Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

Council for National Policy’s deal with Trump

The religious right’s bargain with Trump, in a nutshell, from Bob Garfield’s recent interview with CNP researcher, author Anne Nelson on his podcast Bully Pulpit:

GARFIELD: All right. Let’s now turn to the more-or-less present: the rise of Trump and the now violent assault on democracy. How was CNP involved in Trump’s ascent?

NELSON: The CNP was involved with Trump, initially, very reluctantly. He wasn’t one of them, he had no particular religious background, he was multiply divorced, and he really didn’t reflect their values in many ways. Their favored candidate was Ted Cruz, but they had a problem – which was that Cruz had a tremendous charisma deficit, and as he lost the primaries, they realized that either they supported Trump, the primary victor, or they lived with Hillary Clinton’s presidency, which was unacceptable to them.

GARFIELD: Oh, I – I’m sorry, I just – I just have to interrupt to remind you what then Senator Al Franken (laughs) said about Cruz.

AL FRANKEN: I probably like him more than most of my other colleagues like Ted, and I hate him (laughs).

NELSON: That is the case. Cruz is a formidable intelligence and strategist. He was not a winning candidate outside Texas. So the fundamentalists convened something like a thousand leaders and representatives in New York City in June of 2016 at the Times Square Marriott. They brought Trump out to parade him before them, and they had a number of leaders from the Council for National Policy there on the program. And publicly, what that event was about was to sell Trump to this thousand fundamentalist leaders, many of whom had been Never Trumpers, and they were like, “This is going to be your guy. You need to go home and tell your flocks that this is the plan.” But the second part of that agenda involved meetings where they cut a deal with Trump. They said, “You don’t have a war chest, you don’t have ground troops for the election canvassing, you don’t have a strategy. And all indications are you’re going to get creamed.” So we have all three of those that we can put into your service. But in return –

GARFIELD: We have a shopping list. 

NELSON: We have a shopping list, and it’s basically got three items. The first one was enact some of our policies by executive orders. So when suddenly the Republican platform has this new anti-trans, anti LGBT language that was literally written by the president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, Trump enacted the anti-trans policy for the Pentagon against the Pentagon’s wishes, which, you know, the Pentagon said, “This is disruptive of our operations and trans people are not a problem,” but Trump had to deliver on his deal. The second part was to create an evangelical advisory council. Obama had a religious advisory council, but it included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims. This one was 100% Protestant, and none of these other religions needed to apply. The leadership of this council were in and out of the White House on policy discussions and photo ops on a weekly basis. The third was by far the most important, far reaching, and devastating to our democracy. And that was when they got Trump to agree that any federal judges he nominated would be approved from a list that was submitted by three organizations run by members of the Council for National Policy. These were the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Now, what business the NRA has in recommending federal judge nominations? I do not know, but that’s how it played out, and after his first confirmation, he invited the representatives of these groups, most of them from the Council for National Policy, for a little victory luncheon at the White House.

GARFIELD: So that was the origin story of Trump’s deal with the devil, a man with not only no religion, but no ideology to speak of creating himself in the image of his political and financial sponsors. Over the ensuing – well, so then he was elected, more or less – and then over the ensuing four years, many of Trump’s 30,000 lies, big and small, find their provenance, what do you know, in the CNP. So, can we just tick a few of these off beginning with the COVID hoax, and the savior drug hydroxychloroquine?

NELSON: So if you get to the beginning of 2020, the Trump campaign is in trouble and the Council for National Policy recognizes it. They had hoped that the 2020 elections would be won with a popular vote, that was cast into doubt. COVID set in a couple of months later, and the whole strategy of the Trump campaign had been built around mass rallies and data harvesting from attendees of the rallies and building on that to secure a victory. Well, mass rallies became impossible because of COVID restrictions, so there was a critical phone call that involved the president of the Council for National Policy and members of the Trump campaign staff, where they said, “We need to open up society, get the economy roaring again, and people are afraid of COVID, but they trust doctors. We have a group of doctors who will say that COVID is a hoax, will argue for the reopening of society and the mass rallies.” So that summer, these doctors were convened by Jenny Beth Martin in Washington. Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots and a leading figure in the Council for National Policy. At that point, the point person – when Dr. Simone Gold announced that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for COVID – she was put on partner media platforms of the CNP, including the Charlie Kirk Show and the Christian Broadcasting Network, spreading this disinformation 

SIMONE GOLD: With the tyranny of medical apartheid nipping at our heels, rise up. Rise up. Rise up.

NELSON: And that has now expanded into a small army of unethical physicians who are continuing the hydroxychloroquine hoax. They’ve added ivermectin as a cure and, in fact, they have online prescription services charging money to people who are ordering ivermectin as a COVID cure.

JAKE TAPPER: Poison control centers are reporting that their calls are spiking in places like Mississippi and Oklahoma because some Americans are trying to use an anti parasite horse drug called ivermectin to treat coronavirus, to prevent contracting coronavirus. What would you tell someone who is considering taking that drug?

FAUCI: Don’t do it.

NELSON: There’s no evidence that it helps against COVID and, in fact, there are several cases of deaths. Not just from COVID and the failed approach of ivermectin, but people taking overdoses of ivermectin. At the same time, they’re discouraging vaccination, and the purpose that lies behind this is, I believe, to discredit any federal agency, to discredit the CDC and the NIH, and to have their followers distrust any kind of fact based authority. Whether it’s science, whether it’s professional journalism, whether it’s federal agencies, and work them into this stoked anger and frustration that is then politically mobilized, and so is chaos.

GARFIELD: And not just because they’re elites and look down at the silent majority, as Nixon called Middle America, but because there is a vast conspiracy to make money for Bill Gates or to turn children against their country, or to put right wing political dissidents into concentration camps or, you know, whatever the crazy talk is. It wasn’t enough just to make people suspicious of – of expertise and authority, but to brainwash them that they were actually active enemies of the people.

NELSON: I would say that the strength of the Council for National Policy is to figure out what I call the raw nerves of our culture and to further inflame them. So right now, parents – with kids in public schools – are stressed on so many levels. Are the schools open or are they not open? Are there mandates? Are there not mandates? Can working mothers go to work if their kids aren’t in school? Right? These are real, real issues. And then you put on top of that our very difficult conversation nationally about race. When the Black Lives Matter protests happened, the way that the CNP’s media and other media systems played it was, “these are violent riots,” and they cherry picked photos of buildings and flame and violence in the streets and amplified it and exaggerated it. These were not invented or doctored photos, these things happened, it’s just that they happened as very, very few cases and very small percentage of the peaceful protests. But that’s not what their audience saw.

TUCKER CARLSON: This may be a lot of things this moment we’re living through, but it is definitely not about black lives. And remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will.

The rest of their conversation is HERE. Fascinating and horrifying, both.

The Council for National Policy

Formed in 1981, the Council for National Policy is an invitation-only, secretive charitable organization that promotes deeply conservative Christian values [1], and advances plans and policies for that purpose. It is a coordinating leadership committee for a network of far right groups with an influential membership list.

CNP’s highly private membership is a Who’s Who of right-wing royalty and wealthy dark money donors. Among the member names that some traitor leaked you will find Oliver North, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, former AG John Ashcroft, Steve Bannon, Kelleyanne Conway, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, Clarence Thomas’s influential right-wing wife Virginia and the billionaire philanthropist mother of billionaire donors Erik Prince and Betsy DeVos [2].

Here’s a huge shocker:

On October 14, 2020, The Washington Post reported that it had obtained videos recorded by CNP of several meetings in February and August 2020 whose overtly partisan, political nature raised “potential issues of compliance with election laws and charity rules.”[1]

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I hadn’t even heard of this influential group until a recent, excellent Bob Garfield interview with author Anne Nelson. Garfield says of their talk: a conversation with author Anne Nelson about the Council for National Policy, which has spent decades exploiting bugs in the system to gain minority control of our politics — and our future.

In a two part discussion they talked about the sixty year right wing coup, carried out quite brilliantly by what Hillary Clinton was widely mocked for calling the vast right wing conspiracy. The CNP is part of a large network of well-funded, hugely influential, interlocking organizations. The reach of this network is definitely vast and always serves a well-coordinated right-wing plan to control the narrative of American politics, get and maintain power and make laws consistent with its distinctly minoritarian views.

CNP appears to be close to the top of the movement conservative food chain, the beating heart at the center of well-financed, secretive right-wing power. Here’s a bit more about CNP.

Membership is by invitation only. The organization’s membership list is considered “strictly confidential”. Guests may attend “only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee.” Members are instructed not to refer to the organization by name to protect against leaks.[4] The New York Times political writer David D. Kirkpatrick suggested that the organization’s secrecy since its founding was intended to insulate it “from what its members considered the liberal bias of the news media.”[2]

CNP’s meetings are closed to the general public, reportedly to allow for a free-flowing exchange of ideas. The group meets three times per year.[13] This policy is said to be similar to the long-held policy of the Council on Foreign Relations, to which the CNP has at times been compared. CNP’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status was revoked by the IRS in 1992 on grounds that it was not an organization run for the public benefit. The group successfully challenged this ruling in federal court. A quarterly journal aimed at educating the public, promised in the wake of this incident, has not substantially materialized. The organization has a website that contains many policy speeches from past gatherings (covering the years from 2013 up to the present).[14]

While those involved in the organization are almost entirely from the United States, their organizations and influence cover the globe, both religiously and politically. Members include corporate executives,[15] legislators[15] former high ranking government officers,[15] leaders of ‘think tanks’[15] dedicated to molding society and those whom many view as “Christian leadership”.[15]

In May 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a leaked copy of the membership directory for 2014.[16][17]

A membership list for September 2020, leaked a year later, revealed that members, who could attend meetings together, included elite Republicans, wealthy entrepreneurs, media proprietors and pillars of the US conservative movement, and anti-abortion and anti-Islamic extremists. It was reported that members of the secretive CNP are instructed not to reveal their affiliation or even name the group.[

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The first rule of Fight Club, yo. If they don’t ever find out you’re even doing it, how are they going to be able to stop you? Use your fucking head!

Coming up: the CNP wish list and Trumpism, the deal that was made between CNP and The Donald before the elite of the organized right in the US would throw its weight behind a clearly unsuitable presidential candidate with vast media charisma. It was one deal that Trump kept, 100%, for maybe the only time in his long, transactional life.

[1]

CNP was founded in 1981 by Southern Baptist pastor Tim LaHaye, author of The Battle for the Mind (1980) and the Left Behind series of books. Other early participants have included W. Cleon Skousen, a theologian within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and founder of the Freemen Institute; Paul Weyrich; Phyllis Schlafly; Robert Grant; Howard Phillips, a former Republican affiliated with the Constitution Party; Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist; and Morton Blackwell, a Louisiana and Virginia activist who is considered a specialist on the rules of the Republican Party.[40][41][42]

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[2]

Members of the CNP have included: General John Singlaub, shipping magnate J. Peter Grace, Edwin J. Feulner Jr of the Heritage Foundation, Rev. Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Jerry Falwell, U.S. Senator Trent Lott, Southern Baptist Convention activists and retired Texas Court of Appeals Judge Paul Pressler, lawyer and paleoconservative activist Michael Peroutka,[10] Reverend Paige Patterson,[11] Senator Don Nickles, former United States Attorneys General Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, gun-rights activist Larry Pratt, Colonel Oliver North, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, philanthropist Elsa Prince (mother of Blackwater founder and former CEO Erik Prince and Trump Administration Secretary of Education Betsy Devos), Leonard Leo, and [1] Virginia Thomas (wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas).[1] Former California State Assemblyman Steve Baldwin was CNP’s executive director from 2000 to 2008.[12]

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They never sleep

Octogenarian Rupert Murdoch, powerful autocratic media mogul with a distinctly fascistic worldview, never wastes a minute when he can be spreading patriotically packaged hate to convert another disgruntled citizen to his point of view. He gave up citizenship in the country of his birth, Australia, to become a naturalized, and ultra-nationalistic, highly influential U.S. citizen in 1985. In fairness to Murdoch, fascism is the ideal business environment for well-connected super-wealthy right wingers. Like other Nazi types, Murdoch and his propaganda machine are laser focused on relentlessly hammering home their message and never seem to fucking sleep. Even the enemy armies on the front in World War One took a truce in Jesus’s name on Christmas, came out of their bunkers, toasted each other, sang carols together, sometimes even exchanged gifts. Not Rupert, not today, not any day.

Here is a clip that FOX “news” posted to youTube shortly before Christmas Day turned into the day after Christmas. I am going to transcribe this articulate former elite soldier’s patriotic speech, calling for STRONG military leaders who believe in the exceptional greatness of our threatened nation, so that you can see its compelling, if simplified, “argument” plainly in front of you.

In full disclosure, my Instagram profile, my pronoun is listed as Attack Helicopter so you can let everyone know exactly where you are.

So, yeah, the military has a very specific and strategic job and that’s to keep our country safe and when you thrust them in to be the front line of a sociological experiment which has a pernicious ideology that makes people hate the United States, a soldier can very quickly start to despise the very thing he’s supposed to be protecting.

As the military is getting “woke” it is learning that its country is evil and racist and xenophobic and greedy and steals land and so why in the world should I defend something that is evil and awful? And the answer is “no, only evil people would defend evil things.”

And so it’s really less about whatever little headline is happening right now, it’s really more about the totality of what “wokeism” is doing to the military in general, the whole structure, the whole anti-everythingism that wokeism is is destroying the very fabric of why a soldier would even fight. You’re demoralizing the troops so it’s something far more at the heart of what a soldier is. You’re destroying their love of country and therefore their reason to fight and possibly die for their country. We can’t survive it.

My question for the general would be is are you studying the enemy’s playbook to war against them or to join them? And judging by things like the Afghanistan withdrawal, it looks like we’re more interested in supplying them all kinds of weapons that will absolutely be used, and have been used, to kill innocents. And so I wonder is the general reading to join them or to defeat them? And it looks like the former, not the latter.

My background was in special operations and I’m forever connected to that specific brotherhood, and I do know that that type of elite soldier, whether it’s Army Rangers or Seals or Special Forces they are highly pragmatic they’re intelligent and they’re very impervious to bullying. They’re not “woke”, they don’t go “woke”, you can’t make them be “woke”, wokeism, forced on the military will absolutely make you lose your most elite soldiers. We’ll lose them.

If we can’t get strong leaders who understand that their job in the military is not to play sociological games, but it’s to keep our borders safe from all enemies, foreign and domestic, we’re in serious trouble. That’s problems that we cannot survive.

There’s an ancient quote by a warrior poet named Thucydides and he says “the state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools”. We have to have strong military leadership that cares about pragmatic, in real-world results to keep people physically safe.

They’re everyday Americans, they’re civilians, they’re military, they’re police, they’re EMS, they’re doctors, bankers, lawyers, they’re all of us. And that’s what we’re after. We’re after the common man who loves freedom and who lives for higher purpose, is ready to sacrifice in the defense of others, and that’s the whole idea.

The military, even before its leadership was captured by what FOX calls the false and pernicious notion that our country has a deep history of racism, xenophobia and land seizure (not to mention the fake history of our government ‘disappearing’ of millions of indigenous Americans) has long been a democratizing institution, oddly enough. Not sociological games based on a pernicious ideology, but exposure to other Americans from different backgrounds in a hierarchy that rewards good service. I have a friend who grew up in Tennessee, had few contacts with Blacks and recalls he didn’t particularly like them as a group. In the army he became good friends with Black guys from different parts of the country, he found he had more in common with them than many others in the service. He says the army opened his eyes to how unwittingly racist some of his thinking had been, based on lack of contact and popular racist bullshit that other ignorant friends spouted. This insight came to him simply by his exposure to others, from other walks of life, other parts of the country, in an integrated military, everyone serving the same larger cause.

The strong military leaders this guy calls for never question that our country is the greatest in human history and will give their men good reason to fight and die for this greatest of all nations. It is as simple as good vs. evil. He clearly sees himself as something of a scholar warrior, like Thucydides, who he quotes. Presumably like pardoned felon General Mike Flynn of Q-Anon. As he points out, and follow this sophisticated argument:

And so it’s really less about whatever little headline is happening right now [1], it’s really more about the totality of what “wokeism” is doing to the military in general, the whole structure, the whole anti-everythingism [2] that wokeism is is destroying the very fabric of why a soldier would even fight. You’re demoralizing the troops so it’s something far more at the heart of what a soldier is. You’re destroying their love of country and therefore their reason to fight and possibly die for their country. We can’t survive it.

Fucking anti-everythingism will fucking destroy us, true dat. For example, as he points out, Biden gave the Taliban weapons to use against us, FACT, and Trump unilaterally negotiating the release from prison of 5,000 top Taliban fighters as a condition to our scheduled withdrawal from that unwinnable twenty year war had nothing whatsoever to do with it. The Al Qa-qaa explosives depot that our victorious army in Iraq inadvertently gave to the insurgents back in 2003 has nothing to fucking do with our woke “president” giving weapons to our enemies now!

Real Americans, Murdoch’s myrmidons remind us, know that we can’t survive a direct assault on our belief that we never fucking ever did anything wrong, to anybody!

It’s quite simple, really, are you on the side of good or evil? Choose a fucking side, buddy.

{1]

For example all these nefarious headlines about Trump’s inner circle and their conspiracy to overturn the election results, (presidential results only, mind you) employing every means necessary, including mob violence to do so. These little headlines are clearly designed to distract you from the real threat — “woke” people who hate our freedom, the mindless, godless anti-everything caucus.

The active and former military and police who participated in the totally legal protest at the Capitol to Stop the Steal did so because they sincerely believed their leader when he told them they’d all been robbed. Do not be distracted by headlines about “sedition” the real traitors are those 81,000,000 fake “woke” voters whose communist party claims to have legally defeated the man who got a record 74,000,000 totally legit votes.

[2]

You can’t compromise with Anti-everythingism. The supporters of Anti-everythingism are simply insane, evil, and should answer to superior force pursuant to the argument advanced by scholar warriors like Thucydides and Mike Flynn, and the MyPillow guy.

Liar’s truth slip ups

A broken clock is right twice a day. Tip of the skull cap to Heather Cox Richardson.

(Fucking Twitter apparently requires permission to reproduce a video from Twitter, which I don’t know how to get, so click the link and watch the 15 second clip of Trump nonchalantly saying the wall Mexico paid for would have been completed by now “had we won the election”)

And this refreshing bit of conceited honesty from the same source, just in:

Jews cancel FOX cartoon!

The Anti-defamation League, a group of Jews who scream in the mass media and bring lawsuits whenever a mainstream outfit pushes an overtly anti-Semitic idea, threatened FOX “news” and forced them to take down this cartoon right out of Germany’s Der Sturmer 1936.

Before FOX was forced (by the Jews) to take it down 15,978 MAGA adherents liked it. 754 were moved to make comments, no doubt about the sinister truth of the cartoon, that fucking Jews control the child raping, child-blood drinking, godless, communist Democrat (sic) party. If that many FOX diehards had come out to vote for Joe Manchin III’s Republican opponent in the last senatorial race in West Virginia things would have gone differently. If the well-drawn cartoon (nice piece of artwork, credit where it’s due) hadn’t come down, the number of likes it would have by now would eclipse Centrist Joe’s 290,000 total votes in the West Virginia race he won by three points.

But a couple of larger points, before I get back to the meeting with my fellow rabbis to figure out how to get more gullible colored people into the country to vote for the party that supports intolerable affronts like affordable child care, skilled elder care, universal health care, slowing the destruction of our habitat, replacing police as first responders to mental health crises, and other communist pipe dreams like that, and to insert these coloreds to replace the “legacy Americans” (tip of the yarmulke to Swanson TV dinner heir Tucker Carlson) who embrace conspiracy theories about the one non-right wing billionaire we know about, George Soros. The story goes that Soros, at the age of six or so, worked closely with the Nazis and profited handsomely by selling Jewish homes. That’s some power, if you think about it. Diabolical, really. No wonder anti-Semites hate Soros!

This cartoon could work better as a real reflection of the USA in 2021 if you had a three headed puppeteer, say, Charles Koch, a descendant of Andrew Mellon and the reclusive, autistic math genius Robert Mercer (who put Trump over the top by hooking him up with Sloppy Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Alternative-Fact), working the puppets for tax cuts for the wealthy, right wing extremist federal judges and dismantling all government regulation (while enforcing laws prohibiting abortion). Or the monstrous Charles Koch could stand in for the rest of his network of philanthropic psychopaths, or Rupert Murdoch could, for that matter.

One more point, and I hesitate to make this obvious point, even as I make it with my traditional shrugging Jewish irony:

Doesn’t the fact that Jews forced super-powerful billionaire reactionary Rapert Merde-och to take down an arguably anti-Semitic cartoon showing a very ugly Jewish puppeteer controlling things kind of make the anti-Semites’ point for them? I mean, nu?

Et tu, Mitch?

From today’s New York Times:

Even as House Republicans have condemned the investigation as a political witch hunt, the committee found support this week from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican in the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who in May led a filibuster that blocked the creation of an independent commission to investigate the attack, said this week that he believed the House committee was uncovering valuable information.

“It was a horrendous event,” Mr. McConnell said of the Capitol siege in a TV interview. “I think what they are seeking to find out is something the public needs to know.”

Which, of course, is obviously why I led a filibuster to prevent the creation of an independent commission to investigate the horrendous event. And why I waited almost two months to concede that President Biden won the election. And why I need your money and support more than ever.

Who is Roger Stone (and why does he have Nixon’s face tattooed on his back?)

Self-proclaimed totally innocent rat fucker Roger Stone, one of Trump’s closest long-time advisors (unofficial! No legal connection to Trump!) and coiner of “Stop the Steal” (2000, 2016, 2020, 2024) appeared before the January 6 Select Committee for a few minutes yesterday to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He claimed that Democrats just want to trap people into fake perjury so they can persecute them. The multi-millionaire then began a crowd-funding campaign for his legal defense and to pay for around the clock security guards.

Dirty trickster Stone is an innovator in political dirty tricks who raked in a mountain of cash with his former partner Paul Manafort (no connection to Trump! He worked for free!). Stone has been integral to the disinformation, outright lying and threats of right-wing political violence culture we now live in.

Here is a capsule description of this cynical, destructive man’s career as a presidential campaign disinformation specialist from a recent episode of historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman’s Now and Then podcast called Disinformation and Democracy:

Heather Cox Richardson:

. . . And one of the things that’s interesting about the Nixon campaign . . . is that one of the people involved as a young man who carries an image of Nixon on his back to this day in a tattoo, and that is Roger Stone, who was a 20 year old operative in that campaign. And he did things in that, like making a donation from a fake organization called the Young Socialist Alliance, to somebody who was opposing Nixon in the primary, using things like that to go ahead and again, slime opponents. And that business of running politics by lying is going to make a huge difference in our lives in the year 2000. Thanks again to Roger Stone.

So Roger Stone, again, cuts his teeth in this idea of running politics by convincing people of things that are not true, by changing the trajectory of reality by creating narratives and creating images. And he is instrumental in, what’s known as the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000 after the election of that year. And the way that that played out was that the election of that year was on November 7th. And on that election, it became clear that the outcome of the 2000 election would depend on the electoral votes from Florida. There were a lot of problems with that Florida election; there was a butterfly ballot in which you didn’t actually read down one side of the page and then down the other, you were supposed to read page to page, which meant that a bunch of democratic voters get siphoned off to vote for a far-right candidate. There were a number of people kicked off the roles immediately before the election. But after the election, it becomes clear that Bush has a lead in the state, but as they continue to do recounts, the numbers of votes that put Bush in the lead start to drop, and they start up by a lot. Usually recounts don’t change the vote very much, but in fact, the recounts in Florida drop Bush’s lead in the state from 1,784 votes, to 327 votes,, then to 154 votes.

And finally, attention comes down to Miami-Dade County, which is a democratic stronghold. And there, it seems likely that Gore is going to pick up a lot of votes in a recount. So on November 21st, the Florida Supreme Court authorized a manual recount in four counties and set a deadline for November 26th on that. And then on November 22nd, the Miami-Dade County Canvasing Board decided to focus solely on the contested ballots in order to meet their deadline. And so, they’re trying to hunker down, and trying to avoid the media frenzy that’s descending on them. And so in order to go ahead and avoid that they move into a smaller room on the 19th floor of the County Building, so that they can be close to the ballot scanning machine. That day hundreds of people from around the country, including a bunch of Republican staffers descend into South Florida to protest the recount.

There’s a New York Congressman, for example, a man named John Sweeney who was working for the Bush campaign, who ordered protestors to shut it down, meaning to shut down the recount. And there’s more and more pressure on the Miami-Dade recount that eventually becomes known as the Brooks Brothers riot, because the protestors who were trying to shut it down, come dressed in buttoned shirts and sport jackets. And they appear at the room outside where the counting is taking place, and they start screaming, “Stop the count, stop the fraud, let us in.” And the protestors increasingly accuse the Miami-Dade counters of stealing ballots and of stealing the election. The guy in charge of that was the democratic county chairman, a guy named Joe Geller. And six days after the Brooks brothers riot, Geller told Salon, and this is a quote, “This was not a Miami moment. It was outsiders, Hitler Youth sent in by the Republicans to intimidate the election officials.”

And that’s actually exactly what it was. It was a Stone operation to go ahead and orchestrate that protest in Miami. He recruited a bunch of Cuban American protestors by warning on the radio, for example, that democratic candidate Al Gore was going to stage a coup, the same way that Fidel Castro had staged a coup in Cuba. He’d organized phone banks to encourage Miami Republicans to storm the counting site. And on the day of the rioting, he actually was in a Winnebago outside, organizing the protests. So there was this sense that by manipulating the media and getting people to think that there was something untoward going on in what was really quite a legitimate recounting, that he could go ahead and orchestrate and end to that recount. And that is exactly what happened.

Joanne Freeman:

And think about the layers of impact of that. So first of all, you have the people doing the recount who have the impression there’s this mass of people banging down the doors, wanting to end it all, and that there’s mass opposition. You’re getting an awareness outside of that place that somehow or other there’s a mass movement, mass opposition against what, of course, must be some kind of illicit attempt to steal the election. And that the fact that there’s that kind of protest shows that things not right down there in Florida. So on many, many levels, this out and out fabrication can spread to voters, can spread to the public, can have an impact in Florida, and in the counting of votes in Florida, it echoes, it resounds out in a lot of different ways. And it’s completely fabricated.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well in a sense, we’re talking about information, and how in a democracy, you desperately need to have an informed public, but the manipulation of that information into disinformation that then can be transmitted increasingly quickly over first telegraph lines, then telephone lines, then radio, then television, and now the internet, means that we have a real problem with disinformation, and with its ability to whip people up to an emotional reaction to go ahead and change our history, change our political history. And in the case of 2000, stop a recount that looked as if it were going to put a Democrat who won the popular vote into the White House, rather than a Republican.

Joanne Freeman:

To act on impulse and act on emotion rather than to act on real information. So first of all, that in and of itself, not only is it disinformation, it’s anti-information. It’s trying to get people emotionally riled up. And that kind of emotion is always going to be more effective than plain old, boring truth when it comes to what’s being publicized and what’s catching the public eye. And as you just said, Heather, different forms of technology are helping that transformation, that spread of deliberately emotion rousing lies, to change the whole political picture and alter American political history.

You know, if you think about it, democracy in and of itself is a conversation of sorts between people who hold power, and the people who have given it to them. And the process of governing has to do with the communication back and forth of people with power, and the people who’ve given it to them, that’s where accountability comes in. But any form of technology that alters the nature of that conversation, alters democracy. It makes perfect sense, if democracy is a conversation between people with power and those who’ve given it, any technology that changes that conversation is going to transform democracy. And the question then really becomes: how does the nation adjust to that new technology? How is that new technology reigned in or accommodated what happens in that moment when people are trying to figure out in essence, a new language of politics. And depending on what happens there, really depends the direction of the nation’s politics.

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WATCH: When drawing comparisons between Nixon and Trump ...
Roger Stone: Trump ally, political strategist, Nixon fan ...

I like this federal law

Lawyers for two misguided patriots who attacked Capitol Police on January 6 and made their way into the building to impede the final counting of Electoral College Votes for the candidate who won the election argued their clients did not violate 18 US Code Sec. 1512 and moved to have the federal criminal charge under 1512 dismissed.

The lawyers argued that the joint session of congress was, for a variety of arguable legalistic rationales, not an “official proceeding” and that “corruptly obstructs, influences or impedes” gives unconstitutionally ambiguous notice to rioters who break into a closed Capitol building to merely stop the steal, because “corruptly” is a vague, overbroad and essentially meaningless word.

Federal judge Dabney L. Friedrich, of the DC District Court, was having none of this and wrote a precise and basically unappealable decision denying the motion. In 25 crisp pages she clarified why the law applied directly to the actions of two men who assaulted police with a variety of deadly weapons and forced their way into the Capitol to obstruct, influence or impede the official proceeding then underway.

As for explaining what “corruptly” means in the legal sense (and in the popular sense), she did so unambiguously:

In this sense, the plain meaning of “corruptly” encompasses both corrupt (improper) means and corrupt (morally debased) purposes. … The Court agrees that § 1512(c)’s proscription of knowing conduct undertaken with the specific intent to obstruct, impede, or influence the proceeding provides a clear standard to which the defendant can conform his behavior.

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It’s hard to think that this same federal law would not apply to an elected official who had been informed by the Attorney General of the United States that voter fraud claims had been exhaustively investigated and were “bullshit” and who nonetheless aggressively spread a knowing lie, organized a rally, and an unpermitted march (no reason to have phalanxes of DC cops on the route to the Capitol, which would have happened with a permit for a march, you understand), to corruptly obstruct, influence or impede the last official session of Congress relating to the peaceful transfer of power.

What do you think, Merrick?

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Jennifer Rubin wrote an excellent piece called “A federal court has ruled that obstructing the electoral vote count is illegal. Trump should panic.” describing the case, the ruling and the potential worries for Mr. Trump and his most ardent loyalists.

Grey Lady Attacks!

Exposure to prolonged fear of terrible sickness and death from a highly infectious disease, against which we are largely at the mercy of others doing their part, leads to changes subtle and dramatic in the human psyche. Some respond to this reasonable fear by lashing out, insisting on their right to infect whoever they want, in the name of opposing tyranny. Others isolate and wear two or three masks in public. The endlessly morphing pandemic is terrifying, worldwide and it has changed societies everywhere. It has changed families, friendships, relations between neighbors, mostly not for the better.

At the same time, life must go on. So there was an organized attempt, coming up on a year ago, by our avatar of Covid madness, Donald Trump, to overturn the 2020 election. They did this using a daft, quasi-legal theory that, under the 12th Amendment, the defeated Vice President, whose role it is to certify the electors as the last step in the peaceful transfer of power, is actually in charge of deciding who the new president and vice president will be. You know, democracy. The president’s top lawyers who espoused this bat shit crazy “theory”, or made unfounded fraud claims, or both, John Eastman and Jeffery Boessart Clark, are now standing on their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves by answering questions under oath.

The second paragraph of a NY Times article entitled “Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power” underscores the objective madness of our current moment in history. The Times ordinarily bends over backwards to present the reasonable-seeming side of utterly unreasonable situations and positions, in the interest of appearing always above the controversy in question. Last night readers saw this:

WASHINGTON — Two days after Christmas last year, Richard P. Donoghue, a top Justice Department official in the waning days of the Trump administration, saw an unknown number appear on his phone.

Mr. Donoghue had spent weeks fielding calls, emails and in-person requests from President Donald J. Trump and his allies, all of whom asked the Justice Department to declare, falsely, that the election was corrupt. The lame-duck president had surrounded himself with a crew of unscrupulous lawyers, conspiracy theorists, even the chief executive of MyPillow — and they were stoking his election lies.

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The lame-duck president had surrounded himself with a crew of unscrupulous lawyers, conspiracy theorists, even the chief executive of MyPillow — and they were stoking his election lies.

Damn, Grey Lady! You too? Never mind, good to know that at this perilous moment, even you show a bit of relatable human emotion. Unscrupulous lawyers, indeed.

Liz Cheney and 18 U.S. Code § 1505

I don’t like her extreme right-wing views, or that her father is one of the most evil and destructive men ever in US government, but I have to tip my hat to Liz Cheney. She has been fearless, and laser focused, in her determination to see justice done in the matter of a wildly scheming defeated president inciting a violent siege of the Capitol building to disrupt a joint session of Congress performing their constitutional duty to ensure the peaceful transition of power.

Here is her recent public statement on a key question before the committee:

“We know hours passed with no action by the president to defend the Congress of the United States from an assault while we were trying to count electoral votes,” Ms. Cheney said. “Mr. Meadows’s testimony will bear on a key question in front of this committee: Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?”

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This tracks the language of a federal criminal statute:

18 U.S. Code § 1505 – Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies, and committees

Whoever, with intent to avoid, evade, prevent, or obstruct compliance, in whole or in part, with any civil investigative demand duly and properly made under the Antitrust Civil Process Act, willfully withholds, misrepresents, removes from any place, conceals, covers up, destroys, mutilates, alters, or by other means falsifies any documentary material, answers to written interrogatories, or oral testimony, which is the subject of such demand; or attempts to do so or solicits another to do so; or

Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress—

Shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both.

And as far as the definition of corruption goes, here’s Jennifer Rubin’s piece on a recent federal ruling that is very much on point. It’s called A federal court has ruled that obstructing the electoral vote count is illegal. Trump should panic.

Here’s Tucker Carlson, with the GOP rebuttal:

apologies, I was unable to embed FOX’s link to this hard-hitting report

Ms. Cheney has said that the investigation could very well lead to Mr. Trump facing her questions, with criminal penalties hanging over his head if he lies.

“Any communication Mr. Trump has with this committee will be under oath,” Ms. Cheney said this month. “And if he persists in lying then, he will be accountable under the laws of this great nation and subject to criminal penalties for every false word he speaks.”

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