“Given Mr. Trump’s reckless actions after losing the 2020 vote [1], and the violence they spurred, the newly released emails are unsurprising. But consider that fact for a moment:
It is unsurprising that the president of the United States leaned on the Justice Department to help him try to steal an election.
The country cannot forget that Mr. Trump betrayed his oath, that most Republican officeholders remain loyal to him nonetheless — and that it could be worse next time.”
you people are all fucking losers, you deserve “president” Biden
[1]
Among these reckless actions:
repeating the baseless, infuriating lie that the election was rigged against him and riddled with bipartisan fraud, spending $50,000,000 in advertising to promote this lie, denouncing the numerous courts that found he’d produced no evidence of voter fraud or irregularity, firing the federal appointee who certified the election as fair and clean, attacking Republicans in various states he lost for not overturning election results, leaning on state voting commissions to overturn the election, making calls (18) to at least one Republican state Secretary of State asking him to give him a break and just “find” a total of one more vote than he lost by, calling for and promoting a Stop the Steal rally in front of the White House, with a march to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal,” on the day a joint session of Congress would ceremonially award the Electoral College votes to Biden, and officially make him winner of the presidential election, encouraging anger at the “cowardly” “traitor” Mike Pence who was refusing to be bold, break the “law” and declare Trump the winner, as his crowd stormed the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” with a gallows erected outside, Trump, watching the mob advance inside the Capitol on live TV, tweeted:
etcetera
When he was impeached for these dangerous, unconstitutional actions, he denounced the “partisan” impeachment as a desperate ploy by partisan, witch hunting fraudulent [cannibal pedophile] losers.etc.
Now there are a bunch of new voter suppression laws, in states Trump lost, to make sure what he demanded be done by Trump-loyal state legislators to reverse the election results last time can now all be legally done next time.
Where is the moderate, judicious Attorney General Merrick Garland on all of this? On the obstruction of justice case laid out by Robert Mueller? He hasn’t really taken a public position on the seriousness of this threat to democracy.
Alvin Bragg and Tali Farhadian Weinstein are in the lead as the votes are being counted several hours after the polls closed.We learn, with a key new fact unreported by the New York Times:
Farhadian Weinstein recently made waves by donating $8.2 million to her own campaign, more than all the other candidates have raised, combined.
This is from the end of an interview with a writer named Clint Smith about Juneteenth that Amy Goodman conducted on Democracy Now! on Friday.Juneteenth recently became a federal holiday, over the nay votes of fourteen GOP sticklers . Though, in fairness to them, it was fewer than the number (21) who opposed gold medals for the outnumbered officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 and FAR less than the number (all but six of them in the Senate) who opposed the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the MAGA riot. The new national holiday commemorates the day in June 1865, two months after the Confederacy surrendered — and two months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — that enslaved Blacks in Galveston, Texas learned that they’d been freed more than two years earlier.
AMY GOODMAN: Clint, before we end, you are an author, you’re a writer, you’re a teacher, and you are a poet. Can you share a poem with us?
CLINT SMITH: I’d be happy to. And so, when you’re a poet writing nonfiction, that very much animates the way that I approach the text. And so, this is part of the — this is an adaptation or an except from the end of one of my chapters, that originally began as a poem that I wrote when I was trying to think about some of these issues that I brought up.
[reading] Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an ever-present fixture of my daily life. Every day on the way to school, I passed a statue of P.G.T. Beauregard riding on horseback, his Confederate uniform flung over his shoulder and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes. As a child, I did not know who P.G.T. Beauregard was. I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the architects who designed the Confederate battle flag. I did not know he led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery. What I knew is that he looked like so many of the other statues that ornamented the edges of this city, these copper garlands of a past that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and silenced by the soil.
After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the contours of treason into something they could name as honorable. We called it the Lost Cause. And it crept its way into textbooks that attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding; that told us that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man, guilty of nothing but fighting for the state and the people that he loved; that the Southern flag was about heritage and remembering those slain fighting to preserve their way of life. But, see, the thing about the Lost Cause is that it’s only lost if you’re not actually looking. The thing about heritage is that it’s a word that also means “I’m ignoring what we did to you.”
I was taught the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but I was never taught how the declarations of Confederate secession had the promise of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught the war was about economics, but I was never taught that in 1860 the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory and railroad combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights, but I wasnever taught how the Fugitive Slave Act could care less about a border and spelled Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same way.
It’s easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don’t see the Black bodies buried behind it. It’s easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake.
I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that’s still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there are over 100 schools, roads and buildings named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, Black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there. Every time I would return home, I would drive on streets named for those who would have wanted me in chains.
Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee, take a left on Jefferson Davis, make the first right on Claiborne. Translation: Go straight for two miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender, take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of Black bodies the cornerstone of his new nation, make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.
What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?
It is an unsettling thing to watch a right-wing movement move to an extreme position and appropriate so many of the tactical tics of, say, the Nazis.
When the Nazis controlled the mass media in Germany it was easy enough for the party to get their unchallengeable message across to every citizen. They had a network of spies who informed on disloyal citizens, anyone privately critical of the one-party narrative. These traitors met with harsh, often gruesome fates. In many cases, they were turned in by their own true believer Nazi children, loyal members of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend).
An example of a debatable Nazi talking point, Jews had to be destroyed because they were responsible for the war. Hitler had invaded Poland, unprovoked, because of the Jews. The Jews, you see, were said to be a highly infectious disease that had to be eradicated. Every vice in the great German nation you could think of was a result of poisonous Jewish devilry. The only way to purify the blood of the Aryan Reich and make Germany great again was to exterminate this Judaic bacillus. The news was dispensed day after day in a way that made this controversial “theory” seem not only entirely reasonable but in urgent need of immediate action (or “aktion” in Nazi-speak).
If you get your news from FOX (Rupert Murdoch), or from even more extreme right-wing sources, One America News Network (OANN) or Newsmax, you get a version of reality very much at odds with the facts that can actually be established by things like court verdicts, bipartisan election certifications, real-time videos, written statements, spoken statements, sworn statements made under the penalty of perjury.
In the MAGA telling, the January 6 MAGA riot, for example, was not the result of a long, well-funded, long-planned campaign based on the lie that Trump won in a landslide and that communists, anarchists, anti-fascists (imagine how sick that is!) insane lying, violently rioting Blacks, angry radical Democrats and disloyal, lying Republicans had rigged the election against him, it was a spontaneous show of completely understandable patriotic fervor.
The 140 Capitol Police officers supposedly injured by this crowd of peaceful protesters? Never happened, radical left propaganda. OK, injured cops are speaking up, showing up in Congress to testify. Well, it may have happened, but it was not Trump fans but terrorists from antifa and BLM who did all the damage, viciously attacked the police, who all supported Trump 100% and kissed and hugged the actual peaceful Trump supporters, who behaved like normal tourists (who’d smoked crack or crystal meth a moment earlier). Actually, wait, it was an FBI false flag operation to make Trump, who actually won in a landslide, look like the inglorious loser he will never be!
A logical question I heard some pundit ask the other day: if the FBI staged this evil thing to make Trump look like a treasonous, seditious loser, wouldn’t you want a complete and thorough bipartisan investigation into the fucking FBI? Not the case with the lockstep GOP — they have learned from recent Trump/McConnell/Barr history. They want any finding about the January 6 “riot” to be dismissible as a complete and total “partisan witch hunt” and they know their solid 39% will believe that theory no matter what the radical partisan Democrat liars try to produce as “evidence”.
It is, of course, a mistake to look for logic in any of this. Just like the average disgruntled German who listened to Nazi media broadcasting every evening and came to believe as indisputable fact whatever was confidently repeated several times, the average American who gets only one political opinion, the same talking points echoed endlessly, will never even consider the likely notion that, if Trump indeed was lying about all the traitors who rigged the election against him, the dozens of lost lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence of the rigged election, the expenditure of $50,000,000 to advertise the lie that he’d actually won, organizing a mass gathering to physically Stop the Steal and prevent the peaceful transition of power, and gave a fiery speech immediately before the riot that incited an already angry crowd to break through police barricades, fight the police and storm the Capitol, forcing legislators and their staffs to run for their lives, as the law abiding mob did $1,400,000 worth of damage to the building, maybe . . . Trump didn’t actually win in a landslide.
No matter. As we see from history, authoritarians rely on certain things, primarily blind obedience from their followers, who are inclined to believe whatever supports their view of a world run by vicious enemies who are mercilessly screwing them and need to be fought without mercy. Another common feature of authoritarian mobs is ready, justifiable, righteous violence against these rightfully hated enemies. This violence encourages obedience, or fearful silence, which also helps.
The one thing that every right-wing movement has in common is an unshakable belief in a strongman, an infallible leader with the will to destroy all of their despicable, dangerous enemies. In the case of Trumpism, that leader is Trump. As Trump’s German born grandfather [1] might have said:
The leader is always right.
The Führerprinzip (German: [ˈfyːʀɐpʀɪnˌtsiːp] (listen); German for ‘leader principle’) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the Government of Nazi Germany. This principle can be most succinctly understood to mean that “the Führer‘s word is above all written law” and that governmental policies, decisions, and offices ought to work toward the realization of this end.[1] In actual political usage, it refers mainly to the practice of dictatorship within the ranks of a political party itself, and as such, it has become an earmark of political fascism.
Trump’s entrepreneurial grandfather, Friedrich Trump, trained as a barber, was deported from Germany for fleeing to avoid military service (and tax evasion when bringing in his American-made fortune). Interesting bit from Wikipedia:
As he had emigrated to America in order to evade conscription, the Bavarian Government stripped Trump of his citizenship and permanently banished him following an investigation. As a result, Trump and his family returned to the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 1892.
I would like to be able to think about other things, write about things I love, things that cause me wonder — like the mischievous, versatile diminished chord — but most days, living in Berlin 1932, when 39% of my countrymen believe anything their leader tells them, the Bizzaro world where the “Big Lie” is the one told by people who claim the former president is lying about having won the 2020 election in a landslide, I’m transfixed by the steady stream of revelations of every horror one would expect at a historically perilous moment like this one. Trump is the US manifestation of the “autocratic” (fascist) monster that is rearing its deadly, racist, nationalistic head worldwide, in Poland, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, the Philippines, India and so forth. If this country is to be any kind of bulwark against autocracy, our Department of Justice has a lot of work to do, and not much time to do it.
Every day there is more evidence of the depraved indifference, and cowardly cynicism, of one of our two major political parties. They are concerned only with consolidating power and making the country a minority run one-party state. The leaders of the other narrow majority party (though they represent a sizable majority of voters) do not show resolute courage very often, either. We have constant new proofs of the reality TV superstar former president’s corruption, megalomania and destructiveness. Every day, of course, we wait for a moment of possible accountability for past crimes. A reckoning for these crimes is the only way to avoid the clear and present danger the out-of-control violence stoking superstar presents.
Here is the latest, a trove of insane post-election emails from Trump’s final White House Chief of Staff, a former Tea Party Congressman and a founder of the Freedom Caucus, trying to get the acting Attorney General, the man who headed the DOJ briefly (after even Trump gunsel Bill Barr jumped off the sinking ship with other survival-oriented rats) to file a conspiracy- based Supreme Court lawsuit to try to overturn the election results. The Washington Post editorial:
MANY REPUBLICANS want the nation to ignore and forget President Donald Trump’s poisonous final months in office — the most dangerous moment in modern presidential history, orchestrated by the man to whom the GOP still swears allegiance. Yet the country must not forget how close it came to a full-blown constitutional crisis, or worse. Tuesday brought another reminder that, but for the principled resistance of some key officials, the consequences could have been disastrous.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday releasedemails showing that the White House waged a behind-the-scenes effort to enlist the Justice Department in its crusade to advance Mr. Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud in the 2020 election. On Dec. 14, 10 days before Jeffrey Rosen took over as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump’s assistant emailed Mr. Rosen, asserting that Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan were intentionally fixed and pointing to a debunked analysis showing what “the machines can and did do to move votes.” The email declared, “We believe it has happened everywhere.”
Later that month, Mr. Trump’s assistant sent Mr. Rosen a brief that the president apparently wanted the Justice Department to submit to the Supreme Court. The draft mirrored the empty arguments that the state of Texas made to the court before the justices dismissed the state’s lawsuit. Piling on the pressure, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also dispatched an email asking Mr. Rosen to examine allegations of voter fraud in Georgia. A day later, Mr. Meadows apparently forwarded Mr. Rosen a video alleging that Italians used satellites to manipulate voting equipment. These were just some of the preposterous White House emails claiming fraud in arguably the most secure presidential election ever.
To his credit, Mr. Rosen rebuffed the White House’s entreaties to deploy the Justice Department’s vast powers on behalf of Mr. Trump’s lie, adding his name to the roster of honorable state and federal officials who showed fidelity to truth and duty at that crucial moment. Some have paid with their jobs. Republicans committed to the “big lie” are gunning to replace others, including those with vote-counting responsibilities. If Mr. Trump or another candidate again presses false fraud claims, many Republican officials may find it more difficult to resist the pressure to back the lie — or, indeed, may eagerly participate in advancing it.
Given Mr. Trump’s reckless actions after losing the 2020 vote, and the violence they spurred, the newly released emails are unsurprising. But consider that fact for a moment: It is unsurprising that the president of the United States leaned on the Justice Department to help him try to steal an election. The country cannot forget that Mr. Trump betrayed his oath, that most Republican officeholders remain loyal to him nonetheless — and that it could be worse next time.
“Moderate” Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema recently gave her rationale for opposing any change to the crippling filibuster rule, even a carve out for voting rights. She claims that senators need to change their behavior, not make any adjustment to the parliamentary rule, shamelessly abused by filibuster king Mitch McConnell, that allows 35 senators, or even one, to block debate (no debate!) on any bill they, or their big donors, don’t like.
This line about a sorely needed change of heart apparently echoes her predecessor Barry Goldwater, who famously said, in opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act
“This is fundamentally a matter of the heart. The problems of discrimination can never be cured by laws alone.” Or as he told a crowd later: “You cannot pass a law that will make me like you or you like me. This is something that can happen only in our hearts.”
Here is what Martin Luther King, Jr. said to that sensible “laws can’t change hearts” shit:
“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.”
Pretty important, also. The filibuster was used for more than a century to block every attempt to make lynching a federal crime [1]. Lynching, proponents of the status quo argued, was a matter of States’ Rights, something for each local jurisdiction to lawfully decide according to its customs, like common murder, divorce, most other laws. It was left up to a state like Texas (number three in lynchings, US leader in executions since 1976 with 563), or Mississippi (leader in lynchings with 583 documented lynchings), to decide what to do when some goddamn trouble maker/rapist who deserved to die was strung up by righteous patriots as an example to other dangerous raping rabble rousers to keep their damned radical beliefs to themselves. Hell, isn’t lynching one dangerous raping maniac preferable to mass murder of the rapist’s whole raping community?
A federal anti-lynching law may not have changed what was in people’s hearts but it would have allowed a jury that was not composed of local lynching supporters, and lynching tolerant local judges (some of them members of groups like the Ku Klux Klan), to apply a uniform law and decide any case involving the unfortunate death of somebody who, in the considered opinion of the unrepentant murderers, and local authorities, was in desperate need of a hard lesson.
So, yes, Kyrsten, laws cannot change hearts, and you also cannot legislate morality. The best legislators can do is make and enforce laws against things like lynching, defying Congressional subpoenas, lying under oath during a confirmation hearing (whether or not the lies are “material”) and protecting democratic values like universal adult suffrage, non-partisan counting of votes, and so forth.
In the absence of that kind of national consensus about basic right and wrong, good luck changing behavior — especially when behavior to obstruct all debate, including violent behavior, is rewarded by dark money donors and cheering mobs of angry citizens, ready for further orders from their outraged leader.
I’ll continue my presidency in August, assholes
[1]
As Adam Jentleson writes in his invaluable 2020 book, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of Democracy: “The filibuster has mainly served to empower a minority of predominantly white conservatives to override our democratic system when they found themselves outnumbered.” He notes that in the almost nine decades between Reconstruction’s end and 1964, “the only bills that were stopped by filibusters were civil rights bills.” A bipartisan team of opponents, but mainly Southern Democrats, filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act for roughly two months before it ultimately passed. (In those days, senators actually had to speak and hold the floor in order to filibuster; now they just have to vote to block debate.)
When Adam Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee began investigating the July 25, 2019 Perfect Call between Trump and new Ukrainian president Zelensky (not long after Mueller wrapped up his investigation into the tangled relationships between the Trump campaign and strongman Vladimir Putin, and the obstruction thing), Trump targeted Schiff for personal abuse.
He told an interviewer that Schiff was insane. “I think he is a maniac, I think Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex, for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he’s a very sick man.”
He might also have mentioned that Schiff is paranoid, he thinks the president has singled him out for an open-ended dirt gathering investigation, that the FBI is spying on him, his staff and his family. Of course, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the president hasn’t ordered the FBI to spy on you, your staff and your family. It turns out to have been no fantasy, the Trump DOJ was spying on Schiff, and others, including Trump’s own White House counsel.
How the gag orders to the companies who provided the data the FBI used in their snooping into these lives did not expire until years after the illegal, fruitless investigations closed, is another one of those things US lawmakers need to fix. When a baseless secret government investigation is over, the gag order should expire with it.
The communist sympathizers on MSNBC never missed a chance to create a snarky headline at President Trump’s expense. They named one of their segments, in the lead up to Trump’s first impeachment:
A perfect illustration of why Trump is so disdainful of the “free press”. Enemies of the best people, you understand, a bunch of rats releasing sensitive information that could hurt these very fine people. The next thing you’ll have these sick, dangerous terrorists inciting people to demand so-called democracy.
By the way, speaking of releasing sensitive information, fifty years ago this week the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers. The disclosure of the secret information, hidden from the public and lied about by US president Lyndon Johnson, was the beginning of the end of the long, bloody military project we call the Vietnam War. For those too young to remember:
The Pentagon Papers, officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States’ political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study; they were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971.[1][2] A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.”[3]
The Pentagon Papers revealed that the U.S. had secretly enlarged the scope of its actions in the Vietnam War with coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks—none of which were reported in the mainstream media. For his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was initially charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property; charges were later dismissed, after prosecutors investigating the Watergate scandal discovered that the staff members in the Nixon White House had ordered the so-called White House Plumbers to engage in unlawful efforts to discredit Ellsberg.[4][5]
In June 2011, the documents forming the Pentagon Papers were declassified and publicly released.[6][7]
In a six part series, which any American (or anyone else) can read without encountering a pay wall (Mexicans will pay for the paywall…) the Boston Globe editorial board makes a clear, overwhelmingly strong case for the need to prosecute the former president if we are to save American democracy.
As simpering Trump toady Lindsey Graham put it, after voting to acquit the commander-in-chief who’d incited a violent attack on the Capitol, doubling down on his desperate efforts to prevent the peaceful transition of power (one of his last big crimes in office) “if you believe he committed a crime, he can be prosecuted like any other citizen.” Indeed.
If rich parents pay an infant heir $200,000 a year (before he gets a substantial raise at five), he is a millionaire long before he hits puberty. If he remains a bully in adolescence, you send him to military academy, where, to boost his low self-esteem, you visit every weekend with an age appropriate cute rented girl, a model. He poses for photos with these adorable models and is seen by his peers as a ladies’ man. He excels at making his bed and disciplining younger cadets, he looks good in his uniform.
As a young adult you put him in charge, under very close supervision, of the highly lucrative family business. He soon branches out to running his own other businesses as well. No matter how many times he fails, by taking stupid risks, by his idiotic hubris, you bail him out. Teach him how to use the tax code to his advantage, how to use the bankruptcy code to stiff people working for him and preserve his personal fortune each time he dissolves a failed business venture.
It becomes apparent that he will never be satisfied just to be a rich celebrity playboy with his amazing sex life in the tabloids every day, but that is a start. He makes important contacts in tabloid world, including a powerful man named Pecker. He is introduced to important political contacts and he donates money to them, tax deductible donations.
He is eventually seen as a “useful idiot” to extremely wealthy right wing extremists, a block of religious extremists of a certain stripe, a once powerful foreign adversary led by an autocratic former spook skilled in dirty tricks. Aided by a cabal of domestic political dirty tricksters (two of whom he will later pardon for felonies committed in his name) and the profit-hungry mass media (he is a ratings goldmine), he becomes the GOP candidate for president.
He is cheered by millions of tabloid readers, every bigot in the country, as well as every white person with a grievance, tens of millions of whom vote for him. He is also supported by many of America’s wealthiest, to whom he has promised (and will deliver) a huge tax windfall worth uncountable billions of dollars. With the help of the media (everyone loves a star), a huge, skillfully targeted Russian social media campaign enriching America’s richest 32 year-old entrepreneur, and strategic payments to silence two women he had extramarital sex with, he becomes the 45th US president by a slim, beautifully engineered Electoral College margin.
But he’s the same person he always was– low self-esteem, an angry bully, a person with no idea how to actually run a business (the family business has always been a closely held dictatorship) a man with childishly weak impulse control who has famously never compromised, not once, ever, since he has never, ever been wrong. The times he did have to settle some of his thousands of lawsuits, papers were signed saying he didn’t compromise, that he was not at fault. The term “doubling down,” a desperate gambling move to appear confident, becomes part of normal American English. He demands loyalty, and when he doesn’t get it, he lashes out, takes revenge. He’s angry, vindictive and increasingly delusional.
When he loses his re-election bid, he manages to convince tens of millions of people, not defaming any particular religion, that wealthy Jew Cannibal Pedophile Satanists have stolen the election from him, in league with America hating Muslim-American terrorists, dead Mexican rapists, angry Black terrorists (with irrational anger at a system that gives them everything), a few million Asian disease spreaders (causing a pandemic to support the usurper Biden), vicious anti-fascist doom squads laying waste to American cities (out of an irrational hatred of fascists), traitorous Republican state officials — RINOs, Socialists, Communists, Reds, Anarchists (entire illegal jurisdictions of them!) enraged homosexual and environmental extremist terrorists and so on.
Angry people, we note, will believe anything that supports their rage.
Oh, during the lead up to his first impeachment he was in a rage about the sick, dangerous enemies who were arrayed against him. Daily he’d vent about the maniacs out to get him, simply because he was the greatest genius ever to be the American president. One day he said this:
Two years later we find out he ordered the Department of Justice to investigate Representatives Schiff, Eric Swalwell, their staffs, and their families. The DOJ issued subpoenas, with gag orders to the subpoenaed companies (Apple and Microsoft), to conduct a long “leak” investigation looking to turn up dirt to discredit these vicious enemies of America’s greatest president. Apparently they didn’t turn up anything useful, and this illegal misuse of the government to hunt the president’s enemies was hidden, but not that well. Now it is public knowledge, among about 61% of the population.
But the fucking leaks don’t stop! The NY Times reported the fake news today that Trump had the DOJ issue subpoenas to dig into the phone records of then White House counsel Don McGahn II and his wife. [1] The man was open about hating his many crazy, dangerous enemies, his fulminations against them united his base (Al-Q’ eada, in Arabic), and it is no surprise that he openly (if secretly) used his DOJ to go after them.In spite of that, the NY Times attacks him, with that typical “objective” tone they use so despicably:
Still, the disclosure that agents secretly collected data of a sitting White House counsel is striking as it comes amid a political backlash to revelations about Trump-era seizures of data of reporters and Democrats in Congress for leak investigations. The president’s top lawyer is also a chief point of contact between the White House and the Justice Department.
The question before us all now is how strenuously will Attorney General Merrick Garland defend America’s greatest former, and future, president against these scurrilous charges that he innocently (and totally within the scope of his duties) used the FBI to engage in numerous personal witch-hunt fishing expeditions against a small handful of his many nefarious enemies?
Let us all remember the great man’s pronouncement, via twitter, the day after he was completely exonerated of any and all wrongdoing by the “conflicted” partisan traitor Robert Mueller III.
[1] from that lying article, about the timing of the DOJ subpoena to gather data on McGahn:
Because Mr. McGahn had been the top lawyer for the Trump campaign in 2016, it is possible that at some earlier point he had been among those in contact with someone whose account the Mueller team was scrutinizing in early 2018.
Notably, Mr. Manafort had been hit with new fraud charges unsealed the day before the subpoena. Subsequent developmentsrevealed that Mr. Mueller’s investigators were closely scrutinizing some of his communications accounts in the days that followed.
Another roughly concurrent event was that around that time, Mr. Trump had become angry at Mr. McGahn over a matter related to the Russia investigation, and that included a leak.
In late January 2018, The New York Times had reported, based on confidential sourcing, that Mr. Trump had ordered Mr. McGahn the previous June to have the Justice Department remove Mr. Mueller, but Mr. McGahn had refused to do so and threatened to resign. The Washington Post confirmed that account soon after in a follow-up article.
The Mueller report, and Mr. McGahn himself in private testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this month, described Mr. Trump’s anger at Mr. McGahn after the Times article, including trying to get him to make a statement falsely denying it. Mr. Trump told aides that Mr. McGahn was a “liar” and a “leaker,” according to former Trump administration officials. In his testimony, Mr. McGahn said that he had been a source for The Post’s follow-up to clarify a nuance — to whom he had conveyed his intentions to resign — but he had not been a source for the original Times article.
NOTE: McGahn was a liar, according to Mr. Trump, because he refused to memorialize the lie that Mr. Trump had never asked McGahn to do the thing McGahn refused to do, and in the process of that refusal becoming public, had made Mr. Trump look like a liar. Which, of course, would make McGahn a complete fucking liar, as well as a leaker, and, of course, he probably lied about the extent of his leak to the enemy press. Hence, the subpoenas.
FURTHER NOTE: just because Trump had the investigation into his own White House counsel started the day he learned that Mueller brought new fraud charges against his campaign’s point man with Putin (via Konstantin Kilimnik), Paul Manafort, who lied repeatedly to Mueller, is no reason to add these leaked leak investigations to the long list of Mr. Trump’s alleged “pattern and practice” of using the DOJ in the course of “obstructing” justice, or whatever you want to call the crazy five year conspiracy by sick and dangerous traitors to bring our greatest American to his knees, something that will never happen.
Don McGahn, Trump’s first White House lawyer, is a dedicated conservative who was largely responsible for the selection and lifetime appointments of Messrs Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. After Trump fired FBI director Comey, for refusing to commit to personal loyalty to the president and for not dropping the “Flynn Thing” (Mike Flynn’s illegal contacts with Russia that he lied about), the DOJ appointed a Special Counsel to investigate numerous connections between the Trump campaign and Russia and Trump’s suspicious loyalty to Vladimir Putin, a foreign leader who had openly (and secretly) helped Trump win the “close” election of 2016.
During his famous Oval Office reaction to the news of Robert Mueller’s appointment as Special Counsel, Trump said “this is the end of my presidency, I’m fucked!” according to sworn witnesses. You can look it up.Trump was outraged at this intrusion on to his unlimited executive powers. Partisan witch hunt was a common cry, conducted by “sick and dangerous individuals” who he would punish when the time was right. After a moment of self-pity Trump exploded at his team for letting this witch hunt start in the first place, and his vendetta against the loyal, but not loyal enough, Jeff Sessions began in earnest.
Members of Trump’s inner circle lied to Mueller’s investigators, in exchange for the promise of a pardon from the big guy, which they got. Mueller found 140 instances of coordination, working together, direct communication, collusion, between members of Trump’s campaign and the Russian government, a foreign actor who worked tirelessly to swing the election to Trump. Mueller found there was no doubt of the ongoing collusion, which is not a legal term, but that there was “insufficient evidence” of a criminal conspiracy. Mueller also noted evidence had been withheld and numerous witnesses had lied to him. Hence Barr’s finding of “no collusion” and the announcement that Mueller had “exonerated” Trump of all wrong-doing.
When Mueller started digging he encountered so much lying from Trump’s people, the president’s refusal to answer even written questions his lawyers had agreed to have him answer, defiance of every subpoena and numerous other maneuvers to avoid production of evidence that he began to investigate Trump’s apparent obstruction of justice. One of the ten instances Mueller gave to illustrate what appeared to have been a consistent pattern of obstruction (a substantial pattern that did not allow Mueller to exonerate Trump, even if he also couldn’t directly accuse him of — per DOJ memo about accusing a sitting president of a crime — Mueller took that extra step– if he can’t be prosecuted, it’s unfair to accuse him) involved White House counsel Don McGahn.
At one point Trump asked McGahn to fire Mueller. McGahn advised the president that firing the Special Counsel investigating obstruction of justice would look bad, could bite him hard. As McGahn told Mueller’s investigators, he’d refused to fire Mueller, consulted his own lawyer, packed up his office and wrote a letter of resignation to Trump. Trump didn’t accept McGahn’s resignation, instead asking him to write a memo stating that they had never discussed firing Mueller. McGahn revealed all this, under oath, to Mueller’s investigators.
When Congress sent McGahn a subpoena to appear before a committee looking into impeaching Trump, McGahn filed a federal suit seeking a ruling on whether Congress had the right to subpoena him, whether such a subpoena would violate attorney-client privilege and any other defense to giving testimony that he could think of. The suit dragged on for a couple of years, long past both Trump impeachments. The predictable delay prevented McGahn from giving public testimony that could have seriously hurt his demanding, sometimes lawless, former client. While nothing McGahn did was illegal, it certainly fits into Trump’s pattern of doing everything possible to obstruct any investigation into anything he has ever done.
Recently McGahn agreed to testify in Congress, behind closed doors, with his own lawyer, and Trump’s lawyer, in the room. According to the deal he struck with those who had subpoenaed him years earlier he would not answer anything outside of the scope of what he had revealed to Mueller under oath. I started reading the transcript of his testimony, which was released in its 240 page entirety the other day. I made it to page 8 where I read:
In a nation of angry, divided, freaked out citizens, this McGahn shit is a dead letter, ancient history, irrelevant, Trump already got away with obstruction of justice, and nobody is going to do anything about his incitement to riot, we’ve seen it a hundred times over now — he publicly did many things far worse than asking his lawyer to lie for him and make a written record of the lie.
Moderate Merrick Garland’s DOJ is so far following up on all of Barr’s objections to investigations into Trump’s monkeyshines. No public disclosure of Barr’s lying, falsely classified memo, we appeal the judge’s ruling, no prosecution of Trump and Barr for using teargas, horses and batons against a peaceful protest for Trump’s photo op, we move to dismiss the lawsuit, no penalty for a president defaming a private citizen “during the scope of his duties,” we appeal the denial of our right to substitute ourselves for the former president in this lawsuit according to federal law.
I may be the only person, certain the only poor bastard I know, who is wondering “what the fuck?!” as I read the words from the McGahn transcript “although this interview is not under oath” you’re still not allowed to lie, you know.
My only hope, I think, is that my head will explode before too much longer. We live in Berlin 1932 and we are watching the principled, decent, reasonable, elected Weimar government let the angry right call all the shots, many of them based on outright, easily demonstrable lies. Alternative facts, driving new laws that could help Trump loyalists overturn the next election, if Americans turn out in large numbers to vote the wrong way again, next time. What could fucking go wrong?
You can say “seig heil!” can’t you you? I know you can.
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