That’s why the RNC is footing the bill for all of Trump’s legal fees, he’s a tremendous earner.
A couple of millions in payments to lawyers is chump change in the mutual windfall of a Trump-branded GOP. A frigging gold-plated corporate gold mine, their charismatic leader.
Frustrating that Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice, scrupulous about avoiding the appearance of political motivation, has been so reluctant to even investigate anti-democratic criminal activity we all saw play out in front of us, that we see playing out in front of us now as our democracy hangs by a thread, amid the threat of further, better-organized mob violence.
The belatedly formed House Select Committee on January 6 is doing an excellent job investigating and laying out the case, as two teams of impeachment managers also did, clearly setting out a case that could have been proved beyond doubt by testimony and other evidence withheld, for the benefit of Mr. Trump who never, ever obstructed justice. Of course, the impeachment trials were pure politics, the foreman of the jury pledging to work closely with the defense team to acquit each time. The outcome would have been far different in a court of law. Now it’s Garland’s moment to step up. Step up, my man.
Garland famously followed Barr’s lead when he appealed the judge’s decision not to let the Department of Justice stand in for Trump as defendant in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit, on Barr’s ridiculous theory that the president calling someone who accused him of rape a fucking liar he wouldn’t fuck with Mike Pence’s dick was acting in the scope of his “official duties”. It’s true that the DOJ leaped into action to try to challenge the Texas anti-abortion law that cleverly circumvents court review (DOJ appeal dismissed by Supreme Court) and to protect parents at school board meetings (quickly weaponized by the GOP as Garland’s partisan war against people giving totally legal Nazi salutes to show their hatred of commie school boards who hate our freedom) but, Jesus Christ.
Bending over backward to appear impartial and apolitical, the Biden DOJ let Don McGahn finally testify behind closed doors about what he told Mueller (Trump asked him to fire Mueller, then, when McGahn refused, asked him to write a memo stating they’d never discussed firing Mueller– you know, as one does while not corruptly abusing one’s power…) not under oath (the honor system again), after the court belatedly found McGahn’s defiance of a subpoena under Barr’s ridiculous blanket protective privilege claim not supported by law. You can read the transcript of McGahn’s boring, two year-delayed interview, but nobody else ever did, I won’t even bother you with a link. (OK, fine, click this one— link to transcript halfway down, above graphic.) A cold, legalistic transcript is nothing like damning testimony, delivered under oath, with skilled cross-examination, on live TV.
Equally tellingly, the Biden administration has done nothing to combat Trump’s favorite tactic of weaponizing court delay until the underlying issue becomes moot. No inter-branch dispute court has been created, no changes to the judicial docket in DC have been made, let alone the assignment of special judges for expedited rulings on urgent matters of national security, things that can currently be tied up indefinitely by unscrupulous litigants employing toothless appeals to waste additional months or years. Oh, well.
As for the detailed information that is already out there, here’s a bit from the November 6, 2021 New York Times, all undisputed (except by a compulsively litigious serial liar with millions in donated legal funds) and supported by sworn testimony and documentary evidence:
WASHINGTON — Even by the standards of President Donald J. Trump, it was an extraordinary Oval Office showdown. On the agenda was Mr. Trump’s desire to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to carry out his demands for more aggressive investigations into his baseless claims of election fraud.
On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Mr. Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. According to others at the meeting, Mr. Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Mr. Trump acted on his plan.
Mr. Trump’s proposed plan, Mr. Cipollone argued, would be a “murder-suicide pact,” one participant recalled. Only near the end of the nearly three-hour meeting did Mr. Trump relent and agree to drop his threat.
Mr. Cipollone’s stand that night is among the new details contained in a lengthy interim report prepared by the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to do his bidding in the chaotic final weeks of his presiden
The report draws on documents, emails and testimony from three top Justice Department officials, including the acting attorney general for Mr. Trump’s last month in office, Jeffrey A. Rosen; the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, and Byung J. Pak, who until early January was U.S. attorney in Atlanta. It provides the most complete account yet of Mr. Trump’s efforts to push the department to validate election fraud claims that had been disproved by the F.B.I. and state investigators.
The interim report, released on Thursday, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off the pressure during a period when Mr. Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television, and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command . . .
. . . Republicans have sought for months to downplay reports of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign, arguing that he simply cast a wide net for legal advice and correctly concluded that it would be a mistake to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, echoed those sentiments on Thursday with the release of a report by committee Republicans, which called Mr. Trump’s actions “consistent with his responsibilities as president to faithfully execute the law and oversee the Executive Branch.”
But Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Pak — all Republicans — testified that Mr. Trump was not seeking their legal advice, but strong-arming them to violate their oaths of office, undermine the results of the election and subvert the Constitution.
The report is not the Senate Judiciary Committee’s final word on the pressure campaign.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, echoed those sentiments on Thursday with the release of a report by committee Republicans, which called Mr. Trump’s actions “consistent with his responsibilities as president to faithfully execute the law and oversee the Executive Branch.”
Of course, they did. Merrick?
As for Barr:
The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Mr. Barr weakened the department’s decades-long strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from impacting the election outcome.
The Senate panel found that Mr. Barr personally demanded that the department investigate voter fraud allegations, even if other authorities had looked into them and not found evidence of wrongdoing. These allegations included a claim by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a prime force behind the unfounded election fraud allegations, that he had a tape that showed Democratic poll workers kicking their Republican counterparts from a polling station and fraudulently adding votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. into the count.
Fucking bagpipe playing bastard.
Merrick?
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.
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]
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.[
source
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]
[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]
American Exceptionalism is well-known and beyond dispute, though, of course, it cuts both ways. We are the land of the free and the home of the brave. We lead the world in spending on health care, by a country mile. We lead the world in death by constitutionally guaranteed firearms. Military spending, we’re exceptional by a landslide, numero uno mundial. It’s not even a contest if you put our budget up against the total of the next five miltary big spenders. Though not among the very worst nations for infant mortality, our numbers are impressively high considering our great wealth. We have a deadly, ongoing partisan war over basic health precautions during a deadly plague, for fuck’s sake, and a raging debate over gathering, frequently devastating climate catastrophe we are all witnessing. We have Texas Justice.
Here’s a professor, a constitutional scholar, describing our remarkable, indeed, Exceptional, constitutional democracy. He lays out the unamended anti-democratic traditions enshrined in our original, elite-protecting constitution, blueprint for the most anti-majority democracy in the modern world, by design of the sainted Framers. The Electoral College and non-proportional apportionment of Senators, check it out, fascinating food for thought.
Here’s a good graphic demonstrating how powerful minority rule is in our dodgy experiment in representative democracy. A wealthy conservative senator from one of the poorest states in the US has flatly announced his veto of Build Back Better. Manchin, who has almost always voted with the political right (he voted for Sessions, Barr, Gorsuch, banning abortions after 20 weeks, Kavanaugh) won his seat by a slim 19,397 margin over his Republican challenger, in an election less than half of West Virginia voters turned out for. What we Americans call a mandate.
He abruptly announced on Rupert Murdoch’s FOX network that he is tanking the popular Build Back Better Bill he has pretended to negotiate over for months. He said he cannot “in good conscience” support a bill to tackle catastrophic climate change (fossil fuel industry donors and coal barons hate this), lift children out of poverty (back to austerity, little West Virginians), create jobs for caregivers, home care options for seniors and otherwise shore up our shaky social safety net. President Manchin claims he’s concerned about inflation, and the national debt, and that poor people will only waste direct government child care payments (on drugs) if it’s given to them, that providing seniors with dental and vision care as part of the Medicare we all purchase is a slippery slope to … communism?
Then, after snarling about being called a liar and an obstructionist, he gets in his Maserati and drives to the yacht he lives on. Oh, well, at least he doesn’t own any slaves.
If the GOP manages to take back the Senate in 2022, expect this millionaire man of the people (his people) to immediately defect to the party that will immediately end the “bipartisan” filibuster.
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.
source [1]
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?
[1]
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.
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?”
source
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:
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.”
As someone who dislikes liars, bullies and shameless self-promoters, I’m encouraged by what the January 6 Committee has been doing lately. Chairman Bennie Thompson has announced that in the first months of 2022 they will lay out their case to the American public, and the world. They’ll present detailed evidence that there was an organized, well-funded conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election that resulted, when all other efforts failed, in the storming and sacking of the Capitol. There will be live testimony, there will be graphics, there will be blow ups of the text messages sent back and forth between the conspirators as the attack on the Captiol was going on.
It seems it’s taken a ridiculously long time, and much time was wasted when Democrats negotiated in good faith with Trump’s Republicans over the investigation, but the committee has seemingly uncovered a mountain of damning details. Details they are now strategically releasing in a teaser of what’s to come when they put on their case. I have a few thoughts about the difference between a trial with and without witnesses and evidence.
When Nancy Pelosi decided that Mueller’s findings about apparent obstruction of justice by former president Trump, charges Mueller explicitly wrote he could not exonerate the president for, were too complicated for Americans to understand she opted to impeach him over his attempt (the day after Mueller’s monosyllabic testimony to Congress did no further harm to Trump) to enlist a foreign government to smear his likely opponent, Joe Biden. Whatever you make of Pelosi’s decision, and I think it was a very poor decision, here is the problem with a purely political “trial”. You can have all the proof of your case at hand — the detailed report of the perfect phone call to Zelensky, suspiciously hidden in a top secret government safe, the attempt by Barr to illegally bury the urgent whistleblower complaint, the vicious, public attacks on those who properly reported the improper call to Zelensky, in some cases as they were testifying — but if the head juror announces he will be working closely with the defense, and not allowing witnesses to testify or new evidence to be introduced, and that head juror is the deciding vote, you lose. 100% of the time.
When you can have witnesses testify live, under oath, and evidence can be produced that must be rebutted by actual counter-evidence, and where the fact-finder has not corruptly announced he will be working closely with the defense to get this fake, witch hunt fishing expedition thrown out of court, the outcome is an open question.
If Don McGahn had been forced to testify, repeat publicly the things he told Mueller’s investigators, under oath, the American people would have seen the former White House counsel admit that Trump asked him to fire Mueller and then, after he declined, to write a memo claiming that Trump had never asked him to fire Mueller. Obstruction of Justice 101. Then add Hope Hicks to the witness list, and have her repeat what she quotes Trump as saying when Sessions told him a special prosecutor had been appointed, his soliloquy and anguished call for Roy Cohn’s ghost, in which he despaired “I’M FUCKED!”
There were many more witnesses of apparent obstruction of justice, who’d already given sworn testimony to Mueller, but Bill Barr took care of that. He created the most expansive executive privilege claim in American history, an absolute blanket protective privilege against any attempt by anyone to get any information whatsoever, and told Trump to run with the absurdly broad claim, that he could run out the clock. And so they did. Two impeachment trials in the narrowly GOP Senate, no witnesses or updated evidence allowed, two party line acquittals. Everything was ducky for the former president. Until Trump lost the election and his powerful gunsel Barr finally had to quit.
I have to say, I’ve always been in favor of disclosure. Things kept in the dark molder and fester. Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant. I can think of endless instances of things hidden and forbidden from discussion coming back to haunt the parties that demanded their banishment. We pay a high price for backing a person’s right to lie if they find themselves in a tight spot, facing shame, loss of career, criminal charges. I’m looking forward to a little public sunlight on this hideous attempt to install an American dictator.
The judge who dismissed this lawsuit brought to thwart an illegal “fishing expedition meant to embarrass the former president” was appointed by the former president. The disloyal ingrate added that Trump was wrong on the law and gave him a minimal fourteen days to file an appeal in hopes of finding a reversible error that could bring the dismissed case back to life.
The Supreme Court should pencil this one on its shadow docket for a few months from now …
