Category: Election2020

Trump’s impeachment response includes Trump making outrageous claim of victory

Posted on (Updated by Mark Sumner

On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s legal team made their official response to the article of impeachment delivered by House impeachment managers. Though it might easily have been misdirected since that response is actually written to the “Unites States Senate.” This follows earlier filings by Trump’s legal team to the “United States Districct Court,” the “Northern Distrcoit of Georgia,” and the “Eastern Distrct of Michigan.”

But while the opening words of Trump’s reply may generate a chuckle or an eye roll, it’s really the last section of that response that’s the most laughable. And the most infuriating. Because after providing three replies in which the argument focuses on the question of whether it is considered constitutional to impeach an executive once they’re out of office, the last answer that Trump provides goes directly back to square one by claiming that he never did anything wrong in the first place and that: “Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th president’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies that they were false.”

That’s right. A month after he drove a mob into a murderous rage, Trump isn’t just denying he incited their assault on the Capitol. He’s denying he lied.

In the early hours of Nov. 4, as it was becoming clear to everyone that Joe Biden was going to collect far more than the 270 electoral votes necessary to secure victory, Trump stepped in front of the cameras to complain.  In that appearance, Trump said: “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”

That’s a lie. Had Trump constrained himself to no more than such generalized statements, he might still have generated a sense of righteous anger and disappointment among his supporters, but it’s unlikely that would have created the kind rage that led to Jan. 6. However, Trump didn’t hold himself to the just a generic claim of victory.

By Nov. 7, shortly after the Associated Press called the election for Biden, Trump was back on the air to make a statement that leveled the first of many specific charges. “The Biden campaign ... wants ballots counted even if they are fraudulent, manufactured, or cast by ineligible or deceased voters.” All of those charges would persist right up until Jan. 6, with Trump’s team eventually assigning numbers to each category—8,000 dead voters, 14,000 out-of-state voters, 10,000 late ballots—without ever explaining where they obtained these values.

Over the course of the following months, Trump added more specific charges. He claimed that there were fraudulent drop boxes in Wisconsin. That votes of Arizona Republicans had been thrown out. That boxes full of votes had been smuggled into Philadelphia. 

Trump was still making both his general claims and these very specific charges right up to the final “Stop the Steal” speech on the morning of Jan. 6. “... this year they rigged an election, they rigged it like they have never rigged an election before, and by the way, last night, they didn't do a bad job either, if you notice ... We will stop the steal! ... We won it by a landslide. This was no close election. ... There were over 205,000 more ballots counted in Pennsylvania. Now think of this, you had 205,000 more ballots than you had voters ... So in Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters, and it’s — the number is actually much greater than that now ... In Wisconsin, corrupt Democrat-run cities deployed more than 500 illegal unmanned, unsecured drop boxes, which collected a minimum of 91,000 unlawful votes. ... They have these lockboxes. And you know, they pick them up and they disappear for two days. People would say where’s that box? They’d disappeared. Nobody even knew where the hell it was. In addition, more than 170,000 absentee votes were counted in Wisconsin without a valid absentee ballot application. So they had a vote, but they had no application and that’s illegal in Wisconsin. Meaning, those votes were blatantly done in opposition to state law and they came 100 percent from Democrat areas such as Milwaukee and Madison. 100 percent.”

Would a “reasonable jurist” know these statements were lies? Of course they would. That’s easy to see since every single time these arguments went before a judge they were uniformly rejected. Not all of the Trump team’s 62 lawsuits came down to statements of fact. Some were tossed with statements that explicitly called out the lack of any real evidence behind Trump’s claims.

“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption. That has not happened.” — U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann

There were months in which Trump’s team might have fleshed out their claims. Months in which they might have explained the source of all those numbers. They didn’t do that. Instead they added claims about a dead Venezuelan dictator and servers hidden in Germany. Dominion Voting Systems is suing Rudy Giuliani for $1.3 billion for running a “viral disinformation campaign.” Trump repeated all those same allegations in his rallies, right up to the end.

When Trump’s attorneys claim that a “rational jurist” could not know that Trump’s claims are false, what they actually mean is an ignorant jurist.  Someone who had been subjected to all these false claims and allowed to view none of the actual information. Like a Fox News viewer. Because a rational, informed juror would definitely be able to tell that Trump’s statements were not just lies, but lies created expressly for the purpose of generating confusion over facts that are otherwise very cut and dry.

But what be most surprising is that Trump isn’t just saying that someone making these statements might have been believed before Jan. 6, he’s still refusing to admit that they are false. This explicit inclusion in his reply makes everything Trump has said before and after Jan. 6 fair game. House impeachment managers should be much happier about that than Trump’s legal team.

Republicans who keep a finger on reality are finding out their voters have gone off the deep end

Posted on by David Neiwert

It’s becoming much clearer why Republicans in Congress are so reluctant to acknowledge factual reality—such as the reality that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election fairly, or that Donald Trump incited a mob that attacked Congress and ransacked the U.S. Capitol—and have doubled down on their embrace of anti-democratic disinformation that fueled the insurrection. If the Republicans dare admit any of it is real, they risk the insane wrath of the millions of GOP voters out there who have wholly swallowed all that false Trumpian propaganda.

That’s become especially self-evident among Republicans at the state and local levels throughout the country in the weeks since the Jan. 6 riot. As Hunter recently explained, the GOP at the ground level not only has fully embraced the conspiracist rot that Trump promoted after he lost, but it also has become even more openly extreme than it was before the election. Liz Cheney is now finding that out.

Whenever Republicans have made any gestures toward acknowledging either Biden’s win or Trump’s seditionist behavior, as The Guardian recently reported, voters at the state and local level have responded with outrage and threats.

“The evidence is overwhelming that local parties across the country, in blue states and red states, are radicalized and support extremely far outside the mainstream positions like, for example, ending our democratic experiment to install Donald Trump as president over the will of the people,” Tim Miller, former political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, told The Guardian.

“They believe in insane COVID denialism and QAnon and all these other conspiracies. It’s endemic, not just a couple of state parties. It’s the vast majority of state parties throughout the country.”

The list is long and worrisome:

  • Arizona: The state Republican Party reelected Kelli Ward last weekend. She’s a conspiracy-theory-promoting “Trump Republican” who unabashedly promoted the “election fraud” disinformation. Party officials also voted to censure Gov. Doug Ducey for certifying Trump’s loss in Arizona, along with Cindy McCain, the widow of Sen. John McCain, and former Sen. Jeff Flake, both for having supported Biden in the election.
  • Texas: The state Republican Party encouraged its members to follow them on Gab, the favorite social media platform of white nationalists, with a pro-QAnon conspiracy trope: “We Are the Storm.” Even after Biden’s inauguration, the party insisted that he had won fraudulently: “It took a global pandemic, a thoroughly corrupt media, and massive election irregularities for President Trump to be removed from office," the GOP said in a statement on its website.
  • Hawaii: The Hawaii Republican Party’s official account published a thread of tweets sympathizing with supporters of QAnon—dismissing the cult’s conspiracy theories that Democrats and media figures are secretly operating as global pedophilia ring, but arguing that adherents nonetheless were engaged in a form of patriotism. The same account also praised the “generally high quality” work of a Holocaust-denying YouTuber named Tarl Warwick, saying: “It is good to periodically step outside the ‘bubble’ of corporate commentators for additional perspective.” The party deleted and condemned the tweets; the communications official who posted them has resigned.
  • Oregon: The state’s Republican Party issued a lengthy statement stuffed full of conspiracy theories and disinformation condemning the 10 Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection. It claimed “there is growing evidence that the violence at the Capitol was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump and his supporters.” Some 23 Republican members of the state House repudiated the statement, noting that “there is no credible evidence to support false flag claims,” adding that such rumormongering had become a distraction.
  • Wyoming: State activists opened a campaign to “recall” Congressman Liz Cheney after she joined the Republicans voting to impeach Trump, and they have collected over 55,000 signatures. Ten county-level parties in the state voted to censure Cheney. A state senator named Anthony Bouchard announced a 2022 campaign against the congresswoman. The Wyoming Republican state party said "there has not been a time during our tenure when we have seen this type of an outcry from our fellow Republicans, with the anger and frustration being palpable in the comments we have received."
Matt Gaetz of Florida campaigns against his fellow Republican Congressman Liz Cheney in Wyoming.

Pro-Trump Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida even traveled to Wyoming to lead a rally attacking Cheney. "We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican party, and I intend to win it,” Gaetz told the rally.

The sentiments in Wyoming were deep and widespread. A Gillette woman named Shelley Horn started the Cheney recall petition, and told CNN: “You just can't go, 'Oh well, I need to vote with my conscience.' No! Vote for what your people put you in there to do. You're a Republican, you're supposed to back your party regardless.”

Trump supporter Taylor Haynes told CNN, "In my view, she's done in Wyoming." A poll commissioned by the Trump political operation purportedly showed the impeachment vote had hurt her popularity. “Liz Cheney's favorables there are only slightly worse than her father's shooting skills,” quipped Donald Trump Jr.

Other polls, however, supported the claim. A Jan. 27 McLaughlin poll that showed 70% of Wyoming voters believe the impeachment trial was unconstitutional; more than two-thirds disapprove of Cheney’s vote, and 63% say they are unlikely to vote for Cheney again.

Some longtime GOP figures defended her. Gale Geringer, a veteran Republican strategist, told CNN that Cheney showed "courage" in casting the Trump impeachment vote: "I don't underestimate the anger people are feeling right now. It's huge. And Liz Cheney has become the target of that anger, but I don't think she's really the cause of it. I think it's fear of what the Biden administration is going to do to Wyoming. We're petrified. Our entire economy, all of our jobs, our tax base has been threatened. And there's nothing we can do about Joe Biden for four years. But we can take that fear and anger out on Liz Cheney."

But Politico reporter Tara Palmieri tagged along with the CNN crew, and found it nearly impossible to find anyone in the state who wasn’t angry with their congresswoman. Her impression was that Cheney is in serious political trouble.

Honestly, it was hard to find anyone who would defend Cheney — and I really tried to talk to as many people as I could not at the rally. I stopped at a biker bar, a gun shop, a vape shop, a hardware store, a steakhouse, a diner, a dentist’s office and a pawn shop …

— At Harbor Freight Tools, when I uttered the name “Liz Cheney,” an employee behind the cash register hurled a threatening epithet. Then a beefy and tattooed supervisor, Torrey Price, 48, came over mad as hell. His mask hung below his nose when he told me, “I don’t think she spoke for Wyoming.”

Price never votes in primaries but said he will in August 2022 — to oust Cheney. He shared more of his thoughts: the election was stolen, the U.S. Capitol raid was staged, and the number of Covid deaths were grossly inflated. He and his colleague Joe agreed on all of these points, adding that they would not be getting the vaccine.

— At the Outlaw Saloon, I envied the way a recently vaccinated NYT reporter sauntered into the biker bar maskless, when earlier, a middle-aged DJ in a cowboy hat asked me for my credentials. Likely because there were only two masks in the bar — the one on my face and another on a table, with the words “political prisoner” printed in red. The guy who threw down that mask predicted the size of the rally against Cheney, telling me the night before, “I guarantee you there will be 600 people there.” I didn’t believe him.

— At the steakhouse, our comely waitress said “a lot of people are fired up” about Cheney. As a lifelong native of Wyoming, she said Cheney made a grave mistake by not representing the people of her state.

Palmieri concluded: “If there was any doubt this is still Trump’s Republican Party, my time in Cheyenne dispelled it.”

The push to embrace Trumpism is roiling other state Republican parties as well. In Wisconsin, where 15 Republican lawmakers signed a letter to Vice President Mike Pence the day before the Washington, D.C. riot urging him to postpone the certification, and two Republican congressmen from the state, Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany, objected to the electoral votes, the party is divided into two camps.

“The Republican Party right now is relatively divided, but it's not the traditional ideological divisions that used to be in place, as much as it’s between the sane and insane wings of the party,” RightWisconsin Editor James Wigderson told the Madison Capital Times. “I think that there’s a chance of a real fracture coming.”

Establishment Republicans such as former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, however, defended the Trumpists for their paranoia and embrace of partisan disinformation: “That is the perspective they have, that is the view that they have and it’s valid; you can’t say someone’s opinion of a subjective matter is invalid,” she said. “I mean, what gives us the right to judge someone’s opinion like that?”

In Michigan, where Republicans also embraced the “Stop the Steal” campaign prior to the insurrection, the impulse to maintain their embrace of Trumpism remains largely undiminished. The Allegan County Republican Party censured Congressman Fred Upton because he voted to impeach Trump.

“Not a lot appears to be changing. We have former Ambassador Ron Weiser (expected to be the new Michigan GOP chair) and Meshawn Maddock (expected to be Weiser’s co-chair),” WKAR politics reporter Abigail Censky observed. “(Maddock) led ‘Stop the Steal’ efforts in the state and was a key part of the kind of infrastructure to overturn the state’s election results, which we know from bipartisan clerks and expert testimony was a fair and safe and secure election. It’s interesting to see that that’s kind of beyond reproach still, and that, that leadership is still going to go into place.”

And in Georgia, Republican Party officials are grimacing at the wounds being inflicted on their voter-appeal operations by the presence of QAnon-loving Congressman Majorie Taylor Greene in the state’s delegation, as well as in the media as her multiple conspiracist pronouncements—such as her approval of lynching House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—have come increasingly to light.

“If you have any common sense, you know she's an anchor on the party. She is weighing us down,” said Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia Republican election administrator who criticized the baseless election conspiracy theories espoused by Trump and his supporters.

“Some people are saying maybe Nancy Pelosi will throw her out” of Congress, Sterling said. “The Democrats would never throw her out. They want her to be the definition of what a Republican is. They’re gonna give her every opportunity to speak and be heard and look crazy — like what came out Wednesday, the Jewish space laser to start fires. I mean, I don't know how far down the rabbit hole you go.”

The unhinged behavior and conspiracism is widespread. The Oregon GOP’s statement was rife with conspiracy theories, including a passage explaining why they viewed the Jan. 6 insurrection as a false flag operation:

Whereas this false flag will support Joe Biden plans to introducing new domestic terrorism legislation likely placing more emphasis on themes from post-9/11 Patriot Act such as allowing those charged with terrorism to be automatically detained before trial, outlawing donations to government-designated terrorist groups, allowing electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, letting the government use secret sources in those trials, and perhaps new provisions such as codifying putting conservatives on a secret no-fly list without recourse to due process and restricting free speech, similar to the Sedition Act of 1798, which criminalized making “false statements” critical of the Federal government.

The peculiar combination of self-righteousness, persecution complex, and projection endemic to extremist conspiracism was omnipresent. Shelley Horn, the Wyoming petitioner, blamed Cheney’s impeachment vote for dividing the nation: “It’s just sows more hate and division,” Horn told the Cowboy State Daily, “and people are tired of it. Our country can’t stand much more.”  

As Zack Beauchamp observed at Vox:

It’s obvious that some of the party’s national leaders, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, don’t actually believe in these conspiracy theories. But for too long, the party has been comfortable letting their rank-and-file supporters believe them because it’s politically advantageous. Now, true believers are rising up and capturing the leadership of state parties and local activist groups — putting pressure on national politicians to conform to extreme ideas or risk a serious primary threat.

This makes the GOP’s post-Trump trajectory look even scarier. No one person or organization is in charge of the party, in a position to fix the root causes of its continuing turn toward extremism. Reforming the party requires a fight on multiple levels and in multiple arenas: reforms to the local and national party, transformations of both the party and adjacent institutions like Fox News.

This is what Barack Obama adroitly describes as America’s “epistemological crisis.” It will not stop happening as long as there are news organs that traffic in falsehoods as a profit model, and who devote 24 hours a day, seven days a week of broadcast time to using those lies to coach half of the nation on how and why to hate the other half—and politicians gleefully profiting from it as well.

The amazing and terrifying fantasy world of the Fox News viewer

Posted on by Dartagnan

For some unfathomable reason, probably having something to do with “balance,” Google delivers Fox News headlines to my newsfeed. I saw the poisonous nature of this Republican propaganda network from its very inception, and I remember savaging some right-winger back in the late ‘90s who was trying to convince me that Fox’s token inclusion of the late Alan Colmes somehow made the network’s ridiculously skewed coverage “fair.” Like most people I choose to associate with, I avoid either watching or reading anything spewed on Fox News because it’s an unpleasant experience that leaves me feeling dirty and gross, during and afterward.

Invariably, I have run into situations where such exposure is impossible to avoid, like being compelled to walk down a smelly, urine-soaked alleyway in order to cross a city block. Over the years, these unpleasant encounters have occurred in bars, airports, and gyms, whenever the business opts to subject others to Fox News. Now Google has made the decision to subject me to the outlet—at least until I decide to modify my settings or preferences, I suppose.

Fox News thrives on instilling feelings of outrage and indignation in its viewers in order to confirm, reinforce, and amplify their existing biases, whether they’re biases against women, racial minorities, socially conscious liberals, or just Democrats in general. That’s how it makes money, as vividly explained by a former Fox News anchor: by keeping viewers “hooked” and in a state of near-constant agitation through a constant barrage of vaguely threatening misinformation about supposed nefarious deeds by select groups it targets. Most of its anchors and reporters are dimwitted, giggling monkeys chosen not for their journalistic abilities, but for their willingness to act as a permanent conduit for fear-mongering and outrage-churning. They don’t traffic in facts, but innuendo and selective omission. That’s why there are so few journalists on Fox whom the rest of the profession deems reputable or trustworthy. From the very start, it’s been a network made mostly of commentators posing as journalists, but possessing no credentials or pretense to journalistic bona fides.

Since Fox has now grudgingly been forced to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory and no longer has an opportunity to glorify Donald Trump on a daily basis, it has reverted to its normal defensive crouch, best characterized as constant, picayune whining about everything that Democrats do. Every action by Biden or Democrats is somehow indicative of betrayal, or weakness, or something. 

As Matt Gertz, writing for Media Matters, notes, its coverage and fealty to the Trump administration provided record viewership for Fox News. With Trump now gone, or at least not as accessible as he once was, the network faces an inflection point as it determines how to proceed.

The network's executives would likely prefer to move on from Trump and pivot back to its Obama-era brand, becoming the “voice of opposition” to the incoming Biden administration. The network could focus its programming on smearing Biden officials, conjuring up Biden pseudo-scandals, stalling or blocking Democratic proposals, and bolstering anti-Biden political movements and Republican challengers. That was a unifying message for the right in 2009 that garnered huge ratings for the network. And Republican leaders would doubtless appreciate new Benghazis and “death panels” as cudgels to use against the incoming Democratic administration.

At the same time, Fox’s on-air talent will come under tremendous pressure to rebuild its once-record audience. The clearest path to that goal will be to give the recalcitrant Trumpist viewers what they want: more lies that Trump actually won, more unhinged conspiracy theories about Democrats, more paranoid fantasies about the left, and more apocalyptic culture war rage. That will incentivize the rest of the right-wing media to do the same, in hopes of either snagging guest appearances on the network or pulling away some of its market share.

I suppose all this was to be expected. But now that the 24/7 hagiography of Trump has gone by the wayside, we can also, during this time of transition, see a familiar profile reemerging—that of the “average” Fox News viewer—a profile which can be painstakingly assembled by reviewing how Fox News reports certain people and events.

Unsurprisingly, the typical Fox News viewer is white and male. Based on Fox's advertisers, he is over 60 years old and is very concerned about his Medicare supplemental insurance. He may consider trying to lose weight with Nutrisystem products, and fantasizes about going to a Sandals resort. He is thinking about transferring his old VHS tapes to a Legacybox, but only after he buys a LifeLock to protect his identity from scammers. Presumably he’ll first clear all these decisions with his Visiting Angels home health care aide.

Our Fox News viewer believes that the Black Lives Matter movement is as violent or more so than the Ku Klux Klan. He believes the only purpose of Planned Parenthood is to perform abortions, and many of these are “partial birth” abortions. He believes climate change and global warming are Democratic scams. He has a visceral fixation on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that he can’t seem to understand, because he knows from Fox News that there are millions of beautiful conservative women (many of them blonde) out there who would certainly find him attractive, if he could only meet one of them.

Our viewer believes the U.S. is under continual attack from an invasion of undocumented immigrants, and that a new caravan of Spanish-speaking drug dealers, rapists, and gang members is threatening our southern border as we speak. At the same time, he believes Democrats are plotting to outlaw the possession of firearms.

He believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen and fraudulent, even if he doesn’t know exactly how. He believes the COVID-19 pandemic is completely overblown, and is far less likely to take precautionary measures to protect himself and/or his family and others. He believes antifa is far more dangerous than the COVID-19 pandemic, and believes that the failure of mainstream media to cover “antifa riots” after Biden’s inauguration is proof of liberal bias. This, he reasons, is further proof that the riots on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C., were provoked not by Trump’ own supporters, but by “antifa.”

The following are some more of our typical Fox News viewer’s beliefs, based on headlines from Fox’s website over the past two days:

Biden may be the new president in name, but the actual president is Susan Rice.

Biden’s campaign was bankrolled by millions in “dark money.” This is bad. Republicans would never do this.

Tulsi Gabbard holds noteworthy and important opinions about everything.

The most powerful people in the entire Democratic Party are the four “Squad” Congresswomen.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in particular wields enormous influence within the Democratic Party, such that her every utterance is noteworthy; she dictates the entire Democratic agenda.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is also a coward who is afraid of gun-carrying members of Congress.

Black people are mostly violent criminals, except for those who appear on Fox News as conservative commentators.

Antifa is … everywhere.

Hollywood stars are jumping ahead of everyone else to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone pipeline is a job-killing political disaster that spells doom for the Democratic Party.

Biden and his son Hunter committed unspecified crimes in Ukraine that involved some sort of shady corporate deal and made the Bidens millions. This information is all contained on a laptop somewhere.

Democrats abused the National Guard during the inauguration.

Biden will kowtow to everything China wants.

China is a threat to us in space warfare.

Karl Rove is a sage voice on economic policy.

Glenn Greenwald says Democrats are the true fascists. Because he was once believed to be a liberal, he must be right.

Arms treaties with Russia are bad.

Joe Biden taking questions from pre-selected reporters is bad.

QAnon believers are being persecuted.

A sheriff in Cochise County, Arizona, noticed that “illegal” border crossings “spiked” after Biden won the Democratic primary.

Neera Tanden is bad and dangerous for some reason.

Pamela Anderson believes “Big Tech” seeks to control your brain.

Anthony Fauci is the highest-paid member of the federal government, and this is bad, because Fauci is bad.

__________________________________________________________________________

The common theme through all of these imaginary persecutions and insults contrived by Fox News is one of eternal victimhood, as former Fox anchor Tobin Smith observed in November 2019, writing in The New York Times about the network’s smear of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman after he testified during the first impeachment trial.

Weaponized and tribalized political video narratives in the hands of Fox News producers can become something like drug-abuse epidemics — keeping addicts of that conspiracy theory high and coming back for more.

Believing in conspiracy theories is a psychological construct for people to take back some semblance of control in their lives. It inflates their sense of importance. It makes them feel they have access to “special knowledge” that the rest of the world is “too blind,” “too dumb” or “too corrupt” to understand.

Fox viewers are taught, over and over, to believe they’re under constant assault and must therefore continue tuning in, for the good of themselves and the nation. It’s a cynical psychological scam that has paid huge dividends to the Murdoch family, and by warping the minds of tens of millions of Americans, very nearly wrecked our country in the process.

When history looks back at the events of Jan. 6, it will be simple to conclude that they occurred as a consequence of Donald Trump and his cult of personality. But without Fox News’ full-throated support, Trump’s entire presidency, let alone his baseless, endgame assertions of election fraud, would never have had enough oxygen to sustain itself.

Fox News, and everyone who works there, is every bit as culpable as he is.

Trump plotted to toss the acting attorney general, insert a stooge, and block the electoral count

Posted on (Updated by Mark Sumner

Donald Trump driving a crowd into a violent attack on the Capitol may be the defining image that will remain in the minds of most Americans. But that assault on Jan. 6 wasn’t the only coup Trump planned. After his ridiculous legal ploys had all floundered; after his attempts to strong arm governors and secretaries of state had failed; after he had wined and dined state legislators in an attempt to prevent the certification of votes … Trump had another scheme.

The New York Times reports that Trump worked with Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark on a plan that would have removed acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, then Trump and Clark would use the DOJ to order Georgia legislators to reverse the outcome of the election in that state while blocking Congress from counting the Electoral College vote.

This plan was apparently only halted because of an accident of timing. And it shows once again how close Trump came to completely gutting American democracy.

It was absolutely clear that Trump was frustrated that former attorney general William Barr—who had done everything else to support Trump—refused to use the DOJ to support Trump's legal team in their baseless claims of election fraud. That doesn’t take speculation, because Trump said it openly. Barr refused to go along, telling reporters that the department had found no evidence of fraud. As a result, Barr stepped down in mid December and then Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen took on the acting AG role. 

As The New York Times reports, Trump immediately began to pressure Rosen to interfere in the few remaining steps before the Electoral College votes were counted. The day after Barr’s departure, Trump called Rosen to the White House. Trump pushed Rosen to announce that he was appointing special counsels to look into voter fraud, with one focusing on the unsupported claims—and outright lies—that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell had been spreading about Dominion Voting Systems. And Trump called on Rosen to do what Barr had refused, file legal briefs in support of the lawsuits filed by Trump’s legal team.

When Rosen refused, Trump continued to press. He called Rosen repeatedly. He called him back to the White House and confronted him multiple times. Trump complained that the Justice Department was “not fighting hard enough for him” and pushed Rosen on why DOJ attorneys were not supporting the “evidence” being put forward by Giuliani and Powell.

But as Rosen continued to refuse, Trump went around him to work with Clark. According to the Times report, Clark told Trump that he agreed there had been fraud that affected the election results. Clark tried to pressure his bosses at the DOJ into holding a new conference to announce that it was “investigating serious accusations of election fraud.” But Rosen also refused to go along with Clark.

As Trump and Clark worked together, much of the attention was focused on Georgia, where Trump complained that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung Pak, was also not trying hard enough to defend Trump. In the conversation in which Trump attempted to threaten Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, he complained about Pak. DOJ officials warned Pak that Trump was “fixated” on forcing his office to go along with his plans.  That led to Pak’s resignation just a day before the Jan. 6 insurgency. 

As Trump was pushing on Raffensperger, Clark was continuing to try and force Rosen to act on Trump’s behalf. Clark drafted a letter falsely saying the DOJ was investigating voter fraud in Georgia and tried to get Rosen to send it to state legislators. Rosen again refused to go along with the scheme and on New Year’s Eve, Rosen and deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue met with Clark to tell him that his actions were wrong.

Rather than backing off, Clark went back to Trump. He met with Trump over the weekend, then came back to tell Rosen what they had decided. Trump and Clark concocted a plan in which Trump would replace Rosen with Clark. Clark would then use the DOJ in an effort to prevent Congress from counting the Electoral College results. Clark not only explained this plan to Rosen, but offered to allow Rosen to stay on as his deputy.

Rosen refused to go along and demanded a meeting with Trump. But what stopped Trump and Clark’s plan from moving forward was not some momentary lapse into reason or decency on Trump’s part. Instead, what happened was that, just as Rosen was preparing to meet with Trump, news broke that Raffensperger had recorded his conversation with Trump. Hearing Trump’s direct effort to force the Georgia secretary of state into “finding” votes, along with Trump’s threats over what would happen if Raffensperger failed to go along, apparently stiffened enough spines among the second tier officials at the DOJ that a whole group threatened to resign if Rosen was removed. The “Clark Plan” the group decided would “seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law.”

That same evening, Rosen, Donoghue and Clark met at the White House with Trump, White House attorney Pat Cipollone, and other lawyers. Cippollone made it clear to Trump that pulling the trigger on the Clark Plan would not just generate chaos at the Justice Department, but result in a strong pushback from Congress, including investigations.

After nearly three hours of argument, Trump reluctantly backed away from firing Rosen and using the DOJ to smash open the election.

But it came that close. If the phone call with Georgia officials had not been released, if Rosen had not been able to rally the support of his deputies, if Trump had simply ignored Cippollone and ordered Clark to carry on … what would have happened next is anyone’s guess.

Is it too late to add additional charges to the impeachment?

DOJ investigating U.S. attorney pressured to resign during Trump’s attempt to overturn Georgia votes

Posted on by Mark Sumner

On Dec. 30, Donald Trump called on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to resign after the fellow Republican refused to intervene to overturn the outcome of elections in that state. On Jan. 2, Donald Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and tried to pressure him into multiple violations of election law, followed by a series of threats about what would happen if Raffensperger didn’t “find” enough votes to hand the state to Trump. In that called to the Republican secretary, Trump mentioned a “never-Trumper U.S. attorney” in Georgia, and hinted to Raffensperger that he would be charged criminally once this never-Trumper was sent packing.

The next day, U.S. Attorney Byung J. “BJay” Pak submitted his resignation. Pak, who was nominated to his position by Trump, handed over a resignation letter full of the standard theme of “gratitude.” Coming in the same week that a Trump-inspired insurgency assaulted the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election—and at the same time Trump was making a number of last-minute appointments and changes—Pak’s resignation didn’t draw the same amount of attention that it might have generated in a non-coup week.

But now The Washington Post reports the Justice Department inspector general is looking into why Pak resigned when he did. Because it seems extremely likely that Kemp and Raffensperger weren’t the only ones who got a call from Trump.

If Trump called on Pak to resign out of the blue, that’s odd, but it’s far from illegal. After all, as the prolonged example of Geoffrey Berman demonstrated last June, U.S. attorneys, like most appointed members of the executive branch, can be dismissed without need to give cause. 

However, the fact that Trump referred to a  “never-Trumper U.S. attorney” in his call to Raffensperger absolutely suggests that either he, or some other member of the White House staff, had already tried to pressure Pak into taking some unspecified action to interfere with Georgia’s election. Something that was illegal, or simply wrong enough, for Pak to refuse.

The Post’s sources indicate that Pak received a call from a senior official in the Department of Justice that “led him to believe he should resign.” But since Trump was already angry at the entire Justice Department for failing to support his laughable attempts to alter the outcome of the election in court, it’s unclear just what made Pak feel that he had to step out of the way—especially when his term was almost certain to be up in just two weeks.

In any case, with Pak’s departure, Trump immediately backfilled by expanding the territory of South District of Georgia prosecutor Bobby Christine. That was also a red flag as the job should have passed to Pak’s deputy. However, Christine doesn’t seem to have made any overt moves to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the choice of Georgia voters.

As with so many stories coming from Trump’s final months, it may take some time to understand exactly what Trump did in his efforts to sink democracy. But it’s okay to go ahead with the impeachment trial before all this information is understood.

Trump can always be indicted later.

Jan. 6 was far from the first insurrection Trump supported, and it’s unclear if it was the last

Posted on by Mark Sumner

Right now—and this is a real thing—Donald Trump has lost the Secretaries of Transportation, Health and Human Services, Education, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and whatever the heck role Mick Mulvaney held And really, that’s just the tip of the milky white iceberg of milky white people who made the tough moral decision that 3.95 years of inciting violence, instilling racism, and driving divisiveness was simply all they could take. I mean, 3.94 years? Sure. But they always expected that Trump would become presidential before he stopped being that thing. Everyone has their limits, and for a lot of Trump’s associates, those limits seem to be symbolically stepping back at the very last possible second out of a powerful delusion that this will somehow purify them in time for their next six-, seven-, or eight-figure position.

Then, as happens in serious democracies, this run of camels who finally discovered their last straw, led to Trump spending a good part of his week talking over strategy with the MyPillow Guy. Mr. Pillow came to the White House clutching a sheaf of papers that cleverly pointed out Trump could use the insurrection he incited to declare that people were being insurrectiony. Then he could invoke the Insurrection Act. Then, once Trump had installed himself as president for life and turned the CIA and FBI into the KGB and Stasi, respectively, Trump could just declare martial law and shoot them. Really. That was the plan. Plus you get 80% off a full body pillow using the code #CrossTheRubicon.

Admittedly, there’s no truth behind the discount code. I think. But since the pillows are nothing but cloth bags of shredded foam that probably cost Mike Lindell a nickel apiece to manufacture, feel free to give it a try.

In any case, the major point here isn’t that the pillows are demonstrably smarter and more patriotic than the guy who peddles them. It’s that Trump is so devoid of anything that looks like a serious adviser, he really did spend hours in the White House going over a plan to take America along the same path blazed by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and, of course, Adolf. At the direction of the MyPillow Guy.

All of this is extraordinarily sad. But not for Donald Trump. It’s sad for everyone who isn’t Trump.

As The New York Times reports, everything that has happened with Trump, was exactly what had to happen with Trump.

The siege of the Capitol wasn’t a departure for Trump, it was an apotheosis. For years, he’s been telling us he wouldn’t accept an election loss. For years, he’s been urging his followers to violence, refusing to condemn their violence, and insinuating that even greater violence was on the way. As he told Breitbart in 2019, in one of his characteristic threats, “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

And what do you know, Trump was right. It was very bad.

The Times also points out that Trump didn’t start cheering on mobs overrunning capitols on Jan. 6. That was really more of an endpoint. Trump started off by cheering on crowds who tore through multiple state capitols over social distancing guidelines, or rumors that someone might restrict 100-shot magazines for their AR-15s, or threats to statues dedicated to racist mass-murderers and traitors. In every case, Trump praised the militias, the white supremacists, and the hoarse-throated mob. 

What happened in D. C. on Jan. 6 was just a national version of what happened in Wisconsin, in Colorado, and in Kentucky, and in a dozen other states. Trump not only encouraged these events, he even refused to say there was anything wrong with a plot to kidnap and publicly execute Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Speaking of which, here’s Trump from the rally that came right before his people swarmed up the Capitol steps, smashed through doors and windows, and went prowling the halls of Congress with handcuffs. “We’ve got to get rid of the weak congresspeople,” said Trump, “the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them … Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

Gee. Where did people get the idea that he wanted them to kidnap, try, and execute members of Congress? Right from Trump. (Bonus: Note why Liz Cheney was so willing to sign on to impeachment).

What happened on Jan. 6 was shocking, but it should not have been surprising to anyone. Trump has been calling for this moment since he came down that gold elevator. He’s not just overlooked violence, but encouraged it. He’s made it clear, at every speech and every rally, that beating people up is okay. That violence is good. That executions are fine. In fact, he has complained that there was not enough violence and brutality to suit him in this wimpy modern world. He didn’t just license his followers to smash the police in the face with “thin blue line” flags, he made it inevitable.

Trump is who he has always been. His followers are doing as he has always wanted. None of this was a secret. For the last four years, all of the Republican Party and half of the media has pretended they could not see that Trump was simply a fascist, doing what fascists always do—offering violence and calling it order. 

Don’t expect them to start admitting it now.

The last days of Trump: Abandoned, detested, and as angry as always

Posted on by Mark Sumner

On Thursday, the major activity at the White House seemed to be staff members escaping with photographs and statues that very likely were not theirs to take. Inside, many offices are described as empty, due to all those staffers who suddenly began getting concerned that continuing to associate with a twice-impeached instigator of an insurrection might not be good for their resume.

Meanwhile, somewhere inside the maze of empty offices, Donald Trump still lurks, his fingers twitching to send out tweets forever out of reach, his fevered brow unmopped by an absent Hope Hicks, his bellows of impotent rage echoing sweetly, sweetly through the corridors. And if there is one thing that’s getting Trump extra ragey in these final days before he’s escorted from the property, it is any comparison between himself and one Richard M. Nixon. 

Especially because the thing that keeps coming up is the one thing that Nixon did right for the nation—resign.

As CNN reports, Trump is spending his days in a tweetless, rally-less, and apparently friendless circle of accusations, impeachment, and plunging poll numbers. As he gets ready to head out the door to the lowest ratings since there have been ratings, the one thing that Trump has made absolutely clear is that he’s not going to emulate the one thing that Nixon did that benefited both the nation and himself. That’s not to say the idea wasn’t discussed by staffers and Cabinet members. It was. However, Trump shot down any possibility that he might depart without being kicked out. So much so that now any mention of the the 37th president has been completely banned.

Trump probably doesn’t want to be reminded that not only did Nixon recognize a losing proposition and walk away before getting impeached, he also managed to keep his popularity high enough to grab a second term before his actions related to Watergate brought everything crashing down. Meanwhile, the same Pew poll shows that the major motivation for many voters in 2020 was the chance to get rid of Trump. A majority felt that Trump had bumbled the response to the coronavirus, and an even larger majority want Trump to simply go away and never be a major figure in U.S. politics again.

Right now, Trump can look out his window and see bunting and signs for "2021 Biden-Harris Inauguration" from stands that have been erected across from the White House. Inside the White House, his sources of comfort are few. Not only has Hicks departed, but Trump is on the outs with Rudy Giuliani and infinitely mad at wingman Mike Pence. It’s hard to find a single White House staffer who hasn’t earned Trump’s scorn over the past few weeks by slipping up and admitting the reality—he lost, and his time is almost up.

Aides have tried to cheer Trump up by asking him to give one last address to the nation, one in which he could list all those accomplishments like giving a massive tax break to billionaires, building 30 miles of wall through a national monument that disrupted irreplaceable cultural sites, killing off 400,000 Americans, and triggering the first invasion of the Capitol since 1814. But even this list of incredible achievements has failed to stir Trump into getting out his Sharpie and jotting down a few last-minute lies. 

Instead, Trump is demanding a big sendoff. However, staff are having to work hard to collect enough warm bodies to make it appear that anyone still cares. There’s also the little fact that if Trump waits until the inauguration to depart, he’ll not only be flying on a plane that is no longer Air Force One, but will have to ask Biden’s permission to borrow his jet. Trump hates all of that.

With most of Trump’s Cabinet already departed—some due to last-minute resignations—it will surprise exactly no one if Trump decides to head for Mar-a-Lago while he still doesn’t have to ask someone else for the keys to the plane.

Cartoon: ‘EZ-Leave!’ To Show You Care

Posted on by Mark Fiore

Vimeo Video

Now that President Trump has become the first president in the history of the United States to be impeached twice, more of his Republican allies will no doubt slink away. Resignations have already been piling up from the cabinet level on down since Trump incited a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol building.

Betsy DeVos, Elaine Chao and Mick Mulvaney, among others, have just had it up to here with this president. Why, some switch must have flipped and made Trump a madman, right? (Mulvaney even said that today’s Trump is not the one he knew eight months ago.)

I’m happy complicit Republicans are finally trying to un-complicit themselves, I just wish they had found their spines when Trump tried to get Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on Joe Biden or when the administration separated thousands of children from their families or right after the “both sides” comment about Charlottesville or . . .

Enjoy the cartoon, cross your fingers for an impeachment conviction and visit me over on my Patreon pages if you can help support my work — and get behind-the-scenes goodies for yourself!

It is well past time to confront the truth of the Republican Party’s threat to democracy

Posted on by RETIII

Watching the depressing and alarming spectacle of 17 Republican state attorneys general joining Texas’s bad faith, frivolous Supreme Court application to overturn the election in favor of Donald Trump, I am reminded that in September 2015, I wrote a post titled “The Dark Truth of John Boehner’s Resignation.”

What was that “dark truth”?

What is important here is not that Republicans object to the limits of their power, but that Republicans apparently cannot accept that such limits even exist. 

It sounds crazy, I know, but this represents the true "dark side" of Boehner's resignation: It is another significant step in the Republican Party's shocking withdrawal from our system of democratic governance.  

Five years ago, the notion that Republicans were abandoning democracy was considered to be a somewhat important observation, something to be widely shared and discussed. Today? Well, let’s consider a few of the developments since 2015.

Folks, this is insane. It’s an open, ongoing assault on the fundamental tenets of this country, unseen since the run up to the Civil War. 

Admittedly, defeating this Republican problem is hard and complex, and viable solutions will take discussions longer than this one post. But allow me to propose we rediscover an essential concept: scandal.

The first and necessary step back requires that our country, our politics, and our media rediscover how to label, report, and resist scandalous behavior. Remember Watergate? Whitewater? Benghazi? None of them compares to this threat to democracy (yes, not even Watergate).  

That means reporting this for what it is, and not inviting any co-conspirators on for polite interviews. It means having a panel of historians and civic leaders on, regularly, to discuss the scandal, not a D-list of political hacks. It means consistent front page reporting on this crisis. It means not reporting this as “horse race” politics. And it means that Democratic leadership has to be fighting against this, openly and all the time.

Shutting this down requires that, as a basic first step, we all begin to treat this as the five-alarm fire scandal that it is. 

I once called the Republicans’ hunger for power a “dark truth.” Five years later, sadly, it is an open, proud and largely unchallenged truth.

We can’t let this continue.

Trump and the right are buzzing with hatred toward Hunter Biden … and Bill Barr

Posted on by Mark Sumner

To be absolutely clear: Bill Barr is a terrible attorney general who has used his position to grossly distort the whole purpose of the Justice Department. He auditioned for the role with a letter claiming the Russia investigation was illegal, substituted his own “summary” for the findings of the actual Mueller report, and personally signaled for his prison guard shock troops to begin a violent attack on unarmed protesters. Barr has spent most of the last two years trying to fulfill Donald Trump’s every conspiracy theory dream by appointing special investigators, providing an endless stream of disinformation to right-wing media, and traveling the world in an attempt to find an ally willing to roast U.S. intelligence agencies. And all of that is on top of Barr’s previous star turn in which he played a central role in dismissing charges resulting from Iran-Contra. He’s a bad attorney general, a bad American, and simply a bad man.

But just because Barr is determinedly malevolent, and saved Trump from what should have been an impeachment over the plain fact that his campaign engaged in every form of cooperation with the Russian government in order to subvert the outcome of a U.S. election, it doesn’t mean that Trump is always going to be happy with him. And now, in the twilight of both their careers, Trump is increasingly treating Barr as an enemy.

In Trump’s mind, there are only two possible roles anyone can serve: Completely subservient bootlicker, or infuriating opponent. There is no in between.

So the fact that Barr didn’t wholeheartedly join in with Rudy Giuliani and his parade of Hunter Biden laptops as confirmed by blind shop owners before the election had already made Barr suspect. Trump repeatedly tweeted a mixture of disdain and distaste for Barr in the weeks before the election as it became clear that, unlike 2016, there was not going to be some last-minute statement from the DOJ or FBI to provide Trump a last-minute vote infusion. And now a story from The Wall Street Journal has Trump hammering away at Barr again while Trump supporters are calling Barr a traitor and Republican senators are demanding yet another very special counsel. 

The claims from the WSJ began with a story in which Hunter Biden admitted that his federal income taxes are under investigation. Of course, Donald Trump has claimed that he could not reveal his tax returns for the last ever because he’s perennially under audit. It’s also widely known that Trump’s taxes are the subject of investigations by the State of New York. However, what’s routine for Trump is apparently supposed to be scandalous for Joe Biden’s surviving son—a son who will have no role in the upcoming administration. The investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes apparently predates both Barr and Trump’s phone call to Ukraine but is said to be restricted to tax issues and “doesn’t implicate other members of his family or the president-elect.”

But what has the whole right wing in an uproar is the idea that … Barr knew. Barr knew, and he didn’t make a statement that Trump could use before the election. For Trump, this isn’t just an excuse to attack Barr for failing to come through the clinch, but also to claim that Biden’s term is going to be “so plagued by scandal” that the Supreme Court just might as well hand the election to Trump and save everyone some time and embarrassment.

And of course, Barr did know. He knew that while Hunter Biden’s taxes were being investigated by an office of the department he controlled. Barr also knew that no crime has been alleged, no one has been indicted, and that nothing appeared to be connected to the actual candidate for office. A fuming Trump supporter inside the DOJ also complained that Barr knew about another investigation involving Hunter Biden, an investigation that the WSJ was quick to highlight … before reaching the point where it admits that its sources indicate Hunter was “never a specific target for criminal prosecution.” Connected to the first investigation, this appears to be more a matter of looking at a bank that may have made some shady deals rather than anything specifically done by Hunter Biden.

So what Barr knew was that Hunter Biden’s taxes were being examined in one investigation, and Biden was not the target of a second investigation. Still, Barr’s failure to jump up and down and scream about a family of criminals is apparently all that was required to toss him from the good graces of Trump and his supporters.

Of course Barr may think that trying to at least approximate normal behavior on this one topic at a time when Trump is about to depart center stage might be enough to get him accepted back into normal society. He’s going to be disappointed.