Category Archives: History and Politics

Barr obstructed justice…

Attorney General William Pelham Barr, live on TV, prior to releasing the Mueller Report:

“The Special Counsel found no collusion by any Americans in IRA’s illegal activities. In other words, there was no evidence of the Trump campaign collusion… There was in fact, no collusion.”

The 140 instances of coordination (or its synonym “collusion”) between Trump’s campaign and Putin found and cited by Mueller, without more, were insufficient to support a prosecution for Criminal Conspiracy, as Mueller concluded. This was in part because several Trump associates who spoke under penalty of perjury lied to Mueller’s investigators, the Russians Mueller subpoenaed were beyond the reach of American law and other evidence was destroyed.

Since Mueller issued his report more evidence has come out about direct ties and significant, direct collusion between Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and the Kremlin, via Konstantin Kilimnik (some of this is documented in the post-Mueller Marco Rubio chaired Senate Report, a report Rubio touted as further exonerating the former president).

It should be noted that a good deal of crucial evidence was withheld by non-rat Trump associates who dummied up, or simply lied, in return for a dangled pardon for perjury or related crimes. Unlike in many of Trump’s other business dealings, he actually kept his end of the bargain, pardoning Manafort, Flynn and Stone, along with a rogue’s gallery of others. Can you say quid pro quo?

quid pro quo

In the former president’s defense, he is often called “transactional” — a transaction is a negotiated exchange of promises, goods or services. I give you this, you give me that. You don’t incriminate me, for example, I give you a full unconditional presidential pardon, for example. In Latin the phrase is quid pro quo.

Which leads us back to obstruction of justice. Same deal, note how carefully Barr phrases his lying spin on Mueller’s findings in Volume II, which detailed Trump’s tireless (and ongoing) pattern of obstruction of justice. While Mueller was prevented by DOJ policy from charging the sitting president with this crime, he stated that he would have exonerated him if he could, but that the evidence of obstruction of justice he had gathered did not allow him to exonerate the president. Here’s Barr’s take:

“The evidence developed by the Special Counsel is not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.”

Telling your White House counsel to fire the Special Counsel, and when he refuses, instructing him to write a memorandum falsely stating he was never asked to fire the Special Counsel? This single incident of arguable obstruction of justice (to create a false document to cover up a possibly incriminating act) is not sufficient, even read together with the other nine instances detailed by Mueller, to establish that the president attempted to obstruct justice, or cover up that obstruction. In Bill Barr’s estimation, anyway.

Which is, no doubt, why he had Trump assert a ridiculously all-inclusive privilege that allowed White House counsel Don McGahn (and everyone else Trump had ever spoken to) to defy a Congressional subpoena until long after the first impeachment was over (and the second impeachment too, for that matter).

And Barr has a falsely classified legal memo to prove that he was on the up and up the whole time. This secret memo sets out the legal advice he got and details the legal discussions he had before he made the decision, even if that advisory memo, it turns out, was finalized after he sent his letter to Congress saying Mueller hadn’t found jack shit on the Unitary Executive.

This “privileged” memo, you see, contains the exact legal reasoning on which he relied when dismissing Mueller’s investigation as a partisan witch hunt that basically exonerated Trump of all wrongdoing.

The memo purports to show that Barr made his considered, legally nuanced decision only after getting legal advice that confirmed every jot and tittle of his determination.

Even though, it emerges, the same team (with Barr’s input) simultaneously prepared the letter AND the secret post-letter “deliberative” memo that justified it and they exchanged emails with edits as they prioritized finalizing the lying letter to Congress and the American people over the advisory memo, which they agreed could always be finished after the letter was sent.

The hilarious stand up comic pictured above (mocking those alarmed about the autocratic Unitary Executive theory embraced by right-wing zealots like Barr and the Federalist Society audience he is performing for) needs to be prosecuted for his role in the obstruction of justice he claimed there was inadequate evidence to prosecute Trump for.

History suggests that Merrick Garland may not be prepared to go this far, though I hope very much that I’m wrong. A few years ago Barack Obama made history by candidly stating that “we, uh, tortured some folks”. It was wrong, he said, and against our values, international law and the treaties we may have signed, but some very good people did it, during a very scary time, truly believing they were doing the right thing, so you know, to clear the air once and for all … yes, we tortured some, uh, folks.

Many Democrats in power only seem to register that fire can seriously burn them after they are actually being burned to death. They don’t want to be accused of being vindictive, politically correct, “woke” culture warriors by doing something that can be spun as viciously partisan, like millions of tax dollars spent on a long-running, high-profile Benghazi investigation, ten of them, actually, against then Secretary of State/presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Modern Republicans are admired by the base (al Qaeda, in Arabic) for shooting before they can be asked a smart assed question.

What kind of knife are we bringing to the obstruction of justice gunfight, Nancy? Chuck? Merrick?

On the other hand, WTF?

At 11 pm last night, in the last hour to do so, Merrick Garland’s DOJ appealed a federal judge’s order to produce the full nine page memo that Bill Barr “disingenuously” classified as a protected, deliberative memo he used to make his decision to dismiss the findings of the Mueller Report. The judge, who’d read the memo, ruled that it had been produced as a mere a rationale, for the decision Barr was determined to make regarding the Mueller Report since auditioning for the Attorney General job. Curiously, and shedding doubt on Barr’s story, it was dated the same day Barr wrote his immediate, misleading letter to Congress about Mueller’s findings.

Think back through the intense shit storm that was Trump’s term as president. After Mr. Trump’s cruel disappointment with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his first mainstream supporter, who, with complete disregard for his duty of loyalty to the president, honored an DOJ ethics ruling and recused himself from supervising the investigation into a matter he’d lied about his involvement in, the president got a beautiful audition memo from William Pelham Barr.

Barr’s position in the legal memo was that Mueller’s witch hunt was basically illegal from the git-go and that the AG, under current law, could therefore dismiss its findings. Trump loved it and hired Barr (who had both gravitas and experience in creatively covering up likely presidential crimes, as he had at the end of the George HW Bush administration) to take over from Sessions’s interim replacement, an angry weight lifter in over his head.

Barr distorted the findings of the Mueller Investigation (which concluded they could not exonerate Trump on ten counts of Obstruction of Justice), essentially carrying out his promise to Mr. Trump (quid pro… never mind). Recently a federal judge found that the memo he’d classified, a supposedly “deliberative” memo (again, prepared the same day as Barr’s misleading letter to Congress announcing that Mueller had basically exonerated Trump) was, in fact, a legal fig leaf to give the illusion of deliberation to a decision Barr had made before Trump hired him. “Disingenuous,” wrote Judge Amy Berman Jackson, ruling that the DOJ must produce the full memo — or appeal it by midnight May 25 (George Floyd Day).

In the last hour available to do so, Merrick Garland’s DOJ appealed the judge’s decision that the DOJ must produce the un-redacted memo. The DOJ released the first one and a half pages of the nine page memo, followed by seven and a half black pages.

Scroll to the bottom of the black pages of the memo and you are rewarded with this, the top of the un-readacted final page:

What the fuck?

Take it, Grey Lady:

“Although the special counsel recognized the unfairness of levying an accusation against the president without bringing criminal charges, the report’s failure to take a position on the matters described therein might be read to imply such an accusation if the confidential report were released to the public,” wrote Steven A. Engel and Edward C. O’Callaghan, two senior Trump-era Justice Department officials [in the last paragraph of the un-redacted section of the Barr DOJ’s controversial memo — ed]

The Mueller report itself — which Mr. Barr permitted to become public [1] weeks after his letter to Congress had created an impression that the fruits of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry cleared Mr. Trump of obstruction — detailed multiple actions by Mr. Trump that many legal specialists say were clearly sufficient to ask a grand jury to consider indicting him for obstruction of justice.

Those actions included attempting to bully his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, into falsifying a record to cover up an earlier attempt by Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Mueller, and dangling a potential pardon at Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to encourage him not to cooperate with investigators.

The new Justice Department filing also apologized for and defended its Barr-era court filings about the memo, which Judge Amy Berman Jackson had labeled “disingenuous,” saying that they could have been written more clearly but were nevertheless accurate….

…“The government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused,” the Justice Department said. “But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the court, and the government respectfully submits” that any missteps still did not warrant releasing the entire memo.

Mr. Barr’s claim — which he made weeks before releasing the Mueller public [sic] — that the evidence gathered showed that Mr. Trump did not commit a chargeable offense of obstruction has been widely criticized as deeply misleading.

source

What the bloody hell?

See? Completely partisan witch hunt!

[1]

Would it not have been more accurate, NY Times, rather than this:

which Mr. Barr permitted to become public weeks after his letter to Congress had created an impression that the fruits of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry cleared Mr. Trump of obstruction

to state:

that Mr. Barr prevented publication of, including Mueller’s executive summaries, for weeks after he misleadingly dismissed the findings?

Truth or Big Lie — your choice

How about Bezos’s recent Washington Post puff piece calling radical Trumpist Senator Josh Hawley “a fierce defender of the Constitution”?

As noted, the ongoing danger of a Big Lie is the culture of lying it brings about, many other lies must be told to support the Big One. The election was stolen (not true) therefore we have a right and responsibility to bring the thieves to justice (hang Mike Pence!) and no puny police force is going to stop us (Blue Lives Matter!) we love our flags (nothing wrong with our Confederate flag, “n-words”) and some of us will beat police officers with the flagpoles (“when you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules”).

Today the united position of the GOP is that any claim they ran for their lives on January 6 is a bold-faced lie, they were never afraid of the innocent, totally unarmed (virtually no firearms seized afterwards) law-abiding mob they barricaded the doors against and fled from in terror! They claim there is no need for any investigation — which could have dire political consequences for certain elected officials (like the firebrand from the state of Q) who may have aided the peaceful mob — unless you also investigate the claimed terrorism of Black Lives Matter, antifa and the treacherous machinations of traitor Republicans. You do remember the (rare) rioting Barr and Trump used to bring in federal riot troops night after to restore peace in the first of many “anarchist jurisdictions” that needed pacification after the totally justifiable murder of George Floyd and massive nationwide so-called “peaceful” protests by violent haters!!!

Then we have this sobering (and encouraging) poll about the apparently declining but still prevalent Republican belief that Blacks, antifa and disloyal Republicans stole the 2020 election for Biden (down from 70%, by the looks of it) and some eye-popping number crunching (from Heather Cox Richardson’s latest):

If that 14% contains the politically committed 0.01%, the group that has most of the money in America, well, we see the results every day. You get the “spontaneous” creation of the nationwide Tea Party, Election Integrity laws that make it harder to vote, Stand Your Ground Laws that make it easier to legally kill people you’re afraid of, Anti-Protest Laws that make it a felony to assemble while granting immunity to those who run over now felonious protesters in the street, and for religious types, a solid anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court to finally end government coercion and ensure maximum liberty, etc.

We’re in one heap of a mess, folks, but I like the direction things are going. With every new detail that comes out about the US under Mr. Trump and his gunsel Bill Barr (check out the Manafort stuff– his actual lies to Mueller are now laid out, un-redacted, in black and white [1]), things look a little better, justice-wise. It is inconceivable to me that honest investigations, grand juries and actual prosecutions will not change the face of GOP politics in the coming months. If only fucking Sinema and Manchin had the integrity of your average turd…

“You’re a turd, Widaen! You stink a mile, pal!“

[1]

O`DONNELL: And what was your reaction to what we learned in the newly- unredacted — well, we, the public, learned in these newly-unredacted documents about Paul Manafort dealing with the Mueller investigation and the ways he kept lying to them about Konstantin Kilimnik?

SCHIFF: Well, it`s pretty interesting because in two respects. First, you`re right. It shows Manafort was a bigger liar than we knew, and we knew he was a pretty big liar to begin with. But it also shows the degree of collusion between the campaign chairman for Donald Trump and Russian intelligence.

Here Manafort and Gates, his deputy chairman, are repeatedly giving an agent of Russian intelligence internal polling data, internal strategic documents about their efforts in battleground states and key demographics within those battleground states.

So, you know, this is going on while the Russians are doing a secret social media operation to help the Trump campaign. And so it`s hard to find something more graphic than that in terms of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians and the same Russian intelligence that`s working on the social media campaign.

But what`s also interesting about it is this is now the second federal judge in ordering these things to be unredacted, who has essentially said Bill Barr was misleading the country, misleading the country by saying there was no evidence of collusion, misleading the country by saying that he was compelled to conclude that you could not indict the president on obstruction.

And he`s also — the judge is also saying that essentially Barr has been dishonest with the court about what that memo is about. It`s not about just deliberations.

Apparently it`s about spin. And it`s for that reason, because it`s about how do they spin this pre-decision, this predetermination that they weren`t going to indict the president no matter what — how do they spin that? That`s not something that can be concealed from the public. So it`s interesting at many levels.

source

Your Last Breath

It is a scary thought, breathing out and never breathing in again. Anxiety often expresses itself in this image — I can’t breathe! — Oh my God! — the breath catching, a rising fear of no more oxygen coming in, not enough oxygen, drowning on dry land as the last bit of sand tics through the hourglass of the long soap opera that was, until a second ago, your life.

I saw only one last breath in my life. It was my father’s. A few minutes earlier he’d sent everyone else away, telling them I’d stay with him, that everything was fine. They went down to have a break, to eat dinner in the hospital cafeteria. My father waited until they were gone and then said “I don’t know how to do this.” I assured him that nobody did, that it would be fine.

The moment of his death, maybe fifteen minutes later, was perfectly captured by some poetic Jewish writer two thousand years earlier: like removing a hair from a glass of milk. His death was entirely peaceful, his breathing gently slowed and finally stopped. His last breath was gone a few seconds before I knew it for sure. One benefit, I understand, of dying from liver cancer, it just quietly shuts everything down, making you more and more tired until you simply…

You might think knowing that we all will die would bring out the best in us, our empathy, our higher nature. It is a humbling thing to understand that every life ends with a last breath, the humblest of us and the mightiest. Sadly, the fearsome inevitability of death leads many to indulge the worst side of themselves. Might as well take as many of these fuckers down as I can before I die in a glorious hail of bullets!

We’re living through a time as bad as any in human history. This is a time of vast human panic, irrationality, fear, rage and hopelessness. There are good reasons to be afraid, to be angry, to feel hopeless. Look at the facts. Heck, just look at the lies.

During a deadly, highly contagious pandemic we had autocrats in several large countries telling their nations that the whole thing was a hoax created by our enemies, only weak people believed it, only the pathetic died from it. It would be over soon. No need to worry. A few million died worldwide, continue to die, whose fault is that? Don’t blame the Strongmen!

Our own exceptional American Strongman, the orange one, simply told the nation it was not his fucking problem, that’s what States’ Rights are for, let the states fight it out, that’s what the Constitution was written for, the Civil War fought over.

A few months later, before and after another party-line acquittal in a “partisan” impeachment for doing nothing but speaking his angry mind, in a masterful show of his epic, childish will, he refused to accept the results of the election. He attacked the counting of the votes cast by the American people, denounced it as fraudulent, tried to convince state officials to change the certified vote tallies.

His case is pretty much air-tight, in his mind: a president who, according to the lying polls, had supposedly never cracked 50% in popularity during his time in office got more votes in 2020 than he did in his landslide of 2016. His vote tally, 74,000,000, almost 47% of the vote, set a record for votes cast for an incumbent, therefore– obviously– he won. He continues to insist he won, in a landslide.

His opponent tallied 81,000,000 votes, and there is no real question about those numbers, so Trump and his myrmidons kept reminding people that this corrupt, lying, sleepy, nefarious puppet of the Chinese Communist Party had stolen the election by nefarious means, exactly as he predicted his opponent would do when he himself was attempting to rig the election (in part by conspiring to limit mail-in voting, smug Louis DeJoy ruthlessly removing urban mailboxes and dismantling high-speed mail sorting machines in cities, backed by hundreds of lawsuits and aided in this anti-theoretical mail fraud campaign by no less than Bill Barr)!

70% of the former president’s steady 39% believe the election was stolen from their man, in fact, more than that — 70% of all Republicans. $50,000,000 was spent on an advertising campaign to convince the credulous that the election had been stolen from Trump, no matter what Republican state officials, and every court Republicans brought lawsuits in, kept saying. Finally, another $3,500,000 was spent to organize the rally the Capitol rioters attended to get fired up right before they marched down to breach the Capitol, like normal tourists, and Stop the Steal on the day the vote for the thieving Biden was being certified and made official.

Outside of the millions Trump milked MAGA nation for, all the dark money that funded this incendiary lie came from secret sources, like the money that funds “climate change skepticism” during a time when we are witnessing new instances of rapidly unfolding climate catastrophe weekly. Among these dark money funders, and possibly the smartest of them, is Charles Koch, an evil zombie who refuses to die. Koch (the surviving Koch Brother — Charles and David beat their other two brothers to a pulp in years of litigation) is the mastermind engineer of the radical right-wing long game.

Koch enjoys plenty of company and generous tax-deductible support among his well-born, fellow-traveler classmates. Their billions make sure the credulity of the masses of “low information” Americans serves the cause of liberty from government coercion. The autistic genius billionaire Robert Mercer, who supported Lyin’ Ted to the end, threw his money, expertise and support behind Trump, when the time came, and Mercer’s support– plus the campaign-saving introductions to Steve Bannon and Kellyanne “Alternative Fact” Conway — was critical to the Mercer family’s new candidate’s success. Their endgame is all the same. Pay no tax, preserve absolute liberty from “coercion”, have a strong, violent police force, and fuck the poor.

Men like these die only after inflicting tremendous suffering on as many of the rest of us as possible. It seems to me that the suffering they inflict means as much to them as the profit they reap from inflicting this harm. We had one of the worst of them, for four years, attacking almost everybody in the world, daily, on his hyperactive Twitter feed. It was quite clear from his angry, vindictive behavior, that no victory was complete for him without somebody he hated being publicly humiliated.

His America longs for the good old days, when a rich guy like him could hire goons to break legs, have a mob string up any charismatic opponent, call in a favor from the military, if things got really bad between him and the workers he was trying to screw out of their pay.

Those great lost days when America was great, before the “political correctness” that has made us a “laughingstock” are what MAGA is all about. A time (before women could vote, apparently) when bitches didn’t need $130,000 bribes to keep their big mouths shut about a great man’s innocent “side-action,” when angry Blacks (ungrateful for not being enslaved AND being allowed to vote) didn’t try to sell this horse-shit about their lives mattering, when politically correct losers didn’t suddenly become “woke” and believe that crap about “all men being created equal”.

Obviously that’s not true, they say, people were never created equal, the men who wrote that owned other human beings, creatures they regarded as inferior. There are such things as genetics, eugenics, blood, soil, glory, after all. Only a weak nation allows itself to be taken over by soft-hearted eggheads who think they know everything, feel superior because they arrogantly feel the “truth” is on their side.

This MAGA type dies, like anyone else, but the worst of them are prepared to do things, like participate in a violent mob to stop an election being certified because their enraged leader lied to them, that more thoughtful people wouldn’t do. They die, no question, as we all do. The only question is how many of us will breathe our last before they’re done fouling the air with misdirected anger, miscalculated vengeance and unquenchable desire for the illusion of total domination?

Filibuster change proposal for “moderates”

I don’t know what it will take for Sinema and Manchin to stop behaving like oblivious obstruction-enablers and recognize the filibuster for what it is and has always been– a tool of obstructionist racists, first slaveholders ably assisted by their public servant, and inventor of the Senate filibuster, John Calhoun, and later generations of Dixiecrat klansmen who used it to block all anti-lynching and civil rights legislation. 

The filibuster does not encourage “bipartisanship” as these two asshats keep insisting. It promotes the opposite, particularly when one of the parties embraces the radical “alternate reality” of their enraged leader. As the filibuster is currently constituted, it allows one member of the minority party to block debate on anything not budget-related, with an email. Then it’s 60 votes or suck it if you want to discuss a bill on the Senate floor.

Here’s a point Schumer should make to those two holdouts, today — OK, you don’t want to abolish the filibuster, not ready to go there, fine.  What’s your objection to changing the rule back to what it was just a few years ago — you stand up and talk and when you stop talking, if nobody else from your party immediately steps up, filibuster over?  Why not put the burden back on the party filibustering, instead of the one trying to get on with normal Senate business?

And we add this second change to the filibuster rule — we’ve banned reading the phone book or Dr. Seuss, canceled Green Eggs AND ham, your standing, talking filibuster has to be speeches on the merits of your meritless objection.   

Make those two changes to the filibuster rule and it’s game over for Mitch, Lindsey, Lyin’ Ted, Hawley, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin and their Big Lie embracing ilk.  There is no merit to their positions on anything in the debate over voting rights, the violence of American policing, investigating the January 6 Trump riot, raising the minimum wage, doing everything that can be done to avoid climate catastrophe.

Their objections and obstructions are frequently based on demonstrable lies — as in the ridiculous and dangerous case of their now “peaceful” January 6 non-insurrection. The clown in Congress who recently dismissed the Capitol riot as a normal tourist event is on videotape screaming and crapping his pants as he frantically barricades the door against the peaceful MAGA tourists on that sunny January 6. Those 70 Capitol Police who’ve retired or quit since the peaceful riot? Faint-hearted alarmists who do not know a transformational lie when they see it.

I truly don’t get why that reasonable change to the out-of-control filibuster rules would even be an ask for Sinema or Manchin.

Then again, they don’t pay me the big bucks to suggest these kind of policy strategies.  I hope this will be the issue that finally gets Democrats off their asses to pressure the two “moderate” holdouts to get the filibuster under control. 

If not this issue — a bipartisan investigation to hold the lying propagandists and provocateurs responsible for the riot at the Capitol that stopped the certification of a fair election as members of Congress hid from the peaceful tourists (and later Kevin McCarthy announced that there’s no debate that Biden is the president), truly a matter of Superman’s “Truth, Justice and the American Way” — what issue would be important enough?

Manchin and Sinema could continue to enable Mitch and the slim minority to hold on to its unchecked ability to obstruct until one of the older member of the Democratic caucus finally has a debilitating stroke (as many of us often feel about to have when reading about Manchin and Sinema). Then, that day, hello Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and goodbye filibuster, motherfuckers!

We will block any attempt to have an up or down vote on democracy

We are living in a perilous time. It feels like Berlin 1932, but with a climate catastrophe chaser. Our nation, and much of the world, is teetering between more justice and democracy or very little of either, and only for a select few.

Senate Republicans, now openly the party of Trump, have made it clear that they will allow no vote, or even debate, on the provisions of the For the People Act of 2021. Most Americans approve of this law (check out the polls in West Virginia, Joe Manchin) and see it as a crucial protection for US citizens against infringement of their rights by the state government.

It doesn’t matter how strong the case for this law is, there will be no debate on it under current Senate rules. 39% of American voters simply will not stand for it!

The party of Trump greatly prefers the new think tank-written state voting laws being implemented by Republican state legislators around the country, laws that could have changed the election results in 2020, if they’d been in effect. Only a fool can miss the obvious — the party of Trump is not interested in so-called democracy, they love a strong leader. Trump, the leader, is a sworn enemy of anti-fascists everywhere.

It would be political suicide for the GOP to allow debate any law that proposes to do all these things:

This bill addresses voter access, election integrity and security, campaign finance, and ethics for the three branches of government.

Specifically, the bill expands voter registration (e.g., automatic and same-day registration) and voting access (e.g., vote-by-mail and early voting). It also limits removing voters from voter rolls.

The bill requires states to establish independent redistricting commissions to carry out congressional redistricting.

Additionally, the bill sets forth provisions related to election security, including sharing intelligence information with state election officials, supporting states in securing their election systems, developing a national strategy to protect U.S. democratic institutions, establishing in the legislative branch the National Commission to Protect United States Democratic Institutions, and other provisions to improve the cybersecurity of election systems.

Further, the bill addresses campaign finance, including by expanding the prohibition on campaign spending by foreign nationals, requiring additional disclosure of campaign-related fundraising and spending, requiring additional disclaimers regarding certain political advertising, and establishing an alternative campaign funding system for certain federal offices.

The bill addresses ethics in all three branches of government, including by requiring a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices, prohibiting Members of the House from serving on the board of a for-profit entity, and establishing additional conflict-of-interest and ethics provisions for federal employees and the White House.

The bill requires the President, the Vice President, and certain candidates for those offices to disclose 10 years of tax returns.

source

You can see the many ways this law, which must be infuriating to Trump himself (fucking tax returns… they never fucking stop…). Regulating campaign finance would disadvantage the very wealthy donors currently able to finance campaigns secretly and dictate all political outcomes. Just the suggestion that the Supreme Court adopt a code of ethics for its “justices”– what a maddeningly insane act of radical hubris!

This law is someone like Charles Koch’s nightmare. Koch, a true Nazi bastard (check out his long, ugly life story) is an incarnation of evil in this world, like Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, and a hand full of their refined and autocratic ilk. All of these men would rather see a second bloody civil war, and a mountain range of American corpses, than stand idly by for the implementation of this kind of strangling majoritarian tyranny.

The current Senate rules allows a party in power to pass any budget deal it wants on a straight party line vote, by a procedure called Reconciliation, 51-50 and done, send the law to the president for signing.

For every other piece of legislation that must pass the Senate on the way to the president for signing: the filibuster ends it.

Note: McConnell ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, after blocking a record shattering number of Obama’s nominees (more than the total under all previous administrations) with filibusters, forcing the Democrats to end filibuster for presidential nominees (excluding Supreme Court, which Mitch promptly changed when he needed to).

Current Senate rules allow debate on any bill on the floor of the Senate to be killed by the filibuster, an increasingly permissive parliamentary procedure. Under current rules, any Senator of the minority party can block debate by registering an intention to filibuster — it is now, unlike only a few years back, the intention to filibuster that triggers the filibuster, there is no need for further action. All debate is immediately silenced. Once this minority party senator invokes the filibuster it requires 60 votes with the majority to allow any debate in the Senate. No further action need be taken by the minority of at least 41 who want to block debate.

Trump’s party leader in the Senate (a frequent target of Trump abuse since he made critical remarks about the leader’s riot on January 6) has announced that his focus is 100% on doing everything possible to hamstring President Biden. McConnell is betting Trump’s party will love to hear this, since MAGA nation believes that Biden is an illegitimate cheater president, a puppet of radicals, an enemy to be stopped in his sleepy tracks. There is no question that the Trump party will not tolerate debate on any federal bill related to voting (which is a pure States’ Rights issue, as the Civil War proved… to continue the incoherent MAGA/Koch narrative hewn to religiously whenever advantageous).

There will be a filibuster of any bill proposing to restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965, whether its named for John Lewis, Jeff Sessions, Orville Faubus or anyone else. From the right-wing’s point of view, re-litigating that lost civil rights war would be a grave mistake, one that should be prevented by any means necessary. Government tyranny must not be allowed, except on the state level, perhaps (see, again, The Civil War).

The filibuster is currently effortless, available to any Senator with the touch of a smart phone screen and perfect for blocking all debate on S1, formerly HR1, the proposed For the People Act of 2021.

Currently any Republican Senator can block debate on this crucial federal election rights law, by sending an email announcing that he intends to filibuster. Once that email is received there will be no discussion of a law considered by 60% of the nation as necessary to preserve democracy, unless 60% of the minority-skewed Senate votes to end the filibuster.

Under current parliamentary rules in the Senate (which can be changed at any time by the majority party, 51-50, as Mitch did recently for Supreme Court nominees), the For the People Act of 2021 will never come to the Senate floor for debate. What do Kyrsten “Saucy thumbs down on minimum wage” Sinema and Joe Asshat Manchin not get about this?

You can read all about the For the People Act of 2021 here, at Congress.gov.

Of course, the bill is currently the hostage of a radical anti-democratic party who currently has only one trick, the same trick as its current leader’s only trick, “doubling down”. A lie is good enough, they all seem to agree, if all you want to do is win. It’s a proven winner — since at least 1932.

You really can’t make this shit up

This is from the DOJ press release of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea following the “Filing of Eight Count Criminal Information Alleging Concealment of More Than $4 Million in Unreported Income, $280,000 in Unlawful Campaign Contributions.” The details of how they orchestrated the campaign contributions crime are truly byzantine, involving the machinations of at least one unnamed David Pecker.

On June 16, 2015, Individual-1 began his presidential campaign.  While COHEN continued to work at the Company and did not have a formal title with the campaign, he had a campaign email address and, at various times, advised the campaign, including on matters of interest to the press, and made televised and media appearances on behalf of the campaign. 

In August 2015, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Corporation-1, a media company that  owns, among other things, a popular tabloid magazine  (“Chairman-1” and “Magazine-1,” respectively”), in coordination with COHEN and one or more members of the campaign, offered to help deal with negative stories about Individual-1’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.  Chairman-1 agreed to keep COHEN apprised of any such negative stories.

Consistent with the agreement described above, Corporation-1 advised COHEN of negative stories during the course of the campaign, and COHEN, with the assistance of Corporation-1, was able to arrange for the purchase of two stories so as to suppress them and prevent them from influencing the election.

First, in June 2016, a model and actress (“Woman-1”) began attempting to sell her story of her alleged extramarital affair with Individual-1 that had taken place in 2006 and 2007, knowing the story would be of considerable value because of the election.  Woman-1 retained an attorney (“Attorney-1”), who in turn contacted the editor-in-chief of Magazine-1 (“Editor-1”), and offered to sell Woman-1’s story to Magazine-1.  Chairman-1 and Editor-1 informed COHEN of the story. At COHEN’s urging and subject to COHEN’s promise that Corporation-1 would be reimbursed, Editor-1 ultimately began negotiating for the purchase of the story.

On August 5, 2016, Corporation-1 entered into an agreement with Woman-1 to acquire her “limited life rights” to the story of her relationship with “any then-married man,” in exchange for $150,000 and a commitment to feature her on two magazine covers and publish more than 100 magazine articles authored by her.  Despite the cover and article features to the agreement, its principal purpose, as understood by those involved, including COHEN, was to suppress Woman-1’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.       

Between late August 2016 and September 2016, COHEN agreed with Chairman-1 to assign the rights to the non-disclosure portion of Corporation-1’s agreement with Woman-1 to COHEN for $125,000.  COHEN incorporated a shell entity called “Resolution Consultants LLC” for use in the transaction.  Both Chairman-1 and COHEN ultimately signed the agreement, and a consultant for Corporation-1, using his own shell entity, provided COHEN with an invoice for the payment of $125,000.  However, in early October 2016, after the assignment agreement was signed but before COHEN had paid the $125,000, Chairman-1 contacted COHEN and told him, in substance, that the deal was off and that COHEN should tear up the assignment agreement.   

Second, on October 8, 2016, an agent for an adult film actress (“Woman-2”) informed Editor-1 that Woman-2 was willing to make public statements and confirm on the record her alleged past affair with Individual-1.  Chairman-1 and Editor-1 then contacted COHEN and put him in touch with Attorney-1, who was also representing Woman-2.  Over the course of the next few days, COHEN negotiated a $130,000 agreement with Attorney-1 to himself purchase Woman-2’s silence, and received a signed confidential settlement agreement and a separate side letter agreement from Attorney-1. 

COHEN did not immediately execute the agreement, nor did he pay Woman-2.  On the evening of October 25, 2016, with no deal with Woman-2 finalized, Attorney-1 told Editor-1 that Woman-2 was close to completing a deal with another outlet to make her story public.  Editor-1, in turn, texted COHEN that “[w]e have to coordinate something on the matter [Attorney-1 is] calling you about or it could look awfully bad for everyone.”  Chairman-1 and Editor-1 then called COHEN through an encrypted telephone application.  COHEN agreed to make the payment, and then called Attorney-1 to finalize the deal.

The next day, on October 26, 2016, COHEN emailed an incorporating service to obtain the corporate formation documents for another shell corporation, Essential Consultants LLC, which COHEN had incorporated a few days prior.  Later that afternoon, COHEN drew down $131,000 from the fraudulently obtained HELOC and requested that it be deposited into a bank account COHEN had just opened in the name of Essential Consultants.  The next morning, on October 27, 2016, COHEN went to Bank-3 and wired approximately $130,000 from Essential Consultants to Attorney-1.  On the bank form to complete the wire, COHEN falsely indicated that the “purpose of wire being sent” was “retainer.”  On November 1, 2016, COHEN received from Attorney-1 copies of the final, signed confidential settlement agreement and side letter agreement.

COHEN caused and made the payments described herein in order to influence the 2016 presidential election.  In so doing, he coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments.  As a result of the payments solicited and made by COHEN, neither Woman-1 nor Woman-2 spoke to the press prior to the election.

In January 2017, COHEN in seeking reimbursement for election-related expenses, presented executives of the Company with a copy of a bank statement from the Essential Consultants bank account, which reflected the $130,000 payment COHEN had made to the bank account of Attorney-1 in order to keep Woman-2 silent in advance of the election, plus a $35 wire fee, adding, in handwriting, an additional “$50,000.”  The $50,000 represented a claimed payment for “tech services,” which in fact related to work COHEN had solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign.  COHEN added these amounts to a sum of $180,035.  After receiving this document, executives of the Company “grossed up” for tax purposes COHEN’s requested reimbursement of $180,000 to $360,000, and then added a bonus of $60,000 so that COHEN would be paid $420,000 in total.  Executives of the Company also determined that the $420,000 would be paid to COHEN in monthly amounts of $35,000 over the course of 12 months, and that COHEN should send invoices for these payments.        

On February 14, 2017, COHEN sent an executive of the Company (“Executive-1”) the first of his monthly invoices, requesting “[p]ursuant to [a] retainer agreement, . . . payment for services rendered for the months of January and February, 2017.”  The invoice listed $35,000 for each of those two months.  Executive-1 forwarded the invoice to another executive of the Company (“Executive-2”) the same day by email, and it was approved.  Executive-1 forwarded that email to another employee at the Company, stating: “Please pay from the Trust. Post to legal expenses. Put ‘retainer for the months of January and February 2017’ in the description.”

Throughout 2017, COHEN sent to one or more representatives of the Company monthly invoices, which stated, “Pursuant to the retainer agreement, kindly remit payment for services rendered for” the relevant month in 2017, and sought $35,000 per month.  The Company accounted for these payments as legal expenses.  In truth and in fact, there was no such retainer agreement, and the monthly invoices COHEN submitted were not in connection with any legal services he had provided in 2017.

During 2017, pursuant to the invoices described above, COHEN received monthly $35,000 reimbursement checks, totaling $420,000.

  

source 

You can’t touch me for any of this, FEC deadlocked! LOSERS!

Response to a thoughtful comment

I get very few comments here, I don’t know why. When I get a comment I always reply to it, as we all should when someone takes the time to express themselves to us.

I got a comment earlier today from Pasco Cruz, in reference to my recent post about the Federal Election Commission’s 2-2 vote not to prosecute Trump for the campaign finance violation his former attorney pled guilty to. Pasco wrote:

Non disclosure agreements are in no way illegal and the prosecutors literally made-up a charge that didn’t exist of “interfering with an election”. Any other lawyer should have mopped the floor with that case and thrown it right into the dumpster where it belonged, but Cohen was dumb enough to hire and trust Clinton operative and super slimey attorney Lanny Davis who was clearly working against Cohens best interests and helped to railroad him in an ruined his life all to try to make Trump look bad in the end, which really didn’t even work since Stormy Daniel’s has since come out and said she never even had sex with Trump.

There are legitimate things to rag on Trump about, but this story was made for low IQ simpletons to follow and get hyped up about. Anyone who still talks about it and cannot see it for the sloppy political hit job it was, is pathetic.

Fair enough. I took a moment to see what was on the DOJ website about the Michael Cohen plea, what the actual charges he pled guilty to were, and replied:

Pasco:

Thank you for this well-written and authoritative-sounding comment. The Cohen hush money payments to Stormy Daniels (“Woman 1”) and a former Playboy model (“Woman 2”) were found to be a violation of campaign finance laws, and Cohen was prosecuted by Jeff Sessions’ DOJ. To dismiss Cohen’s conviction for “interfering with an election” as a political hit job to hurt Trump, requires leaving out many important details. Cohen pled guilty to:

tax evasion, making false statements to a federally-insured bank, and campaign finance violations. The plea was entered followed the filing of an eight-count criminal information, which alleged that COHEN concealed more than $4 million in personal income from the IRS, made false statements to a federally-insured financial institution in connection with a $500,000 home equity loan,

and, in 2016, caused $280,000 in payments to be made to silence two women who otherwise planned to speak publicly about their alleged affairs with a presidential candidate, thereby intending to influence the 2016 presidential election.

(the whole DOJ plea announcement, including all the sordid details of the campaign finance violation [which involve the National Inquirer and David Fucking Pecker], is at https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/michael-cohen-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-eight-counts-including-criminal-tax)

Of course it is legal, as you say, in most cases, to pay someone you had sex with to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The payment itself was not the crime — it was paying them as part of a political campaign to hide facts that would have certainly hurt the candidate.

If two women Trump paid (through Cohen) in October 2016 for their legally-binding promise to remain silent had been free to talk publicly about having extramarital sex with Trump right before the election, he likely would not have won the Electoral College vote. Their legally enforceable silence had great political value to Trump, well in excess of the $280,000 he had Cohen pay them.

As you say, there are legitimate things to rag on Trump about, and one of them was his deliberate delay in appointing a quorum on the FEC, disabling the agency that oversees campaign finance violations. Trump left the FEC without any ability to investigate or enforce campaign finance law, after Cohen pled guilty to campaign finance violations he committed at the request of Individual One (Trump).

The recent 2-2 vote among Trump’s December 2020 FEC appointees, the recusal of one and abstention of another, probably tells us more than we’ll ever know about the political fix at the FEC that kept Trump safe from being indicted in connection with that crime.

Peace and keep reading!

Looking on the Bright Side

A friend, depressed by the depressing political news that is fed to us steadily, asked me to only send her news items that contained a ray of hope. I mustered a little hope, which I will describe below.

It may seem only a small glimmer of a bright side, though all hope can be seen that way. This bright side could be the cusp of a political tipping point in our violent clash of cultures. It is nice to imagine that our Department of Justice will now pursue justice, cast a careful eye over the evidence of the Mueller and subsequent Senate investigations. A legal examination of a series of very openly transactional quid pro quos is certainly in order.

It is worth pointing out again, humans are not often ruled by reason or logic. If we were, it would be hard for nationalist racism and fascist logic to prevail in so many countries worldwide. There would be no debate, in a reasonable world, about the right of everyone to live free of terror and violence. In most places that’s a proposition you will need to fight about.

Of course, we have never lived in a calm or reasonable world, and those of us who hope for rational public debate that ends with more fairness for everyone will be waiting a long time. Here in the US we’re at the mercy of a no-compromise/filibuster political party that is anti-debate and has the means to stop any important political discussion before it happens. That we may not succeed in convincing adversaries this fierce of anything they don’t already believe doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to act.

We need to keep in mind that it is impossible to convince anyone of anything just by clearly presenting the facts. The facts never add up to much, if you already hold a strong opinion about the matter.

At a time when a lie carries as much weight as an indisputable truth, and Big Lies have often changed the course of history, we must be creative in how we present our accursed “facts.” We have to take care to avoid sounding smugly superior (as the rest of this sentence no doubt fails to do) to those who fervently worship at the altar of powerful emotion, low-information voters of unshakably held opinions, based strictly on faith, which they believe to be infinitely superior to fallible human “rationality”.

The biggest obstacle to convincing anyone of things that are otherwise true and urgent (like the need to take energetic action to avoid total climate catastrophe) is the ease of spreading even the most easily disprovable lies in siloed, algorithm-driven echo chambers on “social media”. One of our two major parties is now, officially, the Party of the Big Lie (Trump, the loser, actually won — in a landslide), at a time when spreading a lie to millions who will never see the lie contradicted has never been easier.

The most important measure to reverse this pernicious, increasingly deterministic trend, is holding liars accountable for spreading lies. There is currently no price to be paid for spreading even the most obvious lies. In fact, in Trump’s GOP, aggressively promoting a featured lie is a certain path to promotion. See how quickly anyone who calls out the lie is attacked and unanimously canceled by quick voice vote.

There is a simple test for weighing the value of absolute “free speech,” including demonstrable lies, against speech that should be actionable in court — the harm that the false speech causes. It is the same test applied to all other free speech [2].

Under our current law you can’t shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theatre when there is no fire, because a panicked stampede is predictable if you do. Free speech does not protect an American’s right to use words to inflame hatred in a way that predictably leads to violence. Violence-provoking lies should be treated the same way in the on-line world.

How about this for a single, absolute ground rule:

promoting, supporting or endorsing an incendiary lie over “social media,”

AND

refusing to publicly retract the lie when confronted with evidence that it is a lie, and called on it by the platform’s monitors, means that you forfeit your right to use the platform.

Period.  Sounds fucking simple enough, no?

Of course there will be violent contention about what is “incendiary” as well as the definitions of “promoting” “endorsing” and any other words chosen.

It is often easier to see the incendiary nature of a lie after the fact, looking at events in light of the lie. That’s why Twitter banned Trump for life after his long, lie-filled speech on January 6th sent thousands down to the Capitol to violently interrupt the counting and final certification of Electoral College votes against Trump. When Trump eventually went on Twitter to disperse his mob, he told them they were right to be angry, that they’d been cheated, the election stolen from them all, that they were special, that he loved them, to never forget this day, but that it was time for them to go home in peace.

Twitter immediately did what it probably should have done years earlier — took away the platform Trump used on January 6th to remind rioters in the Capitol that Mike Pence had betrayed them. If they’d found Pence, and strung him up, would our discussion today be much different? Hard to know, though I think probably not, at least among Trump die-hards, now the dominant strain of the GOP.

The full damage of a lie is not when it is first told. The real harm sets in each time the lie is replicated, insisted on, every time someone else is converted to belief in something that is destructively false.

The predictable growth cycle of a lie is its most dangerous aspect.

Justifying the January 6 riot at the Capitol requires endless new lies — BLM did it, antifa faked it by posing as a MAGA mob, there was no riot, only Trump supporters died (so where’s the harm? That one trampled to death? shit happens) the cops were lying, only a few of the 140 “injured” were seriously hurt, the “lost eye” story is bullshit, the cop who was “killed” died of a natural heart attack, the videos of the rampage were fake, the protesters were law-abiding, nonviolent tourists, for the sake of our country we need to just move on, there’s no need for a Commission, radical Democrats are just trying to get revenge out of blind hatred of Trump, like they always do, and so on.


While we live in this Age of Trump, the age of wildly insane lies taken, literally, as gospel, the only good political news I see at the moment is the heavy shit storm gathering over the head of the defeated former president who insists he actually won in a landslide. The evidence of Trump’s lifelong pattern and practice of cheating and obstructing justice is rapidly mounting. His day of reckoning in several different courts of law approaches.

I don’t see how he beats the rap in the upcoming Georgia criminal case, where he violated the election meddling statute with great thoroughness and specificity– and is recorded doing so. His best hope may be a stand-off between Ron DeSantis’s Florida troops and federal forces in an interstate extradition battle.

A criminal conviction and more major losses in civil court (where cases are decided, 99% of the time, based on the evidence), plus the conclusions of the January 6 Commission,  should loosen Trump’s death-grip on all but the diehard 39% of his cult of personality. Full public disclosure of the extent of Trump’s corruption and contempt for the law will give his many mostly silent, terrified enemies on the right a shot of courage.

Revelations from the likely Rudy Giuliani prosecution should have a similar effect, even in our arational nation. I think bad news in court for Trump could sway many “swing voters” away from his party.   When he had an attorney general who would constantly fix things for him, Trump didn’t need to worry about the law coming down on him. Now he has great reason to worry about the law finally catching up with him, after a long life of getting away with whatever he wanted because he’s super smart, and a big star, and, when you’re like that, you know, they let you do it.

The pieces seem to be nicely lined up for an obstruction of justice case: 

Former White House Counsel Don McGahn will finally testify under oath that Trump asked him to create false records of their conversation about firing Mueller. Having Trump’s first White House lawyer testify that Trump told him to create a false record is a firm building block for an obstruction of justice prosecution.

Trump’s most competent and accomplished enabler, Bagpiper Bill Barr, the AG who advised Trump to have his people defy all subpoenas and muzzle critics, is in the federal court record as a man judges found “lacks candor”. Three federal judges, in three different cases, concluded that Barr’s rationalizations were not credible and his legal reasoning was in the service of partisan politics. Barr was most recently found “disingenuous” when he tried to illegally conceal other records, falsely classified as “deliberative memos” drafted the day he misleadingly told America and the world that Mueller’s report had found basically nothing on Trump.

Barr’s demonstrated lack of candor, and his relentless. public re-election campaign-related criminal investigation into the the origins of the Mueller “witch hunt” require a DOJ re-examination, based on the actual documents. The same goes for Barr’s rationale for falsely announcing that the Mueller Report basically exonerated Trump for both criminal conspiracy with a foreign power and obstruction of justice. Barr’s conduct was an integral, and crucial, part of that obstruction of justice.

Barr’s repeated untruthfulness, including his lies about the secret Mueller “memo” he classified as supposedly used in his deliberations to declare Trump “exonerated” as he’d promised to do before Trump hired him, will come into play in the obstruction of justice case against Trump.

Add to that all the evidence that has come out since Mueller concluded he had insufficient evidence to find “criminal conspiracy” between Trump’s campaign and the Russians. We have more details about Trump’s corrupt quid pro quo pardons to Manafort and Stone, both of whom lied to Mueller for Trump’s sake, to cover up their closely coordinated work with the Russians. The secret internal polling data that Manafort gave Putin (via Kilimnik) steered Russian influence efforts toward American voters in close districts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three states that gave Trump his Electoral College victory [2].

There are a hundred other related details including Trump’s partially successful attempt to disrupt a joint session of Congress (mission accomplished) to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the election he still claims he won in a landslide (70% of Republicans polled believe Trump won in a landslide).  How about his enlistment of Republican allies like Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy, each of whom made pilgrimages to meet with him in Florida in a show of loyalty, to promote his Big Lie and continue to obstruct formation of a January 6 Commission?

Truly sickening that it is taking so long, but such is life in a democracy hovering on the brink of extinction. It takes time for a prosecutor to make a strong, airtight case ready to be tried in court. Hopefully the rule of law will prevail, before it’s too late for law.

You people are such fucking losers.

[1]

outside of the unlimited dark money “free speech” of corporate persons, of course.

[2] Remember this?

The most important states, though, were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she’d have won the electoral vote, too.

source

Heritage

Voting fraud conspiracist and Heritage Foundation (Mike Pence’s current employer) stalwart Hans von fucking Spakovsky rears his ugly head:

And in a March article for the New York Times, Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein outlined the role of Heritage Action in Georgia’s and Arizona’s voting restrictions, noting that at least 23 of the proposed state bills that dealt with voting had language that looked like that of Heritage.

They also wrote that Heritage plans to spend $24 million to change voting laws in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin before the 2022 election, and that the person behind the Heritage voting policies is Hans von Spakovsky, who mainstreamed the idea of voter fraud in the Republican Party, although experts agree it is vanishingly rare.

source

Hans von fucking Spakovsky [1]. Of whom a judge wrote, after dismissing his testimony as the biased presentation of a partisan activist posing as an expert witness:

The Judge, Julie Robinson, wrote von Spakovsky’s statements were premised on several misleading and unsupported examples and included false assertions. She said his generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws. Von Spakovsky maintains a database of what he calls some 1,300 cases of vote fraud

[since 1982, yo!, putting the prevalence of proven voter fraud in the 0.0001% category– ed].

source

A giant think tank that writes conservative laws that are introduced by party members in 47 states is a vital part of that political party. The highly partisan nonprofit Heritage Foundation (authors of the original Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as I recall) once again rolls out the discredited lies of von Spakovsky, who has been keeping the massive Heritage Foundation database of electoral fraud going back to 1982 (hundreds of cases!!! more than a billion votes, yes, but HUNDREDS of cases!!) to justify enhanced protections for “electoral integrity”.

These new Heritage Foundation approved laws make all the changes to state voting that Trump and the RNC went to court seeking last time. State and federal courts prevented GOP state legislatures from implementing measures to make it harder to vote the last time around. That’s why the Republican controlled states are busily tightening up their voting laws, to ensure minority freedom from majoritarian tyranny!

Lest we forget, Joe Manchin, the Voting Rights Act you support strengthening had its heart cut out by 5 Heritage Foundation embracing Supreme Court conservatives who overruled President George W. Bush, who had immediately signed the extension of the law that passed 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate.

Although there was no hint of this overwhelming bipartisan support in John Roberts’ infamous Shelby County decision, as he struck down the law citing lack of evidence of ongoing voter suppression, there had been 21 hearings where 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under pre-clearance were considered before the law was unanimously reauthorized by the Senate. As Dubya said (from RBG’s dissent) when signing the extension of the 1965 law:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nice try, Mr. Manchin, but you already face opposition from the Heritage Foundation and a couple of their senators on the other side of the aisle.

Hey, just because challenging drop-boxes, mail-in voting, illegally giving water to people waiting on line to vote, reducing voting hours to end at 5 pm and so on didn’t work to stop Trump’s defeat in 2020 doesn’t mean that implementing these measures into state laws won’t work like a miracle in 2022 and beyond!

These right-wing bastards are nothing if not persistent, and they fight, wielding every weaponizable lie, with the desperate fury of a dying breed.

Hans von fucking Spakovsky, former head of Trump’s secret electoral strategy conference of Republican state officials. I figured it was only a matter of time before he crawled back out from under his rock. Let’s see that handsome face one more time, Hans.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 20201016_031538.jpg

[1] As I wrote a few months back (before the 2020 election):

But here’s the really creepy part. A right-wing lawyer working for the Heritage Foundation is advising a group of Republican state attorneys general on how to use disproven legal theories about electoral fraud to take control of state elections and “safeguard the integrity of the upcoming election” to support the president and his followers. This man, Hans von Spakovsky, is the Heritage Foundation’s expert on voter fraud:

HANS VON SPAKOVSKY: All we have to do is look at the many cases, proven cases of absentee ballot fraud to understand that the problem with absentee or mail-in ballots is there the ballots that are most vulnerable to fraud, to being stolen. And they also…

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: Hans von Spakovsky who is well known to ProPublica’s Jessica Huseman.

JESSICA HUSEMAN: Hans von Spakovsky is a longtime voter fraud conspiracy theorist, and he got his start like many people who are now doing strange things in the world of voting in the 2000 election.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: After that, he went to work for the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.

He eventually wound up at the Heritage Foundation where he became their resident expert in making thinly-sourced voter fraud claims.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: In 2018, von Spakovsky was called in to be an expert witness in a federal trial over a Kansas law that required proof of citizenship in order to vote. Von Spakovsky was there to present data on noncitizen voting.


JESSICA HUSEMAN: The judge basically dismissed all of his testimony, called it cherry picked, called it biased. Said that he was more of an activist rather than an unbiased expert witness. And her opinion basically said that she gave his testimony no real credence in her decision.


ANDREA BERNSTEIN: The judge, Julie Robinson, wrote von Spakovsky’s statements were premised on several misleading and unsupported examples and included false assertions. She said his generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws. Von Spakovsky maintains a database of what he calls some 1,300 cases of vote fraud.

So, naturally, he is now working behind the scenes for Mr. Trump’s re-election. He has apparently been hosting Republican-only strategy meetings for state government officials involved in overseeing the 2020 election. The frequency of these meetings is increasing as the already contested election approaches, and officials of the Trump administration are involved in the strategizing.

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: Von Spakovsky’s meetings were attended by state, secretaries of state. These officials are often partisan but their job is to ensure the integrity of their state’s elections.


MIKE SPIES: The purpose of the meeting was essentially to sort of jointly strategize.


ANDREA BERNSTEIN: And, again, only Republican officials were invited to the meetings. Up until 2020, they met basically a couple of times a year in Washington. Republican congressional staffers sometimes came and on at least one occasion so did officials from the Justice Department, Trump appointees.