Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

Crime and Punishment?

The list of the Orange Polyp’s crimes, even just since the end of the tempestuous four years of his Thousand Year Reich, is impressive.  Because he’s done them publicly, and never been held accountable for any violation of law, he’s pushed back the line on what a president can “legally” do.   

We easily forget that at one time a president publicly telling all subpoenaed witnesses into his misdeeds to just not show up, to defy legal subpoenas and fight them in court until the clock runs out, would have been grounds for obstruction of justice charges.   The media hardly blinks when it is revealed that Trump took classified documents out of the White House (and destroyed many others during his tumultuous term) when he sulked off to Florida, something that would previously have been front-page news day after day, amid calls for a Special Prosecutor.

Recall that before his first impeachment he made it “normal” to intimidate a witness testifying in Congress (in an inquiry into what became his first impeachment) in real time, as she was testifying.   “Marie Yavonovich is going to go through some things.”   That was after Rudy, working with buddies Lev and Igor (both quietly being prosecuted, or perhaps already having taken pleas) orchestrated the corrupt outster of the sitting US Ambassador to Ukraine, a diplomat with impeccable credentials, amid threats on her life. They did this as part of a plan to get Ukrainian president Zelensky to announce a fake investigation into Biden’s son, pursuant to a perfect phone call to him.  At orders of Trump, who really didn’t know anything about it, but Rudy had told him “Igor says this bitch has to go” and Trumpie gave his hyenas the word to smear Yavonovich and then he fired her.  In the preceding couple of sentences alone there are probably several different felonies, for an ordinary president.

The delay in prosecuting Trump for anything (although the legal walls do seem to be closing in on America’s classiest former president) is frustrating, with all the crimes he appears to have committed just since he lost the election in 2020.  The only reassuring legal take I heard was from former DOJ prosecutor Joyce Vance explaining how long it takes to build a racketeering case under RICO that can’t  be undone on appeal.  RICO allows prosecutors to show that a mob boss making seemingly innocuous statements like “things could get bad for her” is the same as an order to do bad things to her. It is apparently not hard to indict and convict under RICO, but, according to Vance, it’s also not hard for a team of smart lawyers to get a RICO conviction dismissed on a hundred technicalities.  So maybe Merrick Garland really intends to bring an airtight RICO prosecution against MAGA man and his capos, in which case, we’re only about a year or two away from a big announcement.   Hopefully Garland won’t be announcing it from the glitzy new Trump Auschwitz.

As Lyin’ Ted snarled at the mild-mannered Garland in a Senate hearing: what’s the country coming to when you can’t even give an innocent, Constitutionally protected Nazi salute to a bunch of liberal kikes and woke n-words at a School Board meeting?

through-lines with some of the best people

Follow this brief illustrated timeline, if you will.    It starts with Michael Flynn, US General, retired, Trump’s first National Security Advisor.   Trump fired him 22 days in for lying to Mike Pence about illegal contacts with Russia, lies he later repeated to the FBI, as he had previously done on his security clearance filings that neglected to mention he was on the payroll of Turkey and Russia.  Trump asked James Comey to do him a favor and give this good guy a pass by not investigating him, Comey refused and Trump kicked his ass to the curb, leading to the Mueller Witch HUNT.   

Stephen Miller, hateful troll, was one of very few Trump insiders who was there at the president’s side the entire four years of Trump’s Thousand Year Administration.

Bannon, Trump’s master tactician, was fired for getting too much attention for being “Trump’s brain”– the boss had already revealed that the way to be the smartest man in the room was to hire the best people, as long as they were dumber than you.   

Bill Barr was an exception, being very smart, and something of a magician, he made the damning conclusions, and the many incriminating details, of the Mueller Report vanish into thin air.  Among other feats of legerdemain he also did his damnedest to orchestrate a lawyerly, shamelessly partisan withdrawal of Flynn’s guilty plea for perjury, before the Big Guy pardoned Flynn outright.  In the end, Barr bailed as the roof was blowing off the booby hatch, and it was another Trump-appointee,

Jefferey Clark, who stepped up to take the reins and promote any lie Trump wanted on DOJ letterhead, to create pressure to throw out the votes in states Trump lost.  Clark later had a few months of projectile diarrhea that made it impossible for him, for medical reasons, to appear before the House Select Committee on the Trump riot to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.   

Rudy, one of Trump’s best buddies, who brought several of the post election Stop the Steal court cases that Trump lost, had previously traveled to Ukraine to meet Paul Manafort’s old friends among the Russian oligarch-connected Ukrainians, and with Lev and Igor, Mafia Rave and Fraud Guarantee, dig up some smut on Biden’s surviving son.  His lawyers are currently negotiating the scope of his voluntary cooperation with the ongoing House witch hunt.

Convicted felon Paul Manafort knew every corrupt official and oligarch in Ukraine and Russia from his years grooming the corrupt, Russian oligarch-backed Viktor Yanukovych to become president of Ukraine. As the GOP-chaired Senate Committee Report revealed, Manafort worked closely with Konstantin Kilimnik, Putin’s guy, during his time as Trump’s campaign manager.   Roger “Ratfucker” Stone, another pardoned felon, worked closely with Oath Keepers now under indictment for seditious conspiracy, among other things they guarded his grotesque person on January 5th and 6th.   The baseless Democrat [sic] witch hunt continues!   

the third guy here, also pardoned by Trump, is Jared Kushner’s criminal dad

Meanwhile this smiling John McEntee fellow was promoted from Trump’s bag man, body man, to Czar of loyalty to Trump, working closely with the wife of Clarence Thomas to root out insufficiently loyal Republicans throughout the West Wing and beyond. 

In happier days, and for most of Trump’s term, he was well protected by the powerful, unscrupulous Senate majority leader, now, like so many others Trump feels have betrayed him, his enemy.

In the end, he was left with crackpot theories about the Twelfth Amendment and the Hail Mary of the “Green Bay Sweep” (and coordinated riot) to overturn the 2020 presidential election (oddly, all the other Republicans elected on the same ballots were immune to the massive, coordinated, bipartisan anti-Trump fraud), this guy invoked his Fifth Amendment right countless times and is fighting the release of thousands of possibly incriminating emails.  Here’s the latest on him, from Heather Cox Richardson:

Lawyer John Eastman, who produced the infamous memo with a blueprint for Pence to overturn the election, has claimed that he cannot produce the documents the January 6th committee has subpoenaed because of attorney-client privilege. The judge overseeing the case has ordered him to document those attorney-client relationships by February 22.

Bill Barr left in place the stern-looking, arch conservative, Christian dominionist DOJ Special Counsel John Durham (who Trump praises as “Robert Durham”) to get to the corrupt oringes of the Mueller investigation total witch hunt. Durham has been at it longer than Mueller was (traveling with Barr to Italy, at one point, in search of smoking gun proof of the distractionary partisan witch hunt theory), and had found approximately zilch, though FOX and friends are running hard with the story of his single seeming revelation, a shaky theory about Hillary spying on Donald in the White House before he was even president (and they’re in a hurry to exploit this “bombshell,” ignored by the leftist mass media, before that indictment likely gets dismissed next week). Why this right wing fucknut is still on the “case” is one of the enduring mysteries of American politics. 

Bannon was in the Willard Hotel war room on January 5th and 6th, back in the command center of Trump’s brain, with Rudy, pardoned felon Bernard Kerik, Fifth Amendment and shaky attorney-client privilege citer John Eastman and some of the other best people. 

And Mike Flynn, the good guy who started the whole shit show (after leading chants of “Lock Her Up!” at the Republican National Convention back in the day), has not been restored to active service for the court martial the Q-Anon general so richly deserves (and which Glenn Kirschner made a strong case for).  He’s out there exercising his First Amendment right to advocate martial law, the essential white Christianity of this exceptional nation, the truth of Q’s droppings, to talk absolute shit about whatever pops into his head.   

God bless these United Shaysssh.

A Broken clock tells the right time twice a day

Conservative operative and former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, one of the lawyers who advised Pence not to go along with Trump’s crackpot plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election, wrote a powerful piece about what Congress must do to close loopholes in the Electoral Count Act before Trumpists can drive a caravan of trucks through it in 2024. An excellent analysis of the law and the vividly demonstrated determination of the Clear and Present Danger to use any means necessary to aggrandize himself, get back into power and stay out of prison.

Luttig also wrote an op ed in the New York Times while “Bagpiper” Bill Barr was trying to dismiss Mike Flynn’s guilty plea to being a serial perjurer and a disgrace to his oath to the Constitution. Luttig defended Barr, and Flynn, and Judge Rao, author of the rabidly partisan pro-Trump decision (overturned on appeal) and everybody else connected to protecting the fearless leader and his loyalists.

He seems to have changed his tune a bit recently, in light of Trump’s increasingly unhinged lashing out at democracy itself, after inciting his January 6th riot. The other day Luttig expressed his changed view, quoted by Heather Cox Richardson:

Today, former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit J. Michael Luttig, a Republican, said: “For the past six years, I have watched and listened in disgust that not one single leader of ours with the moral authority, the courage, and the will to stand up and say: ‘No, this is not who we are, this is not what America is, and it’s not what we want to be,’ has done so.”

Anyway, here’s his compelling op-ed, something that lawmakers of both parties should read and immediately take action on — The Conservative Case for Avoiding A Repeat of January 6th,

where the facts and the law take us

Merrick Garland promised on January 5th, 2022 to follow the facts and the law wherever they take us, excluding no one from the operation of our laws by reason of power or wealth. Glenn Kirschner lays out a grievous tale of two arguably identical crimes, one petty (carrying a three month prison sentence) the other massive, pervasive, ongoing and part of a long pattern of corruption and obstruction of justice– with profound national security implications.

In the first case, prompt prosecution, conviction and sentencing. In the second case, not so much…

Here’s Glenn, in the description of his most recent youTube video presenting the law as it regards the mad former president:

In an astounding double-standard of justice, the Department of Justice issues a press release today, February 11, 2022, announcing that a federal employee named Asia Janay Lavarello removed classified documents and was just sentenced to 3 months in prison, whereas Trump removed classified documents (documents that were classified “top secret” as compared to those improperly handled by Ms. Lavarello, which were classified as “secret”), yet Trump is not held to account.

Here is a step-by-step comparison of the two cases, showing how there are two standards of justice at work in our nation.

Note: in the video, I mispronounce Ms. Lavarello’s name as “Laravello.” Apologies to Ms. Lavarello.

Random comment, on target

Sloppy Steve Bannon advocates flooding The zone with bullshit, so much shit is spraying out of a high-powered hose at all times that nobody can ever orient themself to the attack which is ongoing and relentless. Roger Stone is a practitioner of flooding zone with bullshit, misdirection and weaponized lies, as was Trump’s original mentor, Roy Cohn, master of the tabloids, a homophobic horn dog who currently sits on the right hand of Satan.

Of course both Putin and Trump confiscated and destroyed all notes of their meeting in Helsinki. I don’t know why they wouldn’t, I mean, I don’t know why they would. You continually flood the zone with incoherent blather, and then destroy the evidence, of course, I don’t know why you would, I mean, I don’t know why you wouldn’t. Obviously.

Sloppy Steve, visionary global fascist, still chief strategist of Trumpism

February 14th 2022, Glenn Kirschner, former federal prosecutor reminds us, is the statute of limitations deadline for filing obstruction of justice charges based on the Mueller report which documented at least ten fairly clear-cut instances of obstruction by the Orange Polyp. The obstruction case about which Mueller wrote that it was unfair to accuse the president of while he couldn’t actually charge him, but that he also could not exonerate him for. This is what Bill Barr judged to be complete and total exoneration of Trump.

Seeing as Trump’s obstruction of justice is seamless and ongoing, using legal, quasi-legal and extralegal means, as illustrated most recently in his ignoring the Presidential Records Act (after ascertaining, no doubt, that there is no real penalty for violating it, with the usual caveat that covering up a crime is a separate felony) it would seem the statute of limitations should not be a factor in charging him with obstruction of justice, Merrick.

Someone who has never been held accountable for anything in his life understandably believes that accountability is only for fucking losers. Plus, he has the best people.

Council for National Policy member Steve Bannon, whose billionaire patrons the Mercers threw their support behind Trump as the last candidate standing, for example. The Mercers introduced the canny authoritarian Bannon (and fellow CNP member Kelleyanne Alternative Fact) to the Trump campaign. In exchange for the CNP’s help, Trump, who truly believes in nothing, agreed to appoint Federalist Society judges to the bench, limit his religious advisory Council to only Protestants, cut taxes on the super-rich and support a variety of other far-right positions.

Bannon was one of the keys to Trump’s narrow, surgically crafted Electoral College victory, but was soon fired by the thin-skinned Trump when he became known as Trump’s brain. Trump dubbed Bannon Sloppy Steve. And, yet, three years later, it was Sloppy Steve who sat in a suite in the Willard Hotel, the command center for the January 6th insurrection, who later told the House Select Committee on January 6th that it was illegitimate and to go fuck itself with its subpoena, and who’d secured a pardon from Trump on Trump’s last day in office. Pardoned, you know, for making a little money by ripping off the most loyal, and most credulous, of Trumps die-hard 39%. As you do.

Legitimate political discourse, baby.

Profile in Courage

Cowardly sidekick takes a break from licking his master’s boots to state the obvious, only thirteen months too late.

I suppose this also qualifies as “legitimate political discourse.”

Trump-enabler Pence, pious, orthodox homophobe, famed champion of so-called Gay Conversion Therapy (subsidized by Indiana taxpayers), ought to enroll in Ambitious Sycophant Conversion Therapy. Both therapies are no doubt equally effective.

The truth is one thing, and essential, but outgassing from a costive asshole, it takes on a disgusting aspect.

Madness, anyone?

Those who believe in the End Times have much reason to celebrate: a mass death pandemic has driven people to extremes, street crime is on the rise, after two years of surprising restraint by the criminally inclined, the earth is experiencing an unprecedented number of climate catastrophes, the anti-Christ leads one of the two major political parties in the longest running democracy in the world, armies of angry believers, driven by infuriating lies, are on the march all across the globe.   It’s a great day for those who believe a Messiah will return to cast unbelievers into eternal hellfire while the faithful go up to heaven for an endless celebration.

The rise in crime is an interesting one, it has taken a long time to burst forth, given the nation’s pain, deprivation, desperation, the fact that most people are wearing the identity-obscuring highwayman masks anyway.  Crime, defined by statutes, is written by our best citizens. Crime enforcement is famously selective.  Wealthy citizens are allowed to negotiate deals most of the time, the poor never are allowed to negotiate anything but how many years they will spend locked up (and the “deals” are marginal there).  White men who commit deliberate voter fraud are given a stern talking to, and probation, a Black woman with a felony record, apparently cleared to vote by local officials, is sentenced to five years in prison for voter fraud.  Anyone who finds such things clearly racist is clearly the racist.  Up is down, black is white, if you believe your own eyes, you are a traitor. 150 police officers were injured, maimed, during “legitimate political discourse” that halted the constitutional business of Congress, so what is your point if you are a cop who lost an eye?

Unless you believe this raging chaos is a harbinger of the coming Apocalypse, it’s natural to believe we are pretty much fucked.   No matter how much evidence comes out — about the rapidly approaching point of no return with our fossil-fuel doomed planet, about the deliberate indifference to the hundreds of thousands who die deaths of despair from highly lucrative opioids, from guns, about the 98X higher likelihood that you will die of Covid-19 if you are not vaccinated, about the ignorance that comes from banning and burning books, from the parliamentary trick that cuts off all DEBATE of any issue that one party deems inconvenient (anti-lynching bills, voting rights bills, Human Rights bills), about the destructive force of an internet platform that spreads lies to billions in its influence, to a mad criminal blowhard who is still blowing as hard as he can, with every breath — there is no accountability for any of the open crimes of the super-rich and well-connected.   The only cause for optimism, if you are given to monkish superstition, is that all those who deny Christ will be finally and forever cast into the pit of hell, while believers will go on to eternal, joyous life in heaven.  For the rest of us: a mental health crisis.

Which is not to say that madness and a belief that all this horror is actually good news, as it heralds the prophesized return of Jesus Christ, are mutually exclusive.  Many mentally ill people are fervent believers.  Many other mentally ill people do not believe in an all-powerful, all-loving divine being who, though He loves humanity as His greatest creation, tolerates torture, starvation, rape, murder and all the rest.  The line between madness and sanity turns out to be blurry as hell, highly permeable.   

“The Truth,” quoted Christopher Walken, in a great interview with him in the NY Times, “is good, interesting is better.”  Madness?  Fuck if I know. 

Fed Soc Follies

The other day Mike Pence gave a speech to the Federalist Society, the Koch-funded legal fraternity that spawned the united 6-3 Trump Court majority, finally stating the obvious:  Trump was wrong, the Vice President does not have the legal right to overturn election results.   

Had he made this statement a year ago, hats off to a man of integrity.   This career ass-sniffer, backed by the Kochs for his entire obsequious career, once again wreathes himself in shame as he insults the intelligence of the American public, this time by telling the simple truth, belated by a hate-filled year.


Also addressing the Federalist Society’s annual meeting, though his speech was given secretly, Fed Soc alum Neil Gorsuch.  Last year’s keynote speaker was Federalist Society member Samuel Alito, who also spoke at the members only event in secret.  You want secrecy for your totally non-political speeches in front of a partisan legal fraternity you belong to, it’s common sense!  Look what happened to Crooked Hillary for speaking frankly to Wall Street!

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee censured both of its members who traitorously insist on calling the MAGA riot a riot (when, obviously, the only Blacks involved were law enforcement) uniting behind the idea that investigating the insurrection is “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” as you do, if you’re a Nazi (or klansman), and snarling lynch mobs united behind a proven lie are merely a preferred form of legitimate political discourse [1].

The rightwing legal establishment (as opposed to MAGA nation) is positioning itself to pivot, once the Trump dead-enders are, possibly, brought to justice, fully outed, disgraced, hopefully prosecuted and convicted for the seditious conspiracy they participated in.  Note that Trump was as useful an idiot to the far right as he was to his friend Mr. Putin, though the craven Pence’s speech might signal his master’s usefulness is nearing an end. Mainstream movement conservatives will continue marching on with their larger plan, to capture a permanent majority, particularly on the federal bench, a dependable activist majority that will rule in favor of the best of society and against that pesky 95% that causes all the problems here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

[1]

Trump to Pence: “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy,” Trump to Pence: “If these people say you had the power, wouldn’t you want to?” Pence: “I wouldn’t want any one person to have that authority,” Trump to Pence: “But wouldn’t it be almost cool to have that power?” Trump to Pence: “You don’t understand, Mike. You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.” Trump to Pence: “If you don’t do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago … You’re going to wimp out.”