Friday, December 30, 2022
Trump Wanted National Guard Troops to Lead Him into the Capitol on Jan 6th, and Declare Himself Emperor and Dictator of America.
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Saturday, December 17, 2022
Thursday, December 8, 2022
Saturday, December 3, 2022
Bush Ignored Massive Number of 9/11 Warnings
On April 29, 2004, President George W. Bush hosted one of the most unusual meetings to ever take place inside the Oval Office. The 10 members of the 9/11 Commission got to ask him and Vice President Dick Cheney any question they wanted about the September 11, 2001, attacks. The words that were spoken in that room remained secret for nearly two decades. Now, we can finally read what Bush said.
Earlier this month, after more than 18 years, the government declassified a 31-page "memorandum for the record," which compiles notes that the commissioners took during the meeting.
The document shows the commissioners giving Bush multiple chances to acknowledge the numerous documented warnings he'd received from his own government of an impending attack by Al Qaeda. For the most part, Bush failed to do so. Instead, he passed the buck.
Perhaps the largest of Bush's evasions that day concerned his CIA director, George Tenet: "The threat was overseas — that was what George said." Bush's implication at the time is clear. He wanted the commission, and by extension the public, to think that no one could have anticipated Al Qaeda mounting a large-scale attack on US soil. But in fact, Tenet's CIA had warned Bush more than once that Al Qaeda could strike anywhere, at any time, and that all US citizens were potential targets.
The most notorious warning that Bush received, but not the only one, was a CIA briefing headlined "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Very little of Bush's excuse-making and clumsy attempts to rewrite history found their way into the 9/11 Commission's report.
Indeed, one of the commissioners, Richard Ben-Veniste, told Insider he still had questions today about what Bush knew, and when. "I could never square in my mind CIA Director Tenet's intense preoccupation with the Al Qaeda threat in the months leading up to 9/11, with his claim that he never briefed President Bush on the many clues the intelligence community had developed that bin Laden was planning to launch a 'spectacular' attack on the US homeland," Ben-Veniste said.
The commission report's approach to this mystery is to make the apparent disconnect between CIA and the Oval Office sound like something out of a Greek tragedy: "No one working on these late [Al Qaeda] leads in the summer of 2001 connected them to the high level of threat reporting … no analytic work foresaw the lightning that could connect the thundercloud to the ground."
What the new memo makes clear is that the White House's lack of urgency in facing down the domestic Qaeda threat wasn't all that complicated. Tenet, the record shows, did everything he could to get Bush to focus on Al Qaeda. Bush just wasn't interested.
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
Thursday, November 24, 2022
GOP Fascists
The Rachel Maddow "Ultra" podcast is about an astonishing and little known story about Nazi-collaborators in the US Congress, Congressmen and Senators that were knowing agents of the Nazis during WWII, and the failed efforts of the US justice department to bring these traitors to justice. They were mostly Republicans.
Part of her main thesis is that, reminiscent of our current problems bringing modern day traitors like trump to justice, is that the legal and justice system just isn't built to handle these sorts of cases, as weird and frustrating as that might be.
She ties this story of Nazi collaborators in with the overall fascist movement in the US-- the American Firsters and Christian Nationalists, the racist fascist elements that have been around for ages and still keep popping up. It's all deeply disturbing.
Maddow ends the series on kind of an inspirational note, despite the many setbacks that occurred in bringing these terrible people to justice along the way.
The stories told in the various episodes are really remarkable overall, with amazing parallels to our current batch of traitors.
The bottom line is that it is the work of citizens, and the press, not the justice system, that keep these extremist elements in check and that voters do kick them out when they are properly educated about these scumbags.
So it's work for all of us to keep our country from falling into complete fascism. And let's be clear, the modern GOP is as close to being blatantly fascist as they ever were.
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
Rightwing Violence and Our Grim Political Future
Brynn Tannehill--
The credible, close-call attempt to kill or maim Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a second time, and the GOP response, signals how close the US is to the end of the road as a Democracy. It also tells us about what comes after the fall.
The GOP has generally treated it as a joke, denied that DePape was conservative, or spread conspiracy theories that it was a gay quarrel during a hookup. There's been a lot of wink and nudge, "Sure it was bad, but whatever gets Nancy out, amiright?" comments like Youngkin's.
There has been almost NOTHING done to deter other would be assassins from killing Democratic officials. When people protested outside homes of SCOTUS justices, security was immediately increased. Dead silence now.
The difference is that Dems and Republicans are willing to protect conservative officials, but Republicans aren't willing to protect Dems, because they know that actual violence against officials is driven by the right wing base.
“We” Don’t Have a Political Violence Problem. Republicans Do. The Paul Pelosi attack was no aberration. (Only one party counts violent insurrectionists as a constituency it dare not alienate. https://newrepublic.com/article/168391/political-violence-is-republicans-problem)
There is the implicit assumption by Republican leaders that violence will come for their opponents, and not for them. And at the moment, they're correct. But, most of them weren't in Iraq from 2004-2006.
I had a front row seat as Sunnis, cut off from power, formed AQI and started launching a campaign of terror aimed at government officials, particularly judges. Targeting family members was very much part of their CONOPS. It didn't take long before retaliations began.
Baghdad segregated rapidly, as mixed neighborhoods forced out people who were the local minority. Similar (violent) sorting happened among Iraqi Kurds in the north.
One lesson I took away is that once political murders are normalized, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. It turns into an accelerating cycle of violence, particularly when both sides feel like it's a matter of group survival.
Part of the violence in Iraq in that period was the settling of old scores. Saddam had displaced, gassed, and murdered innumerable Kurds. He had kept Shiites (who form a plurality of the population) powerless and second class citizens for decades.
In the US, the GOP intends to seize power, and never let go, much as Saddam did with the Ba'ath Party. They're not hiding it. I'm not engaging in hyperbole or putting words in people's mouths. This is coming straight from their candidates.
If the GOP does win, they're promising to settle scores. Here we have the former President, and likely the next administration, promising to lock up journalists and have them raped until they give up confidential sources.
(Trump Threatens Journalists With Prison Rape for Not Revealing Supreme Court Leak (Video) “When this person realizes he’s going to be the bride of another prisoner very shortly he will…'tell you exactly who that leaker is!'" Trump warned https://www.yahoo.com/video/trump-threatens-journalists-prison-rape-182417235.html)
The repeated violence against Pelosi, and ongoing stochastic terror, is a promise of what is to come. If the GOP seizes power, you can be sure that they will do as little as possible to prevent, stop, deter, or prosecute political killings. The DoJ will become a tool for imprisoning political opponents. It also won't lift a finger to do anything about assassinations of Democrats, journalists, or political enemies or disfavored minorities (like trans people or doctors treating them).
They'll claw back control of the City of DC, and prevent prosecutions of violence against Dems there, while blaming the murders on the victims for being soft on crime.
Most Republican leaders are smart enough to know that it isn't really leftists driving the political violence. They'll yell about Antifa and BLM, but they're not stupid (Ok, true believers like MTG, Jordan, and Boebert are), but Cotton and Cruz can do math.
The problem with their thinking is that they assume that the status quo will hold: that their opponents will continue to feel like they can vote their way out of the problem, the threat is not perceived as existential, and they will eschew targeted violence.
I've had front row seats when a country tears itself apart. I also learned that an insurgent group only needs maybe 10-15% of the population supporting it for it to be self sustaining. And, like Iraq, it's about religion.
45% of Americans are ready to end democracy to make the US an explicitly Christian nation. People under the age of 40 are much more likely to be secular.
(45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a ‘Christian Nation’ But they hold differing opinions about what that phrase means, and two-thirds of U.S. adults say churches should keep out of politics. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/10/27/45-of-americans-say-u-s-should-be-a-christian-nation/)
This creates a situation in which the unaccountable theocratic government engaging in stochastic terror against political enemies is hated by the largely secular majority of young people who have little economic prospects, no say in government, and no hope of peaceful change
WTF do you think is going to happen? Because this is pretty much an exact description of the situation in Iran, except there are ~390 million guns just lying around.
Republican leaders by and large tend to believe that they can manage whatever response happens to their complete take-over of government, and institution of theocratic rule, or that people will quietly accept it the way they have in Hungary, Russia, Turkey, and Poland.
The semblance of democracy, using elections rigged against the opposition as an anesthetic for the population, pretending "vote harder" might remove the authoritarians from office, or simply presenting it as a fait accompli, has worked elsewhere to prevent unrest.
So maybe it's even better than 50-50 bet. But it's not a sure one: they're creating the necessary conditions. It's worth remembering that in Iraq, once the toothpaste was out, 150k US troops struggled for almost a decade to restore some semblance of order.
Thus, by tolerating or encouraging political assassinations, the GOP is raising the risks, and the potential consequences, of their authoritarian drive to end democracy and punish those they see as political enemies.
Take it from someone who spent most of the aughts studying insurgency, counter insurgency, destabilized countries, hybrid governments, and evaluating the risks of civil war: what is happening with Pelosi is playing with fire.
Sunday, October 23, 2022
GOP Agenda If They Gain Control in the Midterms
— a national abortion ban.
— gut Medicare and Social Security.
— help Putin rape and torture Ukrainians.
— endless bullshit investigations, e.g. of Hunter Biden and Anthony Fauci
— holding the debt limit hostage to get cuts they want to govt programs
— if they don’t get what they want, letting the US default on our debt and destroying the global economy
— finding bullshit reasons to impeach Biden, Harris and anyone else in the govt they don’t like
— overruling the will of American voters to install Trump as president
Freaking assholes
Traitor Trump Is Still A Russian Asset Trying to Destroy America
What a treasonous asshole
"Tonight Trump blamed America for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, war crimes there, and nuclear threats; said there’s no free press or free speech in America; and said Democrats want Iran to have nukes. And all this deceit and anti-American rhetoric was preloaded onto a teleprompter.
We’re well past the point at which we could say Trump doesn’t know anything about America or our politics and tells tens of thousands of lies simply to hide his ignorance and advance his career.
His scheme to undermine America and spread Kremlin lies is premeditated and sinister.
If you want to know how the Kremlin sees America—lies about our crime rates, freedoms, leaders, and foreign policy—all you have to do is go to any Trump rally.
In 2016, Putin’s friends and allies co-wrote Trump’s speeches (Google it). I wonder if this is happening again in 2022.
You will never hear more hatred of America than at a 2022 Trump rally. And much of it is orchestrated—literally. Violins play over the loudspeaker as a man who has betrayed his country over and over and over again does so to a script whose author we do not know and really should.
I’m serious.
Watch the video below (see link), understanding that *every word of it* synchronizes with Kremlin propaganda about how weak, divided, rudderless, hypocritical, dangerous, broke, and morally lost America is.
Putin could have delivered these lies—and has.
In 2016, Donald Trump’s early foreign policy speeches—as reflective of the Kremlin’s viewpoints as any speeches ever given by an American politician—were co-written and co-edited by Kremlin agents and/or associates and/or allies Manafort, Simes, Burt, Kushner, and Papadopoulos.
Now we learn that Trump wants the most pro-Putin elected official in the U.S., Marjorie Taylor Greene, as his 2024 VP. And tonight he’s in Texas attacking America ruthlessly—with literally scores of lies about people, data, events and trends—using words the Kremlin would applaud.
I don’t *know* why Trump wants to destroy America. I only know that he has done everything he possibly can to undermine and weaken this country and our national security since he entered politics in 2015, having spent the preceding 30 years trying to cut business deals in Russia."
Monday, October 17, 2022
Trump Crimes, Get Your Trump Crimes
What an asshole (and likewise every person who supports him):
As of September 2022, Donald Trump has been credibly accused of committing at least 55 criminal offenses since he launched his campaign for president in 2015. That total only reflects allegations relating to his time in or running for office and omits, for instance, Trump’s criminal exposure for fraudulent business dealings.
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Saturday, September 24, 2022
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Trump committed serious crimes and breached national security by illegally storing highly classified documents
What a treasonous motherfucking Russian asset evil asshole
This is perhaps the worst security compromise in US history. The damage to our country is beyond measure. And Trump and his lawyers not only lied about it, they did it in writing to the FBI. I would have been prison for the rest of my life. If I was lucky. Why this guy isn't indicted right now, is utterly beyond me.
Saturday, August 20, 2022
Friday, August 12, 2022
Traitor Trump Took Top Secret Information relating to Nuclear Weapons and Signals Intelligence from the White House
Was Likely Marketing Them to Our Foreign Enemies.
Biggest traitor ever, this is beyond assholery-- the Orange Piece of Shit needs to be locked away at minimum.
Monday, August 8, 2022
Wednesday, August 3, 2022
Thursday, July 21, 2022
Thursday, July 14, 2022
They Planned for "King Trump" After the 2020 Election
Their plan was to steal the 2020 election, have dump declared king and never have to face voters again. Delusional yes, but Undemocratic to the extreme. Just utterly loathsome.
Saturday, July 9, 2022
Ohio House Republicans are advancing a bill to teach BOTH SIDES OF THE HOLOCAUST.
Ohio House Republicans are advancing a bill to teach BOTH SIDES OF THE HOLOCAUST. They are the party of forced birth for children. Of mandatory genital inspections. Of book bans. Of coal bailouts. They ARE the thought police.
Sunday, June 26, 2022
Sunday, June 19, 2022
The Whole GOP Is Now Insanely Radicalized
Assholery and insanity beyond belief:
This weekend the Republican Party of Texas met in Houston for the first time in four years. The results were predictably offensive. What emerged was a platform so extreme and radical that it left many shaking their heads.
But anyone paying attention is less than surprised as the GOP has very publicly and noticeably careened off the political cliff and submerged itself totally in a radicalized reality. Despite assurances from institutionalists of all stripes - whether in the media or even, depressingly, in the White House - that Republicans would emerge from the Trump years a new and more sensible body, it’s now undeniable that that hope was little more than a self-serving fairy-tale.
Donald Trump may be in exile in his gaudy and embarrassing Mar-a-Lago resort, but the fascistic worldview and project he represented is still alive and well. In fact, it’s thriving. Over the course of three days, Texas Republicans pushed forward an agenda that should serve as an alarm for anyone still grasping at hope that this situation will simply solve itself.
According to The Texas Tribune, it includes the following troubling items:
Requiring Texas students “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child,” including teaching that life begins at fertilization and requiring students to listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses.
Amending the Texas Constitution to remove the Legislature’s power “to regulate the wearing of arms, with a view to prevent crime.”
Treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” language that was not included in the 2018 or 2020 party platforms. Deeming gender identity disorder “a genuine and extremely rare mental health condition,” requiring official documents to adhere to “biological gender,” and allowing civil penalties and monetary compensation to “de-transitioners” who have received gender-affirming surgery, which the platform calls a form of medical malpractice.
Changing the U.S. Constitution to cement the number of Supreme Court justices at nine and repeal the 16th Amendment of 1913, which created the federal income tax.
Ensuring “freedom to travel” by opposing Biden’s Clean Energy Plan and “California-style, anti-driver policies,” including efforts to turn traffic lanes over for use by pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit.
Declaring “all businesses and jobs as essential and a fundamental right,” a response to COVID-19 mandates by Texas cities that required customers to wear masks and limited business hours. Abolishing the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and guaranteeing the right to use alternatives to cash, including cryptocurrencies.
Of course, we live in a political moment where so many of these planks are regular talking points of GOP figures and pundits, but to see them so fervently embraced by a statewide party is telling.
As many of us have warned over and over and OVER again, the rhetoric used by these politicians and networks and websites and provocateurs eventually influences the positioning on the ground level. Voters are prepared to accept framing and policies that prime them for action that would be previously unthinkable.
To work our way through the list is to wrestle with some of the more disturbing aspects of the American Right. Continuing a nationwide trend, the GOP is using its donor-funded attack on public education to insert its own indoctrination, in this case to push a pro-control agenda focused on eradicating the autonomy of women to control their own bodies.
In a country beset by an epidemic of gun violence that not only results in mass school shootings that rob children of their safety and lives but also damns the rest of us to lives of terror and anxiety as regular existence now involves shootouts and petty arguments that lead to murder, they have set the state on a path toward an even more dangerous path beset on all sides with more and more guns.
Defining “homosexuality” as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” it begins a crusade to treat gay Americans as deranged and dangerous. This, as past regimes have shown us, is an incredibly troubling precedent as children can be taken from parents and “deviants” can be imprisoned, tortured, or even killed. On a similar note, transgenderism is targeted because of course it is. When an authoritarian movement has ambitions to control society it must first control reality. And where we are currently going, unless we fight back, is a society prejudiced toward, and aggressively at war with, transgender people.
Texas’s war against taxes has a long and problematic history, but make no mistake: the GOP will not only fight to roll back taxes, but more than likely, as they have before, turn it into an aggressive weapon for redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. And, I doubt I have to explain why limiting the number of Supreme Court justices is applied, but in case I do it is simply a matter of rigging a system they have co-opted by stealing the institution.
The battle between Texas and California, both ideologically but also population-wise, is a subject we should all become familiar with. As federal power is intentionally restricted by the wealthy, states have taken the lead and are currently feuding with one another over population change.
Texas has spent unbelievable amounts of money and political capital to lure Republicans and libertarians from California, including a dogged attempt to poach the tech sector, which is dominated by wealth-obsessed demigods like Elon Musk. This plank emphasizing the “essential” right of businesses seems like a pandemic feint, but hides a ton of problematic interpretations, including the possibility that the Right will likely push to re-legalize segregation as a “business choice,” with an emphasis not only on race but sex and sexual orientation.
For anyone paying attention, cryptocurrencies are a tool of the Far Right for not just laundering money but trafficking it to shadowy projects in order to conceal participation.
And, to top it all off, the GOP of Texas happily endorsed the Big Lie that the Election of 2020 was stolen and that Joe Biden is an “illegitimate president.”
The rancid cherry on top, as it were. There is no arguing about who the GOP is and what they believe. The people who wanted you to hope they would return to “normalcy” post-Trump, that they would “wake up” or “shake off their fever,” were either delusional, complicit, or both simultaneously.
Whether Donald Trump ever runs for office again, whether he is prosecuted, whether he so much as utters another word, does not matter ideologically. What he represented - again, as a symptom of a larger disease - was within the Republican Party all along and simply came raging into the open air.
This is the GOP. This is what they believe. This is what they plan to do and what they want to accomplish. There’s simply no denying it anymore.
Republicans Are Holding America Back. Republicans Are the Problem.
"Washington is broken. Politicians can’t get anything done. They don’t listen to voters.
Voters have been making these complaints for decades, but never have they been truer than they are today. The preferences of a supermajority of voters, whether that’s investigating an armed insurrection to topple our democracy or securing the right to vote or passing reasonable gun measures or respecting women’s physical autonomy, are almost never translated into legislative output.
"Our democracy doesn’t work when the will of the majority is consistently ignored (repudiated, even) by a [Republican] minority out of step with the nation’s views and values. This takes place primarily with four antidemocratic tools: (1) the electoral college, which has installed Republican presidents who lack majority support; (2) thinly populated, overwhelmingly White states’ disproportionate power in the Senate; (3) the filibuster, which effectively gives the minority party a veto over the majority; and (4) lifetime tenure of Supreme Court justices."
Worse, the results — a society rife with guns, the criminalization of abortion, attempts to subvert elections — are moving the country in ways that threaten the lives and rights of Americans."
(snip)
Sunday, May 22, 2022
Saturday, May 14, 2022
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Sunday, May 1, 2022
How Trump Led to a Rise in Antisemitism
Our society, clearly, is not healthy. It was unwell before the pandemic — a country that could elect Donald Trump is sick by definition — and is in much worse shape now. The pandemic and the accompanying changes in the way people live, work and go to school were wrenching and destabilizing. Isolated people turned to social media, which, as the Tel Aviv University report pointed out, abounded with conspiracy theories blaming Jews for spreading the coronavirus so they could profit from vaccines.
These conspiracy theories helped erode people’s faith in their leaders, which was already weakened by governments’ inevitable difficulties balancing shifting public health guidance with people’s need for autonomy and pleasure. Hate spread even as the unspoken restraints governing people’s conduct fell away. Besides being a crisis, escalating antisemitism is a warning: Things are falling apart.
Friday, April 22, 2022
The 2022 Midterms Are Essentially A Presidential Election
1⃣ The GOP, led by McConnell, will support Trump if he’s its 2024 nominee—as all polls say GOP voters will make him.
2⃣ If the GOP has the Senate, it won’t hold hearings on any Democratic SCOTUS nom.
3⃣ 2022 isn’t a midterm—it equates to a presidential election.
IOW, the question of whether the GOP does or doesn’t hold Congress is the question of whether we have a democratic government. Anyone who thinks the 2022 election is a midterm is wildly off the mark: it’s the determination of the future of this nation and its democracy—full stop.
Put yet another way, the GOP just announced that (a) it’ll back sedition if its voters do and (b) we don’t have a government—as to our judicial branch, at a minimum—during any period the GOP holds the legislative branch. This means *all* midterms are presidential elections, now.
I strongly urge every Democratic voter to tell your friends and family that the 2022 election is functionally a presidential election. There can be absolutely no misunderstanding on this among Democrats; if you think what is coming in November is a “midterm,” STOP thinking that.
Leader McCarthy and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene both have some explaining to do about Jan. 6
Both are awful, treasonous assholes.
On Thursday night, audio surfaced of McCarthy, during a call with other Republican leaders, pushing the idea that President Donald Trump should resign in the wake of the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol. McCarthy, who is angling to be speaker, earlier had denied a report that he did this. What will Trump have to say?
We could find out today. Greene, meanwhile, is fielding questions about her role leading up to that day during a court hearing in Atlanta where activists are challenging her right to appear on the ballot this year. Early on, Greene declined to say whether unlawfully interfering with the counting of electoral votes in a presidential election would make someone “an enemy of the Constitution.”
Also
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/21/mccarthy-disputes-report-that-he-privately-vowed-confront-trump-after-jan-6/
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
Saturday, March 26, 2022
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Sunday, March 20, 2022
Saturday, March 19, 2022
Republican/Conservative Ideology Kills
"It should come as no surprise that the highest rates for covid-19 deaths and murders are found mainly in red states. A political mind-set that prioritizes racial resentment, anti-science zealotry and manufactured cultural wedge issues is not likely to be conducive to long, healthy lives. Indeed, antagonism toward “elites” (e.g., experts) often impedes common-sense measures that save lives."
Sunday, February 27, 2022
Friday, February 25, 2022
Trump Calls Putin's Invasion of Ukraine "Genius"
What an evil psychopathic POS treasonous asshole:
"Former president Donald Trump on Tuesday hailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to recognize two breakaway regions of Ukraine and deploy troops into the rebel-held territory as “genius.” In an interview with the conservative “Clay Travis and Buck Sexton” radio show, Trump said he was impressed by news of Putin’s actions.
“Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump said. “So Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’” Trump said Putin will now “go in” to Ukraine “and be a peacekeeper.”
“That’s strongest peace force … We could use that on our southern border,” he said. “That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy … I know him very well. Very, very well.” (via WaPo)
Sunday, February 20, 2022
Friday, February 11, 2022
Saturday, February 5, 2022
Trump's Desperate and Deeply Corrupt Plot to Seize Voting Machines
What an asshole:
The crux of the New York Times’ new report is that Trump went farther than previously known in entertaining the use of law enforcement and national security agencies to seize voting machines to cast Joe Biden’s victory as illegitimate.
Trump’s pressure on Barr unfolded as follows: The meeting with Mr. Barr took place in mid- to late November when Mr. Trump raised the idea of whether the Justice Department could be used to seize machines, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Barr that his lawyers had told him that the department had the power to seize machines as evidence of fraud.
It appears Trump was listening to more conspiratorial-minded allies — lawyer Sidney Powell, former national security adviser Michael Flynn — about how to thwart the transfer of power, and tried to enlist the Justice Department in the scheme.
Barr told Trump that the department had no basis for seizing the machines, per the Times.
But these efforts continued. Indeed, soon after that, the Times reports, Powell and Flynn tried to prevail on Trump to use the military to seize the machines, but this was resisted by Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, a longtime Trump ringleader who for some reason suddenly decided to defend the rule of law.
At around that time, reports the Times, Trump instructed Giuliani to call a top Homeland Security official to see about executing the scheme. That, too, was rebuffed.
On the Barr revelations, note that a Senate report already documented that Trump and his allies tried to co-opt the department to help validate fake fraud claims, apparently to create the pretext for his vice president to delay the congressional count of electors. This would kick the election back to states who might then send fraudulent electors.
Remember, a Trump ally tried to get the department to send letters advising swing states to hold special sessions to consider sending new electors. In this context, Trump’s apparent flirtation with seizing voting machines is probably best understood as another effort to corrupt law enforcement to create a pretext for thwarting the transfer of power in Congress.
Tuesday, February 1, 2022
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
Monday, January 17, 2022
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