The J6 committee has been laying out a sprawling conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, while leaving all other Republicans elected on the same ballots in place. The wide-ranging conspiracy did not culminate in the storming of the capital on January 6th, the riot was a violent Hail Mary when everything else had failed. Trump continually lied (and continues to) about massive voter fraud, pressured state electoral officials from Michigan to decertify Michigan electors. He did this openly and publicly. Slates of fake electors from several states Trump lost were submitted on official looking falsely sworn papers, a plan was hatched to seize voting machines, impose martial law, Sidney Powell was poised to become a special counsel to prosecute voter fraud that didn’t exist in any significant numbers, legal memos were drawn up advocating illegal actions to keep the angry losing candidate in power, actions their author admitted even this supreme Court would rule 9 to 0 against. The head of Trump’s Secret Service detail, a lying scumbag named Tony Ornato, was promoted to Deputy Chief of Staff while still working for the Secret Service which Trump had converted into his personal praetorian guard. Oddly all Secret Service texts from January 5th and 6th have been permanently deleted. In a lucky coincidence for the deranged former president, all of Trump’s phone records and burner phones from those days were also lost. Whoops!

The conspiracy has too many tentacles to list here, but at the center of each one was the personal ambition of one man, Individual One, to do everything imaginable to stay in power after losing an election. This kind of conspiracy, with many arms and many disparate actors who don’t necessarily know each other, all working toward the same goal is called a hub and spoke conspiracy and Glenn Kirschner has been describing exactly this for many months in regard to prosecuting Trump’s many pronged attack on democracy.

Former DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann wrote an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that DOJ must begin a hub and spoke conspiracy investigation and begin prosecuting some of these malefactors, several of which are running for reelection. Should have been done a year ago, but in a couple of months Garland will demure because of the DOJ policy of not interfering with upcoming elections. Here’s Weissmann, explaining why this is not a typical top down pyramid conspiracy simply to storm Congress and Stop the Steal:

Instead, what the hearings have revealed is evidence of a plot orchestrated by Mr. Trump and his allies in the White House and elsewhere — including players from the Mueller investigation like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani as well as new players like Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman. The “spoke” of the Jan. 6 riot should be seen and investigated simultaneously with the other “spokes”: orchestrating fake electors in key states, pressuring state officials like those in Georgia to find new votes, plotting to behead the leadership of the Justice Department to promote a lackey who would further the conspiracy by announcing a spurious investigation into election fraud, and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to violate the law.

source

We jump to conclusions about people’s guilt, sometimes, in spite of our justice system being based on the presumption of innocence.   We jump to these conclusions, in part, because some citizens are presumed much more innocent than others in our impartial justice system.

Just because all of former president Trumpie’s phone records and burner phones from January 6th are lost, and all Secret Service texts from January 5th and 6th were deleted, apparently after they were requested by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, and just because the former president recently phoned a witness who is about to testify to the J6 Committee, for a reason none of us knows, it doesn’t mean there is anything funny going on.   Trump and his people view the law as a transactional thing which presumes everyone innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  If there is no trial, there is always reasonable doubt.  If you can influence public opinion and stop the trial before it starts, or work closely with the jury in case, God forbid, there is a trial, you are innocent!

Bernard Kerik, a convicted felon (for crimes committed while Giuliani’s police commissioner) who spent time in the can, was in the January 6th Willard Hotel war room?   He’d been pardoned, washed clean as a newly baptized baby.   So had Flynn, Bannon, Stone, Manafort, Jared’s father, Jack Johnson, Susan B. Anthony and dozens besides.

The AG of Texas, Ken Paxton, has been under federal indictment for felony securities fraud for SEVEN years.  No trial yet, presumed innocent.   Nothing stopped him from using his office to submit a far-fetched emergency legal challenge to the US Supreme Court arguing that the voters in Texas had been victims of massive anti-Trump voter fraud in states that swung to Biden in 2020.  Lyin’ Ted Cruz and other elected Republicans in national office signed on to the Hail Mary case, which was quickly dismissed (for lack of standing or the slightest legal coherence) by even the 6-3 Federalist Society majority.  They clearly had bigger fish to fry, like eliminating privacy rights, which are, like, totally unenumerated in the actual text of their sacred originalist Constitution.

How long ago did the IRS give Trumpie a controversial $70,000,000 tax rebate for massive business losses?  Pretty long ago, they’ve been auditing that giant rebate for years, are apparently still puzzling over it.  Two second search result:

Between 1984 and 2004, he used actual losses, loss write-downs from previous years, and other accounting dodges to pay virtually nothing in federal income taxes. From 2005 to 2007, this latest Times scoop reveals, he did finally pay about seventy million dollars to the Internal Revenue Service. But then, in 2010, he demanded a full refund for those tax payments. And the I.R.S. acceded to his request: it paid him $72.9 million, including interest. This 2010 refund seems to be at the center of an auditing dispute between Trump and the tax authorities that has dragged on for almost a decade. It also appears to be the money that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, was referring to in his 2019 testimony to Congress, when he recalled Trump showing him a huge check from the U.S. Treasury and remarked that Trump “could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.” [1]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trumps-seventy-three-million-dollar-tax-refund-is-the-biggest-outrage-of-all

Again, if you are powerless, you will immediately be liable to pay in full whatever fines and penalties the IRS imposes.  There is no negotiation, no discussion, no appeal and the fines and penalties continue to be stacked on top until you pay every dime.  If you are a smart cookie like the Orange Polyp?  Hah!  Different story, baby.

Those protesters of police killing of unarmed Blacks, assembled at Lafayette Square?  Terrorists!   The full force of Bill Barr’s ragtag federal law enforcement army forcibly drove them from the street so the president, who was screaming for governors to “dominate the streets!”, could look strong and stroll for a photo op with a bible.  None of the arrested protesters was charged with anything, after being gassed, charged by feds on horseback, handcuffed and thrown into paddy wagons to be dragged in for processing.  The “peaceful tourists” who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, as was their patriotic 1776 right to legitimate political discourse?  Allowed to leave the crime scene in peace, back to their hotels, back to homes all over the country the next day.   800+ were later rounded up and arrested, at the cost of tens of millions in investigation costs and DOJ work hours.  Many of these outraged pawns will spend time in prison, but not one person who sent them into a rage over the bullshit claim that Blacks stole the presidential election from them, incited them to come and be wild, paid for their hotel rooms, is on trial for anything, or even indicted for anything.

The impartial administration of justice at the Department of Justice that Merrick Garland is intent on restoring, almost two years in, after four years of an openly lawless Department of Justice shamelessly carrying out a giant, vindictive two year-old’s every whim?   

(cue the crickets)

[1]

In the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties, Trump’s businesses, some of which he had greatly overpaid for when he bought them, racked up more than a billion dollars in losses, and four of them ended up filing for bankruptcy: three casinos in Atlantic City and his Plaza Hotel, in New York. In 1995, as he emerged from this wreckage, he declared a tax loss of more than nine hundred million dollars, which the I.R.S. allowed him to use in subsequent years as an offset against any profits his businesses made. So even in years when the Trump Organization did well, his loss carryovers reduced his tax bill to zero.

source linked above

Recall that immediately after McConnell, McCarthy, Graham and other top Republicans publicly denounced Trump’s riot on January 6th, Congress went on a brief break.   The House drafted articles of impeachment designed to make sure the insane, riot inciting bastard was disqualified from ever running for president again.   McConnell waited a few days before returning to Washington to accept the articles of impeachment officially, right before Biden was sworn in.

It’s too late, McConnell solemnly argued as the impeachment trial began, Trump has already left office, we can’t impeach a former president, as a procedural matter the charges must be dismissed.   Mueller had concluded after a long investigation that though the evidence of obstruction of justice against Trump was strong, that he was prevented by a DOJ memo from recommending prosecution of a sitting president.  The proper venue for doing that, he wrote, was Congress, which was, sadly, controlled by Trump’s flying monkeys.   McConnell intoned during the quick second impeachment trial that the former president could be investigated, indicted and tried for any crimes he may have committed, now that he’d left office.  After the four day rope-a-dope, Republican senators acquitted Trump on the technicality that the House had not served the articles of impeachment in a timely manner.  More Republicans voted to impeach a Republican president than at any impeachment in US history (generally party line votes) but too few to make sure Trumpie was done, and facing criminal charges as an ordinary corrupt oligarch, or mob boss, in private life might.

It is striking how quickly law enforcement grabs people with no power and how carefully it proceeds against the powerful.  If you are an anonymous driver with a broken tail light, there is reasonable cause to legally pull you over, and if you are not judicious in how you express fear of police who are almost never held accountable for overkill, you can be legally killed, for a variety of standard reasons.   If you are a wealthy white male scofflaw with an army of lawyers, and a political machine behind you, you can enjoy absolute freedom for years before anyone comes looking at you for crimes everyone knows about.

Now, after the most recent J6 hearing, we know why the Stop the Steal January 6 organizers never got a permit for a march from the rally at the Ellipse to the Capitol.  Trump was hiding the planned march so he could argue that it was just a spontaneous outpouring of love for him and the police that sent thousands barrelling down Pennsylvania Avenue to Stop the Steal and hang the disloyal coward Mike Pence so that president pro tem Chuck Grassley could do the right thing and throw the presidential decision to the House, which under a never used rule, could install Trump in spite of his huge electoral loss.  The hundred or so out-numbered police who wound up in the hospital?  Never mind them, the riot was about patriotism, law and order, freedom from tyranny!  As we see time after time, a coherent narrative is unnecessary when passionate feelings are in play.

Notice how none of these people testifying to the January 6th Committee, people who offered damning testimony about the fevered machinations of Trump and several crazy dead-enders plotting to keep the Apprentice star in power after he lost, NOT ONE, came forward while illegal plans were being hatched, during the second impeachment trial or at any time since.  One and a half years later, Patsy Baloney needed public pressure from Liz Cheney and a subpoena to become a frank, candid, supremely careful witness to weeks of Trump’s insane conspiracy theorizing and illegal actions planning.  

True enough some of these shocked patriots, both White House insiders and journalists, published tell-all books, several of them best sellers, which laid out much of the sordid story of an unhinged loser just claiming he won, at the urging of “an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani” (one of Liz Cheney’s best lines), Sloppy Steve “Build the Wall scam” Bannon and folks so clearly insane they are now called “the crazies” by “normal” Republicans — traitor Mike “Declare Martial Law” Flynn, clearly mad Sidney Powell, passive, silent, seething Mark “we might be able to stay in power” Meadows, Lin Wood, John Eastman, Jeff “Let me put my pants on” Clark and others.  I saw one, that white mustached asshole John Bolton, another “I told you so” guy who refused to testify, in part because he was paid a large sum to withhold everything he knew about Trump’s madness until publication day, publically venturing his latest opinion of coups d’etat, Trump, the J6 hearings and the hundred failures of Biden.  I declined to watch.

When Trump lost virtually all of the five dozen RNC-financed post election cases his spokes-sphincters claimed the courts had never reached the merits, that all sixty lawsuits were all dismissed for procedural reasons (mostly lack of a scintilla of evidence for any claim).  “If only courts had heard the actual arguments!” they argued.  The actual arguments were so frivolous and weak, and unsupported by credible evidence, that defending herself against strong claims of defamation Sidney “Unleash the Kraken” Powell said nobody in their right mind could have taken any of her legal claims seriously.

Of course not.

Bannon got slapped down in his latest eleventh hour attempt to postpone his contempt trial that starts Monday.  The crime of contempt of Congress was committed, 100%, by a defiant Bannon who is still bravely talking shit, between breaks for actual diarrhea.   The Trump-appointed judge underscored Bannon’s guilt when he agreed with Bannon’s desperate lawyer that since there are no legal defenses for Bannon what is the point of even going to trial?

The question on millions of minds is where is Merrick Garland, as the J6 committee lays out more and more damning evidence, sworn to under oath by hundreds of eye witnesses.   Garland appears regularly defending other DOJ actions, to protect asylum seekers’ rights, to protect school board members threatened by angry Trumpists, to protect LGBTQ persons under attack by new discriminatory state laws, to protect what’s left of a woman’s right to abortion and so on.  Witness tampering? Obstruction of Justice?  Obstructing an official proceeding?  Planning and launching an armed insurrection to overturn the results of a valid election?    Nothing, Dogg? 

American carnage, Trumpie’s proud legacy.

Like everything else in MAGA world, the claim is bullshit.   Trump can barely read a teleprompter and only does so when he thinks it will help his “brand” to stumble through prepared comments.  Whether he reads or not is beside the point, the message in “Trump reads transcripts” is that you can’t hide from the wrath of this destructive, vindictive maniac, even if what you truthfully reveal is only written on a page somewhere.  The bold lies of MAGA world are central to its popularity, its legitimacy!  You can’t argue so-called truth with people happy with any lie that helps their cause, and who are openly calling for the killing of their hated enemies.

Against this determined onslaught we have a 79 year-old moderate chosen by his party as our leader in this perilous moment.  Joe Biden promised to give his heart and soul as president.  He probably has.  His heart is clearly broken and his soul appears to be inconsolable too.  He is blamed, by virtually everyone, for worldwide inflation, for the “failure” of all his promises to make it past the sacred, inviolable filibuster, supported to the death by two of his slim 51-50 Senate majority, nullifying all initiatives.  There’s nothing sacred about the filibuster.  Remember how nonchalantly fucking Mitch McConnell changed the sacrosanct filibuster rule to install a “51-49, suck it” fully MAGA Supreme Court majority after denying Obama’s nominee a hearing and leaving Scalia’s seat open for Gorsuch.   And, of course, cramming Christian cultist Amy Coney Barrett down America’s collective throat to make it “6-3, suck it” while votes were being cast in the 2020 presidential election.  Quite the little shit sandwich, with supremely entitled, angrily hissing victim of left wing revenge conspiracies, Boof Kavanaugh, in between.

Biden seems to live in his memory as much as in 2022.   He probably remembers having coffee with Mitch McConnell years back and coming away with the impression that Mitch wouldn’t stand by silently as others tried to lynch the first mulatto president.   He still believes a calm, steady approach appealing to decency is best, that Reason always wins over blind hatred (true in the long run, perhaps, but not in the short run).   He acted in accord with this belief when appointing calm, steady, cautious Merrick Garland as AG, with the perfect poetic justice of the moderate Supreme Court candidate the GOP fucked out of a hearing leading prosecutions of those who trampled American democracy, restoring bipartisan faith in American justice and democracy.

American justice has most often been carried out by violence.   Frontier justice, Texas justice, Home Rule justice, States’ Rights justice.  Lynch mobs that support their leader’s view of things always act with impunity.  The simpleton’s nuanced logic runs this way:  deadly violence to keep the peace is justified when the good guys with the guns control the violence, otherwise common criminals would run roughshod over all of us.   Police routinely arrest white mass murderers and quietly take them into custody, they also fill Black traffic law violators, or those suspected of such violations, with bullets from time to time.  A literal lynch mob storms the Capitol, armed to the teeth, organized, led by paramilitary hate group members.  The cry of the violent is always “Justice!“

So, yeah, by all means, keep in mind that Trump reads transcripts, just like he reads his second favorite book, The Bible.   The book he kept at his bedside, according to his first wife, was the Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler.   Hitler knew a thing or two about how to get things done.   How the will, exerted as mightily as possible, can overcome all obstacles, all logic, all so-called decency, overcome all hesitation, all so-called moral qualms (conscience being a Jewish invention, according to AH).  Find men who believe you were sent by God Himself, an infallible man of destiny.  When the moment calls for a screaming temper tantrum, rage, that’s how you bend people to your will.

The answer to a screaming temper tantrum, of course, is firmness, logic, and sometimes, a good hard slap.  If the tantrum is by a president insisting on his right to take illegal action, the good hard slap is enforcement of the laws he and his allies violated.   It is the enduring shame of the human race that we have so often been herded by groups of wilful men operating in a blinding rage, opposed by good people bound by moral qualms.  When Trump finally goes to his reserved seat in the smoking section of Hell, the radical party of born-wealthy men like him will continue to exert its infuriated will.  After all, what good is having all the money in the world if you also can’t make everyone in the world do whatever you tell them to?

When Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the J6 Committee under oath last week (a sin for present day Republicans), the committee revealed written attempts to get Hutchinson to “do the right thing” and to “remain loyal”.  The tweets, likely sent under direction of her former boss Mark Meadows, made philosophical observations about what a shame it would be for a nice young woman like her to… etc.  The witness tampering, and obstruction of investigations of extreme national importance, is ongoing.   

Witness tampering is a felony that carries a twenty year prison sentence.   The punishment is twenty years because the crime is such a serious threat to the rule of law.  If you can freely intimidate all witnesses and get their memories to disappear in all relevant areas, the administration of justice stops dead.  You have the rule of the mob, free to intimidate anyone who calls them a mob.

The only thing political about not prosecuting witness intimidation is a paralyzing fear that the other side will somehow use the prosecutions politically.   

During Trump’s first impeachment trial, the former president (who won reelection in a landslide, necessitating the peaceful, legal, patriotic protest of January 6th…) tweeted thinly veiled threats against people who were testifying truthfully about his attempts to get the president of Ukraine to announce a fake investigation into Joe Biden’s son.  He threatened witnesses publicly and in real time, as they were testifying in public hearings on television.   He also swiftly took revenge on witnesses and family members of witnesses for testifying truthfully.  He took his revenge lap right after impeachment failed, days after jury foreman Mitch McConnell announced he was working closely with the president’s defense team (Patsy Baloney, Federalist Society superlawyer and future White House counsel among them) to get the impeachment farce quickly dismissed.

For years prior to that hearing, and up to the present day, Trump’s standing order to anyone in his party receiving a Congressional subpoena is to tell Congress to shove its subpoena, and they’ll fight it out in courts until the clock runs out.  That’s a novel and brazen approach to lawful, compulsory subpoenas, sir.   The DOJ, headed first by Jeff Sessions and later by the supremely unprincipled Bill Barr (hell of a bagpipes player, I’ve heard) was clearly fine with all of their boss’s obstructive tactics, even the plainly illegal ones (someone has to prosecute crimes or they’re just partisan allegations of crimes).  Trump’s handpicked political operatives at DOJ were all on team MAGA, all shared the same goal of turning the clock back to the days before that Commie Supreme Court desegregated the schools, allowed women the final choice about whether to give birth, gave civil rights to homosexual perverts, due process protections to (presumed guilty) ordinary people arrested for crimes and gave the state’s blessing to the vile practice of miscegenation, race-mixing.

Fabulous piece of shit Jared Kusher comes to mind.   A C student in his private school, he attended Harvard after his billionaire father, Charles, made a two million dollar donation to that institution.  Now Jared is smart!  Charles Kushner was involved in some illegal activity, he juggled money between companies he owned and signed false papers on behalf of partners to make larger than legal political contributions (to Democratic candidates, funnily enough).   They had him dead to rights, the state’s main witness being his brother-in-law.

Charles Kushner didn’t get where he is by coloring between the fucking lines.  He hired a professional scumbag to set up a meeting between a hooker and his brother-in-law.  The hooker was good, picked the witness up and brought him to a hotel room rigged for video recording.   Charles brought the tape to his sister and told her if her husband didn’t dummy up the video would be all over the fucking internet.   His sister may have been wearing a wire, the case against Charles Kusher was now about a much bigger deal: witness tampering.

We know the prison sentence for the felony of witness tampering is twenty years.  Billionaires, however, usually get a steep “best people” discount on the rare occasions they’re sentenced for crimes.  Charles was sentenced to two years, served fourteen months, presumably because his behavior was so good.  Jared never forgave fellow piece of shit Chris Christie for prosecuting his innocent father.  Charles eventually got a pardon from Trumpie, no doubt one of the many Jared had his nose buried in while the planned coup d’etat was being feverishly enacted all around him while he was so busy working on a stack of pardons that he had no idea of any plans.  He told J6 investigators he was too busy working on pardons to listen to people like Patsy Baloney whining about Trumpie’s proposed, allegedly illegal plans.

Pardon me for this rant.   I’ve extended every benefit of the doubt to Joe Biden, not my first pick among the Democratic candidates, nor even my tenth.  Under the horrific circumstances, I think he’s doing a decent job.  I extend the benefit of the doubt to Merrick Garland, a methodical, capable prosecutor probably building a complex and difficult racketeering case (RICO) against Trump and his myrmidons, as he tries to restore public faith in the impartiality of the DOJ.  I’ve heard RICO cases are not hard to win, but are also, unless perfect, not hard to get thrown out on appeal.  Clearly it would be a fatal disaster if Trump was about to be locked up as a political mob boss, appealed and had the case overturned.  Seen that way, it is understandable, and smart, that Garland is building a careful, airtight case against a criminal syndicate.   

But if Garland doesn’t bring prompt prosecutions against people we know are actively committing the felony of intimidating witnesses to cover the gigantic criminal ass of the most prodigious liar the world has ever known, what the fuck?  What the fucking fuck, Merrick?