that Trump will incite another insurrection. Text Block: https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1347749265435734016?s=20/photo/1
RFERL, Ben Gutterman: The Week In Russia: Fact-Check That Schadenfreude? http://bit.ly/2JZbbtX
NBC, Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny: Extremists made little secret of ambitions to ‘occupy’ Capitol in weeks before attack http://nbcnews.to/39v5Ao3
// On Thursday, Washington Police Chief Robert Contee said at a news conference that there was “no intelligence that suggested there would be a breach of the U.S. Capitol.”
🐣 RT @ForeignAffairs It should not have been surprising that, since taking office, Trump has promulgated a disturbing set of authoritarian values, writes @PippaN15. But the rot goes deeper than one man.
⋙ ForeignAffairs, Pippa Norris: It Happened in America http://fam.ag/2MCp1mP
// Those who failed to foresee the risks of the United States’ current crisis weren’t paying enough attention to the writing on the wall.
💙 ⋙ 🐣 RT @DDDrewDaniel I can’t stop looking at these two pictures and thinking about the strategic advantage that political incoherence provides. Was MAGA deadly serious or a total farce? It’s both! Binding hostage-taking gun guys & flagwaving grandmas, the elasticity of vague ideas is their strength. https://twitter.com/DDDrewDaniel/status/1347578923618619392?s=20/photo/1-2
⋙⋙ 🐣 I think the reality of real violence and death will freak out a lot of people. Two polls: the first showed GOP approval of the assault on the Capitol at 45%; Marist poll today is at 18%. More will peel away. A dangerous hard core will remain, 10-15% or so.
🐣 RT @brianstelter Twitter execs fear that the American president poses a threat to the public. So they are intervening as a result. That’s astonishing. http://cnn.it/3oou4W5
🐣 RT @Burger_Meister6 Michael Caputo urged trump’s supporters to prepare for an armed insurrection after a contested election and accused government scientists of “sedition” in a Facebook Live chat that he described in detail to The Washington Post.
⋙ WaPo (Sep): Top Trump health appointee Michael Caputo warns of armed insurrection after election http://wapo.st/3q6KTFg
// 9/14/2020
🐣 RT @MikkoAlanne Wow. It appears the man who leads the group that organized the terrorist attack on our Capitol for Trump has been identified. And he’s… the Attorney General of Alabama @AGSteveMarshall. https://twitter.com/MikkoAlanne/status/1347717629079769089?s=20
🧵 RT @AshaRangappa_ THREAD. I am failing to see any better path for Trump apart from resignation. (Yes, I know you will say, “He’ll never do that” but also did you ever think three days ago that he’d be impeached twice?) Here’s me as HIS (competent) lawyer: 📌 https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1347778514888642561?s=20
🧵 RT @AshaRangappa_ THREAD. I am failing to see any better path for Trump apart from resignation. (Yes, I know you will say, “He’ll never do that” but also did you ever think three days ago that he’d be impeached twice?) Here’s me as HIS (competent) lawyer: 📌 https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1347778514888642561?s=20
WaPo, Greg Sargent: The far-right Trump insurgency just scored a huge propaganda coup http://wapo.st/39iZ7fJ
About Releasing a Video Committing to a Peaceful Transition of Power and Condemning the Violence at the Capitol” ¤ He regrets committing to a peaceful transition—so he must be removed immediately.
⋙ NYT: Democrats Ready Impeachment Charge Against Trump for Inciting Capitol Mob http://nyti.ms/3nnGr3m
// Speaker Nancy Pelosi threatened decisive action against the president for his role in the insurrection against Congress if he refused to resign.
💙 // yep: “Behind closed doors, he made clear that he would not resign and expressed regret about releasing a video on Thursday committing to a peaceful transition of power and condemning the violence at the Capitol that he had egged on a day before.”
🐣 RT @mcuban Josh, let me explain Capitalism to you. Sometimes people decide not to do business with you. It’s their decision. You know the whole “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service” thing ? In your case it happens to be “No Principles, No Honesty, No Book” thing. Feel free to Self-Publish [link to JDawsey about book]
🐣 RT @AdamParkhomenko “Another man allegedly showed up in the nation’s capital with an assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and told acquaintances that he wanted to shoot or run over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, prosecutors said.”
⋙ CNN: Feds say police found a pickup truck full of bombs and guns near Capitol insurrection as wide-ranging investigation unfurls http://cnn.it/2XmBRYH
🐣 RT @ParkerMolloy Thinking back to this story about the guy who used to handle Trump’s social media accounts finding out that Trump learned how to send tweets. ¤ He compared it to the raptors in Jurassic Park learning how to open doors. Politico: http://politi.co/3s7qu50 https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1347720611519488015?s=20/photo/1-2
🐣 RT @DrEricDing Wow—I don’t think I have ever witnessed one member of Congress scream at another on Twitter with such passion and frustrated anger. @tedcruz deserves it. ¤ Thank you @RepBrendanBoyle.
⋙ 🐣 RT @RepBrendanBoyle Dear @tedcruz – Just stop. You know better. I know you know better. It’s not a fucking game. 5 people were killed. What the fuck is it going to take for you to end this shit? How many more 20-yr old staffers do you want to be terrorized and hiding in our offices? […]
🐣 RT @reason FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he does “not intend to move forward with the notice of proposed rule-making” about Section 230 that Trump wanted #ReasonRoundup [link] https://twitter.com/reason/status/1347551895183794178?s=20
🐣 RT @jimbourg [Reuters] I heard at least 3 different rioters at the Capitol say that they hoped to find Vice President Mike Pence and execute him by hanging him from a Capitol Hill tree as a traitor. It was a common line being repeated. Many more were just talking about how the VP should be executed.
⋙ 🐣 RT @andrewfeinberg There are multiple photographs of pro-Trump rioters carrying law enforcement-style flex-cuffs.
Rioters went looking for @VP, @SpeakerPelosi, @SenSchumer.
It raises the question of whether there was an organized plan to take hostages.
🐣 RT @ariehkovler [12/21] How will US Conservatives react? Well, they made Kyle Rittenhouse into a hero. They ignored the Whitmer kidnap plot, except as a way of calling for more violence against her.
⋙ 🐣 On Parler they‘ve been making the woman shot as the mob tried to enter the chamber into a hero. ¤ Hitler did this with a man named Horst Wessel. A song was written in his honor which became the party anthem.
🐣 RT @joshscampbell This is what the pro-Trump mob did to American law enforcement officers after the President incited a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol ¤ (warning, graphic video) 💽 https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1347749675777011714?s=20/photo/1
NYPost: Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Don Jr. may be charged over Capitol siege, DC AG says http://bit.ly/2Xr4hk4
CNN: As riot raged at Capitol, Trump tried to call senators to overturn election http://cnn.it/3nmPBgA
🧵 RT @rgoodlaw Good analysis by @robertwrighter
Timeline
1. Trump knows Pence will uphold his constitutional duties, but Trump does not tell crowd
2. Trump says: Let’s see what Pence does
3. After mob enters Capitol, Trump tweets that Pence has betrayed him and them
http://bit.ly/3hUBw97 📌 💽 https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1347764891562758154?s=20/photo/1
// timeline incriminates Trump
😅 RT @peterwsinger “Which of you will allow me to use your Twitter account?” 💽 https://twitter.com/peterwsinger/status/1347747731436163072?s=20/photo/1
// dubbed from Downfall film
🐣 [To Adi:] Thx for your tweet. Yes, was frightening on Jan 6. Trump’s crazy followers tried to stop the votes on the Electoral College with violence. They were stopped, but five people died, including one policeman guarding the Capitol building. …
The police were able to get the Senators and Congressmen to safety before the doors were broken down. The “Trumpists” ransacked the building, while Trump refused to let the National Guard be called to help. Finally the Guard came in cleared the Capitol. …
Congress completed its work and at about 4:00 in the morning, Biden was declared the winner. ¤ Trump is pure evil, a would-be dictator, who stands against everything the US has aspired to be. He is also insane.
Biden is to be sworn in on Jan 20. In the meantime, legal action has begun against Trump for insurrection. Twitter and other social media are banning him to keep him from launching another assault on our country. …
In the meantime, two new Democratic Senators were elected in a run-off election, meaning we will hold the Presidency AND both Houses of Congress. God willing, Justice will “flow down like a mighty river” upon these traitors. ¤ love you always ♡♡♡
🐣 RT @RichardGrennell I’m down 35k plus [followers]
🐣 RT @jbff1755 We are living in a B-movie political thriller inside a B-movie pandemic thriller
😅 RT @champnella uh oh… 💽 https://twitter.com/champnella/status/1347733854841229316?s=20/photo/1
// Morse code being beamed from White House
🐣 RT @engadget Donald Trump is trying (and failing) to get around Twitter’s ban https://engt.co/2XlGUsm
🐣 RT @peterwsinger That was quick. ¤ The problem for Trump’s effort here is that every burner account they burn through is followed by less and less people…
// @teamtrump Twitter account shut down
🧵 RT @C_C_Krebs In the Summer of ’19 @mastersonmv and the @CISAgov elections team started the #WarOnPineapple to raise awareness about how #disinfo campaigns work. Step 5, “Taking the Conversation into the Real World,” is what we saw on Weds when incited insurrectionists stormed the Capitol. 📌 https://twitter.com/C_C_Krebs/status/1347720498109685763?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs The rigged election claims had all the hallmarks of a foreign influence operation. From identifying the hot button issue, mobilizing accounts, trolls & other high profile accounts beating the drum, & then hopping into mainstream media. Unfortunately, it was a domestic operation.
⋙ 🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs We saw the rigged election narrative forming over the summer and feared that left unchecked it could land us right where we are, physical violence. So among other efforts, we launched http://CISA.gov/RumorControl to debunk rumors like hacked voting machines & break the #disinfo chain.
⋙ 🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs Solving our domestic #disinfo problem is going to be difficult in the long term, but we have a more immediate problem – continued #disinformation inciting additional violence and acts of insurrection in the run up to inauguration on January 20th. ¤ So how do we prevent that?
⋙ 🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs First, Congressmembers that objected on Wednesday have an obligation to denounce the stolen election claims and implore their constituents to accept the outcome of the election.
Second, State elected officials need to similarly denounce their rigged election claims.
⋙ 🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs Third, news outlets like NewsMax and OAN need to accept reality.
Fourth, social media platforms mainstream or not need to drop the hammer on rigged election #disinfo. There’s no #1stAmendment issue here.
⋙ 🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs Fifth and finally, the President needs to clearly and unequivocally communicate to the MAGA community that this was a free and fair election, and President-Elect Biden prevailed. ¤ It was not rigged and he lost.
⋙ 🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs Of course, he can’t do that by Twitter, so maybe a nice video on http://whitehouse.gov? Thanks @jack!
⋙ 🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs It’s not hard to do what’s right, you’ll survive. Admit you lied to the American people. Do the right thing for the sake of this country. This was a secure election. There was no widespread fraud or anything close to it. ¤ Do your part to #Protect2020. It’s not too late.
🐣 RT @CraigCaplan Speaker Pelosi in letter to House Democrats: “If the President does not leave office imminently and willingly, the Congress will proceed with our action.” Text Block: https://twitter.com/CraigCaplan/status/1347586673312411650?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ Olivianuzzi NEW: a portrait of how things are going for Mark Meadows currently:
“Jared has been telling people, ‘Don’t even deal with him anymore.’”
“He’s a dishonest asshole.”
“The only way it gets to this point are a thousand really bad small decisions.”
⋙ NYMag, Olivia Nuzzi: Senior Trump Official: We Were Wrong, He’s a ‘Fascist’ http://nym.ag/3s4tZcm
// “The legacy of the Trump administration is going to be that the president sparked an insurrection and people died.”
🐣 Twitter: Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump ¤ http://bit.ly/3q5neW6
🧵 RT @rgoodlaw On Trump’s potential criminal liability for sedition etc, 18 USC 2383-85:
Exhibit 1:
In real time, Republican House Minority Leader McCarthy demanded that Trump release a statement denouncing the mob as they were attacking the Capitol. Initially Trump would not agree.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ 4. It’s not just that Trump did not approve use of the National Guard. ¤ “Trump initially REBUFFED and RESISTED requests to mobilize the National Guard….It required intervention from the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, among other officials.” [link]
🐣 RT @LukeRussert I cannot stop thinking about how close the 1-2-3 in the line of presidential succession, VP-Speaker-Pro tempore came to being physically harmed on Weds. The terrorists had operable bombs, killed an officer and ransacked difficult to access areas of the Capitol. We need answers.
🐣 RT @AnaCabrera NEW: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Trump incited rioters ¤ “What we witnessed was an assault on democracy by violent rioters, incited by the current president and other politicians,” Trudeau said during a press conference Friday.
🐣 RT @bryantylercohen BREAKING: Apple has given Parler an ultimatum to implement a full moderation plan of its platform within the next 24 hours or face expulsion from the App store. cc: @slpng_giants
🐣 RT @Amy_Siskind The Twitter presidency has ended 🥂🍾
🐣 Journalists may feel they need Parler accounts to do their reporting (I have one), but I hope they don’t use it to post. Trump doesn’t really want to mix with his followers. For him, Twitter has been a way to get attention from “elites,” especially the press.
🐣 📊 RT @ryanstruyk Support for Trump supporters breaking into the US Capitol via new PBS/Marist poll:
All Americans:
8% support
88% oppose
Republicans:
18% support
80% oppose
Democrats:
3% support
96% oppose
⋙ 🐣 yeah ~ that other poll was taken way too early, before videos, photos of the destruction, stories of what had happened ~ not to mention death counts ~ were widely available. GOP support was 45% in first poll, 18% in this one. I expect it to fall more.
🐣 RT @ChristopherBouzy Parler is about to go through some things.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Hey, all you chickenshit Republicans who have told me a hundred times, “Oh, I don’t like Trump but he might tweet something bad about me….” ¤ Now’s your moment, you gutless worms.
🐣 RT @chrislhayes I kinda wonder if he tried to tweet something really nuts?
🐣 ‼️ RT @kylegriffin1 Reuters: TWITTER SAYS IT HAS PERMANENTLY SUSPENDED TRUMP’S ACCOUNT DUE TO THE RISK OF FURTHER INCITEMENT OF VIOLENCE
WaPo, Catherine Rampell: RIP, the GOP of ‘Personal Responsibility’ http://wapo.st/39dTMq3 “These arrogant demagogues thought they were merely playing to the mob … It apparently never occurred to them that the mob might someday come for them, too”
🐣 RT @TrickFreee “One current Metro D.C. police officer said in a public Facebook post that off-duty police officers and members of the military, who were among the rioters, flashed their badges and I.D. cards as they attempted to overrun the building”
⋙ Politico: Justice Department warns of national security fallout from Capitol Hill insurrection http://politi.co/3nswrFZ
// Lawmakers are demanding a “full accounting” of what was taken as rioters ransacked congressional offices.
🐣 RT @MSNBC Despite attempts from conservative pundits and some Republican lawmakers to deflect responsibility for the U.S. Capitol attack, there is no evidence that anti-fascist activists were involved in the riots, FBI Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono says.
⋙ ✅ NBCNews: No evidence of antifa involvement in Capitol mob, FBI says http://nbcnews.to/3hUmXCi
💙 🧵 RT @awprokop Ben Sasse, citing conversations with senior White House officials, says Trump was “excited” and “delighted” as his supporters tried to storm the Capitol and was “confused” others weren’t so excited 📌 https://twitter.com/awprokop/status/1347583108934197248?s=20/photo/1
// screenshot of part of iunterview of Sasse by Hugh Hewitt
🐣 RT @Amy_Siskind Flynn, Powell and Lin all suspended from Twitter. But the guy with the biggest megaphone is back. https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/1347664345275244544?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @maddow Calling Sen. Ron Johnson a “leading member of the Senate’s Sedition Caucus,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says he “deserves to be expelled, just as 10 senators were expelled in 1861 for refusing to accept the will of the voters who elected Abraham Lincoln.”
💙 ⋙ MilwaukeeJS: Editorial: Ron Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany should resign or be expelled for siding with Trump against our republic http://bit.ly/3hWRHm8
RT @atrupar This remarkable footage shows how close we came on Wednesday to a situation where lawmakers were taken hostage or worse by the Trump mob 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1347629727692050433?s=20
💙 ⋙ 💽 WaPo: Video shows moments leading up to fatal Capitol shooting on Jan. 6 http://wapo.st/2L70zKd
🐣 RT @ScottMStedman Murkowski: “if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me”
🐣 RT @AaronBlake Notably includes a prohibition on holding public office in the future.
🔆 This❗️⋙ ≣ 🐣 RT @NBCNews JUST IN: 4-page draft article of impeachment against President Trump that Reps. Raskin, Lieu, Cicilline are planning to introduce Monday: “Incitement of insurrection” https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1347651887764557826?s=20/photo/1-4
🧵 RT @MuellerSheWrote THREAD: Okay. I’m about to get SUPER space beans tin foil hat on you, so stop reading if you’re not into that. Based on what we’re learning from public reporting, the pentagon curtailed the response to the trump coup. 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1347485104872988676?s=20
⋙⋙ WaPo: Pentagon placed limits on D.C. Guard ahead of pro-Trump protests due to narrow mission http://wapo.st/2MKISAt
⋙ 🐣 What I’m confused about is this letter from Mayor Bowser DECLINING federal support, perhaps sparked by the “little green men” of the summer protests. Maybe the focus is intended to be on “unidentified” fed forces. The complexities of the CoC of natguard in DC makes it worse ● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1347518249995558913?s=20/photo/1
NYT: Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage http://nyti.ms/3s4WIh3 Brian Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher. “He returned to his division office and collapsed,” the Capitol Police said. He was taken to a local hospital, where he later died.
// The officer, identified as Brian D. Sicknick, was initially injured while “physically engaging with protesters,” the department said, and later collapsed after returning to his division office.
🐣 [To @HawleyMO] Getting people to think their candidate won an election you know he lost ~ now THAT’S Orwellian. ¤ Turning down a book publishing offer because its expected sales just dropped precipitously ~ that’s just Capitalism.
🐣 RT @EvanMcMullin Sorry, Ted. You misled millions of Americans about the election, enflamed their anger and joined the president’s plot to overthrow the republic of which the invasion of the Capitol was part. You bear responsibility for the resulting murder of this officer.
⋙ 🐣 RT @TedCruz Devastating. Heidi and I are lifting up in prayer the family of the U.S. Capitol Police officer who tragically lost his life keeping us safe. He was a true hero. ¤ Yesterday’s terrorist attack was a horrific assault on our democracy. Every terrorist needs to be fully prosecuted..
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @frankthorp BREAKING: A Capitol Police Officer has died after being injured by a protester in the Capitol on Jan 6 ¤ Per spox: Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and was injured while physically engaging with protesters. https://twitter.com/frankthorp/status/1347404855606915072?s=20/photo/1
// Brian D Sicknick, joined force in 2008; [other source: struck w fire extinguisher]
⭕ 7 Jan 2021
ProPublica (1/7): Capitol Rioters Planned for Weeks in Plain Sight. The Police Weren’t Ready. http://bit.ly/3sudZAC
// 1/7/2021; Insurrectionists made no effort to hide their intentions, but law enforcement protecting Congress was caught flat-footed.
NYDailyNews, Chris Sommerfeldt: Pro-Trump rioters smeared poop in U.S. Capitol hallways during belligerent attack http://bit.ly/3bqtTpu
Some of the unhinged pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday defecated inside the historic building and “tracked” their feces in several hallways, the Daily News has learned.
A source close to Sen. Chuck Schumer said staffers to the New York Democrat found out about the fecal fiasco on Thursday. ¤ The vile attackers, whose violent invasion of the Capitol left five people dead, apparently went No. 2 in a bathroom and then smeared their extremist excrement around the building, leaving behind brownish “foot-prints,” the source said. ¤ “It looked like they tracked it around,” said the person.
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump We need to talk about the infiltration of law enforcement by right wing extremists. This attempted insurrection was planned and it was coordinated. A Capitol police officer died defending our Capitol from a mob incited by Donald’s violent rhetoric. Impeach and remove him now.
🐣 RT @JohnBrennan What else must Trump do before he is removed from office? Are VP Pence, the Cabinet, and Republicans in Congress waiting for a disaster of unimaginable proportions to take place before they come to their senses? They must act now.
🐣 RT @DavidAFrench [R] As the death toll mounts, do not forget that an unfit president stoked yesterday’s attack. ¤ As the death toll mounts, remember this image. ¤. Will our nation’s leaders at long last have the courage to seek justice? Impeach and remove Trump. Expel Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1347413769622843395?s=20/photo/1
// Hawley clenched fist salute
🐣 RT @mikememoli Michael Chertoff, former DHS secretary under Pres. Bush, says in statement: “Whether through resignation, impeachment and conviction, or invocation of the 25th amendment, President Trump must leave office immediately.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @mikememoli Trump “has violated his oath of office and betrayed the public trust. More than that, his ongoing presence and unwillingness or inability to faithfully exercise his constitutional duties pose a direct threat to the peaceful transfer of power and the well-being of the Republic.”
DailyBeast, Adam Rawnsley and Justin Rohrlich: ‘Ready to Die’: Two Months of MAGA Mob Warning Signs http://bit.ly/2Xs2BXv A timeline
// From Trump’s promise of a “wild” protest to far-right calls to “get into Capitol building” and posts of floor plan layouts, all the ways the cops should have seen the riot coming.
DailyBeast, Rick Wilson: The ‘Oh Fuck’ Moment Is Finally Here for Trump’s Enablers http://bit.ly/2Xl0JQt “The invasion and seizure of the Capitol was a perfect extension of the nihilist trolling operation that’s replaced the Republican Party”
🐣 RT @sfpelosi Now we have to wonder anew why Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Esper … was it to put in a “yes man” to accommodate his whims and refuse assistance to people targeted by his supporters?
⋙ 🐣 RT @RobertMackey Here’s video of @GovLarryHogan saying Maryland’s National Guard was repeatedly denied authorization to deploy to defend Congress on Wednesday during the 90 minutes after a panicked phone call from senior House and Senate leaders who were hiding from the president’s mob https://twitter.com/RobertMackey/status/1347374738369175553?s=20/photo/1
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @lrozen “I was actually on the phone with Leader Hoyer who was pleading with us to send the guard,” Maryland Gov. Hogan. ¤ But Hogan said Maj. Gen. Timothy Gowen, head of the Maryland National Guard, was *repeatedly rebuffed by the head of the National Guard on the federal level.*
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @eilperin NEW: How the U.S. Capitol Police were overrun in a ‘monumental’ security failure, by @phscoop @CarolLeonnig @byaaroncdavis and @Fahrenthold
⋙⋙⋙⋙ WaPo: How the U.S. Capitol Police were overrun in a ‘monumental’ security failure http://wapo.st/3os2K9h
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @lrozen Why did acting Secretary of Defense Chrsitopher Miller not say yes for so long to national guard troops for the Capitol unless he or his advisors believed the White House did not want them to?
⋙ 🐣 RT @lrozen “You didn’t need intelligence. You just needed to read the newspaper,” said former DHS chied Michael Chertoff. “They were advertising, ‘Let’s go wild. Bring your guns.’ You don’t need to have an FBI investigation. You just need to be able to be able to read.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @lrozen Former Trump NSC advisor Fiona Hill: “The president was trying to stage a coup… This could have turned into a full-blown coup had he had any of those key institutions following him. Just because it failed or didn’t succeed doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.”
⋙⋙⋙⋙ DailyBeast, Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng: Trump Officials Rush to Keep Him From Sparking Another Conflict—at Home or Abroad http://bit.ly/3bk5rGn
// Trump is increasingly unhinged. Top national security officials are trying to keep the whole world from paying the price.
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @dcpoll >> Kash Patel ¤ “Defense and intelligence officials have discussed strategies to prevent Trump and his loyalists at the Pentagon—especially Kash Patel, CoS to Chris Miller—from carrying out their own political agendas that could threaten national security.”
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @dcpoll High-ranking national security officials have spent the last 24 hours scrambling to figure out how to keep Trump from inciting further violence at home, spilling national secrets, or sparking confrontations with international foes. [link to DB ⇈]
🐣 ♫ Blood on My Name for @realDonaldTrump
There’s a reckoning a’comin’
And it burns beyond the grave
With lead inside my belly
‘Cause my soul has lost its way.
Oh, Lazarus, how did your debts get paid?
Oh, Lazarus, why are you so afraid?
🧵 RT @oneunderscore__ [Ben Collins] Extremist forums like TheDonald/4chan are turning on the president after that video. They’re extremely upset at him, Lin Wood, and Q. ¤ This appears to be the moment they realized there was no grand plan to win back the election. ¤ This may not be permanent, but they feel betrayed. 📌 https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1347349017886412804?s=20
🐣 RT @nytimes There is no evidence that the antifa movement — a loosely organized collective of antifascist activists — stormed the Capitol on Wednesday. https://nyti.ms/2L2PWIl
🐣 RT @WSJopinion The Editorial Board: If Trump wants to avoid a second impeachment, his best path would be to take personal responsibility and resign.
🔆 This❗️⋙ WSJ Editorial: Donald Trump’s Final Days http://on.wsj.com/35iL48w
// The best outcome would be for him to resign to spare the U.S. another impeachment fight.
💙 🧵 RT @RighteousBabe4 Folks need to stop thinking you can appeal to thought/logic of the MAGA base. They have been conditioned for emotional responses. Emotional responses override rational ones. 📌 https://twitter.com/RighteousBabe4/status/1326591314692026374?s=20
🐣 RT @SethAbramson Video surfaces of Trump, Ivanka, Don, Eric, Kim Guilfoyle and Chief of Staff Meadows in a celebratory mood shortly before Trump incited an insurrection against the U.S. government. Guilfoyle is heard urging Trumpists to “fight” for Trump. (h/t @edi_samira) 💽 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1347297028381040643?s=20/photo/1
WaPo: ‘The best one I’ve seen’: a storm chaser captured mesmerizing tornado video in Canada in August http://wapo.st/35k7arc
// His footage reveals the visually striking structure of a potent supercell thunderstorm
🐣 RT @NatashaBertrand “The top federal prosecutor in Washington D.C. said Thursday that President Trump was not off limits in his investigation of the events surrounding Wednesday’s riot at the U.S. Capitol”
⋙ WaPo: Trump’s remarks before Capitol riot may be investigated, says acting U.S. attorney in D.C. http://wapo.st/2Xi44je
🐣 RT @kyledcheney Rep. SLOTKIN, a former intel officer, says she’s heard from “a number of senior Trump administration officials” that the president is “increasingly unhinged.” https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1347310784024608778?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @MaryLTrump Democracy didn’t prevail yesterday, it was knee-capped after 4 long years of being pushed to the breaking point. It will survive only if Donald and his fellow seditionists in Congress are removed from office. Now. Otherwise they’ll try it again—and next time they’ll succeed.
NYMag, Kara Swisher: It’s Time for Social Media Platforms to Ban Trump Forever http://nym.ag/35kABK5
// Tech-company executives have let him run rampant for years. The Capitol riot was a glimpse of where that inevitably leads.
🧵 RT @brhodes 1. People like Graham declaring that Trump lost the election doesn’t merit an honorable mention in profiles in courage. What Romney said about leaders needing to tell the truth is more consequential. But what would that mean in practice? That’s what Republicans must consider. 📌 https://twitter.com/brhodes/status/1347296146918502400?s=20
2. First, it means abandoning conspiracy theories that have been literally the foundation of the Republican Party for the last decade, the toxins that are spread constantly on Fox, talk radio, online, and mainlined into peoples’ social media feeds through profit-driven algorithms
3. Could every Republican leader say these things? Barack Obama was born in the US. Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. Joe Biden didn’t intervene in Ukrainian politics to help his son. There is no cabal of child sex traffickers somehow running the world.
4. Those are just the easy steps – walking back from the brink of tolerating madness, from allowing the grievances of your “base” to be transformed into mass mobilization through an ever-escalating politics of Us versus Them. One that obliterates truth.
5. To be serious about governing in a democracy, though, there has to be a deeper commitment to truth that is separate from ideology, or legitimate differences about things like the size of government, the efficacy of regulation, or the conduct of foreign policy.
6. Could every Republican leader say things like this? Climate change is real, it is an existential crisis, and it is caused by human beings. Then let’s have a debate about what solutions must be government initiated or market driven.
7. Or, more urgently. That COVID is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. That wearing masks and social distancing will save many thousands of lives. That vaccines are part of the answer, and that those who tell you otherwise are wrong.
8. Then, even more difficult I’m sure, the hard truths about America. That structural racism is real. That Black people or Muslims over-running the U.S. Capitol would have been met with violence, and never would have been permitted to enter and exit with such ease.
9. Again, these are just some basics. And no, I’m not optimistic that Republicans will do this. But some can. I hope they do. It’s a starting point to restoring the sense of objective reality upon which democracy depends, which can be the basis for real debates and compromises
10. Because what happened yesterday is what happens when a major political party, a governing party with a massive propaganda machine lies relentlessly and cynically to tens of millions of people every single day for years.
11. Donald Trump is the apotheosis of this brand of politics, but he is not alone, nor are those people who attempted an insurrection yesterday. If this isn’t addressed, it will happen – in different forms – again and again and again.
12. By all means, disagree with Democrats on all manner of things. Fight, passionately, over things. But not over truth – what is real and what is isn’t. Consider the insanity of telling your voters for months that they won an election that wasn’t even particularly close.
🐣 RT @ASlavitt $750 billion in defense spending and it turns out the duck dynasty cast can overthrow the Capitol.
🧵 RT @LGTHRMcMaster The reasons for yesterday’s criminal assault on our Congress and election process are many. But foremost among them is the sad reality that President Trump and other officials have repeatedly compromised our principles in pursuit of partisan advantage and personal gain. 📌 https://twitter.com/LTGHRMcMaster/status/1347273185641734144?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @LGTHRMcMaster Those who engaged in disinformation and demagoguery in pursuit of self-interest abdicated their responsibility to the American people. It was, in every sense of the phrase, a dereliction of duty.
⋙ 🐣 RT @LGTHRMcMaster It is time to educate ourselves about the gifts our republic bestows, recognize our republic requires continuous nurturing, bolster our democratic institutions and processes, and reject conspiracy theories and false narratives designed to polarize us and pit us against each other
DailyBeast: Pelosi Gives Pence an Ultimatum as House Members Draft Articles of Impeachment http://bit.ly/3s42UWH
// Reps. David Cicilline (D-RI), Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) have authored the articles, according to two individuals familiar with the matter.
🐣 RT @davidcicilline NEW: I am circulating Articles of Impeachment that @RepTedLieu, @RepRaskin and I have prepared to remove the President from office following yesterday’s attack on the U.S. Capitol. https://twitter.com/davidcicilline/status/1347228936594477057?s=20/photo/1-4
🐣 RT @nytmike EXCLUSIVE: Trump has suggested to aides he wants to pardon himself in the final days of his presidency, a move that would mark one of the most extraordinary and untested uses of presidential power in American history. w/@maggieNYT
⋙ NYT: Trump Is Said to Have Discussed Pardoning Himself http://nyti.ms/2L3somF
// The discussions occurred in recent weeks, and it was not clear whether he has brought it up since he incited a mob of supporters to attack the Capitol.
🐣 RT @neal_katyal So @msnbc has just reported that Speaker Pelosi has told Pence, invoke 25th Amendment or we will take up impeachment. ¤ Exactly right.
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 BREAKING: Nancy Pelosi is calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked. She says impeachment should be considered if that doesn’t happen.
🐣 RT @ShannonWatts Donald Trump greeted with cheers on morning call to RNC as he and Pence cancel public speeches in wake of riots: “We love you!” some in the room yelled.
⋙ TheIndependent [UK]: Trump greeted with cheers on morning call to RNC as he and Pence cancel public speeches in wake of riots http://bit.ly/
// ‘This gathering should send a message to them: This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party,’ his oldest son said Wednesday before violent riot
🐣 RT @JesseRodriguez Fmr AG Bill Barr says Donald Trump’s conduct as a violent mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol was a “betrayal of his office and supporters.” In a statement to The AP, Barr said that “orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress is inexcusable.”
🐣 RT @jdawsey1 Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao is resigning, per two officials. Cites yesterday’s events as reason in email to DOT colleagues, per draft. First Cabinet secretary to resign. Chao is married to Mitch McConnell. More TK.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jdawsey1 “Our country experienced a traumatic and entirely avoidable event as supporters of the President stormed the Capitol building following a rally he addressed. As I’m sure is the case with many of you, it has deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside.” —Chao says.
🐣 RT @DavidCornDC Whoa….Chertoff was DHS secretary for George W. Bush, and he’s calling for Trump to leave office.
⋙ 🐣 RT @abramowich The president has violated his oath of office and betrayed the public trust. Whether through resignation, impeachment or invocation of the 25th amendment, President Trump must leave office. Statement from me and @freedomhouse chair Mike Chertoff
⋙⋙ FreedomHouse, Michael Abramowich and Michael Chertoff: United States: President Trump Must Leave Office Immediately http://bit.ly/2Xm6FbO
// Through his actions, President Donald J. Trump has violated his oath of office and betrayed the public trust.
🐣 RT @RonWyden As I said last night Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to our democracy. His Cabinet must use the 25th amendment to act. And if Mike Pence and Trump’s “see-no-evil” Cabinet don’t have the stomach to do their duty, Congress should re-convene to impeach this dangerous man.
🐣 RT @JakeSherman It’s a pretty big deal that Schumer has called for Trump to be removed from office. ¤ Pelosi is holding a 1 p.m. presser.
🐣 RT @ChrisMegerian The White House announces that the president has withdrawn Chad Wolf’s nomination to be the permanent Homeland Security secretary, hours after Wolf urged the president to denounce yesterday’s violence.
🐣 RT @File411 Judge Merrick Garland -Attorney General
Lisa Monaco -Deputy Attorney General
Vanita Gupta -Associate Attorney General
Kristen Clarke -Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division
WaPo, Max Boot: Trump is guilty of sedition. Impeach him again. http://wapo.st/3nlhF3P
WaPo Editorial: Trump caused the assault on the Capitol. He must be removed. http://wapo.st/3hQBjDL
WaPo: Congress affirms Biden’s presidential win following riot at U.S. Capitol http://wapo.st/3bjFbvU
🐣 RT @harrylitman It’s in the nature I think of this sort of cataclysmic day that things will feel very different tomorrow but in a way we can’t confidently predict. On the one hand, it was a dark and harrowing day; and he forced us to look directly into an abyss; on the other, it always seemed
⋙ 🐣 RT @harrylitman clear that the Republic was not in danger. Will his tempered pledge for a peaceful transition defuse the calls to exile him from political life? or will his continued insistence that the election was stolen just increase the resolve to take drastic action against him?
🐣 RT @kaitlancollins [2:51am] New POTUS statement: “Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20th. I have always said we would continue our fight to ensure that only legal votes were counted…”
⋙ 🐣 RT @kaitlancollins “…While this represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it’s only the beginning of our fight to Make America Great Again.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @kaitlancollins It must be noted this statement promising an orderly transition comes amid semi-serious discussions of the 25th amendment and talk of mass resignations.
WaPo: Aides weigh resignations and removal options as Trump rages against perceived betrayals http://wapo.st/3nn6k3o “One administration official described Trump’s behavior Wednesday as that of ‘a monster,’ while another said the situation was ‘insane’ and ‘beyond the pale’”
// “[S]enior administration officials were discussing Wednesday night whether the Cabinet might invoke the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to force him out”
Meanwhile, a trio of senior White House aides — national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien, deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger and deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell — were contemplating resigning, according to three senior administration officials.
Their possible departures, which were first reported by CNN, could trigger a cascade of other resignations from inside the already hollowed-out West Wing.
O’Brien, traveling in Florida, was appalled at the Capitol mob and angry that Trump attacked Pence even while he and lawmakers were under siege, one person familiar with his thinking said Wednesday. O’Brien tweeted support for Pence and did not mention Trump.
“I just spoke with Vice President Pence. He is a genuinely fine and decent man,” O’Brien tweeted from his personal account. “He exhibited courage today as he did at the Capitol on 9/11 as a Congressman. I am proud to serve with him.”
… One official said Trump would have to issue a statement committing to a transfer of power and to prosecuting the rioters to keep some of his top aides on the job for his final 13 days in office. Officials were urging him late Wednesday to release a statement committing to a peaceful transition.
… There was considerable internal anger directed toward chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to four aides, both because of what many view as his incompetence managing the White House and in his willingness to prop Trump up and indulge his false election fraud claims.
… People who interacted with Trump on Wednesday said they found him in a fragile and volatile state. He spent the afternoon and evening cocooned at the White House and listening only to a small coterie of loyal aides — including Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, personnel director Johnny McEntee and policy adviser Stephen Miller. Many of his top confidants — Meadows, son-in-law Jared Kushner and first lady Melania Trump, among others — were publicly silent. ¤ “He’s got a bunker mentality now, he really does,” the close adviser said.
As rioters broke through police barricades and occupied the Capitol, paralyzing the business of Congress, aides said Trump resisted entreaties from some of his advisers to condemn the marauders and refused to be reasoned with.
“He kept saying, ‘The vast majority of them are peaceful. What about the riots this summer? What about the other side? No one cared when they were rioting. My people are peaceful. My people aren’t thugs,’” an administration official said. “He didn’t want to condemn his people.”
“He was a total monster today,” this official added, describing the president’s handling of Wednesday’s coup attempt as less defensible than his equivocal response to the deadly white supremacist rally in 2017 in Charlottesville
Some aides were mortified that Trump was so slow, and resistant, to telling his supporters to vacate the Capitol, and believed he did irreparable damage to his presidency and his legacy.
Aides and a range of lawmakers begged Trump to call on his supporters to stop rioting at the Capitol. Some former aides echoed those pleas on Twitter, tagging the president presumably in hopes he might see their messages.
“The best thing @realDonaldTrump could do right now is to address the nation from the Oval Office and condemn the riots. A peaceful transition of power is essential to the country and needs to take place on 1/20,” former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney wrote.
Alyssa Farah, the recently-departed White House communications director, wrote, “Condemn this now, @realDonaldTrump — you are the only one they will listen to. For our country!”
Current White House aides tried to get Trump to call into Fox News Channel, but he refused. He at first did not want to say anything, but was convinced to send some tweets — although Twitter later locked his account, something that enraged the president. Then they scripted a video message for him to record, which he agreed to record and distribute on Twitter. But the president ad-libbed by including references to false voter fraud claims that they had asked him not to include, the administration official said.
“He didn’t want to say anything or do anything to rise to the moment,” the official said. “He’s so driven by this notion that he’s been treated unfairly that he can’t see the bigger picture.”
This official described Trump as so mad at Pence “he couldn’t see straight.” Several White House aides were upset that the president chose to attack Pence when the vice president, secured at an undisclosed location at the Capitol, was in harm’s way.
A former senior administration official briefed on the president’s private conversations said, “The thing he was most upset about and couldn’t get over all day was the Pence betrayal … All day, it was a theme of, ‘I made this guy, I saved him from a political death, and here he stabbed me in the back.’”
Trump’s fury extended to Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short. The president told aides he wanted to ban Short — who was with the vice president all day at the Capitol — from the White House grounds, according to an official with knowledge of the president’s remarks. ¤ Short has told others he would not care if he was banned. …
“Three men made comments today, two of them very helpful and meaningful, and should be remembered,” [John F.] Kelly said. “[Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell’s remarks this afternoon, just before the riots, were, I think, words for the ages and not from a politician, but from a statesman. President-elect Biden’s were presidential and right to the heart of what we have to do to heal ourselves.”
Kelly also seemed to voice regret about Trump’s election. ¤ “We need to look infinitely harder at who we elect to any office in our land — at the office seeker’s character, at their morals, at their ethical record, their integrity, their honesty, their flaws, what they have said about women, and minorities, why they are seeking office in the first place, and only then consider the policies they espouse,” Kelly said.
⭕ 6 Jan 2021 🔥💥🔥 Capital Seige
🐣 RT @RepLizCheney We just had a violent mob assault the Capitol in an attempt to prevent those from carrying out our Constitutional duty. There is no question that the President formed the mob, the President incited the mob, the President addressed the mob. He lit the flame. 💽 https://twitter.com/RepLizCheney/status/1346976173230878720?s=20/photo/1
🚫 🐣 RT @KremlinTrolls This was an inside job. Aided and abetted by law enforcement. cc @MayorBowser
⋙ 🐣 RT @KremlinTrolls Evidence yesterday’s terrorist attack on the Capitol was planned and coordinated by Trump’s lackeys.
🚫 ⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @donlew87 🔥 Inside job? 🔥
– Lin Wood is on a board w/ Bernie Kerik. Kerik’s been close to Giuliani since 1990’s. In the undated photo on the right, Kerik is behind Rudy. Look at the guy shaking hands w/ Giuliani. In the photo on left, look at the guy in the Capital today.
– Interesting
🔥Inside Job?🔥
– Lin Wood is on a board w/ Bernie Kerik. Kerik's been close to Giuliani since 1990's. In the undated photo on the right, Kerik is behind Rudy. Look at the guy shaking hands w/ Giuliani. In the photo on left, look at the guy in the Capital today.
– Interesting pic.twitter.com/uupXnML7EO— Don Lewis (@DonLew87) January 7, 2021
🐣 RT @JenGriffinFNC Between 6000-6200 National Guard troops from Pennsylvania, NJ, NY, Delaware, MD and VA will stage outside the DC area in case they are needed in addition to the 1100 DC National Guard who staged at DC Armory tonight, a senior US official tells me.
⋙ 🐣 RT @JenGriffinFNC The additional troops will report to the DC National Guard’s Maj Gen Walker and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. ¤ No active duty troops being mobilized.
🧵 RT @RespectableLaw JOURNALISTS: Let me help you debunk the lies in the @mattgaetz floor speech about a “facial recognition company” discovering antifa agitators. It all comes from a fake news article from the notorious Washington Times. I will break it all down for you… 📌 💽 https://twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/1347055062284120064?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @SecDef19 My statement on today’s events at the Capitol: https://twitter.com/SecDef19/status/1347038965786959873?s=20/photo/1
TulsaWorld: Inhofe: “I’ve never seen Mike Pence as angry as he was today” http://bit.ly/3bmGJFv
// “I had a long conversation with him,” said Inhofe. “He said, ‘After all the things I’ve done for him.”
🐣 RT @NormEisen Now what? ¤ I have 3 predictions, 1 of which is that Trump will be convicted before the next midterms. ¤ Headed back @cnn NOW to talk with the great @ChrisCuomo about this historic day (for good & ill) and what it means for for all our lives. ¤ Last hit of a long day. Please join!
🐣 RT @JoeBiden Today is a reminder, a painful one, that democracy is fragile. To preserve it requires people of good will, leaders with the courage to stand up, who are devoted not to pursuit of power and personal interest at any cost, but to the common good.
💙 🧵 RT @TAPSTRIMEDIA The RW extremists who enjoyed today’s #insurrection attempt make no bones about it. They claim victory. They have dubbed it Battle of Capitol Hill on Jan 6, 2021 with recall to the British siege of August 24, 1814. ¤ They have also begun attacks on any GOPer who denounces this. 📌 https://twitter.com/TAPSTRIMEDIA/status/1347063692710584320?s=20
🐣 RT @StarTribune “INSURRECTION” @startribune front page of a historic day, with the U.S. Capitol stormed. Story: http://strib.mn/35egCMW https://twitter.com/StarTribune/status/1347052846705946624?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @byashleyhackett Four people died during Capitol protest Wednesday:
1 shot & killed by police.
3 died after facing medical emergencies on Capitol grounds.
MPD arrested 52 people and recovered firearms, 2 pipe bombs, and a cooler full of Molotov cocktails, acc. to MPD Chief. 14 officers injured
🐣 RT @TVietor08 “after Trump tweeted that Mr. Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” dozens of messages on Gab called for those inside the Capitol building to hunt down the vice president…protesters could be heard chanting “Where is Pence?””
⋙ NYT: The storming of Capitol Hill was organized on social media. http://nyti.ms/2L2oESm
🐣 RT @JebBush The President has provoked the disgusting events at the Capitol today. He has gone from creating chaos to inciting insurrection. Mr. President, accept your defeat, go home to Florida and let our elected officials do their jobs and rebuild confidence in our democracy.
Front Pages:
🐣 RT @OliverDarcy NYT’s Thursday A1: “TRUMP INCITES MOB: RAMPAGE IN CAPITOL FORCES EVACUATIONS; IT’S ‘PART OF HIS LEGACY,’ A REPUBLICAN SAYS” https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1347041493912059904?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OliverDarcy WaPo’s Thursday A1: “Trump mob storms Capitol” ¤ “PRESIDENT INCITES CROWD TO ACTS OF INSURRECTION, VIOLENCE” https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1347010764759048197?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @OliverDarcy WSJ’s Thursday A1: “MOB STORMS CAPITOL” https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1347031933730115585?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @PhillipWegman CONFIRMED: Short tells me he is not allowed back on White House grounds: “He’s blaming me for advice to VP.”
// Marc Short, Pence Advisor
🐣 RT @gtconway3d This isn’t surprising. He’s a narcissistic psychopath. He praised the rioters because he views them as vindicating him, thus providing him with narcissistic supply. He also views them as an instrument of revenge, and as a psychopath (and a sadist), revels in that. …
⋙ 🐣 RT @gtconway3d In any event, what matters now is that he’s desperate, cornered, and more dangerous than ever. What’s at stake for him goes beyond assuagement of his narcissistic ego; he understands that once he is forced to leave office, he can be subjected to criminal prosecution. …
⋙ 🐣 RT @gtconway3d Trump is a very dangerous, very unwell man who will do anything he can to maintain power, or failing that, cause maximum destruction. He must be removed now.
🐣 RT @VABVOX Hillary Clinton warned everyone this would happen. You chose not to listen. https://twitter.com/VABVOX/status/1347034600762204160?s=20/photo/1
// “I’m the last thing standing between you and the Apocalypse”
🐣 RT @RHFontaine The tragedy is that the mayhem was all based on a lie. The crowd sought to stop a vote not stolen, protest a system not rigged, save a country not fallen. An insurgency in pursuit of a fever dream. America can do so much better.
⋙ NYT: Trump Told Crowd ‘You Will Never Take Back Our Country With Weakness’ http://nyti.ms/3nmedpI
// As Congress prepared to certify the victory of his successor, President Trump railed against the election and helped set in motion hours of violence.
🐣 RT @TheHill Sen. Chuck Schumer: “President Franklin Roosevelt set aside Dec. 7th, 1941, as a day that will live in infamy. Unfortunately, we can now add January 6th, 2021 to that very short list of dates in American history that will live forever in infamy.” 💽 https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1347027977142480896?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kaitlancollins National security adviser Robert O’Brien, deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger and deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell are all considering resigning, sources tell me, @jaketapper and @vmsalama.
🐣 RT @Yamiche A source familiar with the president’s thinking today tells me, “The president is living in a reality that he has created for himself. He wants to show that he is in control and has power at any cost.”
🐣 RT @DrLeanaWen “The best way we can show respect to the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth.” —@SenatorRomney
🐣 RT @Joyce_Karam UPDATE:
• 3 White House officials Resign
• More could resign including NSA O’Brian
• Increasing Chatter about 25th Amendment
• Congress session underway to certify Biden’s win > [6 Aye* (pro-Trump)]
• Very few objections so far
• Curfew in DC; Capitol secure
• Trump locked out of twitter
~ *Cruz, Hawley, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Kennedy, Tuberville
🐣 RT @AliVelshi “The President bears responsibility for today’s events by promoting the unfounded conspiracy theories that have led to this point. It is past time to accept the will of American voters and to allow our nation to move forward.” – Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC)
🐣 RT @McFaul The dangerous divide in America is not between conservatives and liberals, but between autocrats and democrats. Democrats are the clear majority, but revolutionaries around the world have proven many times that you don’t need to be the majority to overthrow or threaten democracy
🐣 RT @kurtbardella It shouldn’t have taken a seditious insurrection to get Republicans to accept the reality that @JoeBiden won the presidency.
🖼 WaPo: Visual Story: Scenes from a violent day at the Capitol http://wapo.st/39c5j94
// Throngs of pro-Trump rioters pushed past police who were trying to block them from entering the building as senators inside debated the certification of the presidential election.
WaPo, Aaron Blake: ‘Let’s have trial by combat’: How Trump and allies egged on the violent scenes Wednesday http://wapo.st/2L96oXl
😅 RT @RogueFirstLady The Donald now officially in Twitter jail. Real jail is take some time.
🐣 RT @Robert4787 #Twitter just blocked Trump’s Twitter account from further tweets. It’s so embarrassing being an American.
🐣 RT @AshaRangappa There is NO reason for anyone to oppose removing Trump, whether through the 25th Amendment or impeachment. Anyone who still supports him wants to retain the support of the same people who tried to overthrow our government today.
🐣 RT @brianklaas Do you really want the guy who encouraged and justified violent insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol to have sole control over the world’s most destructive nuclear arsenal for another two weeks?
🐣 RT @sahilkapur MITT ROMNEY: “What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the President of the United States.” https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1346958635692290049?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @kylecheney1 PELOSI confirms the joint session will resume tonight once the Capitol is secured: https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1346962444191719424?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @cspan Statement by President George W. Bush https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1346955842243977216?s=20/photo/1
Trump’s tweets today (rev chron):
🚫 🐣 RT @real These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!
I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
These scoundrels are only toying with the @sendavidperdue (a great guy) vote. Just didn’t want to announce quite yet. They’ve got as many ballots as are necessary. Rigged Election!
The States want to redo their votes. They found out they voted on a FRAUD. Legislatures never approved. Let them do it. BE STRONG!
They just happened to find 50,000 ballots late last night. The USA is embarrassed by fools. Our Election Process is worse than that of third world countries!
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND, MORE IMPORTANTLY, OUR COUNTRY, NEEDS THE PRESIDENCY MORE THAN EVER BEFORE – THE POWER OF THE VETO. STAY STRONG!
States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!
Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd is so happy with the fake voter tabulation process that he can’t even get the words out straight. Sad to watch!
If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency. Many States want to decertify the mistake they made in certifying incorrect & even fraudulent numbers in a process NOT approved by their State Legislatures (which it must be). Mike can send it back!
BusinessInsider: A well-known QAnon influencer dubbed the ‘Q Shaman’ played a highly visible role in the Capitol seige http://bit.ly/3njlS8k
// A leader in the QAnon conspiracy-theory movement kept popping at Wednesday’s Capitol siege in Washington, DC.
🐣 RT @mjahanna The acting Secretary of Defence confirms it was Vice President Pence NOT #Trump who authorised deployment of National Guard
🐣 RT @Tfort9 Trump has been a domestic terrorist his entire presidency. He is an unrelenting abuser. We have been his victims. Anyone familiar with abusive people recognize that this is what has been happening for years. We need collective therapy. Everyone.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d It should have never come to this, but it was always going to come to this.
⋙ 🐣 RT @sbg1 It should never have come to this. Never.
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln The Lincoln Project released the following statement about today’s sedition and insurrection: https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1346943978269069314?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @shadhj Implication is that Miller acted without Trump say-so in activating national guard. Good. Less good is that this falls to an inexperienced acting SECDEF, virtually unknown, who has already acquiesced to insertion of partisan hacks in senior DoD positions & purge of its boards.
⋙ 🐣 RT @adegrandpre Acting SECDEF Chris Miller on activation of the D.C. National Guard: ¤ “Our people are sworn to defend the constitution and our democratic form of government and they will act accordingly.” Text Block: https://twitter.com/adegrandpre/status/1346937538775289856?s=20/photo/1
// Miller and Milley spoke with Pelosi, McConnell, Schumer and Hoyer; notably: not with Trump or House Minority Leader McCarthy
🐣 RT @sahilkapur GOP Sen. @BenSasse: “Today, the United States Capitol — the world’s greatest symbol of self-government — was ransacked while the leader of the free world cowered behind his keyboard — tweeting against his Vice President for fulfilling the duties of his oath to the Constitution.”
🐣 RT @stuartpstevens If you don’t think this isn’t what @HawleyMO, @tedcruz and Trump wanted, you aren’t getting their fundraising emails.
🐣 RT @gtconway3d The twenty-fifth amendment could be used to take @realDonaldTrump out for the rest of his term.
🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs We called out #disinfo repeatedly before & after the election. Yet the President & his campaign/lawyers/supporters fanned the flames for their own selfish reasons culminating with today’s objections followed by his video message. WHAT DID THEY THINK WOULD HAPPEN? They own this.
🐣 RT @Tom_Winter NEW: Washington D.C. Metro Police Chief Robert Contee III says they were requested to the Capitol by officers there, “due to the violent behavior towards the police officers…. a riot was declared.” ¤ Says tear / pepper spray was deployed against police.
🐣 RT @RepJasonCrow We have stopped the coup attempt and will be returning to the Capitol today to finish the business of the people. We will never back down, we will return.
🐣 RT @AndrewBatesDC .@JoeBiden: “The work of the moment and the work of the next 4 years must be the restoration of democracy — of decency, honor, respect, the rule of law; just plain, simple decency. The renewal of a politics that’s about solving problems, looking out for one another.” 💽 https://twitter.com/AndrewBatesNC/status/1346932924453691399?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @duty2warn Holy heck. If there were any doubt that he needs to be impeached again AND convicted and removed – now, as in NOW, that doubt disappeared hearing the innuendo and grievances that just punctuated his speech to curtail violence. Dysfunctional. Dangerous. Appalling. Get him GONE!
🐣 RT @Amy_Siskind In a video – which I am not going to post – Trump tells supporters the election was “stolen” from him. Lightly mentions people should go home. But continues the lie that he has not lost.
🐣 RT @brhodes This is the day that Vladimir Putin has waited for since he had to leave East Germany as a young KGB officer at the end of the Cold War.
🐣 RT @benjaminwittes It doesn’t border on sedition. It is sedition. Here is the statute: Text Block: https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/1346928649023287296?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @RamirezReports #BREAKING @realDonaldTrump tweets video to his supporters (still) saying “we had an election stolen from us” and “but you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law & order…” @fox5dc https://twitter.com/RamirezReports/status/1346930014940491778?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @real [Twitter warning:] This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence
🐣 RT @MariaTheresa Ivanka has political aspirations of her own. ¤ She calls armed mob at the Capitol who have injured Capitol police American Patriots. Then deleted it. ¤ She’s complicit in her father’s attempted coup. [screenshot:] https://twitter.com/MariaTeresa1/status/1346925305617928198?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @shelbyholliday AP calls Senate race for Ossoff, giving Dems control of the Senate, House and White House in the coming weeks.
⋙ WSJ: Democrat Jon Ossoff Defeats Republican David Perdue in Second Georgia Senate Runoff http://on.wsj.com/39786jR
🐣 RT @MSNBC “At this hour, our democracy is under an unprecedented assault unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times,” Pres.-elect Biden says after Trump supporters storm the US Capitol. “This is not dissent — it’s disorder, it’s chaos, it borders on sedition, and it must end now.” 💽 https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1346929264197652481?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @sfchronicle NEW: Pictures from the Capitol taken by Getty Images photojournalists show members of a pro-Trump mob inside of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. Pelosi’s daughter, Christine Pelosi, said her mother is safe. ¤ Live updates: https://trib.al/ouMdua4 https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1346921755881967616?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @KatieBoWill DOD: “The DC Guard has been mobilized to provide support to federal law enforcement in the District. Acting Sec Miller has been in contact with Congressional leadership, and Army Sec McCarthy has been working with D.C. gov. The law enforcement response will be led by DOJ.”
🐣 RT @NBCNews JUST IN: Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer: “We are calling on President Trump to demand that all protestors leave the U.S. Capitol and Capitol Grounds immediately.”
🐣 RT @Sollenberger So why didn’t Trump go over to the Capitol himself, believing as he surely must have that the crowd he personally directed to walk over there, and to “fight much harder” against “bad people” — “you will never take back our country with weakness” — would be peaceful?
🐣 RT @DavidManel There will be a reckoning. There must be a reckoning.
⋙ 🐣 RT @ManuelQ From our Francis Chung, Sen. Josh Hawley greeting protesters in the east side of the Capitol before riots began. https://twitter.com/ManuelQ/status/1346913744736157714?s=20/photo/1
// clenched fist salute
🐣 RT @vermontgmg I hope a lot of GOP representatives and senators are thinking hard about their party affiliation tonight, as their party’s leader has launched a terrorist attack on their coequal branch of government. You’ve made a choice to enable this. This blood and shame is on your hands.
🐣 RT @BryanLlenas House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy confirms on Fox News that shots were fired inside the Capitol. “We can disagree but we should not take it to this level. This is unacceptable…You do not do what is happening right now. People are being hurt. This is unacceptable.”
🐣 RT @toddzwillich .@RepGallagher, GOP of Wisc., is on CNN: “I have not seen anything like this since I deployed to Iraq.” ¤ “The president needs to call it off. Call it off. Call it off. It’s over.”
🐣 RT @SabrinaSaddiqui “This is what you’ve gotten, guys,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, yelled as the mayhem unfolded in the Senate chamber, apparently addressing his colleagues who were leading the charge to press Mr. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
⋙ NYT: Pence and lawmakers evacuated as protesters storm the Capitol, halting Congress’s counting of electoral votes. http://nyti.ms/3omC1eu
🐣 RT @marceelias We are witnessing a coup attempt at the US Capitol.
🐣 RT @BillKristol Trump should be impeached and convicted tomorrow.
🐣 RT @BGOonTheScene Trump supporters break into the U.S. Capitol Building after storming the police line here in Washington #DC #Trump #DCRally #BreakingNews
💽 https://twitter.com/BGOnTheScene/status/1346904244008456193?s=20/photo/1
// protestors breaking windows
🐣 RT @MikeLupica From Trump: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!” Stay peaceful? What the hell is he talking about.
🐣 RT @harrylitman Senate being evacuated. Unbelievable. Trumpists roving building w/o having gone through metal detector. why shouldn’t House immediately vote out articles of impeachment? What possible greater dereliction could there be or has there been of the president’s duty to take care??!
🐣 RT @ElijahShaffer BREAKING: Trump supporters have breached the Capitol building, tearing down 4 layers of security fencing and are attempting to occupy the building — fighting federal police who are overrun ¤ This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Thousands, police can’t stop them 💽 https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1346881968819105792?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @FrankFigiuzzi1 Make no mistake; the president has incited this violence against police:
⋙ 🐣 RT @Tom_Winter NBC News: 2 buildings on Capitol Hill, one a part of the Library of Congress and the other Cannon House Office Building have been evacuated as protestors engage in violent clashes with police. ¤ Reported by @kasie and @frankthorp
🐣 RT @real Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
🐣 RT @stevennelson10 Trump protesters just discharged a fire extinguisher outside Senate chamber. Many protesters are inside building, and most people are hiding from them 💽 https://twitter.com/stevennelson10/status/1346900228264308737?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @NumbersMuncher If you saw this in ANY other country, you’d immediately say that the leader causing the capitol building to be stormed is trying to stage a coup. ¤ This isn’t difficult, and every Republican who has signed on to try and overthrow the election should forever be remembered for it.
🐣 RT @igorbobic Police officers are holding them steps away from the Senate chamber, which is locked. Senators are inside. I see a few confederate flags. https://twitter.com/igorbobic/status/1346899437520621568?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @rgoodlaw On the comparison between the Stop-the-Steal myth and the Stab-in-the-Back myth (that helped give rise to fascism in Germany), this valuable analysis by @JochenBittner sticks in my mind:
⋙ NYT, Jochen Bittner: 1918 Germany Has a Warning for America http://nyti.ms/3olx0m9
// 11/30/2020; Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign recalls one of the most disastrous political lies of the 20th century.
🐣 RT @RepJasonCrow I’m in the House chamber for debate while just a few feet away supporters of Donald Trump riot and fight with Capitol police outside the Capitol. It didn’t need to be this way. Enablers of Donald Trump led us to this point.
💙 🐣 RT @cspan Full remarks from @senatemajldr: “We cannot simply declare ourselves a national board of elections on steroids. The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken…If we overrule them it will damage our Republic forever.” 💽 https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1346892934097072128?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AVindman To protect our democracy we need accountability. This is what happens when you ignore a “perfect phone call”. The next thing you know, there’s an attempted coup. The Administration and its enablers must be held accountable in the courts and through elections. #HereRightMatters
⋙ 🐣 RT @Renew_Democracy Don’t look away.
This isn’t normal.
This isn’t democracy.
This is a failed coup. 💽 https://twitter.com/Renew_Democracy/status/1346859874483728385?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @jonflan McConnell says he will not overthrow the will of the people expressed by their votes, nor ignore the actions of the the states, nor the decisions in the courts. He spoke against the objections, criticized those who who would vote the wrong way because other members vote rightly. 🖼 https://twitter.com/JonFlan/status/1346890673023307778?s=20/photo/1
// photo of sad Mitch McConnell
🐣 RT @mitchelreports Mitch McConnell calls for observance of truth and allegiance to constitution. Says he will not pretend this is harmless protest vote. Where was this @senatemajldr when GOP denied hearing to #MerrickGarland?
🐣 RT @AndrewDesiderio OBAMA on the Georgia runoffs: “My friend John Lewis is surely smiling down on his beloved Georgia this morning, as people across the state carried forward the baton that he and so many others passed down to them.” Text Block: https://twitter.com/AndrewDesiderio/status/1346883483474518017?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @neal_katyal What a disgrace
🚫 ⋙ 🐣 RT @MikeSackEsq Trump on his SCOTUS noms: “They rule against me so much. You know why? Because the story is I haven’t spoken to any of them since virtually they got in. But the story is they’re my puppet…they hate that it’s not good on the social circuit…”
// questionable
🐣 RT @rebeccaballhaus Full Pence letter to Congress: Text Block: https://twitter.com/rebeccaballhaus/status/1346878701523382272?s=20/photo/1-3
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Crowd here should fill in after Trump rally but pretty underwhelming rn https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1346855495177564161?s=20/photo/1
// Trump rally very small
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Breaking Politico: Joe Biden has selected Judge Merrick Garland to serve as his attorney general, according to two people with knowledge of the decision.
⋙ Politico: Biden to tap Merrick Garland for attorney general http://politi.co/2LohuaS
// The pick comes after Democrats appear poised to gain control of the Senate, making the task of finding a replacement for the judge far easier.
🐣 RT @stuartpstevens I’ve worked on the Republican side in Senate and governor’s races in every Deep South state. What @ReverendWarnock and @ossoff just pulled off is one of the more amazing political feats of our time. Like winning the World Series by pitching four perfect games. Extraordinary.
🐣 RT @jaketapper He won’t and
You won’t and
They don’t and
They didn’t and
It wasn’t and
He can’t
⋙ 🐣 RT @real If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency. Many States want to decertify the mistake they made in certifying incorrect & even fraudulent numbers in a process NOT approved by their State Legislatures (which it must be). Mike can send it back!
💙 ≣ RepublicanLeader: U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today regarding the Electoral College challenge: Transcript http://bit.ly/3nIzKZU
We are debating a step that has never been taken in American history: Whether Congress should overrule voters and overturn a presidential election. I have served 36 years in the Senate. This will be the most important vote I have ever cast.
President Trump claims this election was stolen. The assertions range from specific local allegations to constitutional arguments to sweeping conspiracy theories.
I supported the President’s right to use the legal system. Dozens of lawsuits received hearings in courtrooms across the country. But over and over, the courts rejected these claims — including all-star judges whom the President himself nominated.
Every election features some illegality and irregularity and it’s unacceptable. I support strong state-led voting reforms. Last year’s bizarre pandemic procedures must not become the new norm.
But nothing before us proves illegality anywhere near the massive scale that would have tipped this entire election. Nor can public doubt alone justify a radical break when that doubt was incited without evidence.The Constitution gives Congress a limited role. We cannot simply declare ourselves a national Board of Elections on steroids.
The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken. If we overrule them all, it would damage our republic forever. This election was not unusually close. Just in recent history, 1976, 2000, and 2004 were all closer. This Electoral College margin is almost identical to 2016.
If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would bring a scramble for power at any cost. The Electoral College would soon cease to exist, leaving the citizens of entire states with no real say in choosing presidents.
The effects would go even beyond elections themselves. Self-government requires a shared commitment to truth and shared respect for the ground rules of our system. We cannot keep drifting apart into two separate tribes; with separate facts, and separate realities; with nothing in common except hostility toward each another and mistrust for the few national institutions that we still share. …
Our duty is to govern for the public good. The United States Senate has a higher calling than an endless spiral of partisan vengeance. Congress will either overrule the voters, the states, and the courts for the first time ever… or honor the people’s decision.We will either guarantee Democrats’ delegitimizing efforts after 2016 become a permanent new routine for both sides… or declare that our nation deserves better.
We will either hasten down a poisonous path where only the winners of elections accept them… or show we can still muster the patriotic courage that our forebears showed, both in victory and in defeat.
The framers built the Senate to stop short-term passions from boiling over and melting the foundations of our Republic. I believe protecting our constitutional order requires respecting limits on our own power. It would be unfair and wrong to disenfranchise American voters and overrule the courts and the states on this thin basis.
And I will not pretend such a vote would be a harmless protest gesture while relying on others to do the right thing. I will vote to respect the people’s decision and defend our system of government as we know it.
🐣 RT @EWErickson Republicans in Georgia in November won 51% of all votes cast for congressional races; 53% for state house races; and 54% for state senate races. Then the President and the State GOP Chairman spent two months telling Republicans the game was rigged and the election was stolen.
Politico: Republicans turn on Trump after Georgia loss http://politi.co/3s0ryaz
// Fissures are forming as Republicans decide whether it’s useful to cling to Trump — even as he tries to subvert an election — or to distance themselves.
⭕ 5 Jan 2021
🐣 RT @EWErickson Republicans in Georgia in November won 51% of all votes cast for congressional races; 53% for state house races; and 54% for state senate races. Then the President and the State GOP Chairman spent two months telling Republicans the game was rigged and the election was stolen.
Politico: Republicans turn on Trump after Georgia loss http://politi.co/3s0ryaz
// Fissures are forming as Republicans decide whether it’s useful to cling to Trump — even as he tries to subvert an election — or to distance themselves.
NYT: What to Expect When Congress Meets to Certify Biden’s Victory http://nyti.ms/2KZpPlw ● Text Block: https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1346752796247392256?s=20/photo/1
“The last four years have demonstrated that law only gets you so far in running a democracy,” said James A. Gardner, a professor of law at the State University of New York who is an expert in constitutional and election law. “What has really been driven home is that the entire constitutional edifice sits on top of a foundation of norms and beliefs and social consensus.” He added of the lawmakers, “If they are not willing to submit themselves to those norms, then there is nothing to restrain them, except force.”
NYT: Trump Says Pence Can Overturn His Loss in Congress. That’s Not How It Works. http://nyti.ms/2XbLwBj
// The vice president plays a crucial but largely ceremonial role in formalizing the election results in Congress. Here’s how the election tally actually works.
WaPo: Biden camp girds for Wednesday’s culminating electoral dispute http://wapo.st/392nD4F
🐣 RT @brhodes The fact that Mitch McConnell – a man with an unrelenting commitment to undermine America’s first Black president – could lose his veto power over American democracy bc of Raphael Warnock, John Ossoff and Stacey Abrams is some kind of American justice.
🐣 RT @Delavegalaw 😅 Funniest tweet of the day!
⋙ 🐣 RT @AutumnChiklis My mom in 2016: What is a “majority leader”?
Mom in 2021: It looks like the most populous counties are counting their Mail-ins first, but if Democrats can hold their margins in Savannah and Fulton, chances are they’ll maintain their lead…
NYT: Matt Flegenheimer: Bearish G.O.P. strategist texts: “This jump-starts the debate we’ll see through the ’24 election: Is Trump the problem or the solution?” Given suburban tallies, strategist says, it’s plainly the former. http://nyti.ms/2LorTmK
// Senate GA both seats leaning Dem, flipping the Senate
NYT: Matt Flegenheimer: Bearish G.O.P. strategist texts: “This jump-starts the debate we’ll see through the ’24 election: Is Trump the problem or the solution?” Given suburban tallies, strategist says, it’s plainly the former. http://nyti.ms/2LorTmK
// Senate GA both seats leaning Dem, flipping the Senate
🐣 RT @kathrynw5 Oh, boy. https://twitter.com/kathrynw5/status/1346652016630759424?s=20/photo/1
// Trump denies Pence and he talked about Pence not being able to overturn election
🐣 RT @JenniferJJacobs The only living GOP ex president, George W. Bush, will attend Biden inauguration, his 8th inauguration. He wants to witness “the peaceful transfer of power” that is “a hallmark of our democracy that never gets old,” aide says. @laurawbush coming, too.
⋙ Bloomberg: George W. Bush to Attend Biden’s Inauguration in Signal of Unity http://bloom.bg/3s03Yuy
// George W. Bush, the only living former Republican president, will attend the inauguration of Joe Biden later this month, a spokesman
🐣 RT @EvanMcMullin I’ve never been more optimistic about the New Conservatives, who stand for truth, reason, decency, hope, the Constitution and a just, free America for every patriotic soul who labors on its soil and dreams in its heavens. 🇺🇸
NYT: Pence Said to Have Told Trump He Lacks Power to Change Election Result http://nyti.ms/3hKwhbK
// A day before he presides over a joint session of Congress to ratify Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, the vice president tried to lower the president’s expectations while seeking ways to mollify him.
🐣 RT @BillKristol “This is an attempted coup d’état under color of law. It would be entirely appropriate to impeach Trump a second time and remove him from office before his term ends. No one who has participated in this poisonous buffoonery should ever hold office again.”
⋙ NatRev, Kevin Williamson: Trump’s Final Insult http://bit.ly/3q5eGhZ
🧵 RT @atrupar So, uh, the Trump rally in DC is off to a good start 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1346531619029594118?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @ […] these pro-Trump rallies in DC really illustrate how Trumpism has merged with batshit views of all stripes, including anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, coronavirus trutherism, QAnon, anti-Semitism, and so forth […]
🐣 RT @W7VOA Judge bans Proud Boys leader from nation’s capital after arrest on vandalism, weapons charges, reports @AP.
🐣 RT @amybwang “What may be Trump’s final signature political rally as president felt like a grasping, wistful last hurrah. If this was the last stop on the Trump roadshow, it ended not with a bang but a whine.” ¤ via @agearan:
⋙ WaPo, Anne Gearan: The Trump roadshow whines to a close with a grasping, wistful last hurrah http://wapo.st/2Xr2j3v
🐣 RT @CISAgov Just released: Joint statement with our partners at @FBI, @ODNIgov, and @NSAGov on the recent significant cyber incident involving federal government networks: http://go.usa.gov/xA5Pj
🐣 RT @dnvolz The White House has dismissed the director of public affairs at the federal agency responsible for responding to an ongoing, massive suspected Russian hack of government computer systems and helping states secure their elections. [link wsj]
🐣 RT @renatto_mariotti For Trump to personally appoint an outsider as “acting” successor to the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta who abruptly resigned yesterday is beyond unusual. ¤ There is likely more to this story, given Trump’s desire to get DOJ to investigate his bogus allegations of election fraud. [link TPM]
🐣 RT @MuellerSheWrote I don’t wanna hear any of this “let’s move forward” shit. We can move forward AND hold criminals accountable at the same time. In fact, I don’t think we *can* move forward unless we sort out the past.
⭕ 4 Jan 2021
NYT, Michelle Goldberg: To Defend Democracy, Investigate Trump http://nyti.ms/2XeUKwq
// There needs to be a cost to trying to overthrow an election.
🐣 RT @tribelaw “Fani Willis, the newly elected DA of Georgia’s Fulton County, said her office stands ready to prosecute Trump for telling Secy of State Raffensperger in a phone call Saturday to ‘find’ him enough votes to overturn Biden’s narrow win in the state.“ [link NYDN]
WaPo, George Will: Hawley, Cruz and their Senate cohort are the Constitution’s most dangerous domestic enemies http://wapo.st/2Xclgqg
America’s three-party system — Democrats, Hawley-Cruz Republicans, and McConnell-Sasse Republicans — will continue to take shape on Wednesday. Watch how many of these Republican senators who might be seeking reelection in 2022 have the spine to side with the adults against Hawley-Cruz et al. and the Grassy Knollers among their constituents: John Boozman, Richard Burr, Mike Crapo, Charles E. Grassley, John Hoeven, Mike Lee, Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Rob Portman, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Richard C. Shelby, John Thune, Todd C. Young. By aligning with Cruz, four — Ron Johnson, John Neely Kennedy, James Lankford and Kelly Loeffler — have reserved their seats at the children’s table.
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom I tuned in the Georgia rally. It’s a volcano of delusion and madness, and it’s increasing the chances that someone’s going to get hurt at some point in the coming days.
💙 🧵 RT @atrupar Kimberly Guilfoyle is one of the opening acts at the Trump rally in Dalton, Georgia — and she is YELLING 📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1346261102385106944?s=20
💙 🧵 RT @ “Hello, Georgia. By the way — there’s no way we lost Georgia. There’s no way. That was a rigged election.” — the first words out of Trump’s mouth in Dalton, Georgia
📌 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1346278421802987520?s=20
🐣 RT @ruthbenghiat What is most interesting about Zhirinovsky’s post is his belief that Trump has Putinesque powers. “As long as he is President, everyone will obey him.”
⋙ 🐣 RT @olgaNYT1211 Sociopath Russian nationalist politician Zhirinovsky offers Trump his full support and backing for his last attempt of overturning our election and seizing power in a post on Telegram. He was Trump’s most vocal supporter in 2016 Text Block: https://twitter.com/OlgaNYC1211/status/1345614386350628865?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @ReliableSources “Trump essentially announced that he was going to carry out a coup. He has been doing this for six months,” @TimothyDSnyder said. And “because he announced it in advance, it numbed us all…”
⋙ 💽 CNN: Timothy Snyder on how to cover Trump’s coup attempt http://cnn.it/3909c0L
// Yale professor Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny,” says Donald Trump is “moving from the territory of the medium-sized lie into the big lie” about the election. Snyder tells Brian Stelter the news media should “take a deep breath” and “talk about the context” of Trump’s anti-democratic actions, including what it means for the integrity of future elections..
🐣 RT @ Former DoD official Eric Edelman tells @BryanDBender he “had heard things that were eerily similar” to David Ignatius’ reporting that officials feared Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to mobilize the military & re-run the election in swing states.
⋙ Politico: Ex-Defense secretaries say military must stay out of election battles http://politi.co/359XXlz
// The 10 who signed on to an opinion column include two who served under President Donald Trump.
🐣 RT @BillKristol “This evening, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue will put the final seditious exclamation point on a re-election campaign in which they promised to be whatever the MAGA hordes demanded they be. No more. No less.”
🐣 RT @Timodc I wrote about the astonishing fact that two incumbent senators are holding a joint rally tonight with a man who just yesterday was caught trying to steal an election in their state. ¤ MAGA Nihilism on the Ballot in Georgia.
⋙ TheBulwark, Tim Miller: MAGA Nihilism Is on the Ballot in Georgia http://bit.ly/38brJIi
// We believe in nothing . . . except God-King Trump.
✅ PolitiFact: Donald Trump stated on January 2, 2021 in a phone call with Georgia’s Secretary of State: “We won Georgia easily. We won it by hundreds of thousands of votes.” http://bit.ly/3b2M3O2 🔥 PANTS ON FIRE 🔥
✅ WaPo, Glenn Kessler: Fact-checking Trump’s call to the Georgia secretary of state http://wapo.st/3hFYErP
🐣 RT @JohnJHarwood “The GOP attempt to overturn the election doesn’t pose an imminent threat to the Republic – Biden will be sworn in Jan 20 regardless – but it’s hardly meaningless. We’re watching another iterative stage in the party’s long evolution into authoritarianism”
⋙ NYMag, Jonathan Chait: The Trump Era Could Only End in a Final Attack on Democracy http://nym.ag/3nhSSO2
// Four years of mainstream Republican denial have come crashing down.
🧵 RT @gregolear As we now have an hour-long recording of Donald John Trump going full mobster on a Georgia state official, I thought I’d do a thread highlighting some of my work on the criminality of Trump & his associates. 📌 https://twitter.com/gregolear/status/1346058029016502272?s=20
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ BREAKING- This is a considerable red flag. The outgoing US Attorney in Georgia needs to be interviewed by law officers ASAP about why he resigned and any pressure exerted by Trump to take election actions beforehand. Same for Barr. [link]
🐣 RT @BillKristol I did a double-take when I saw this. Yes, other Republican occasionally distance themselves from Trump, demur or differ some, express a measure of disappointment or concern–but how many boldly and clearly and unapologetically refute his lies? What a breath of fresh air!
⋙ 🐣 🖼 RT @JustinGrayWSB Georgia Secretary of State staff about to hold a press conference refuting 1 by 1 the claims President Trump made on the call with @GaSecofState https://twitter.com/JustinGrayWSB/status/1346184101838127104?s=20/photo/1
// chart: list of Claims Vs Facts
NBCNews: Trump pushed QAnon and 4chan-created conspiracy theories in Georgia call http://nbcnews.to/358AEIJ
// The call offered a look at just how much Trump is now relying on some of the most outlandish theories from obscure corners of the internet to make his case for election fraud.
WaPo: Business leaders urge Congress to certify Biden win http://wapo.st/3pSzXeD Almost 200 of business leaders from “banks, airlines, investment firms, pharmaceutical companies, professional sports leagues, real estate conglomerates, top law firms and media companies”
WaPo, Michael Gerson: Let the anti-constitutional Republicans reveal themselves http://wapo.st/38dtvc7
Politico: Raffensperger: Trump could face investigation over election call http://politi.co/393YI0m
// Legal experts and lawmakers have expressed alarm at the president’s conversation with Georgia’s secretary of state.
🐣 RT @kurteichenwald In tossing the most recent Trump election “fraud” suit, the courts have stepped up their “this is absurd” rulings and are finally letting lawyers know they may be subjected to sanctions for using the courts for political theater. Text Block: https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/1346177984093368321?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @bluestein The @ajc front page today didn’t hold back … https://twitter.com/bluestein/status/1346073464885682177?s=20/photo/1
NYT, Peter Baker: An Insurgency From Inside the Oval Office http://nyti.ms/2XgccR7
// President Trump’s effort to overturn the election he lost has gone beyond mere venting of grievances at the risk of damaging the very American democracy he is charged with defending.
🐣 RT @john_sipher “…a former French military officer…said that the Trump call ‘shows that the current president is in a mind-set to do anything — absolutely anything — before Jan. 20. There is zero standard, zero reference, zero ethics.”
⋙ NYT: Trump’s Call Leaves Allies Fearful for American Democracy http://nyti.ms/3of7dfD
// Many now take the president’s disregard for democratic and ethical norms for granted, but also fear its effect on America’s standing in the world.
🐣 RT @hugolowell Just in: House Dems Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice make a criminal referral to FBI Director Wray and demand an investigation into Trump after he demanded that the Georgia secretary of state subvert the election.
WaPo, Greg Sargent: A leading historian of U.S. democracy issues an urgent warning http://wapo.st/38aq4Tt Harvard’s Alexander Keyssar, the leading historian of U.S. democracy, fears the norm of Congress not meddling in elections “is being broken
⭕ 3 Jan 2021
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Trump Georgia phone call intervention is at face value a criminal attempt to intimidate a public official to overthrow a legitimate election. This is gangster stuff. Utterly shocking.
🐣 RT @brhodes America will not be able to effectively support people fighting for democracy and human rights around the world unless and until we do some serious soul searching and repair our democracy at home.
🐣 RT @goss30goss Want to give Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger a shout-out. He did something NO Republican member of Congress has been brave enough to do in 4 yrs. ¤ He stood up to the bully & didn’t back down. ¤ Integrity means everything. ¤ History will remember.
🐣 RT @BeschlossDC Just like in 1975, after Watergate, the next Congress must pass new laws that will reduce the chance for a future President to follow in Trump’s footsteps by abusing power and attacking our democracy.
🐣 RT @C_C_Krebs That phone call was an hour of mainlined #disinfo crazy, effectively countered by @GaSecofState & his General Counsel, consistent w/ the courts, experts, common sense, & US and state constitutions. What’s next, including any bloodshed, is on the President and the objectors.
🐣 RT @Mpolymer Correct. And if this happened in another country, the US would strongly condemn the behavior, issue demarches and public statements, cut off military aid, and sanction the officials who were behind the coup. This is pure insanity what is happening in 🇺🇸. Are we dreaming?
⋙ 🐣 RT @carlbernstein In any other conceivable moment in US history, this tape would result in the leadership of both parties demanding the immediate resignation of the President of the United States.
⋙⋙ 💽 CNN: Carl Bernstein: This is the ultimate smoking gun tape http://cnn.it/38beMOF
// Legendary Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein reacts to audio obtained by the Washington Post of President Donald Trump pushing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes to overturn the election results in the state.
🐣 RT @AWeissmann_ Trump on the full tape is an amalgam of a criminal mob boss and Captain Queeg of The Caine Mutiny. He uses the abuse of the power of the presidency, lies, and threats of criminal liability to coerce state officials to undermine democracy. Sounds like Nixon’s tapes, only worse.
🧵 RT @SteveSchmidtSES The seditious actions of GOP Members of Congress will not succeed on January 6th. Joe Biden will be inaugurated POTUS January 20th at noon. However, if their ACTION was sucessful it would destroy the government of the United States and cause the collapse of the Republic. 📌 https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1345919807972106240?s=20
🐣 RT @DanLamothe Mixed messages from Pentagon: ¤ Last week, Acting SECDEF Miller said USS Nimitz was coming home amid Iran security concerns. Was seen as deescalatory. ¤ Tonight, Miller announces the Nimitz has been turned around. ¤ What changed? The threats were ongoing. ¤ Pentagon isn’t saying. Text Block: https://twitter.com/DanLamothe/status/1345914833418514432?s=20/photo/1
⋙ 🐣 RT @DanLamothe Aircraft carriers, and their accompanying escort ships, draw attention and strategic calculations. That makes tonight’s announcement a head scratcher unveiled on the anniversary of the U.S. killing of Iranian general Soleimani.
🐣 RT @DMRDynamics “Pathetic” and “Sickening” are strange ways of describing omertà. ¤ More appropriately, it’s considered a criminal conspiracy.
⋙ 🐣 RT @kelliwardaz I don’t record my calls with the President of the United States. It’s humbling to have the opportunity to speak with the leader of the free world. Betraying the trust of the honor of those conversations is abominable. #Pathetic #Sickening
🐣 RT @awprokop I think any take on the nature of the “Republican Party” re: Trump’s election-stealing effort really has to grapple with the fact that no R swing state governor, swing state legislature leader, judge helped him in any substantive way. And McConnell and Barr didn’t either
⋙ 🐣 RT @awprokop What’s unfolding now is that Trump is making corrupt requests (that don’t seem to be working), and that many House Rs and some Senate Rs (though not their leaders) are willing to back him in a congressional vote that’s 100% certain to fail.
🐣 RT @awprokop I think any take on the nature of the “Republican Party” re: Trump’s election-stealing effort really has to grapple with the fact that no R swing state governor, swing state legislature leader, judge helped him in any substantive way. And McConnell and Barr didn’t either
🐣 🖼 RT @cliffordlevy ON TAPE, TRUMP PUSHES GEORGIA TO ‘FIND’ VOTES ¤ — Monday’s banner headline in @nytimes https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1345943091753209863?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @natsechobbyist [Rachel Vindman] True story.
⋙ 🧵 RT @SpanbergerVA07 I can tell you this — every foreign diplomat and intel officer posted to the United States is surely writing cables back home tonight about the fragility of America’s democracy and the depravity of her President. 1/8 📌 https://twitter.com/SpanbergerVA07/status/1345930246017740801?s=20
WaPo, Dan Balz: Trump knows no limits as he tries to overturn the election http://wapo.st/3hCY6D1 “The content of the [Trump’s] call [with Raffensperger] speaks for itself, and the audio excerpts should be heard by anyone who cares about the integrity of elections in America.”
🧵 RT @BandyXLee1 Please remember that, in every other situation, with any other citizen, he would be deemed a danger to himself, others, and the public and would meet criteria for an involuntary mental health hold. 📌 https://twitter.com/BandyXLee1/status/1345809960253485056?s=20
🐣 RT @mehdirhasan Here’s the harsh reality for Americans who’ve long believed we lived in the greatest democracy on earth: if Raffensberger wasn’t Sec of State in GA and/or if GOP controlled both chambers of Congress, there’s more than a high chance that Biden wouldn’t be president come Jan 20th.
🐣 RT @RWPUSA GA Code § 21-2-604 (2016) ¤ “A person commits the offense of criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony under this article, he or she solicits, requests, commands, importunes ….”
⋙ 🐣 RT @RWPUSA “or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.” GA Code § 21-2-604. ¤ Article 2 of the Constitution does not protect the President from criminal process, including arrest, if he enters Georgia. See Trump. v. Vance, 591 US ___ (2020).
🐣 RT @carlbildt It is deeply worrying that all ten living former 🇺🇸 Secretaries of Defense felt the necessity of coming together and write this.
🐣 RT @RuthMarcus Sign of the dangerous times: every living former defense secretary, all 10, warn Trump, not by name, against misusing military and argue for importance of peaceful transition of power. Imagine how alarmed they must be to have done this.
🐣 RT @JakeTapper The fact that these 10 former Secretaries of Defense felt the need to unprecedentedly sign this letter should absolutely be a cause for alarm.
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Very powerful group of former Sec Def’s. Their letter publicly gives strong bipartisan endorsement to the Constitution and the Armed Forces. Trump has already had WH criminal conversations to discuss military seizing vote responsibilities in swing states.
🐣 RT @BillKristol It’s good news all ten living former defense secretaries put out this statement. It’s bad news that, from Dick Cheney to Don Rumsfeld to Bob Gates to Leon Panetta to Mark Esper, they felt it was necessary to do so.
🐣 RT @NPRKelly All 10 living fmr Defense Secs calling on current Pentagon leaders to “refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.” ¤ What do they know, that they believe such a warning is necessary?
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 All 10 living former defense secretaries declare election is over in forceful public letter – TRUMP A CLEAR DANGER TO THE CONSTITUTION.
🐣 RT @SCClemons Wake up folks. When 10 former SecDefs, including Esper and Mattis, join up & warn of dangers of military intervention in elections, they smell something, they feel something, they are worried. People need to have courage of their convictions on this one
🔆 This❗️⋙ WaPo: All 10 living former defense secretaries: Involving the military in election disputes would cross into dangerous territory http://wapo.st/2LjUrh3
🐣 RT @neal_katyal This tape demonstrates impeachable offenses. It is unAmerican and unDemocratic. Trump has had his shot to have his complaints heard. In court. He lost. Many, many times. Browbeating election officials to try to “find” votes for him is Soviet.
🐣 RT @beschlossDC Definition of “extortion”: ¤ The practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats. ¤ (Oxford English Dictionary)
⋙ 🐣 I’d rank 11K votes right up there with money
🐣 RT @PaulBegala Former Justice Department Inspector General.
⋙ 🐣 RT @mrbromwich Unless there are portions of the tape that somehow negate criminal intent, “I just want to find 11,780 votes” and his threats against Raffensperger and his counsel violate 52 U.S. Code § 20511. His best defense would be insanity.
🐣 RT @JohnJHarwood Trump and fellow Republicans have reframed what distinguishes them from Democrats
the spectrum of recent decades, ranging from conservative to-liberal, has been supplanted by new ones:
lies—>truth
insanity—>sanity
authoritarian—>democratic
un-American—>American
🐣 RT @WolfBlitzer Just to recap. In the national vote, @JoeBiden won 81,283,098 votes (51.3%) and @realDonaldTrump won 74,222,958 votes (46.8%). All 50 States & DC certified the results. On Dec. 14, the Electoral College affirmed Biden won 306 Electoral Votes to Trump’s 232. (270 needed to win)
🐣 RT @tribelaw From Benghazi to Emailgate to the 2020 #Cruz inquiry, the GOP has perfected the circular technique of stirring baseless doubts with endless inquiries — and then pointing to those doubts to undermine the legitimacy of those they oppose politically. It’s a variant of the #BigLie
💙 🔊≣ WaPo: Here’s the full transcript and audio of the call between Trump and Raffensperger http://wapo.st/3ncgS5l
↥ ↧
🔊 WaPo: Audio: Trump’s full Jan. 2 call with Ga. secretary of state http://wapo.st/3pHUkeg
// In a one-hour phone call on Saturday, Jan. 2, 2021 with Georgia election officials, President Trump insisted he won the state and threatened vague legal consequences if the officials did not act. This audio has been edited to remove the name of an individual about whom the president makes unsubstantiated allegations.
// Trump call to Raffensburger full audio
🐣 RT @DanRather The audio of Trump with the Georgia secretary of state. Wow. It’s like telling the Nixon tapes to “hold my beer.”
🐣 RT @20committee Dear GOP: The “stolen election” fable was fun, it’s all kayfabe, more fund-raising off your rubes (whom you despise but need), but Trump’s “suggestions” to Raffensberger are obviously criminal in intent. This is verging on a coup, by morons who can’t manage it, but still a coup.
🐣 RT @caminosver Criminal solicitation to commit election fraud. ¤ 2016 Georgia Code, Title 21 – Elections, Chapter 2 – Elections and Primaries Generally, Article 15 – Miscellaneous Offenses § 21-2-604.
🐣 RT @juliaioffe For those of who have studied democratically elected authoritarian regimes, the mantra is: one person, one vote, one time. All it takes is one election to install someone who has no intent of ever leaving.
🐣 RT @JuliaDavisNews He knows.
⋙ 🐣 RT @jason_kint ****Carl Bernstein*** on @cnn just called this ***the ultimate smoking gun tape.**** let that sink in.
🐣 RT @SamanthaJPower Chilling: Trump doesn’t just demand @GaSecofState “find” 11,780 votes, but threatens him & his lawyer by saying their failure to report electoral fraud (when there was none) was “a criminal offense.” Trump: “You can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you. I’m notifying you.”
🐣 RT @thomaskaplan Biden senior adviser Bob Bauer on Trump’s call with Georgia’s secretary of state: “We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place”
🐣 RT @RadioFreeTom The President of the United States is threatening the Georgia Secretary of State in order to flip an election and reverse the votes of the citizens of Georgia. ¤ This is an impeachable offense and for anyone enabling it, a criminal conspiracy.
🐣 RT @daveweigel Unexpected statement from Paul Ryan: “It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans.” https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1345828795996123145?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @brett_mcgurk Remarkable that there have been no resignations from this administration after all that’s transpired over the last 60 days and now today. The oath is to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the U.S. Constitution. It’s written that way for moments like this.
🐣 RT @StevenBeschloss One of Trump’s goals was to benumb people to the crimes he’s committing. How well did he do? He did so well he convinced elected members of the House and Senate to commit sedition in broad daylight, a felony with a punishment of up to 20 years in prison.
🔊WaPo: ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor [Audio] http://wapo.st/3pL2fYl
// In a recording obtained by The Washington Post, President Trump alternately berated, begged and threatened Brad Raffensperger
🐣 RT @XSovietNews Vladimir Zhirinovsky advises that Trump’s last chance to stay in power will be to declare a state of emergency.
⋙ 🐣 RT @GazetaRu [trans:] LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky said that the “last chance” of the current US President Donald Trump to remain in power may be the emergency regime.
🐣 RT @AnneApplebaum If the voters don’t eventually punish the Republicans who are calling for a de facto coup, then we have to conclude that a substantial number of Americans no longer believe in our democracy either.
⭕ 2 Jan 2021
WaPo Editorial: The U.S. needs a democracy overhaul. Here’s what Biden’s first step should be. http://wapo.st/2LjWEcn “Mr. Trump and a disturbing number of Republican officials have made obsolete the old assumptions that each major party will play fair”
💙 🐣 RT @brianschatz Some of the same people who voted no on impeachment, saying that the remedy for malfeasance is an election, are now saying the remedy for the election is malfeasance.
🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 Trump Acting Sec Def orders carrier USS Nimitz home over the objections of the CENTCOM Commander and the Chairman JCS. Tomorrow 3 Jan anniversary of US killing of Quds Force Soleimani. Hyper aggressive then abrupt move. Carrier should stay until 21 Jan. https://twitter.com/mccaffreyr3/status/1345593478021976068?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @AdrienneH2425 These are not the machinations of someone as limited as Trump. Who is pulling the strings in these last-minute bits of puppetry?
⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @mccaffreyr3 No clue. Five political ACTING DOD officials with weeks to go over riding the CENTCOM Commander and Chairman JCS.
🐣 RT @BillPascrell The text of the 14th Amendment expressly forbids Members of Congress from engaging in rebellion against the United States. Trying to overturn a democratic election and install a dictator seems like a clear-cut example of that. https://twitter.com/BillPascrell/status/1345478048313970688?s=20/photo/1
💙 🐣 .@SteveSchmidtSES is a modern Thomas Paine. ¤ Hear! Hear!
⋙ 🧵 RT @SteveSchmidtSES Trumpism is an American autocratic movement with Fascistic markers. There are seven specific parts that comprise its core 1. THE LEADER. Donald Trump is the unquestioned leader of this movement. It is a cult of personality and there are no serious challengers against his (1) 📌 https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1345551423455559680?s=20
🐣 RT @AdamParkhomenko Who do you want to see Biden appoint as Attorney General
⋙ 🐣 a non-partisan, tough-as-nails, by the book individual who will get through Senate confirmation without a hitch, then lower the boom; also needed: a couple of commissions to do damage assessments
🐣 RT @clairecmc There are actually 12 Senators “pointing a loaded gun” at the heart of democracy. They should always be known as the #dirtydozen They all know better. They all know there is no evidence. They all know that every case was thrown out of court, even by Trump appointees.
🐣 RT @StevenBeschloss It still stuns me all these Republicans are so short-sighted they think they can side with Trump and sedition and there won’t be long-term consequences. It only underscores the necessity of holding Trump and all the criminally complicit accountable.
🐣 RT @kylegriffin1 Sen. Angus King on CNN: “To bring this challenge at this date is— it’s Democracy versus Trump at this point. I mean, that’s really what we’re talking about. This is a direct attempt to overturn a democratic election, which is the beating heart of our entire democratic system.”
🧵 RT @SteveSchmidtSES The die is cast for the Republican Party. It will be destroyed on January 6th in much the same way the Whig party was destroyed by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The act unraveled the Missouri compromise and allowed for the westward expansion of slavery. 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1345533164102541315?s=20
🐣 RT @AshaRangappa_ […] Basically, it sounds like Hawley has appointed himself as a one-man “Supreme Court” who gets to second-guess issues of state law by a state high court which has already decided the issue and which the *actual* Supreme Court declined to hear. Sounds a little dictator-y to me.
🐣 RT @brhodes What’s happening in the Senate has nothing to do with polarization. It’s a far right attempt to overthrow an election and institute authoritarian rule. The frame of “polarization” absolves Republicans of being an extremist, far right, authoritarian movement.
🧵 RT @SteveSchmidtSES 2021 will be a hard year in the life of the American nation. There is a great struggle that lies before us and our disbelief at its arrival must not blind us to the lethal danger it poses to the American experiment. 1/ 📌 https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1345522648772718593?s=20
🧵 RT @ScottMStedman Absolutely devastating. This was a cataclysmic failure of government from the top-down. ¤ “it now appears Russia exploited multiple layers of the supply chain to gain access to as many as 250 [government] networks.” 📌 https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/status/1345565992391331846?s=20
⋙ NYT: As Understanding of Russian Hacking Grows, So Does Alarm http://nyti.ms/3pINMvT
// Those behind the widespread intrusion into government and corporate networks exploited seams in U.S. defenses and gave away nothing to American monitoring of their systems.
🐣 RT @hurdonthehill When I was undercover at the CIA, I saw firsthand how our enemies steal elections and try to interfere in ours. Elected officials continuing to sow doubt amongst the public for petty political gain is playing into our enemies hands.
🧵 RT @vermontgmg THREAD: Every death from Covid-19 is a tragedy—all 340,000 Americans so far—but it’s hard to ignore that the Republican Party has become a literal death cult, all to assuage Trump’s ego. Every state and federal elected official to die so far from Covid-19 is a Republican…. 📌 https://twitter.com/vermontgmg/status/1344382147046551552?s=20
// links to death reports
🐣 RT @ArletteSaenz Biden spox @MichaelJGwin: “This stunt won’t change the fact that President-elect Biden will be sworn in on January 20th, and these baseless claims have already been examined and dismissed by Trump’s own Attorney General, dozens of courts, and election officials from both parties” [link to CNN]
🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Cliff notes version: Senator Hawley & Senator Cruz are squaring off to compete against each other in the 2024 election & they don’t care how much harm they do to the republic or your rights to gain power. They’ve absorbed the ultimate lessons of Trumpism.
⋙ 🐣 RT @peterbakernyt Mitt Romney on the Trump-Cruz effort to overturn the results of a certified democratic election: “I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world. Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”
🐣 RT @ProjectLincoln Meet the Senators from the new #JimCrowCaucus.
#RememberTheirNames: @HawleyMO @tedcruz @RandPaul @SenTomCotton
and the corporate America titans who are funding them: @ATT @Citibank @CharlesSchwab
#EveryVoteCounts 💽 https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1345407824428494848?s=20/photo/1
🐣 RT @AerariumL […] 💽 https://twitter.com/AerariumL/status/979695373982760962?s=20/photo/1
// Gladiator: “Are you not entertained?”
🐣 I am reminded
Of the monks of Lindisfarne, Iona
Copying Latin—
Scribbling folk tales
In the margins. ¤
Vikings set sail
● https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1345521557536444423?s=20/photo/1
TheAtlantic, Lee Drutman: America Is Now the Divided Republic the Framers Feared http://bit.ly/352UBRb
// John Adams worried that “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.” And that’s exactly what has come to pass.
🐣 RT @JohnWDean Now they are racing to see who can hit bottom first. The Republican Party’s dive into dictatorship is pathetic. Not all those 74 million Trump voters are stupid. Many are just greedy tax-free freeloaders. GOP is disintegrating, quickly. It’s not pretty.
🐣 RT @TheRickWilson Let’s be very clear what these people are: seditious traitors. This isn’t about election fraud; they’re the founders of a new #JimCrowCaucus that seeks to disenfranchise tens of millions of African-American voters so Trump can hold power.
🐣 RT @brhodes One problem with politics being covered like sports for so long is that you end up with people in positions of public trust acting like it’s all just a game.
🐣 RT @GovCTW [C Todd Whitman] The 140 representatives & 10 senators who are going to refuse to validate the electors from states Trump lost are not only violating their oaths of office, but actively encouraging a coup. There must be some legal penalty for their actions. via @bpolitics
⋙ Bloomberg: Cruz Set to Lead Group of GOP Senators in Opposing Certification http://bloom.bg/38WBFVg
// A larger group of Republican senators is preparing a push to delay and even oppose certification of President Donald Trump’s loss […]
💙 🧵 RT @SkinnerPm Stop trying to shame the shameless. Just organize and outwork them. If they weren’t afraid of your vote, they wouldn’t try to disenfranchise you or throw away your votes. Day to day. Every day. Stop hoping shame works on the shameless. Just stop it. They don’t care about you. 📌 https://twitter.com/SkinnerPm/status/1345440141654052864?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @SkinnerPm Ignore the endless gushing profiles of the blameless economically anxious voter who is only anxious when women and minorities get near power. Ignore the anger. Ignore the fear. Hold your corners and expand. Day by day. We don’t have to be this way. Do good today then do it again
🐣 RT @sbg1 The Trumperdammerung was always going to include the flames consuming his own party…
🐣 RT @brianklaas Another way of putting this in context: Nearly 1 in 4 Republican Senators will vote to overturn a democratic election, backing an authoritarian power-grab by the man who lost the election. They are voting to destroy democracy in the United States. We shouldn’t mince words.
🐣📋 RT @cchoksy These senators are fascists:
Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) @MarshaBlackburn
Mike Braun (R-IN) @SenatorBraun
Ted Cruz (R-TX) @SenTedCruz
Steve Daines (R-MT) @SteveDaines
Bill Hagerty (R-TN) @BillHagertyTN
Josh Hawley (R-MO) @HawleyMO
Ron Johnson (R-WI) @RonJohnsonWI
John Kennedy (R-LA) @SenJohnKennedy
James Lankford (R-OK) @SenatorLankford
Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) @CynthiaMLummis
Roger Marshall (R-KS) @RogerMarshallMD
Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) @TTuberville
// list of emails from @rgoodlaw ¤ The Anti-Democratic Dozen: [list] ¤ Coup plotters. History’s hall of shame.
🐣 The #Sedition Caucus: @MarshaBlackburn @SenatorBraun @SenTedCruz @SteveDaines MT @BillHagertyTN @HawleyMO @RonJohnsonWI @SenJohnKennedy @SenatorLankford @CynthiaMLummis @RogerMarshallMD @TTuberville
🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger I pledge: When referring to any of the senators voting to overthrow the election I will on whatever topic I am writing refer to their sedition. Please consider adopting this practice.
↥ ↧
🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger all attorneys in that group should be disbarred
🚫 ⋙ 🐣 RT @JoyceWhiteVance Unfortunately, just now, a Joint Statement from Senators Cruz, Johnson, Lankford, Daines, Kennedy, Blackburn, Braun & Sens-Elect Lummis, Marshall, Hagerty & Tuberville refuses to accept Biden’s win & repeats baseless accusations, rejected by every court to consider them.
// #traitors #seditionists
🧵 RT @gtconway3d “Two people familiar with the matter say that in recent days, Trump has told advisers and close associates that he wants to keep fighting in court past Jan. 6 if members of Congress, as expected, end up certifying the electoral college results.” 📌 https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1345380347031281664?s=20
⋙ 🐣 RT @thedailybeast “The way he sees it is: Why should I ever let this go?… How would that benefit me?” said one a source who’s spoken to Trump at length about the post-election activities to nullify his Democratic opponent’s decisive victory.
⋙⋙ DailyBeast: Trump Plans to Fight the Election Even After ‘Stop the Steal’ Rally Ends http://bit.ly/3b2Vgpl
// The president has told advisers he isn’t deterred by the setbacks in the courts and won’t be deterred by Congress certifying Joe Biden’s win.
🐣 RT @tribelaw Threatening the life of the President, Vice President, or the Speaker of the House is a federal crime under 18 U.S. Code § 871. Five years in prison is the penalty. Obviously @TwitterSupport must boot #LinWood from this platform now
⭕ 1 Jan 2021 💫🥂🍾💫
NYT: In Abrupt Reversal of Iran Strategy, Pentagon Orders Aircraft Carrier Home http://nyti.ms/2MsjQGb
// After weeks of escalation and threatening language, the Defense Department is sending mixed messages as the anniversary of the death of an Iranian general nears.
🐣 RT @JRubinBlogger Disappointed rules proposed for House do not sanction members seeking to overthrow democracy.
DailyBeast, Michael Tomasky: How Biden Could Become One of the Greats, and How He Could Fail http://bit.ly/3rOmAh2
// Having a president who sounds like one again is a good start, but he’ll be up against Trump, Fox, and the rest of them pulling for the worst once the body count is on Biden.
⋙ DailyBeast, Justin Baragona: Trumpist Lawyer Lin Wood Goes on Unhinged Rant Suggesting Justice John Roberts Is a Murderous Pedophile http://bit.ly/3b1DVgv
// Wood has recently been in touch with President Trump, who has encouraged his election-stealing lawsuits and behavior.
🐣 RT @FrankFigliuzzi1 Conveying threat against a vice president, Title 18 U.S. Code: http://bit.ly/3n5Ht3X
⋙ 🐣 RT @LLinWood If Pence is arrested, @SecPompeo will save the election. Pence will be in jail awaiting trial for treason. He will face execution by firing squad. He is a coward & will sing like a bird & confess ALL.
🐣 RT @real Because of the Trump Administration, hospitals are now required, effective immediately, to publish their REAL PRICES, which will create competition and drive downs costs MASSIVELY. Won lawsuit last week. Bigger than healthcare, it’s called PRICE TRANSPARENCY….
⋙ 🐣 Doesn’t change much since 90%+ of payments are made based on contracts with Medicare, Medicaid and insurance companies. Only the wealthy (often foreigners) and the uninsured pay list prices.
🐣 RT @joycewhitevance President’s lawyer calling for the arrest of the VP https://twitter.com/Auriandra/status/1345179306419433473?s=20
⋙ 🐣 Is he [Lin Wood] actually one of Trump’s lawyers – or would he just like to be? He’s nuttier than Sidney Powell!
🐣 RT @abeaujon Proud Boys say they’ll “be incognito” for Jan. 6 rallies in DC, spurning trademark black-and-yellow clothing:
⋙ Washingtonian: Proud Boys Say They’ll “Be Incognito” During January 6 Trump Rallies in DC http://bit.ly/3841TWE
// 12/31/2020; The group will not wear its trademark black-and-yellow clothing, its leader says.
⋙⋙ 🐣 they’ll likely be acting as agents provocateur ➔ pretending to be antifa ¤ counter-protestors SHOULD STAY HOME; we won. Trump is looking for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act. Don’t make it easy for him
🐣 RT @real Before even discussing the massive corruption which took place in the 2020 Election, which gives us far more votes than is necessary to win all of the Swing States (only need three), it must be noted that the State Legislatures were not in any way responsible for the massive….
⋙🐣 RT @real ….changes made to the voting process, rules and regulations, many made hastily before the election, and therefore the whole State Election is not legal or Constitutional. Additionally, the Georgia Consent Decree is Unconstitutional & the State 2020 Presidential Election….
⋙ 🐣 RT @real ….is therefore both illegal and invalid, and that would include the two current Senatorial Elections. In Wisconsin, Voters not asking for applications invalidates the Election. All of this without even discussing the millions of fraudulent votes that were cast or altered!
⋙⋙ [QuoteTweet ⇈ ] 🐣 RT @kyledcheney Trump falsely says the two Senate special elections in Georgia, just four days away, are “illegal and invalid.”
⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 RT @ Therefore, Republicans shouldn’t bother voting. And Trump should just cancel his rally in Georgia.
⋙⋙⋙⋙ 🐣 he should have his rally and tell people the election is illegal and not to vote ⇉ why should he care about McConnell at this point? 🍿
🐣 RT @real Our Republican Senate just missed the opportunity to get rid of Section 230, which gives unlimited power to Big Tech companies. Pathetic!!! Now they want to give people ravaged by the China Virus $600, rather than the $2000 which they so desperately need. Not fair, or smart!
↥ ↧
WaPo: Congress overrides a Trump veto for the first time with Senate vote on defense bill http://wapo.st/3pKqwNZ “The strong bipartisan majorities supporting the defense bill in both chambers … contains several repudiations of his policies as commander in chief”
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