During the same February 2021 impeachment trial speech in which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Donald Trump "practically and morally responsible" for the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, McConnell also argued that impeachment alone was never intended to be "the final forum" for justice.
"Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office—as an ordinary citizen," McConnell said as he sought to explain away the vote he had cast to acquit Trump.
"We have a criminal justice system in this country," McConnell continued. "We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one."
Yet on Tuesday when McConnell was asked if he still believes Trump isn't immune from prosecution, McConnell dodged the question, choosing instead to reframe the legal query as an electoral matter.
"Well, my view of the presidential race is that I choose not to get involved in it, and comment about any of the people running for the Republican nomination," McConnell responded.
Q: “You had argued, after voting to acquit the former president that presidents are not immune from prosecution is that still your view?” McConnell: “I choose not to get involved...and comment about any of the people running for the Republican nomination.” pic.twitter.com/uhVut62se8
— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) January 9, 2024
It's a point former Rep. Liz Cheney has made repeatedly during her book tour for "Oath and Honor." In the book, Cheney writes that McConnell originally seemed "firm in his view" that Trump should be impeached. But as the vote approached, he got squishy and ultimately folded.
“Leader McConnell, who had made a career out of savvy political calculation and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, got this one wrong,” Cheney writes.
After years of McConnell worship by Beltway journalists, the fact that he 100% whiffed on the most consequential issue of our time might finally be sinking into the psyche of some political journalists and analysts.
As former U.S. attorney, deputy assistant attorney general, and “Talking Feds” host Harry Litman noted this week on NPR's “Trump Trials” podcast, we would never be here if McConnell hadn't "blinked" on convicting Trump.
"When you think of all the forks in the road over the last several years, that one moment with McConnell who was obviously saying that [Trump] was guilty and should have been convicted, stands out to me as the absolute road not taken," Litman observed.
That would have been the most "straight-forward" and appropriate way for McConnell to have "solved this national nightmare," Litman added, "and he blinked."
In her new book, former Rep. Liz Cheney unloads on her former colleagues in the Republican Party, and to no one's surprise, her disgust is seething and deep.
"Oath and Honor," which was obtained by CNN, serves as an overarching indictment of the many Republicans Cheney deems most responsible for gifting the GOP to the twice-impeached, four-time criminally indicted Donald Trump, whom she calls “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office.”
“As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution," writes Cheney, who served as the number three House Republican before being ousted from leadership over her vote to impeach Trump for the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol.
According to the book, then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Cheney following the 2020 election that Trump knew he had lost. “He knows it’s over,” McCarthy reportedly said at the time. “He needs to go through all the stages of grief.”
Yet that same day, Cheney reveals, McCarthy fanned the election-denial flames on Fox News, telling viewers, "President Trump won this election."
Cheney writes, "McCarthy knew that what he was saying was not true.” So much for virtue.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a pro-Trump MAGA stalwart, derided the legal avenues for challenging the election results, saying, “The only thing that matters is winning,” according to Cheney. So much for honor.
Cheney also shredded Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana in the book, which she finished writing before he was elevated to speaker. Johnson, she said, pressured his Republican colleagues to sign on to an amicus brief supporting his legal challenge to 2020 results.
“When I confronted him with the flaws in his legal arguments," Cheney writes, "Johnson would often concede, or say something to the effect of, ‘We just need to do this one last thing for Trump.'" So much for the rule of law.
Fast-forward to Nov. 29, 2023, and Johnson contrasting Republicans' ham-handed effort to impeach President Joe Biden with what he framed as Democrats' "brazenly political" impeachment of Trump for springing a violent coup attempt on the U.S. Capitol.
"What you are seeing here is exactly the opposite. We are the rule-of-law team—the Republican Party stands for the rule of law," Johnson told reporters Wednesday, touting his work to defend Trump against Democrats’ "meritless" impeachment proceedings.
Speaker Mike Johnson claims that both of Donald Trump's impeachments were “brazenly political” and “meritless,” but says the GOP's efforts to impeach Joe Biden are “just the opposite” because “the Republican Party stands for the rule of law.” pic.twitter.com/vqpjqbPnbk
Just a quick trip to Republicans' present day house-of-mirrors routine as the majority party in the House. Now, back to the book.
Perhaps the most chilling part of CNN's write-up was Cheney's recollection of House Republicans' methodical efforts to reject the will of the people in 2020. Here’s CNN:
On Jan. 6, before the attack on the Capitol, Cheney describes a scene in the GOP cloakroom, where members were encouraged to sign their names on electoral vote objection sheets, lined up on a table, one for each of the states Republicans were contesting. Cheney writes most members knew “it was a farce” and “another public display of fealty to Donald Trump.”
“Among them was Republican Congressman Mark Green of Tennessee,” Cheney writes. “As he moved down the line, signing his name to the pieces of paper, Green said sheepishly to no one in particular, ‘The things we do for the Orange Jesus.’”
Once again, the fundamental crisis in America’s political journalism is an unwillingness to confront corruption—or even to recognize it. Uncritically repeating politically motivated hoaxes is a corrupt act, one that sabotages democracy by depriving citizens of the facts necessary to make democratic decisions.
A new CNN story is indicative of this very problem, so let’s rip it to pieces and see what we can learn. The article is "McCarthy starts to plot Biden impeachment strategy while GOP skeptics remain,” and it is a bog-standard inside look at the politics of the Republican Party’s attempt to further its propagandistic narratives.
The article tells us that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has "privately told" Republicans he plans to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden "by the end of September." And yet, despite setting up an array of committees and subcommittees for Trump's most-loyal toadies to probe Biden and his family, the vengeance squads continue to present only nebulous theories and claims that have already been disproven. This presents McCarthy with a problem.
The article continues:
But leadership recognizes that the entire House Republican conference is not yet sold on the politically risky idea of impeachment. That’s why one of the biggest lingering questions – and something Republicans have been discussing in recent weeks – is whether they would need to hold a floor vote to formally authorize their inquiry, sources say. There is no constitutional requirement that they do so, and Republicans do not currently have the 218 votes needed to open an impeachment inquiry.
Skipping the formal vote, which would be a tough one for many of the party’s more vulnerable and moderate members, would allow Republicans to get the ball rolling on an inquiry while giving leadership more time to convince the rest of the conference to get on board with impeachment.
In other words, with no clear evidence of wrongdoing, House Republicans in swing districts don't want to commit to an impeachment based on the murky say-so of the chamber’s conspiracy cranks. So, to make his deadline, McCarthy plans to simply skip that vote if he must and launch the inquiry anyway.
The issue with this article is not what it covers but how it covers it. All this information is presented as a problem of political gamesmanship. That Republicans have unearthed no actual justification for impeaching Biden is depicted as a political problem, nothing more.
Another factor that could complicate the fall timeline for an impeachment inquiry: Government funding expires at the end of September. McCarthy has already signaled they will need a short-term spending patch to keep the government’s lights on, which hardline conservatives have balked at.
Officially moving ahead with an impeachment inquiry could help keep angry conservatives off McCarthy’s back. And the speaker himself has linked the two issues publicly, warning that a government shutdown could hinder House Republicans’ ability to continue their investigations into the Biden administration – a direct appeal to his right flank, and a sign of all the competing pressures that the speaker is facing.
Every political journalist in Washington, D.C., knows that House Republicans’ push to impeach Biden exists as a strictly partisan maneuver to (1) retaliate against Trump's impeachments and (2) manufacture an anti-Biden scandal so as to offset the accusations of Trump’s rampant criminality. Republicans want to bend the narrative from "Trump and his Republican allies did crimes" to "Both sides are doing crimes." Their intention is to use the false claims to sway the next presidential race. Again.
But we political journalists are going to ignore all that, studiously, and report on the propaganda campaign as a political tactic. What does this mean to Republicans in vulnerable districts? How will it affect short-term spending battles? Can McCarthy thwart would-be Republican moderates to push the propaganda campaign forward?
It's not until paragraph nine that we get the disclaimer: Republicans’ impeachment rationale is bullshit:
Republicans have pointed to unverified allegations that Biden profited from his son’s foreign business dealings as grounds for impeachment and have also alleged that there was political interference at the Department of Justice in the ongoing Hunter Biden criminal case – neither of which Republicans have been able to prove, which the White House and Democrats have repeatedly stressed.
“Unverified” is the key word, but the paragraph ends with a deflection to "White House and Democrats" who insist on pointing out that Republicans have not been "able to prove" their claims—a deflection that is unnecessary and borders on manipulative. CNN knows these claims are unverified, that Republicans have been unable to prove their accusations, and yet the grounds for this impeachment inquiry gets a passing mention deep in the story.
Most of the claims surrounding Hunter Biden are the product of a Trump-era ratfucking operation by Rudy Giuliani, the now-indicted former mayor of New York City. The operation’s goal was to deflect from Russian election interference with a bizarre theory that, actually, it was Russia’s enemy Ukraine that meddled in our elections and that Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, and the Hamburglar were all somehow involved. Republicans’ investigations of the “Hunter Biden” story isn't a case of longstanding suspicions of a Biden crime ring being dutifully probed by public servants; it is a conspiracy-peddling campaign pushed by known liars, several of whom are facing charges for their own roles in an attempted coup.
Republicans’ conspiracy mongering is the far more interesting and important story, and political journalism so often seems uninterested in telling it. It is as if these journalists cannot comprehend conspiracy-peddling as corruption. Surely, by writing such articles, they would invite retaliation from elected officials whom the journalists court for access. Better to have access to those telling lies than to point out the lies.
The article closes out by calling attention to a new social media post by the man at the center of all this. On Truth Social, Trump screeched his frustration at, of all people, his allies in Congress: "You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven. … Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!"
That is what the article should have focused on: the indicted leader of an attempted coup demanding the impeachment of the man who beat him, all while the indicted leader himself mounts a new bid to retake power. It is the story of one political party mired in corruption and peddling hoaxes. It is the most exciting political story on the planet, the story that happens in nations just before democracy falls and a strongman and his toadies declare elections to be too corrupt to continue and journalists to be enemies of the citizens. It is the last political story a democracy tells, and the political journalists tasked with fetching quotes from the conspirators still avoid telling it.
We talk about the upcoming Republican presidential debate and how sad a situation it is. The Republican Party shot itself in the foot with a Trump-sized bullet and now it's stuck with him for the foreseeable future. We still try to game out the possible paths the Republican field might take in order to rid themselves of the Donald.
On the heels of the public exposure of a memo from lawyer Kenneth Chesebro proposing what would become the central strategy of Donald Trump's attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, Politico has a new overview of Chesebro's role in the conspiracy that's worth a read.
Chesebro only made it to Co-Conspirator 5 status in Trump's newest federal indictment, overshadowed by figures such as hoax architect Rudy Giuliani and lawyer John Eastman, but in memos it was Chesebro who laid out each of the core elements of the plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to simply nullify the election's results come Jan. 6. Eastman appears to have been the one who packaged it all up for sale to Trump and the rest of the White House team.
In the Dec. 6 Chesebro memo revealed Wednesday, he proposes a plan to create fake, uncertified electoral slates in multiple Joe Biden-won states that would then be passed to Pence, who would announce them as the "true" electors using an allegedly unilateral constitutional power that allows the vice president to count up the electoral votes literally however he or she wants. That version of the plan was the one the co-conspirators and conspiring Republican members of the House and Senate worked towards, creating the fake electoral slates. It was Sen. Ron Johnson who appears to have been the volunteer who would smuggle the fake electors to Pence on the day of the vote.
Pence foiled the scheme by refusing to be a part of it even though Trump and Trump's team had pressured him intensely. He was retaliated against on Jan. 6 when Trump singled out Pence as his enemy even as violent pro-Trump insurrectionists hunted for targets in the halls of the Capitol.
But Chesebro had alternative plans as well. All of them hinged on the conservative Supreme Court being sufficiently crooked enough to come up with a legal facade for ignoring the certified electoral slates of multiple states purely on Republican say-so. Or at least for the court to put a pause on the electoral counting that would, in the eyes of the public, help justify other extreme actions to overturn the results.
A week after the Dec. 6 memo proposing the original plan of Pence unilaterally altering the counts himself, Chesebro had already brainstormed a fallback position that would have the same effects.
On Jan. 6, Chesebro said, Pence would announce his recusal from presiding over the joint session of Congress, citing the unconstitutionality of the Electoral Count Act as well as a conflict of interest because of his candidacy for reelection. This, Chesebro contended, would “insulate” Pence from charges of making a self-serving decision and leave the matter ostensibly in the hands of a senior Republican senator. Then, after beginning to count electoral votes from an alphabetical list of states, that senator would refuse to count the votes from Arizona, citing the competing slates of electors. If Arizona wants to be counted, this senator would say, it would either have to “rerun” its election or allow for more judicial review of the outcome.
It's important to acknowledge here that this plan, too, was absolutely batshit crazy. The plans concocted by Trump's alleged "legal" team all hinged on a supposed ability for a vice president or temporary acting Senate president to simply declare that they weren't going to count the votes of states that the Republican candidate didn't win because fuck you, that's why. This was in accordance with the theory that power is unilaterally invested in the vote-counter and there is not a damn thing anyone else in the entire country can do about it.
This was entirely batshit crazy for a whole host of reasons, and perhaps especially for the complete indifference shown towards what 330 million people might think—or do—when they learned that their entire constitutional democracy was a fiction. Chesebro himself continued to recognize that his plan was so destructive and batshit crazy that the Supreme Court could very well not go along with it. Again, this is a plan that would end with Chesebro and the others facing a firing squad at pretty much any other point of history or in any other country. At some point even the Supreme Court would have to decide whether this was a stunt worthy of forcing the most powerful military on the planet into choosing sides.
But Chesebro still held out hope that the resulting batshit chaos would somehow result in a miracle occurring. Perhaps the election would be thrown out, making House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the acting president. Or perhaps not. Spin the wheel and take your chances, America. The rancid sacks of shit proposing this plan were willing to risk everything for the slightest chance to erase an election.
But another outcome, he said — one that appears even more far-fetched in hindsight — might play out: Trump could quit the race in exchange for a negotiated deal to make Pence president.
“In this situation,” Chesebro wrote, “which would be messy and unpalatable to many … it doesn’t seem fanciful to think Trump and Pence would end up winning the vote after some legislatures appoint electors, or else that there might be a negotiated solution in which the Senate elects Pence vice president and Trump agrees to drop his bid … so that Biden and Harris are defeated, even though Trump isn’t re-elected.”
First off, fuck this dude sincerely for his willingness to throw all of democracy against a wall in the off chance that the debris would make a pretty pattern that he, personally, might like. But the notion that Donald Trump would "quit the race" in a ploy to make Pence president may be more delusional than the plan to assert dictatorial Pence powers. Trump has never done anything in his life unless it would benefit Trump. Just how were Giuliani, Eastman, and the other seditionists going to convince Trump to drop his claims of winning the election so that Pence could sit behind his desk? Were they going to offer him Alaska? Delaware? Agree to convert our newest aircraft carrier to a floating Trump-branded result?
And no matter how many Trump lawsuits fell because each of them were based on craptacular hoaxes that fell apart upon even the most cursory examination—which has landed multiple lawyers in Trump's orbit in deep professional trouble, and that is putting it mildly—Chesebro and Eastman and the others just kept pressing forward. As the House select committee that investigated the coup discovered, Justice Clarence Thomas was widely seen as the coup's most likely Supreme Court ally. As Trump pressured Pence, the coup's architects hunted for cases that might give Thomas the means to at least temporarily block a state's results from being counted.
“Possibly Thomas would end up being the key here — circuit justice, right? We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt,” Chesebro wrote. “Realistically, our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress, is from Thomas — do you agree, Prof. Eastman?”
This was just one week before Jan. 6, after courtrooms across the country had thrown out the team's farcical "evidence" of fraud over and over again, leaving the seditionists with no remaining legal fig leaves that would justify their plan. But when not even Thomas gave them the justification they sought, the plan didn't change.
Trump and his allies even scheduled a "march" on the Capitol to coincide with the counting of electoral votes, another means of potentially delaying the vote or creating enough chaos to justify throwing out or "redoing" the election's results.
The reason Trump stood by as the violent mob attacked police and ransacked the building is self-evident: This was the delay the team had been trying to make happen. Trump and the coup planners indeed used the delay caused by the evacuation of Congress to again work the phones, pressuring individual lawmakers to go along with the plan.
What the Chesebro and Eastman memos have spelled out, much too plainly, is that from at least Dec. 6 the plan was to nullify Trump's presidential election loss through Republican fiat, either through Pence or through other House and Senate accomplices, and the co-conspirators all recognized that a likely result of their plan would be massive public unrest and almost certain violence. And they did not care. At all! The "plan" was for Trump to declare that the Insurrection Act allowed him to put down public protests by military force, and he was to give those orders, and the coup planners were willing to spin the wheel on what would happen after that as well.
There was seemingly no jumping-off point where Trump's team of true believers proved unwilling to risk mass violence, military violence, or a new civil war on the vaporous chance that they could erase a Republican election loss. The memos are banal in tone: Things might get "messy" after their "bold" strategies were employed, but oh-fucking-well, those were simply the risks of overturning a democratic election and installing a Republican winner regardless.
It was seditionist from the start. The plan was never to prove actual fraud in any state, it was to unilaterally declare "fraud" and announce that the results were invalid because Pence said so. The Supreme Court would hopefully declare the moves "nonjusticiable" because it was Congress doing them, after which the only remaining concerns would be enforcing order as the public objected.
These ratbastards and their allied Republicans intended a coup from the beginning. It was a stupid plan, mind you. It was premised on a great deal of wishful thinking, and with never a thought to what would happen if Trump called up the military and some member of the military dropped a missile onto the White House in response, but it was a coup by design.
It's hard to imagine what justice can even be meted out here against a team of conspirators whose communications show complete indifference to the damage caused by their schemes.
Conservatives cried about how the “woke” (whatever that means) “Barbie” movie would fail. It didn’t. In fact, the film has struck a chord with American and international audiences. Daily Kos writer Laura Clawson joins Markos to talk about the film and the implications of the Republican Party’s fixation on mythical culture wars, which is failing them in bigger and bigger ways every day.
The federal grand jury seated by special counsel Jack Smith has reportedly heard additional testimony from former Homeland Security officials about Donald Trump’s efforts to seize voting machines following the 2020 election. CNN reports that both former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and former Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli testified that Trump went ahead with plans to seize the machines even though they repeatedly told him that he did not have this authority.
A report in January revealed that Trump had drafted at least two versions of an executive order in December 2021, directing the military to seize voting machines after discussions with convicted former national security advisor Michael Flynn and retired Col. Phil Waldron. Waldron was also the author of an extensive presentation in which he claimed that the voting machines had been tampered with by foreign governments. He urged Trump to declare a national emergency and use U.S. marshals and National Guard troops to manage a “secure” election. Trump and Waldron reportedly had multiple meetings with Trump and took his “how to overthrow democracy” slideshow around Washington, where it was played for Republican members of Congress, who were eager to participate.
The latest testimony apparently focused on Wolf and Cuccinelli telling the jury that Trump continued in these efforts even though they told him repeatedly he did not have the authority to seize the machines. Additional testimony on the subject came from former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, but this was reportedly given to investigators in a closed-door meeting, not to the jury.
All of this testimony shows that Smith’s investigation is focusing heavily on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election that extended beyond the specific scheme on Jan. 6.
As CBS notes, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that Trump could not shield former staff members from testifying before the grand jury under claims of executive privilege. That ruling is likely to mean that Cuccinelli, Wolf, and O’Brien will spend more time with the grand jury. It will also mean that Mark Meadows and others who have previously avoided such testimony are likely out of options.
Much of this testimony appears to be new information not heard in either Trump’s impeachment trial or previous investigations.
The House Select Committee did have one of the drafts of Trump’s executive order, one that ordered the Department of Defense to take charge of the voting machines. That order contained a vast collection of improbable and unsupportable claims, including that the voting machines had been altered by “a massive cyber-attack by foreign interests,” that the machines “intentionally generated high number of errors,” and that voter databases could not be trusted because they had been “hacked by Iran.” It also leans heavily on a “forensic analysis,” which actually confused counties in Michigan and Minnesota. The order ended by instructing officials to take seven steps, starting with:
“Effective immediately, the Secretary of Defense shall seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records...”
That the jury is hearing this testimony means that Smith is interpreting his writ beyond the narrow confines of just how Trump’s actions contributed to violence on Jan. 6 but all the ways that Trump sought to undermine the election. It’s also unlikely that the jury would be hearing this testimony unless Smith thought there was a good possibility that it would support criminal charges.
Now that the appeals court has removed another layer of doubt around whether or not Trump could halt some testimony—no, he can’t—Cipollone and O’Brien are also likely to be asked about an infamous Oval Office meeting in mid-December. That was the “rancorous meeting” at which Trump, Flynn, attorney Sidney Powell, and others launched so deeply into sedition that even Mark Meadows reportedly turned away. Cipollone and O’Brien were reportedly first-hand witnesses to that event.
Between Waldron’s military coup presentation, attorney John Eastman’s plan for declaring Trump the winner on Jan. 6, the Jeffrey Clark plan to replace the attorney general and declare the vote invalid in several states, the scheme laid out for Pence to simply ignore the vote in seven states, and straight out calls for violence and threats on Jan. 6, Trump tested the waters on just about every illegal option he could use to make himself dictator. Smith has plenty to look at.
All that came after every possible legal remedy, including requests for recounts, were rejected, and it’s not even considering the efforts Trump made in deliberately leaning on local officials in Georgia.
If a federal grand jury is hearing testimony, it’s because Jack Smith thinks they need to hear it. They’re likely to hear a lot more.
There is some unfortunate news to report today. Sadly, I have died. My cause of death was, as I always knew it would be, The New York Times. Seldom do we talk about the ongoing dangers presented by the Times, which is the unregulated gas stove of newspapers, but anyhow I read this new Times focus group piece talking to yet another band of unrepentant Trump voters and it caused me to immediately die. It's a damn shame, but I probably had it coming.
The premise of the piece is the same premise used for each of its one hundred million previous incarnations: The Times gathered up a dozen average-Joe Republican Americans it had previously talked to and asked them yet again what they thought about seditious coup conspirator Donald Trump, about the Republican Party, and about oh right the Jan. 6 insurrection and subsequent hearings publicizing what investigators have been able to learn about the origins of the violence.
What you get, when you ask any random dozen Americans to weigh on any subject not in their personal wheelhouse, is almost certain to be a train wreck every single time it is attempted. We know this. We have always known this. The whole genre is mostly an exercise for the press to find out how badly the press has fucked up its own public responsibilities, and in specific it really can't be anything more than a parlor-game premise in which we attempt to deduce, knowing nothing at all about the handful Americans corralled for public display, which news channel their television most frequently ends up on.
Most. Americans. Do. Not. Pay. Attention. To. Politics. They know only what they have heard thirdhand. The most useable quotes almost always come from the volunteers who are the least informed but the most hardheadedly confident in themselves, a bad combination that never gets any better than absolutely awful.
This is a very useful exercise if you want to lose all hope in America. It's one of the best approaches possible if your paper is looking to collect all its readers who do pay close attention to politics for the purpose of killing them all off at once.
When it comes to actually collecting useful information about anything other than the relative reach of various television and radio programs, however, the assault-every-diner approach is useless. So it must be that the Times really did intend to kill readers. They are serial killers. Their depravity knows no bounds. The murder weapons? Quotes from Americans still willing to say they support Republicans even after the party egged an attempted coup into being, Americans who have been selected for inclusion based explicitly on their utter disinterest in any politics that cannot be sloganed onto a hat.
(Sandy, 48, white, Calif., property manager) Well, I think Republicans are our only option as far as getting us out of this mess that the Democrats have started with inflation and all that. Do they have a plan at this point? Doesn’t look like it. But are they organized? Doesn’t look like it. But there is hope there.
See, I don't want to write about politics anymore. I just don't. I want to write stories about elves and dwarves and dragons, stories in which the dwarves and elves are at each others throats because elves think trees should exist and dwarves can only find joy in extraction-based industries, and both are competing for control of a fantasy legislative body but they're evenly matched and can't make progress but then a collection of mountain trolls begin to run for office as well, and the mountain trolls argue that since the main reason for electing dwarves is that dwarves really hate elves, well then mountain trolls hate both elves and dwarves so that makes them even more qualified for office.
Anyway, it would all end with the head dwarf, whose name is Kevli or whatever, bargaining for the trolls' support by allowing them to eat both of his legs, one of his arms, both ears, and five dwarven legislators to be named later. It's all a mess, and while the dwarves are all arguing over who to feed to the trolls in order to keep Kevli from looking like a complete dork here the Dark Lord Braendoen is gathering his forces to give everybody slightly cheaper insuli—I mean, potions. Slightly cheaper potions.
I don't have to write about politics. I've got a vivid imagination that could, like, totally nail a story about racist dwarves that conspire with even more racist mountain trolls to keep anyone from getting cheap insuli-I mean, health potions.
But no, here I am, a corpse, because the Times had to kill me before I even had the chance to switch careers in self-defense.
Q: Is there a particular idea or value that you’d like [Republicans] to stand up for?
(Judi, 73, white, Okla., retired) Honesty.
See, I'm dead now. Everything you're hearing from me after this point is just gas escaping.
(Andrea, 49, white, N.J., executive assistant) Just start putting things back on the right track. It makes me scratch my head that the country never did better than when Trump was president — never. You know what I mean? The gas prices were low. The border was under control. Everything was just great. And he got run out of town just because he sends mean tweets and has a big mouth. They’d rather elect a nice guy and have the country in the toilet.
Andrea, a MILLION PEOPLE DIED and you're fucking on about cheap gas prices? THERE WAS A COUP, ANDREA. How the hell did The New York Times ever even find you, how is it that you even became aware that something called The New York Times even existed and wasn't just a phishing effort aimed at getting hold of your Social Security number?
(Alissa, 29, Latina, Fla., procurement) Just thinking back to how well we were doing as a country when [Trump] was running it, I would love to see that again. I think he’s strong. I thought he was a great president. If DeSantis decides to run, I might turn a little bit. It depends.
What Donald Trump brought to America was hats. That's it. There's not a damn thing he actually did except the hat thing. And public belligerence. And being a rapist who bought an entire beauty pageant brand so that he could see teen girls change in the dressing rooms. Oh, and the international extortion bits. And the complete upending of American standing overseas, selling out allies while prodding enemies to open up new beach resorts. And using the presidency of the United States as a reason to mark up cocktail prices in his Washington hotel.
It's the hat thing, isn't it. The exchange Donald Trump made with America is that he gets to ignore laws and be roundly incompetent and kill off so many people that we’re stuffing bodies in refrigerated trucks for lack of other places to put them, but in exchange the shittiest people you know all get the opportunity to buy Chinese hats with a meaningless slogan on them. I mean, who wouldn't go for that deal.
Q: Is there anything about [Trump] that’s turned you off over the last year or that you sort of lost steam on?
(Judi, 73, white, Okla., retired) Well, when Covid started, I think he was swayed into the vaccine thing. He listened to the wrong people. I’ll leave it at that.
Yeah, that's when I died the second time, becoming double-dead. So far I cannot report any meaningful differences from just being the usual kind of dead. This must be what it's like to be a cat.
(Lorna, 60, white, Mo., customer service representative) I think it’s ridiculous people want to put him in prison. For what? And look at Biden and his son.
Again, there is only one reason why any journalistic outlet should ever do any of these diner-inspired stories about The Common American. It is a window into which news outlets they consume and nothing else. There is not one glitteringly enfuckened thing Lorna, 60, of Missouri could tell us about the relative legal jeopardy of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, or Beefystevo Biden that would be the slightest bit informative or useful.
And I do mean that: You could concoct an entirely fictional Biden son named "Beefystevo," ask 12 Republican voters about Beefystevo's crimes, and at least eight of them would insist that Beefystevo has done many, many crimes, all very bad, some of them in Ukraine and some of them in Narnia, and they will tell you that The New York Times is crookedly covering up the very existence of Beefystevo Biden in coordination with Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and a giraffe in Texas that looks kind of similar to Bill Gates.
I dare you to ask your focus groups about Beefystevo and his crimes. I dare you, New York Times. You know what will happen, and I know what will happen. Do it, you diner-hounding cowards.
(Sandy, 48, white, Calif., property manager) I want DeSantis to run. He’s just like Trump. He’s just as cantankerous, but I think he’s a little bit more refined. For example, you have Jack Daniels, or you have Gentleman Jack. Gentleman Jack is a lot smoother, but it’s still whiskey.
Thank God we finally have someone willing to be honest about Republican politics. That's the word that comes to mind when you think about Florida's Ron DeSantis: Refined. The man is refined, in that you can either suck on what he's selling or what Trump's selling and both will get you nice and politically shitfaced but the DeSantis version goes down smooooother. It's probably because Ron DeSantis doesn't have as much golf-course bunker sand in his shoes. It might be because the DeSantis bottle is spiked with 20% hydroxychloroquine siphoned from an early-pandemic Florida stockpile DeSantis is still trying to get rid of.
Hey, so do any of our fine Normal Republican Americans want to revise or extend their past remarks about the 2020 presidential election being stolen just because a traitorous crapsack and his eight syphillitic reindeer shouted about it way back when? Anyone want to walk that back, or not walk that back?
Was Trump, glorious figurehead who raised American life into the highest tier of awesomeness that has ever been, "cheated" out of winning his pandemic economic-crisis post-(first)-impeachment election?
(Andrea, 49, white, N.J., executive assistant) Cheated as in ballots — truckloads of ballots showing up in the middle of the night. There’s videos of it. There is proof. [...]
(Sandy, 48, white, Calif., property manager) I know the videos that Andrea is talking about. It’s well documented, but the media doesn’t want to cover that type of stuff.
(Judi, 73, white, Okla., retired) No, I still think [Trump] won the election and that he should still be our president. He should be our president right now.
Truckloads! Truckloads of secret vaccines! I mean, ballots! It's all on video! It's streaming in 5G from every maple tree, but the government doesn't want you to know! It is very important that we, the readers of The New York Times, are exposed to the free and unfettered opinions of our nation's most thickheaded and source-agnostic of opinion havers, because reasons! How would America know that one specific retired Oklahoma vaccine skeptic believes Joe Biden is not the legitimate president if The New York Times did not create an entire "interactive" web feature highlighting this important fucking information? How could the readership survive if we did not contact these people not once, but a second time so that they could rub their curlicue opinions in our eyeballs twice instead of once?
What about the whole coup thing? You know, the attempted coup, the one in which Trump advertised for a rally coinciding with the certification of the United States presidential election, got angry when his security forces tried to deprive the mob of their weapons, and told them all to march to the Capitol during a joint session of Congress as means of threatening Congress if they did not overturn the election's results? That whole thing? The thing that should have made any decent person look for an exit sign, rather than being thought a supporter of a genuine bona-fide traitor to the nation?
(Andrea, 34, biracial, N.H., I.T. support) The internet was just ablaze. I made a post in support of it, and a lot of people came to attack me in the comment section. That day was really crazy. [...]
When I saw videos of everything that happened, I was pretty embarrassed. I was like, “Oh, no. We’re going to hear about this forever.” It did look very chaotic and violent. I knew it was going to come down to blaming Trump somehow, saying that he was a ringleader and he’s responsible, he riled everybody up.
Ah, the very American view of "you make comments supporting one violent riot and everybody gets on your case about it" followed by "oh jeez, this turned out very fucky, now we're all going to be stuck hearing about it." Can't kill me any more than twice, New York Times. Not in a single day, anyway.
What about all those congressional hearings detailing what investigators found out about the coup's organizers, allies, and origins? Any minds changed over here in the Republicans Who Don't Pay Attention To Politics ballpit?
(Sandy, 48, white, Calif., property manager) If anything, I think my views have become more solidified. If you look, they made a big thing out of it in the media. They didn’t cover Black Lives Matter, antifa. I mean, you talk about Jan. 6 being planned. Antifa, throughout the whole summer of 2020, I mean, those things were planned, organized. The media didn’t cover it.
I cannot emphasize how enraging it was that the media kept covering things that did happen while ignoring things that did not happen. You know who else planned, well, not the violent overthrow of our nation's government but, like, other stuff? Antifa, probably! But no, instead everybody made a Big Damn Deal out of a Republican-led attempt to erase a constitutional United States election. Gawd.
Please tell me any of these Informed Public Voices at least watched the hearings they're now being asked to opine on?
(Barney, 72, white, Del., retired) I didn’t see anything live. It was a waste of $3 million.
I cannot emphasize this enough, but I mean this in kindness: There is no amount of government money that could be spent that would not be a waste of money, when it comes to convincing Barney of Delaware, retired, to have an opinion other than the one he wants to have. This is indeed a terrible waste of government resources.
But the crowd Donald Trump gathered to march on the Capitol was a pretty violent bunch, at least we can all agree on—
(Alissa, 29, Latina, Fla., procurement) No, I don’t think it was. I’ve personally been to Trump rallies. They’re very peaceful. So I don’t think what happened that day had anything to do with Trump. I think it was planned.
EVERYBODY FORGOT TO ASK ALISSA WHETHER TRUMP’S JANUARY 6 CROWD WAS VIOLENT, I BET YOU POLICE OFFICERS ALL FEEL PRETTY STUPID NOW.
Surely the news of an attempt to violently overturn the results of a U.S. election have left at least some small impression on Republican Jus' Folks.
(Lorna, 60, white, Mo., customer service representative) Well, a couple of people locally here were arrested. So of course, they’d show them every news clip, on every channel. It just got old. It was just a waste of taxpayers’ money, in my opinion.
I mean, that's the thing about failed violent coups, they're just so boooooring and everybody keeps going on about them all the time and it makes channel surfing sooooo tedious. Thank you again, New York Times, for exposing us to the very important views of that class of Americans that tries very hard to know nothing about politics and gets bitter and resentful when you shove it onto their television channels anyway.
Because, you know, the Jan. 6 hearings were a farce to begin with. How the hell would the United States Congress know more things than Andrea of New Jersey does? How would anyone in the White House know more about Trump’s actions than Andrea does, or Barney does? They wouldn't, so that means this was all a set up.
(Andrea, 49, white, N.J., executive assistant) I 100 percent agree with what Barney said. I think they testified because they weren’t part of the cool kids anymore or bribes. I’m not really sure what it is, but to make up blatant stories like that, there’s got to be some kind of underlying “What’s in it for me?” kind of thing, I think.
Well, we've rediscovered a core Republican voter tenet so we can't say this was a total waste of time. Ask pretty much anyone in the Republican Party, from the common voter to your average sex-crime-covering-up Republican lawmaker, and they'll tell you that there's no possible reason anyone would want to offer evidence about a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol unless there was something in it for them. The idea that anyone would be sincerely shaken by, say, a mob of pole-wielding cop-beating weirdlings hunting down Trump's political enemies in the halls of the Capitol is utterly foreign to Every Single Republican. The notion eludes them. It is not a concept that can wiggle into their smooth and proud brains.
If people are going to jump in to "testify" every single time an armed mob beats police officers inside the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to hunt down the vice president then where will it end? It's all very suspicious. They probably just want to make the coup guy look bad.
I really wish I hadn't died. Well, I suppose it's more accurate to say I really wish The New York Times hadn't gone out of its way to write an interactive fancy-pants feature specifically intended to kill me, because it seems like a jerk move every time they've tried it and yet they just keep pushing.
Bring us home, Timesy. Show us that any of these people have opinions even an onion-skin thickness above the buzzword generic. Show us that you have gathered up a small crowd who, while admirably anonymous and no doubt chosen according to best dice-throwing the editorial staff of the Times can provide, is worthy of national attention because these dozen people have at least thought about any of this stuff long enough to have any opinion that could not be more efficiently produced by an artificial intelligence exposed only to the opening monologues of weekday Fox News opinion hosts.
Show us, please show us, that you have not just gathered a collection of cranks who are angry that government keeps feeding children and trying to prevent polio and keeps blocking very profitable companies from pumping skin-dissolving toxic soup directly into your home's plumbing. That these are people who have put thought into this, and are not simply reactionary faux-libertarian crackpots spooning the wisdom of gum wrappers and fortune cookies into everyone else's tired, tired brains.
Q: Sandy, what would be a sign that our democracy is healthy?
(Sandy, 48, white, Calif., property manager) I would say getting back to the basics, sticking with the Constitution. There’s just too much government interference in everything. We’ve got so many regulations, taxes and controls and spending and everything. Get back to the fundamentals. Less government involvement. We should have an army, a military. That’s about it. Otherwise, just stay out of the way.
(Michael, 65, white, Utah, retired) I tend to agree with Sandy, just hoping that we could start letting the Constitution be the Constitution and let us have our rights with freedom of speech and just start living the way that they did hundreds of years ago, when they believed in our country.
There you go. How wonderful. I am so, so glad I didn't live to see that.
Happy New Year! Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter is on the show today to talk about the wild garbage fire that was the Republican speaker of the House vote. Kerry and Markos also break down what this onionskin-thin conservative majority can and cannot do in the coming year, as well as what the Democratic representatives can do to make Kevin McCarthy’s life just that much tougher.
Jan. 6, 2021, was madness. Without a proper account of that day, the stain of its violence and betrayal, already indelibly etched into the national history, could continue to spread, shading and infiltrating every institution low and high until finally, this ‘great experiment’ collapses in on itself in a heap of dingy authoritarianism.
For the last several weeks, the Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol presented its findings on the insurrection incited by former President Donald Trump now more than a year ago.
He is the only American president ever impeached for this betrayal, making him uniquely offensive since his actions obliterated the core of what the Constitution demands of presidents above all else when they take the oath: its faithful preservation and defense.
So much of what happened on the way to Jan. 6 unfolded in public.
Trump said long before Election Day if he lost, it was because the election was rigged. Many of his personal attorneys and members of his administration spent weeks promoting or defending wild conspiracy theories of voter fraud at press conferences, on podcasts, on the radio, or on television. This continued unabated even after the nation’s Attorney General and heads of the nation’s intelligence networks confirmed to Trump in public—and in private, as the committee showed at length this summer—that his fraud claims lacked credibility entirely.
It was an all-out assault of disinformation and propaganda aimed at convincing the American public he was not defeated after a single term in the White House where his tenure and popularity were regularly marred by the cruelty of his policies and the consequences of his own actions, like impeachment for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 was a tirade but it was also an open invitation to his most devoted followers to help him retain power by force despite losing the 2020 election popularly and by way of the Electoral College. And when the debris, blood, sweat, urine, and feces were finally cleared away from the Capitol after the mob stormed it, Trump’s second impeachment followed.
The case was, as Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told Daily Kos during an interview this week, “made almost completely with facts from the public record, and the statements and actions Trump made.”
“It was overwhelming,” Raskin said. “Although the incitement was plain to see and the violence was bloody and fresh on people’s minds, what we did not have was the detailed account of the president’s step-by-step effort to orchestrate a political coup against the election and essentially set aside Joe Biden’s seven-million-vote victory.”
Kevin Seefried of Delaware, pictured here, was found guilty of obstruction of Congress among several other charges in June. He used the Confederate flag to jab at U.S. Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman. Goodman was the officer responsible for luring rioters away from lawmakers by mere seconds and inches. Seefried is sentenced in September.
Now, that “detailed account” has been presented to millions of Americans.
An average of 13 million broadcast viewers watched per hearing day, according to Nielsen, hearing evidence at each juncture about how Trump: 1) worked to overturn the election results by promoting a lie; 2) attempted to install his allies at the Justice Department when legal avenues to assert his victory were defeated; 3) advanced a fake elector strategy to pressure the vice president to stop Congress from certifying the count; 4) invited a crowd he understood to be armed to march to the Capitol with him during the Joint Session of Congress; and 5) abandoned his sworn duty to protect the United States by sitting idly for nearly three hours while ignoring pleas for help as a mob erected a gallows, issued calls to hang the vice president and Speaker of the House, stormed the halls of Congress and attacked hundreds of outnumbered police officers with a barrage of lethal weapons.
During its two primetime sessions alone, a cumulative 30 million (or more) broadcast viewers heard this evidence—and then some.
Raskin told Daily Kos in April he hoped the hearings would become a way of arming the American public with the tools of “intellectual self-defense against the authoritarian and fascistic policies that have been unleashed in this country.”
”These hearings have been so devastating for Trump and his followers because they have shown everyone exactly every effort he undertook to overturn the election and the Constitutional order. And almost all of it was based on evidence brought forth by Republican witnesses,” Raskin said by phone this week.
That is true, despite what disinformation may be flowing out from right-wing platforms.
The testimony during the hearings overwhelmingly featured Republican lawyers, judges, political commentators, election attorneys, Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys, a Republican city commissioner, and a Trump campaign manager, to name but a few.
”I think [the hearings] have moved the whole spectrum of public opinion closer to the facts of what actually happened. These people who were already convinced of Donald Trump’s culpability now have a lot more evidence to corroborate their initial convictions,” Raskin reflected.
“Those who were on the fence have been moved to reject the ‘Big Lie’ and to doubt the continuing efforts to undermine the reality of Biden’s victory. Those who were in Trump’s camp as true believers have begun to melt away at the margins even though many of them are still holding firm. It does not look like a promising scenario for those who continue to want Donald Trump to be the central figure of American politics,” he said.
A Morning Consult/Politico poll released this week found that the hearings may not have shaken loose many of Trump’s most fundamental supporters, but the share of unaffiliated or independent voters in the U.S. that believe the former president is responsible for the insurrection has increased significantly. And almost more importantly, those independents who held “favorable views” of Trump have continued to dip, too. Many independents are indicating they will vote for a Democrat in November.
If the Justice Department will not make it so that Trump is unable to hold office, at the least, this should be a small comfort: the hearings have manifested an even greater number of Americans who believe there is good reason to vote against a person, or persons, who would incite a deadly insurrection.
Raskin would like to see the Justice Department take action publicly and more definitively before the midterms. He also knows that the timing of that announcement could draw ire, and that screeches of political impropiety are likely to come.
“But the Constitution itself regards this matter with the utmost gravity,” Raskin said. “Section III of the 14th Amendment said that people who have sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and betray it by engaging in an insurrection shall never hold federal or state office again. That is a constitutional principle.”
He continued: “It’s obviously a legitimate thing for us to be talking about. But the Department of Justice and prosecutors at other levels have to make their decisions without regard to anyone’s political plans. If people had immunity from prosecution just because they were running for office, then anybody who was suspected of a crime, any crime at all, could simply announce for political office, and then they would have legal immunity. That can’t be right,” he said.”
The committee’s debut session was a year ago this month. Police who defended the Capitol testified for the first time publicly and put a personal face on the raw, frenzied violence that most Americans only witnessed from afar.
As the months have marched on, the committee has unearthed hundreds of thousands of pages of records from the White House and elsewhere and has interviewed over 1,000 people who were directly or indirectly involved with Jan. 6. Those interviews continue. Raskin said this week the number of former Trump aides who have come forward recently are producing a “waterfall of truth.”
Attempts to stop the committee from airing its evidence have been unceasing, yet mostly unsuccessful. Those caught in the committee’s scrutiny have been unable to cast the panel as illegitimate when fighting subpoenas in court.
The committee’s work has been overwhelmingly bolstered through judicial opinions, providing an outcome that offers benefits twice over. When Judge David Carter ruled that Trump and John Eastman, the attorney who developed a six-point strategy to overturn the election, had likely engaged in a criminal conspiracy—and further that they “engaged in a coup in search of legal theory”—it set a strong precedent for Congress and upped the ante for investigations at the Justice Department.
In fact, this week, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Windom revealed in court that the Department obtained a new search warrant to access records on John Eastman’s phone. This process has been unfolding for the last month. The home of Jeffrey Clark was also searched. Clark is the former DOJ attorney who Trump tried to install as attorney general after existing senior officials at the department refused his scheme to declare the election as false. And Clark’s underling, Ken Klukowski, is now cooperating with the DOJ’s probe into Jan. 6 in full, according to Klukowski’s lawyer, Ed Greim.
Cassidy Hutchinson, who provided some of the most shocking public testimony this summer is cooperating with the department. During the hearings, she testified under oath that Trump knew the mob was armed—“I don’t fucking care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me,’” she recalled him saying—and she disclosed that her boss, Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, sought pardons in the aftermath of the insurrection. She also disclosed information about a small battery of Republican lawmakers who sought pardons in the wake of Jan. 6.
She also divulged how the president wished to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6 after his speech, offering insight into his mindset that day. When this request was rejected, his outrage was so severe, Hutchinson said, that the former president lunged at the arm and neck of a Secret Service agent driving him.
Other witnesses have refused to cooperate under subpoena, courting contempt of Congress charges and indictments like Trump ally and strategist Steve Bannon and former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. Bannon was found guilty on two counts and faces sentencing in October. Others, like Meadows or onetime adviser Dan Scavino, have cooperated to varying degrees and managed to evade prosecution. Other Trump-world officials have invoked their Fifth Amendment rights after being subpoenaed. Committee vice chair Liz Cheney said last month, more than 30 witnesses called before the committee invoked their right against self-incrimination.
The most high profile of those figures are Eastman; Clark; longtime GOP operative Roger Stone; conspiracy theory hack and right-wing podcaster Alex Jones; and Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser.
In December 2020, Flynn publicly advocated for Trump to invoke martial law to rerun the 2020 election. He was also part of discussions with Trump and his attorneys where there was talk of the military seizing voting machines. He did not ultimately cooperate with the select committee, but in airing a five-minute clip of Flynn’s deposition, the committee allowed his silence to speak volumes.
When Cheney asked Flynn if he felt the violence on Jan. 6 was legally justified, he pleaded the Fifth. When she asked if he believed it was morally justified, he pleaded the Fifth. When she asked him if he believed in the peaceful transition of power in the United States, the retired three-star Army general pleaded the Fifth.
A Capitol Police officer walks past a worker cleaning damage a day after a pro-Trump mob broke into the US Capitol.
With each day that has passed since the committee’s first-ever hearing last July, the truth continues to pour out.
”The defense of the constitutional order and the rule of law should be something that unifies Americans across the political spectrum,” Raskin said. “Trump convinced millions of people that if your team does it, if they break the law or upend the Constitutional order, you embrace it or defend it regardless of how unlawful or criminal it is.”
“But that’s just an appalling descent for intellectual and ethical standards in American life,” Raskin said.
“When the people [who believed the Big Lie] called for ‘Justice for Trump’ they said ‘let the people decide.’ The people voted for Biden. But Trump tried to overthrow the election, so he was impeached for doing that. And we took it to trial, and at trial, they told us then, ‘don’t deal with this through impeachment, you could prosecute him if there was a crime.’ “
“Now the Department of Justice is investigating whether there is a crime, and these same people are saying, ‘you can’t prosecute him, it’s too political!’ No matter what is done, they essentially assert that Donald Trump is beyond the reach of the law and that is a profoundly anti-democratic attitude,” he said.
One of the last battles to be waged between Trump and the truth about January 6 will very likely play out on the field of executive privilege disputes and crime-fraud exceptions where the Department of Justice, not the select committee, will lead the charge of a criminal investigation into the former president and his associates.
The Justice Department is moving at its own pace and operating mostly in stealth, but the dam seems to be breaking as more reporting now suggests the DOJ has its Jan. 6 prosecutors focused on two principal tracks: Trump’s possible orchestration of a seditious conspiracy and obstruction of a congressional proceeding and fraud.
The fraud track would stem from the fake-elector scheme and is believed to encompass the pressure campaign Trump and his allies put on officials at the DOJ to say the election was rigged and votes were fraudulently cast.
The committee’s investigation, meanwhile, is still humming as members maneuver their way through new challenges—like what to do about a batch of deleted Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 as well as deleted texts from the same period at the Department of Homeland Security.
That department’s inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, the Washington Post was first to report on Friday, “scrapped” an effort to recover agency phones. In February, after learning that messages had been erased during a “planned” device reset, Cuffari reportedly decided to stop further review and collection of phones. He only this month notified the House and Senate Homeland Security committees of the “erased” texts. He was asked by the head of that committee, and various others 10 days after the insurrection to ensure all records and devices were preserved.
Committee chairman Bennie Thompson, as well as Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who sits on a committee that oversees offices of the inspectors general, have called on Cuffari to recuse himself from the investigation. The director of the Secret Service, James Murray, announced late Friday he would waylay his planned July 31 retirement to “ensure our agency's continued cooperation, responsiveness, and full support with respect to ongoing congressional and other inquiries.”
This is an unsettling series of developments, Raskin admits.
“This profound mystery of the Secret Service texts and what information is being masked by their disappearance is something we are all pursuing. We are invested in finding out the truth there,” he said.
The next hearing is expected in September and the committee plans to produce an interim report around the same time. A final report will follow, but meanwhile, over the next month, he said, “everyone has loose ends that they want to follow up on.”
During the course of its probe, every member of the committee has specialized in a different facet of the investigation.
Raskin’s focus was Trump’s mobilization of the mob as well as domestic violent extremist groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers. and Three Percenters.
“There are still significant things that we are finding out that I want to pursue there,” Raskin said. “The same goes for the shakedown of the Justice Department, the attempt to coerce state election officials, and so forth. I would say each member has his or her continuing research agenda and then we have some things we consider major to the whole of the investigation we are pursuing.”
It has been a long year already and it is not quite yet over. As for the man at the center of the probe, former President Trump, he has yet to stop his incessant spread of disinformation about the 2020 election and is poised to take another run for the White House.
But Raskin is optimistic.
“I’m most optimistic about the fact that the vast majority of the American people do not believe in coups, insurrections, and political violence to usurp the will of the people. There is still a profound allegiance to constitutional democracy in the country,” he said.
He is not cynical, but “sobered” around other facts.
What “sobers him,” he said, is that Republican Party, even now “remains under the spell and stranglehold of Donald Trump.”
He continued: “They are using every anti-democratic device in the book to thwart majority rule; from voter suppression statutes to gerrymandering of our districts to the weaponization of the filibuster to the manipulation of the Electoral College.”
“We are in a race between the clear majority’s will and preference for democratic institutions and progress and the efforts to drag us back into some kind of anti-democratic past,” Raskin remarked.
So, then, are the people now armed with the tools of “intellectual defense” they need to resist this and other aspiring tyrants to come?
“I don't think people will fall for any more ‘Big Lies’ or disinformation for the most part,” he said.
The lawmaker reflected: “People who have been disabused of all these notions aren’t going back. But there is an important question being tested here: whether the new propaganda systems that have grown up in the internet age can actually operate like an intellectual straight-jacket? Will millions of people really be locked into a system of lies? That’s a question that is closely connected to the future of our democracy. Democracy needs a ground to stand on, and that foundation has got to be the truth.”
Cases containing electoral votes are opened during a joint session of Congress after the session resumed following protests at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, early on January 7, 2021.
In the wake of the insurrection, there was a reported flurry of conversation among members of former President Donald Trump’s Cabinet about whether he should be removed from office by way of the 25th Amendment. Now the Jan. 6 committee is conducting interviews with some of those officials as investigators pursue more information about what unfolded around Trump after the attack.
According to reporting first from ABC, the committee has now interviewed former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and plans to interview former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before the week is out.
Mick Mulvaney, who parlayed his job as Trump’s acting chief of staff to become the special envoy for Ireland, is also reportedly meeting with the panel on Thursday.
Exactly six days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the House of Representatives passed a resolution 223-205 urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
At the time, Pence said he did not believe this course of action was “in the best interest of our nation or consistent with the Constitution,” and he dubbed the resolution a “political game.” He also issued his refusal to invoke the 25th Amendment before the House had even completed its vote.
That “game” Pence worried about, however, was reportedly one that some members of Trump’s inner circle had already considered playing.
In ABC reporter Jonathan Karl’s book, Betrayal, he described a conversation between then-Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and then-Secretary of State Pompeo. Pompeo, Karl reported, sought out “legal analysis” on how the 25th Amendment could be applied and how fast it might work.
Washington, D.C., was heavily reeling from the Capitol assault. Yet during an appearance on MSNBC last November, Karl said the 25th Amendment talks were quickly nipped in the bud once officials learned the process could be a lengthy one and potentially complicated by the fact that members of Trump’s Cabinet had resigned after Jan. 6, including Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
It was reported Thursday that both DeVos and Chao are figures of interest to Jan. 6 investigators, too, and that they may also be asked to cooperate.
DeVos stepped down 24 hours after the attack and told USA Today this June that she was part of conversations where the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment with other members of Trump’s Cabinet was discussed.
In a portion of his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, former White House attorney Pat Cipollone told investigators that former Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia wanted members of the Cabinet to meet 24 hours after the insurrection. Scalia said he asked for the meeting because he felt “trying to work within the administration to steady the ship” would be better than watching more resignations roll in.
Pompeo has historically denied that he was part of any conversation after Jan. 6 where invoking the 25th Amendment came up.
DeVos’ recent interview undercuts that claim.
“I spoke with the vice president and just let him know I was there to do whatever he wanted and needed me to do or help with, and he made it very clear that he was not going to go in that direction or that path,” DeVos said of Pence on June 9. “I spoke with colleagues. I wanted to get a better understanding of the law itself and see if it was applicable in this case. There were more than a few people who had those conversations internally.”
DeVos said when she realized invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump was not a viable path forward, she tendered her resignation. She has not outwardly blamed Trump for Jan. 6, but she told USA Today she “didn’t see the president step in and do what he could have done to turn it back or slow it down or really address the situation.”
Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testified to the Jan. 6 committee that discussions of removing Trump with the 25th Amendment were flowing after the mob laid siege to the Capitol. Trump had spent three hours watching the mob attack without strongly condemning the violence or taking concerted action to stop it. When he finally delivered a speech in the Rose Garden that afternoon, and only after multiple people had died and much blood had been shed, he proclaimed “we love you” to his supporters before asking them to go home.
The next day, officials at the White House pushed to have Trump deliver a speech. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the committee under oath that the plan for the Jan. 7 speech mostly went into effect because people inside the White House were terrified of two things: the mounting criticism that Trump didn’t do enough and that the 25th Amendment would be invoked.
“The secondary reason to that [speech] was that, ‘think about what might happen in the final 15 days of your presidency if we don’t do this, there’s already talks about invoking the 25th Amendment, you need this as cover,’” Hutchinson said.
According to CNN, the committee is also seeking testimony from John Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas who vehemently defended Trump during Trump’s first impeachment inquiry for obstruction of Congress and abuse of power as well as during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference of the 2016 election.
Chad Wolf, once the acting secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, and his former deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, are in reported talks to meet with investigators, as well.
Both Wolf and Cuccinneli were asked to cooperate with the probe voluntarily last October.
Wolf was once much adored by Trump. He began to lead the Department of Homeland Security after then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned in April 2019. Despite Nielsen’s overt willingness to enforce any number of Trump’s cruel immigration policies during her tenure, she wasn’t enough of a toady for the 45th president, and he slammed her in the press as an ineffectual before she resigned. When she finally stepped down, Kevin McAleenan, then the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, filled her slot. McAleenan resigned in November 2019.
Those transitions were riddled with problems, however.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) would later reveal, after its own independent assessment of DHS, that both Nielsen and McAleenan altered or amended internal policies on lines of succession at the department. DHS pushed back on the report when it went public but Wolf ultimately stayed in place with Trump’s full support. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee as well as the Jan. 6 committee, said the succession rules were altered in haste so Trump’s “ideologues” could bypass typical Senate confirmation procedure.
Thompson had good reason to feel this way. In a February 2019 interview with CBS’ Face the Nation, Trump acknowledged that he enjoyed lording over acting officials versus those who had to go through more rigorous congressional approval.
Mulvaney, who meets with the committee Thursday, should cooperate without much trouble, if history is any indicator. Though he was a fierce defender of Trump’s during his tenure with the administration, after Jan. 6, Mulvaney became a more vocal critic.
“You don't get to where you got to yesterday with something that's normal. That's not normal for any citizen, let alone a president of the United States,” Mulvaney said on Jan. 7 when facing questions about whether Trump should be removed through the 25th Amendment.
Since then, Mulvaney has thrown his support behind those Trump officials who have come forward to testify, including Hutchinson.
The Jan. 6 committee is expected to continue its probe in the weeks ahead, and chairman Thompson has said that additional hearings will be held in September.
Why is it that, with a few notable exceptions, prominent Republicans almost always wait until they’re on their way out the door to slag off Donald Trump? They’re like B-movie ninjas who attack an enemy one at a time. Or, perhaps more accurately, they’re like doctors who watch the mole on your back gradually morph into a Rorschach blot over the course of six years before telling you, on the eve of their retirement, that you should probably think about getting that looked at.
Sen. Pat Toomey is one of these folks. While he voted to convict Donald Trump following his second impeachment (though not after the first)—and never really warmed up to the ocher arschloch during his reign of whatever-that-was—Toomey had already announced his retirement when he voted to dump Trump into the dustbin of history. So while his impeachment vote was more courageous than his compatriots’ votes to acquit, it wasn’t like he was risking his political future or anything.
That said, he's making his position perfectly clear before he rides off into the sunset to work at some noxious conservative think tank that will craft an elegant intellectual rationalization—based on time-honored Jeffersonian principles—for pushing Medicare recipients out to sea on ice floes.
But to his credit, he thinks Trump is garbage. Just listen to his very measured and dispassionate case, which he relayed toward the end of a recent Bloomberg TV interview:
Sen. Pat Toomey (R) Pennsylvania: “He disqualified himself from serving in public office by virtue of his post-election behavior.” He also thinks the Republican Party will have a stronger candidate than Donald Trump in the next presidential election https://t.co/qlvvI3zrftpic.twitter.com/qp32wpfbiz
TOOMEY: “I think he disqualified himself from serving in public office by virtue of his post-election behavior, especially leading right up to Jan. 6. I think the revelations from this committee make his path to even the Republican nomination much more tenuous. Never say never, and he decides whether to throw his hat in the ring, but I think we’ll have a stronger candidate.”
Okay, it’s nice of him to state the obvious and everything, but how about showing some urgency? How about dropping napalm like GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are doing? Maybe he could out his fellow Republican senators who agree with him but are too craven to admit it lest Trump’s preternaturally wee Chucky Doll hands “Truth” out some scarcely comprehensible, ungrammatical, ALL-CAPS DIATRIBES to his flying monkeys in the heartland. It’s not like the future of our democracy is at stake or anything!Hello! McFly!
Donald Trump is not more powerful than every single member of the GOP combined. They didn’t need the revelations from the House Jan. 6 committee to sink him. They could have done that literally dozens of times over the past year and a half by closing ranks with whatever pro-democracy forces managed to crawl out of the smoldering wreckage of Jan. 6.
But, well, a mealy closing statement about the GOP having “better candidates” than Trump is something, isn’t it? It’s not much, but it’s something.
Of course the party has better candidates. No one on the face of God’s green globule could be a worse candidate. But what exactly are you going to do about it once you’re out of Congress, Toomey? Fire off a handful of press releases and call it a day?
We are at a crossroads. One fork of the road leads to Putin-style fascism, the other to a healthier and happier democracy that can continue to thrive on a planet that will at most be half Mad Max hellscape if we manage to reverse course in time.
The Republicans who know better—and I’d like to think there are a lot more than just Cheney, Toomey, and Kinzinger who do—need to do their sworn duty to our Constitution, or it will eventually be worth less than Donald Trump thinks it is.
You may not have heard of Right Side Broadcasting Network, and if that’s the case—congratulations! You live a rich, full life unadulterated by brain weevils. Obviously, you’re not part of the network’s target demographic, which appears to consist almost entirely of Scott Baio getting shambolically drunk on Boone’s Farm.
But what the network lacks in gravitas it more than makes up for in goofy-ass displays of meretricious nonsense. Enter the ever-benighted Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia’s modest contribution to our slow-rolling apocalypse.
In a recent interview with RSBN’s Brian Glenn, Greene was so gobsmackingly weird, for a moment I thought my Jewish space LASIK surgery was making me hallucinate.
Watch:
“I thought the Capitol was the most secure building in our country ... There are lots of cameras, but you can’t see the video footage. I don’t know why you can’t.” — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who apparently missed the January 6th committee’s first public hearing pic.twitter.com/OSzcEZhcow
GREENE: “My third day on the job, the Capitol gets breached and then they blame me and President Trump and many other Republican members of Congress for doing it. I was so shocked, and I’ll tell you what was so shocking, I thought the Capitol was the most secure building in our country at least.”
GLENN: “Right, with thousands of cameras.”
GREENE: “Well, there are lots of cameras, but you can’t see the video footage. I don’t know why you can’t ....”
For one thing, there is video footage of the attack—including lots of Capitol security footage—and it’s definitely viewable to anyone who cares to look at it. For instance, there’s this NBC News video from Trump’s second impeachment, helpfully titled “Impeachment Managers Show New Graphic Security Footage Of Capitol Riot”:
Meanwhile, Greene is also convinced that humans aren’t actually hurting the planet by burning fossil fuels—we’re enhancing it! Think of it as our new, improved operating system, Earth 2.0—only without all the usual bugs. No, really. There will be no bugs. They can’t possibly survive what’s coming. Earth 2.0 will be a fungus-and-lungfish paradise, which gives MTG a fighting chance, come to think of it.
Marge Greene presents her scientific argument why global warming is a good thing: “This earth warming and carbon is actually healthy for us.” pic.twitter.com/fw5DMMeSJN
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 13, 2022
Transcript:
GREENE: “We’ve already warmed 1 degree Celsius, and do you know what’s happened since then? Here, let me tell you. We have had more food grown since then, which feeds people. We are able to, producing fossil fuels, keep people’s houses warm in the winter. That saves people’s lives. People die in the cold. This Earth warming and carbon is actually healthy for us. It helps us to feed people, it helps keep people alive. … The Earth is more green than it was years and years ago, and that’s because of the Earth warming, that’s because of carbon.”
In January 2021—with a big assist from our worst-ever president—Georgia was kind enough to gift us two Democratic U.S. senators. They also gave us this moist, quavering mound of peach tree-dish detritus.
