Writing in the Washington Post Jennifer Rubin makes an irrefutable argument against the popular media talking point that prosecuting those who participated in a many tentacled plan to overturn a democratic election would somehow make us look like a Banana Republic.

Here is her short list of things a democracy must prosecute such people for if it is to protect democracy itself:

How do you know democracy is unraveling? It is when an incumbent does these sorts of things:

Refuses to acknowledge he lost an election.

Uses captive media outlets to undermine the sanctity of elections and lie about election “fraud.”

Ignores mounds of evidence showing the election was legitimate.

Attempts to use the Justice Department to throw doubt on the legitimacy of an election.

Pressures state officials to “find” just enough votes to change the result of a key state.

Pressures state officials to retract voting certificates and create fraudulent documents to override the will of the people.

Cooks up a scheme to retain power that his own counsel understands would be illegal.

Pressures his vice president to disregard his oath and help facilitate the coup plot.

Calls angry people to show up at the nation’s capital just when the legislature is counting electoral votes and promises the gathering will be “wild!”

Invites an armed, unhinged mob to march on Congress and promises to join them in confronting the elected leaders carrying out their constitutional duties.

Incites the crowd to hold his vice president responsible for not having the “courage” to overturn an election, even as the violent mob moves in on him.

Refuses to use law enforcement or national security personnel to put down his supporters’ violent insurrection.

https://wapo.st/3OHvR4U

Let Heather tell it:

This morning, Jon Swaine and Dalton Bennett of the Washington Post reported that on October 11, 2019, at Trump’s National Doral golf resort in South Florida, Danish filmmakers caught an unguarded conversation between Trump allies talking about their legal exposure because of their work for the president. 

Recording a documentary about Trump’s friend and operative, Roger Stone, the filmmakers caught Stone and Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Stone’s lapel microphone talking about Stone’s upcoming trial for lying to Congress and witness tampering during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. . .

. . . [Trump advisor and campaign chief executive Steve] Bannon viewed Stone as the Trump campaign’s access point to WikiLeaks.” Stone lied to Congress five times, interfering with their Russia investigation, and threatened another witness to try to keep him from exposing Stone’s lies.

At the time the new tape was recorded, Stone was complaining that prosecutors were pressuring him to turn on Trump, and on the tape, said he might “have to appeal to the big man.” Gaetz can be heard agreeing that Stone was “f*ck*d,” but Gaetz didn’t think he would “do a day” in prison. Claiming he had heard it directly from Trump, Gaetz said: “The boss still has a very favorable view of you,” and continued, “I don’t think the big guy can let you go down for this.” “I don’t think you’re going to go down at all at the end of the day,” Gaetz told Stone.

Gaetz sits on the House Judiciary Committee and thus had seen portions of the redacted sections of Special Counsel Muller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the committee members were prohibited from talking about it except among themselves, Gaetz talked with Stone about it, telling him that he was “not going to have a defense.” 

And it just gets deeper and deeper as Bagpiper Bill Barr waltzes in, at the big guy’s urging. read on:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-30-2022?utm_source=email

If this Washington Post caption is not the most chilling one you’ve read this month, I’d hate to see the one that chilled you more:

Chad Wolf, a former secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, during the America First Policy Institute’s America First Agenda summit in Washington, D.C., US, on Monday, July 25, 2022. The nonprofit think tank was formed last year by former cabinet members and top officials in the Trump administration to create platforms based on his policies.

“To create platforms based on his policies.”   Trump’s policy is simply self-promotion and the corrupt exploitation of everyone else for the profit and glory of himself and his gold-plated brand.  Similar to the GOP party platform for 2020 — whatever the Orange Autocrat wants, baby.

Breaking news:  Joseph V. Caffari, Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, Trump-appointee, has been hiding his knowledge of the destruction of evidence of likely crimes for months.  Also implicated in the destruction of January 6th evidence story (although not the cover up), surprisingly, are Trump’s former acting  DHS secretary (Trumpie said he loved acting, can hire and fire ’em at will, no vetting, no pesky Senate advice or consent) Chad Wolf, and another totally like non-corrupt Trump appointee, former acting deputy untersharführer for DHS Ken Cucinelli, all of their texts from that period also, unfortunately, accidentally deleted in the routine “reset”.   America first, baby.

Carol Leonnig reports in the Washington Post:

Text messages for former President Donald Trump’s acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli are missing for a key period leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to four people briefed on the matter and internal emails.

This discovery of missing records for the senior-most homeland security officials, which has not been previously reported, increases the volume of potential evidence that has vanished regarding the time around the Capitol attack.

My man Cuffari doesn’t enter the story til paragraph six, but it’s a pretty good role the tireless watchdog’s got, nonetheless:

The office of Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari did not press the department leadership at that time to explain why they did not preserve these records, nor seek ways to recover the lost data, according to the four people briefed on the watchdog’s actions. Cuffari also failed to alert Congress to the potential destruction of government records. . .

. . .In a nearly identical scenario to that of the DHS leaders’ texts, the Secret Service alerted Cuffari’s office seven months ago, in December 2021, that the agency had deleted thousands of agents’ and employees’ text messages in an agency-wide reset of government phones. Cuffari’s office did not notify Congress until mid-July, despite multiple congressional committees’ pending requests for these records.

The telephone and text communications of Wolf and Cuccinelli in the days leading up to Jan. 6 could have shed considerable light on Trump’s actions and plans. In the weeks before the attack on the Capitol, Trump had been pressuring both men to help him claim the 2020 election results were rigged and even to seize voting machines in key swing states to try to “re-run” the election.

Hmmm, the coincidences here, all amounting to lost evidence of likely criminal conspiracy among top-ranking Trump loyalists, really are amazing, especially since they all seem so eerily like deliberate destruction of evidence and a hamfisted coverup of that destruction of evidence, during an investigation that evidence is extremely pertinent to.   To a paranoid person it could almost seem like part of a long, seamless pattern of ongoing obstruction of justice.

Obviously:

Neither Cuccinelli nor Wolf responded to requests for comment. DHS’s Office of Inspector General [Cufarri] did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Wolf and Cuccinelli had remained at DHS as Trump openly challenged the 2020 election results, even though the agency led efforts to help state and local governments safeguard the integrity of the election results.

Starting in late December, numerous DHS intelligence units across the country were warning of extremely worrisome chatter in white nationalist and pro-Trump social media platforms that were promoting coming armed to Trump’s Jan. 6 rally and using violence to block Biden from becoming president.

In late December, Trump railed in a Cabinet meeting that his secretaries were failing to properly help him investigate fraud that had corruptly “given” the election to Joe Biden, but cited unsubstantiated claims. Trump fired Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in a tweet after Krebs countered Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud, and complained that Wolf should have moved faster to force Krebs out. . .

. . . Wolf had resigned five days after the attack on the Capitol, and cited “recent events” as well as legal rulings questioning his legitimacy to continue leading the department as an acting secretary for 14 months. . .

. . . A Government Accountability Office report in 2020 found that Wolf and Cuccinelli were ineligible to serve in their positions because their appointments had not followed the proper order of succession, an issue the GAO referred to the DHS Office of Inspector General. [that would be our boy Joseph V. Cuffari, for those keeping score at home]

Oh, my God!  Is there no end to the unfounded partisan insinuations against poor Mr. Trump?!  Here is the rest of Carol Leonnig’s scabrous story:  https://wapo.st/3PQ5Dic

Why does the mainstream media have such a hard time having an unpaid kid spend a minute on google getting further information on a story of great and immediate public concern?  Joseph Cuffari, the man who ordered the Secret Service to stop looking for the incriminating texts they deleted, from the lead up and the day of the Trump riot, is nowhere to be seen in the media.  His name is rarely mentioned, though he recently ordered the internal search by the Secret Service to immediately cease, while his office investigates the apparent criminal cover-up of destruction of evidence, causing great confusion — and delay — all around.  Congressional Democrats are now calling for the DHS Inspector General, this same Mr. Cuffari, to “recuse himself” from the criminal investigation of the Secret Service.

If an unpaid intern had looked up the Trump-appointed, still serving, Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Cuffari, she’d have immediately found an April 8, 2022 letter from a government watchdog group to Joe Biden giving ample reasons for Cuffari’s removal as IG.   At the time Cuffari had known for at least two months (the writer of the letter, Congress and the public would not, until five months later) that vital criminal evidence, the Secret Service’s text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, had been destroyed, irretrievably deleted in a “planned January 27 data migration” by the USSS.  The letter begins:

Dear President Biden:

In order to preserve the integrity of the independent inspectors general system and to begin counteracting the pervasive culture of impunity at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we urge you to take swift and decisive action to address the chilling lack of independence demonstrated in multiple instances by DHS Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari, who was under investigation as of February of this year by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s (CIGIE) Integrity Committee. While POGO has said in the past that it would be reasonable to place Cuffari on administrative leave pending the findings of a CIGIE investigation, our enclosed reporting reveals such extraordinary and improper deference to DHS officials that we call on you to immediately remove Cuffari from his position as DHS inspector general.^{1 . . .}

^{. . .} POGO’s most recent investigation documents an unreleased survey in which more than 10,000 employees at DHS law enforcement components said they have experienced sexual harassment or sexual misconduct, part of an unpublished report that Cuffari still has not released, even though the survey was conducted from fiscal years 2012 to 2018. The same POGO investigation documents Cuffari’s signed instructions resulting in the removal of evidence from a 2020 report showing that Customs and Border Protection, a DHS component, substantiated domestic violence charges in 30 cases involving its employees — then continued to allow them access to government firearms.

That latest investigation is enclosed, as are previous POGO investigations which revealed that Cuffari quashed a pair of investigations involving the Secret Service that had been recommended by the agency’s career staff, that he repeatedly impeded and delayed two ongoing investigations into alleged intelligence manipulation and whistleblower retaliation, and that he may have illegally “retaliated” against former high-ranking employees within the DHS inspector general office.⁴

Cuffari’s lack of independence contributes to a culture of impunity at DHS and its components. Time and time again, Cuffari has used the authority of his office to bury instances of systemic wrongdoing and perpetuated an environment in which dysfunctional and predatory behavior goes unpunished. This should be deeply concerning to you and anyone else committed to the principles of accountability, transparency, and oversight in the federal government.

source 

Wake up, Sleepy Joe, Biden-appointed, Senate-confirmed US Secretary of DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas, Congress, mass media.  What is a justice obstructing, evidence burying fuck like Cuffari still doing in the US government, as unaccountable watchdog for a huge, vital agency, no less? 

Oh, yeah, remaining loyal to his unhinged patron, obstructing justice, and a Congressional investigation, by telling USSS to stand back and stand by.    Come on, man!  None of this is that hard.

In the overwhelming torrent from the high powered right-wing fire hose of excrement, it’s hard to keep track of all of the poisonous shenanigans that keep us constantly distracted from focusing on any one depraved or illegal act by Trump’s wildly obstructionist GOP. 99% of them in the House of Representatives voted recently against contraception, same sex marriage, abortion, and interstate travel for pregnant women. That betrayal of American values and our notions of privacy and personal freedom barely made the news.

It’s worth noting that our original insurrectionist former president, before he finally petulantly relinquished power (and did not attend his successor’s inauguration, which he tried to prevent), the stinking angry two year-old did not have a transition team giving the new Biden Administration daily briefings on Covid, national security or anything else.

Mind you, this was during a huge surge in infections and deaths Trump caused (with the assistance of Barr, DeJoy, Kavanaugh and others) by forcing voters to vote in person, rather than more safely by mail. The frequently repeated preemptive excuse for Trumpie’s loss was massive voter fraud, but even Bill Barr himself, one of the most despicable lying smug fat fucks of all time, told the president that voter fraud claims were bullshit, “they’re shoveling bullshit, Your Highness.”

Trumpie’s refusal to cooperate in any way during the transition was as unprecedented as a lame duck president hatching a multi-tentacled conpiracy to prevent the peaceful transfer of power and remain in office. The punishment this unprcedented rogue former president receives must also be unprecedented. It has to be a cautionary lesson to every future enraged two year-old who manages to get enough free speech/financial backing to become president.