Category Archives: Law and Justice

Trump scores AGAIN!

Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan yesterday ruled against Trump’s attempt to conceal all presidential papers relating to the planning and implementation of the January 6 Stop the Steal rally and subsequent MAGA riot at the Capitol. All quotes are from the Newsweek edited version of Judge Chutkan’s decision.

Plaintiff does not acknowledge the deference owed to the incumbent President’s judgment. His position that he may override the express will of the executive branch appears to be premised on the notion that his executive power “exists in perpetuity.”

But Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President. He retains the right to assert that his records are privileged, but the incumbent President “is not constitutionally obliged to honor” that assertion.

That is because Plaintiff is no longer situated to protect executive branch interests with “the information and attendant duty of executing the laws in the light of current facts and circumstances.”

And he no longer remains subject to political checks against potential abuse of that power. Moreover, contrary to Plaintiff’s assertion that President Biden’s decision not to invoke executive privilege is “unprecedented,” history is replete with examples of past Presidents declining to assert the privilege.

Trump’s lawyers. doing their best with an extremely weak legal hand, argued there is no legitimate legislative purpose to justify release of Trump’s plans to overturn the election. In attacking Congress’s legitimate legislative purpose in obtaining these documents, they were skating on very thin ice. Judge Chutkan clarifies that Congress does not need to specifically announce its intended legislative purpose, particularly if the Executive Branch agrees that Congress has a legitimate purpose. Then she helps Trump out in understanding what those purposes likely include:

The court has no difficulty discerning multiple subjects on which legislation “could be had” from the Select Committee’s requests. Some examples include enacting or amending criminal laws to deter and punish violent conduct targeted at the institutions of democracy, enacting measures for future executive enforcement of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment against any Member of Congress or Officer of the United States who engaged in “insurrection or rebellion,” or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 3, imposing structural reforms on executive branch agencies to prevent their abuse for antidemocratic ends, amending the Electoral Count Act, and reallocating resources and modifying processes for intelligence sharing by federal agencies charged with detecting, and interdicting, foreign and domestic threats to the security and integrity of our electoral processes.

Several times in her decision Judge Chutkan states the obvious, making a public record:

The Select Committee appears to be operating under the theory that January 6 did not take place in a vacuum, and instead was the result of a months-long groundswell.

Defendants argue that to identify effective reforms, Congress must first understand the circumstances leading up to January 6 and how the actions of Plaintiff, his advisors, and other government officials contributed or responded to that groundswell.

The court notes that the Select Committee reasonably could find it necessary to investigate the extent to which the January 6 attack on the Capitol may have been an outgrowth of a sustained effort to overturn the 2020 election results, involving individuals both in and outside government.

But the “very nature of the investigative function—like any research—is that it takes the searchers up some ‘blind alleys’ and into nonproductive enterprises. To be a valid legislative inquiry there need be no predictable end result.” Eastland, 421 U.S. at 509.

See, for example John Durham’s so far two and a half year investigation of alleged left wing traitors behind the Mueller investigation. Compare: five day, extremely limited FBI “investigation” into allegations (witness tips forwarded directly to Kavanaugh’s sponsor, fellow Federalist Society all-star Don McGahn) against Justice Boof Kavanaugh.

The Committee could reasonably expect the requested records to shed light on any White House planning and strategies concerning public messaging about the election, any efforts to halt or delay the electoral count, and preparations for and responses to the January 6 rally and attack.

Such information would be plainly material to the Select Committee’s mandate to discover and report on “the facts, circumstances, and causes relating to the January 6 [attack],” H.R. 503, § 3(1), and to pass remedial legislation in any number of previously identified areas within their legislative purview.

Court: Trump’s claims fall, release the records, Trump loses this one. Trump: Judge Chutkan is fake, smelly and a liar who does disgusting things when she goes to the bathroom! I have already appealed this bullshit decision, will win AGAIN 6-3 in my Supreme Court!

When is preventing the administration of justice by every possible means officially Obstruction of Justice?

My friend, after taking my recommendation and reading Jason Stanley’s great short book about the rise of fascism, which follows an identical path everywhere it takes hold, called the book a bit hyperbolic. Two years later, after an angry mob of violent “patriots” overran the Capitol, at the urging of their leader, he laughed when I described a cartoon of us I’d like the discipline and talent to draw. He and I are emaciated, dirty, dressed in striped pajamas, skeletal hands on the barbed wire fence in front of us, staring ahead with dead eyes. The caption: “still think Stanley’s book was hyperbolic?”

Our democracy is like the famous frog, comfortable in the warm, then hot water, until he begins to boil and learns it’s impossible to leap with boiled legs. When something awful happens by degrees it can slip by unnoticed until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Biden’s earnest Attorney General Merrick Garland will not convene a grand jury to investigate the now well-documented plot to overturn an American presidential election. Even though there is a federal statute directly on point.

Garland doesn’t want, God forbid, to look political so he takes no action, even knowing there was a coordinated, multi-pronged plan, involving the former president, members of Congress, several lawyers, a grimly effective fascistic political strategist/podcast host, at least one former military officer, several talking heads of extreme right-wing media, plus the wealthy donors who paid, in dark money, to finance what we now nonchalantly refer to as The Big Lie and the MAGA riot.

Even knowing there was a January 6th election overturn command center, paid for by Trump’s campaign, at a hotel a block from the White House, where several conspirators huddled before and during the violent assault and breach of the Capitol to prevent certification of the 2020 election, Garland’s principled passivity is as supine as the famously supine passivity of the idealistic democratic leaders of the Weimar Republic, during the final days before the Thousand Year Reich.

So scrupulous is Garland about appearing nonpartisan that he won’t even indict Steve Bannon for openly telling Congress, the Department of Justice and the rest of the administrative state he despises to go fuck themselves, stick their subpoena where the sun don’t shine. Nineteen days after the House made the contempt referral to DOJ (Glenn Kirschner’s counting it down), Garland continues to agonize over how to apply the facts (legal subpoena, Bannon “fuck you”) to the law (willful defiance of legal subpoena without legal grounds = contempt).

The recent subpoena for pardoned asshole, admitted perjurer, QAnon promoter and former general Mike “Lock Her Up!” Flynn brings us full circle on Trump’s endless merry go round of obstruction of justice.

When, weeks into the Trump administration, Flynn lied about illegal contacts with Russians, and forgot to disclose, while getting top security clearance, that he was on the payroll of Turkey and likely other foreign governments, Trump was forced to fire him. Then the big guy cornered the FBI director, problematic anti-hero James Comey, and one on one, over dinner, asked him to drop the Flynn thing, Flynn being a good guy and a valued member of Trump’s team. Comey refused, was fired. Flynn was prosecuted, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. This was all normal DC politics and the law, playing out pretty much as it always had.

Then as Flynn watched other Trump operatives play coy in legal proceedings, counting on the quid pro quo pardons that Trump continued to dangle for self-proclaimed political ratfuckers like Manafort and Stone, encouraging them to obstruct their own trials, intimidate witnesses, change their stories, playfully threaten a federal judge or two, he realized how stupid he’d been to plead guilty, just because they had the proof of his lies and it would have been worse for him to go through a full trial.

Flynn hired the insane, well-connected right wing attorney Sidney Powell who argued that Flynn had been tricked into his guilty plea by the cunning canards of a cabal of cannibal pedophile cucks. The Department of Justice worked closely with Flynn’s new attorney, a true right wing Kraken superstar (at that time), and they hastened to dismiss all charges against Flynn, claiming now that Trump’s FBI had been compromised by treacherous partisan Democrats who hated Trump and that Flynn had been suckered into lying and then lying about lying.

Trump’s gunsel, Bill Barr, took the extraordinary step of arguing against his own Department of Justice, who had successfully prosecuted Flynn. He did this behind the scenes, as well as publicly.

At the same time, he loudly appointed a Special Counsel to start an investigation into the Mueller “witch hunt” with an eye toward a propaganda coup, that could be announced with great fanfare right before the 2020 election, like Comey’s 2016 game changer about Hillary Clinton. It turned out Durham had turned up an irregularity in a FISA warrant for Trump associate Carter Page, the apparent lie being the omission of the pertinent fact that Page had been a CIA asset or something of that nature. Barr ran with this — if the Page warrant was obtained based on a lie, the whole Mueller investigation was based on pure hatred of Christian Dominionists by Satan worshipping secular cuck anarchist antifa liberals.

Trump successfully obstructed justice during the Mueller investigation, in at least ten separate counts that Mueller could not exonerate him for. He successfully obstructed justice again by having Barr bury the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s shakedown, two day’s after Mueller’s shambling testimony left no doubt that the Mueller investigation had failed to nail him, of the new Ukrainian president for dirt on Joe Biden. Trump was “acquitted” in two separate witness-free impeachment trials, run by his own party, working closely and openly with Trump’s demented defense team.

After lying for months, now a year, about his election loss and conspiring with a cast of pathetic but energetic characters, he fomented a riot to Stop the Steal. He also had a plan to subvert the constitutional order, sought to replace an acting AG intent on following the law, tried to strong arm his loyal vice president to go along with a mad plan to keep control of the government, and when he refused, incited a mob to string the fucking cowardly traitor up.

If you were writing a novel about a corrupt leader obstructing justice, you might be afraid to put this much detail into it, for fear of straining the readers’ willingness to suspend disbelief.

If I were an Australian, with a deep stake in American democracy, Jim Jefferies, for example, I would probably at this point call Merrick Garland a cunt, though I realize that’s not a word we can use here, in the USA, where words fucking matter.

Garland may well be a very principled, judicious, deliberate man, but he’s not a wartime Attorney General ready to deploy the law boldly against seditious conspirators, making them actually obey subpoenas from Congress — for starters, to end the GOP’s seamless obstruction of justice and ensure that fascism is not our immediate fate here in the land of the free and the home of the highly principled.

Mike Flynn is laughing his autocratic ass off now, as the far-right’s Steve Bannon continues to bray from his basement, basking in his open contempt of Congress and law, and the good citizens shudder, wondering when they will finally just take over, put troops and angry mobs of armed vigilantes in the street and the Enemies of the People, and bigmouths like me, into harsh, airless, stinking, sun-baked Joe Arpaio-style prison camps.

Three faces we should all know

John Durham

John Durham, Special Counsel appointed by Bill Barr to investigate and root out the “traitors” who brought the “baseless, lying, partisan witch hunt” investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians to the Department of Justice. Durham has now been at his work longer than Mueller was. He recently issued a third indictment, arresting a man who allegedly did the same kind of thing Mike Flynn did — lying to conceal the fact that he was lying.

In Flynn’s case the lies were eventually deemed ‘immaterial’ by Barr. In the case of the indicted Clinton-supporting alleged liar who gave unfounded rumors to the author of the anti-Trump Steele Dossier (a document which was not, in fact relied on by Mueller – the definition of ‘immaterial’ lies when investigating the oringes of the “Rusher thing”), and allegedly lied about it to Durham’s investigators, he will face justice.

Durham’s face (and this seems to be his official DOJ photo) says a lot about him — he is fierce, implacable, deeply conservative, a devout Catholic (like fellow Christian dominionists [1] Bill Barr, former White House Counsel Pat Cippolini, Mick Mulvaney, Mike Pompeo) and a dogged ratter.

So as not to appear “political” Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland has authorized Durham to continue hunting for the partisan liars who brought the fake and embarrassing “Rusher thing” in an attempt to compromise and humiliate the honest and never the least bit corrupt or “transactional” Donald Trump.

Presumably the same fear of appearing partisan has restrained Garland from convening grand juries to indict any of the people we now know conspired with the defeated former president1 to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Not Rudy Giuiliani (who brought numerous baseless post election lawsuits promoting Trump’s Big Lie and, prior to the election, played a key role in the smearing and ouster of US ambassador Marie Yavonovich, so as to promote a fake Ukrainian investigation into Hunter Biden), not either of the two lunatic fringe Federalist Society lawyers, Jefferey Bossert Clark and John C. Eastman, who energetically served the mad former president in his mission to remain in office after losing the election.

Jeffrey Bossert Clark

Clark is the ambitious Trump appointed weasel [2] who wrote a letter based on Trump’s lies and tried to pressure the acting Attorney General into signing the letter to top Georgia officials falsely claiming there had been massive voter fraud in Georgia, that there was an ongoing DOJ investigation into that fraud. Both claims were false, knowing lies, in Barr’s phrase “bullshit.” Clark gave it his best shot in the days immediately before the January 6 riot, he was ready to step in as acting AG, sign the lying letter himself, if Trump said the word. Trump backed down under pressure from DOJ officials and his own White House Counsel.

On January 14th Clark resigned his post at the Department of Justice and immediately went to work for a far right nonprofit that brought lawsuits against mask and vaccine mandates and abortion providers. The latest on this fucker, who cited a vague privilege instead of testifying before the January 6 Committer on Friday:

“The Trump taint is sticking to Jeffrey Clark,” Business Insider reported Thursday. “In the 10 months since the would-be Justice Department coup, Clark’s name has been scrubbed from the conservative legal group where he’d landed his first post-Trump job. He lawyered up in the face of congressional scrutiny. But, just days before his Friday interview with the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Clark parted ways with the defense lawyer Robert Driscoll, Politico reported late Wednesday.”

Clark is just the latest attorney to suffer repercussions for their relationship with Trump.

“In the eyes of several former colleagues, Clark has joined the ranks of once respected conservative lawyers — including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the former prosecutor Sidney Powell, and the constitutional scholar John Eastman — who have been burned flying too close to Trump,” the report noted.

After Clark stonewalled the January 6 Committee last week he should have been found in contempt and locked up pursuant to Congress’s power of inherent contempt, until he agreed to testify truthfully. Unfortunately, while legal, it would appear as “political” as the prosecutions Merrick Garland is thus far not pursuing. To the party that honors rules and norms, and places a quaint reliance on empirical facts, this kind of hardball tactic is apparently inconceivable.

Which brings us to another Federalist Society stalwart and former dean of a presumably right wing law school, John Eastman.

This jackass, who spoke at the January 6th Stop the Steal rally and subsequently lost his job, turns out to have authored a battle plan for Mike Pence to defy the Constitution, and more than 200 years of precedent, on January 6th and insist that since there were alternate slates of electors from each swing state Trump lost (there were no alternate electors — every state had certified its electors a month earlier) he was invoking his (imaginary, counter-factual) Twelfth Amendment power to disqualify the electors in those disputed states, call the election undecided for lack of an Electoral College majority and send it to the gerrymandered House for a straight party-line vote (that would, under the rules for deciding a deadlocked election, bypass the actual majority in the House) where Trump could be declared president by the loyal members of his own party, who enjoyed a majority in the House for this purpose only. You can read this braying jackass’s short, to the point, memo to Pence HERE.

Under Eastman’s learned constitutional analysis, the Vice President who loses a re-election bid, under powers arguably (but only by someone insane) granted by the convoluted, procedural 12th Amendment, has the absolute final say on whether or not he lost his re-election bid. Clearly the intent of the Framers, no?

The absurdity of this claim aside, Eastman provided step by step instructions for how Pence needed to proceed, to sidestep constitutional and procedural objections and silence Democrats when they “start to howl”. Eastman was in the war room at the Willard Hotel, taking the short walk over to exhort the crowd to go to the Capitol, shortly before the January 6th Stop the Steal rally unaccountably turned into a violent assault on the Capitol. His hotel bills, we learned recently, were paid by the Trump/Pence 2020 campaign.

Of course, indicting him for anything — and how can you indict a lawyer for a good faith argument for illegal actions to overturn a certified election? — would only play into the hands of the really hardcore right wingers who want a violent overthrow of democracy. And so, in Biden and Merrick Garland’s judgment, you dig, we must avoid the appearance of being overtly on the side of not overturning US elections, because, you know, it would only infuriate powerful American Nazis.

Makes me wanna holler.

[1]

Dominionism, or Christian Dominionism is a term coined by social scientists and popularized by journalists to refer to a subset of American Christianity that is conservative, politically active, and believes that Christians should, and eventually will, take control of the government. The term is sometimes used as a “catch-all” by bloggers to describe any politically active Christian, but not every conservative, politically minded Christian is a Dominionist.

Christian Dominionists believe that God desires Christians to rise to power through civil systems so that His Word might then govern the nation. The belief that “America is a Christian nation” is sometimes called “soft dominionism”; the idea that God wants only Christians to hold government office and run the country according to biblical law is called “hard dominionism.”

Dominion theology’s beliefs are based on Genesis 1:28, which says, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (emphasis added).

This verse is taken by Christian Dominionists as a divine mandate to claim dominion over the earth, physically, spiritually, and politically. However, this is taking a large step away from the text, which only says to have dominion over the creatures of earth, and to “subdue” the earth. It is likely that this verse simply means for humanity to a) multiply and expand over the face of the earth instead of staying in one place and b) keep and take care of all other living things. There were no political entities in Genesis 1.

However, dominion theology goes even further with this verse, leading to two other philosophies: Christian Reconstructionism and Kingdom Now theology. Christian Reconstructionism is an intellectually high-minded worldview, most popular among the more conservative branches of Christian faith. Reconstructionism says that dominion will be achieved by each Christian excelling in his or her individual field (Christian artists taking dominion of the art world, Christian musicians taking dominion of the music world, Christian businessmen taking dominion of the business world, etc., until all systems and fields are “subdued”).

source

[2] From a January 24, 2021 story in the New York Times

WASHINGTON — It was New Year’s Eve, but the Justice Department’s top leaders had little to celebrate as they discussed Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, who had repeatedly pushed them to help President Donald J. Trump undo his electoral loss.

Huddled in the department’s headquarters, they noted that they had rebuked him for secretly meeting with Mr. Trump, even as the department had rebuffed the president’s outlandish requests for court filings and special counsels, according to six people with knowledge of the meeting. No official would host a news conference to say that federal fraud investigations cast the results in doubt, they told him. No one would send a letter making such claims to Georgia lawmakers

When the meeting ended not long before midnight, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen hoped that the matter was settled, never suspecting that his subordinate would secretly discuss the plan for the letter with Mr. Trump, and very nearly take Mr. Rosen’s job, as part of a plot with the president to wield the department’s power to try to alter the Georgia election outcome.

It was clear that night, though, that Mr. Clark — with his willingness to entertain conspiracy theories about voting booth hacks and election fraud — was not the establishment lawyer they thought him to be. Some senior department leaders had considered him quiet, hard-working and detail-oriented. Others said they knew nothing about him, so low was his profile. He struck neither his fans in the department nor his detractors as being part of the Trumpist faction of the party, according to interviews.

source

Filibustering the Right to Vote

Seeing it from their point of view, American Nazis are right to fear both federal government coercion/law enforcement and majoritarian tyranny/democracy. Their party has only one idea, outside of loyalty to a dangerous maniac they fear: cripple the government, take it over, bend democracy to the needs of the few, the entitled, and fuck the rest of these “entitlement mentality” putos.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is arguably the most effective anti-racism, democracy protecting law in our history. It cured much of the abuse it was enacted to fix. It enjoyed broad support under Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and, under Bush II it was reauthorized in the Senate 98-0, just a few years before Dubya’s appointee John Roberts took a sharp gut hook to it, pulled it hard and gave the Voting Rights Act a nice, thorough evisceration [1].

Check out the numbers the Voting Rights Act kept getting reauthorized by in Congress:

(that Senate tally for 1982 doesn’t look right)

Here is what is included in the proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that Republicans unanimously (minus one) filibustered for the 3rd time the other day

Here’s a good, short video tour

Heather Cox Richardson:

Republicans are holding tight to the idea of pre–Civil War Democrats that our system of democracy gives to the states alone the power to determine how people within those states live, and who in those states gets to vote to determine those rules. After that idea led to the Civil War, Republicans overturned it with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which give the federal government the power to protect equality within the states.

Since World War II, the federal government has taken that charge seriously, protecting minority voting in the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and, most thoroughly, in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since the passage of that measure, Congress repeatedly reauthorized it by large, bipartisan majorities, most recently in 2006, when the Senate voted unanimously in favor of it. But then in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted that law, and now, only 8 years later, Republican senators claim federal protection of voting rights is an assault on states’ rights.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-4-2021?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=

One year anniversary of 2020 election cigar

[1]

A guided tour through the benign seeming, bloodlessly vicious Roberts decision, and highlights of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliant dissent are at https://wp.me/p2DHRV-j6q

Incoherence is no longer a problem

If emotion is the only reliable indicator of what we should believe, incoherence is no longer a valid critique of anything. Facts are not only inconvenient in political debate, they are irrelevant to millions of Americans. Listen to any of Joe Manchin III’s recent statements for a potent example of willful blindness and easily demonstrable, bombastic, self-righteous incoherence.

With the fire hose of false fecal matter constantly streaming from the Trump machine it is easy to lose track of single details.  In fact, that’s by design of the fire hose of diarrhea, it just keeps coming, it’s revolting, maddening, and the latest burst instantly covers the disgusting stuff already on the ground.  It’s exhausting to be exposed to this kind of unyielding onslaught and in the end enough good, reasonable people tune out that it becomes easy for evil plans to flourish.

On New Year’s Eve 2021, a few days before Trump and his enablers made their final push to pressure Pence to resteal the Stolen Election, with the outlandish Eastman memo, days before the storming of the Capitol, the Washington Post ran an article with the curious title of 

Pence seeks rejection of lawsuit that aimed to expand his power to overturn the election

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Trump’s bid to overturn the election by one of the most openly idiotic members of Congress, Trump die-hard Looey Gohmert of the great state of Texas.   Gohmert’s suit sued Pence to make him give Pence the power to overturn the election.   

You get the theory of the lawsuit?   Gohmert sued Mike Pence, as Vice President, to force him to give himself the power to overturn the election on January 6th, leaving it up to a willing House to vote Trump into office for another four years.

The Washington Post explains what was unusual about Gohmert’s moronic, frivolous lawsuit.

To win a lawsuit, a plaintiff must convince a judge that the interests of the person they are suing are opposed to their own — there must be some controversy or conflict between them that could be resolved through the litigation.

This baseless hail Mary lawsuit, which Pence and the DOJ urged the court to dismiss, did not present a genuine controversy that a court could decide.  Pence was the wrong guy to sue to make Pence the final arbiter of who won the 2020 election.   

Aside from John Eastman’s insane (but audacious) six point plan for how Pence could brazen it out on January 6th to keep himself and his boss in power, nobody has ever tried to argue that the VP effectively decides if he and his running mate lost the election that has just been certified. The notion that the loser could legally declare himself the winner of a democratic vote is classically incoherent. The DOJ, in urging the court to dismiss the frivolous lawsuit, was more circumspect than I can be.

“The Vice President is not the proper defendant to this lawsuit,” wrote Deputy Assistant Attorney General John V. Coghlan.

“The Vice President — the only defendant in this case — is ironically the very person whose power they seek to promote,” he added. “A suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction.”

Pence followed the law, a crime for which a lynch mob was sent to administer justice. In the days after the riot, Pence and the rest of the GOP had their come to Jesus moment when they closed ranks behind the insane former president and amplified his Big Lie about Trump’s massive landslide victory snatched from him by bipartisan conspirators who upheld the validity of the Stolen Election.

Looking for the conspirators in the Seditious Conspiracy prosecution that should have begun months ago? Here is a partial list: Louie Gohmert, Jefferey Clark, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Donald John Trump, Texas AG Ken Paxton, Lyin’ Ted, Madison Cawthorne, Mo Brooks, Rudy, Mike Flynn. The proof of their criminal conspiracy to overturn an election result they hated is already in the public record, Merrick.

Chilling Halloween timeline of Dems heroic fight to save democracy

After Joe Biden won the 2020 election Trump and his closest allies went into maniacal overdrive to overturn the results. He had no reason to believe he couldn’t keep himself in power.

As president he’d used the powers of his office to obstruct justice for four years, and if he could obstruct it just a little more, he believed, he could remain president in spite of the sizable majority that voted against him. He had no reason to doubt this, based on his many triumphs over accountability during his long life. He has, literally, never been held accountable for any mistake, let alone crime, why should a lost election be any different?

Glenn Kirschner laid it out so clearly the other day when he was asked about Jeffery Clark, the DOJ bureaucrat who stepped forward to advance Trump’s fraudulent claim about a stolen election in the swing states where Trump hoped to disqualify electors so the House, where Republicans, the minority party, were winners in a straight majority count, two votes per state, under the weird system for deciding on a deadlocked election. Jeffery Clark (American Eichmann) wrote a letter to Georgia that Trump was trying to get the AG who took over after Barr fled to sign, days before the MAGA riot to stop the final certification of Biden’s win. The idea was to claim there was a dispute in the Electors in every swing state Trump lost and throw the decision to the House. Here’s Kirschner:

Jefferey Clark was a willing co-conspirator with Donald Trump when Donald Trump said “look, I know there was no fraud, just say there was fraud and leave the rest to me and my sycophants in Congress.” Jefferey Clark said “I got you, boss, let me draft a memo to the states like Georgia to try to corruptly overturn the election.”

There’s a conspiracy in the harsh light of day, give me three hours in front of a DC jury, I’ll prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

source

The rest of the seditious conspiracy [1] funded by a group who kicked in $50,000,000 in dark money to promote the lie that Trump’s landslide victory had been stolen by a bipartisan, international cabal of radical Democrats, traitor GOP officials, traitor Trump-appointed judges, dead voters, cheating Blacks, Muslims, Socialists, Illegals, George Soros, the Clintons, the dead former president of Venezuela, and many, many other highly nefarious characters.

While fifty million was spent on advertising the lie about the stolen election, there was another 3.5 million dollars for the organizers of the January 6 Stop the Steal Event at the Ellipse. The date was chosen because it was the last possible moment to block Biden becoming the president. They had no permit for any kind of march that day. Some of these organizers are cooperating with the House January 6 Commission (and hopefully also the DOJ) and at least one contends she had no idea a march to the Capitol, let alone a forcible invasion to stop a joint session of Congress, was part of the plan. She was well-paid, presumably, to get the permit for the Stop the Steal gathering at the Ellipse, publicize it and organize things for the passionate, animated speakers, including one in body armor, to whip up the crowd before Trump stepped up to address his fans from behind bulletproof glass [2].

The Democrats, the party whose leadership decided during the primaries that in spite of the vast popularity of his ideas for fundamental reform, and his string of victories in Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders would be replaced as the presidential candidate by moderate master of compromise Joe Biden. The party fell in behind this plan, Biden won by more than seven million votes.

Now Democrats, led by President Biden, are quickly and forcefully responding to a violent assault on American democracy, after Trump’s expensive ad campaign promoting a lie including the Communist plan to steal the 2020 election and the rest of Trump’s fight to the death against the hellish conspiracy revealed, with great coyness, by someone named Q (who has gone silent now for many months). They are planning to carefully think about many ways to combat the pugnacious real-time obstruction of the investigation into the MAGA riot on January 6..

Here is a snapshot of the bold actions being taken by the party of Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer et al in the immediate defense of our democracy.

Makes you wonder if they’d all be acting the same way if the MAGA rioters had actually put violent hands on Leader Pelosi and others they taunted and threatened on that dark day in January 2021 when an insane president, not accepting the will of the voters, sent an enraged mob down to stop business in the Capitol, with a large contingent of GOP lawmakers fully embracing his Big Lie and voting to contest the certified election results in numerous states.

[1] Seditious Conspiracy

[2] from a January 5th news report

The president tweeted Tuesday evening that he would be speaking at the Save America Rally on the Ellipse at 11 a.m.

Several pre-event rallies took place Tuesday, and DC Police said two arrests were made during the first day of demonstrations (as of the afternoon). Charges included carrying a pistol and rifle without a license, possession of high capacity feeding device, unregistered ammunition and firearms, no permit while driving an unauthorized van and possession of illegal fireworks  

Attendees rallying on Wednesday are holding the first amendment rally, “to demand transparency and protect election integrity” on the same day Congress is set to officially approve the 2020 election results. This event comes after President Trump warned via Twitter that there would be a “very big” and “wild” protest on Jan. 6 after he refuses to concede due to unfounded allegations of election fraud. 

I will be speaking at the SAVE AMERICA RALLY tomorrow on the Ellipse at 11AM Eastern. Arrive early — doors open at 7AM Eastern. BIG CROWDS! pic.twitter.com/k4blXESc0c

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2021

Bullying bullies bullying

Speaking of bully politics , I watched Josh Hawley snarling at mild-mannered Attorney General Merrick Garland Wednesday, as did fellow insurrectionists Lyin’ Ted and Tom Cotton and, in a gentler way, the folksy, 88 year-old gentleman conservative from Iowa, ancient Chuck Grassley, laying on the lash as Garland sat for more than four hours being grilled in front of a senate committee.

The Trumpists were pummelling Garland about a memo he sent to local DOJ offices advising them to work closely with local law enforcement to protect school board members against threats of violence.

The Trumpists find this memo offensive and despicably partisan, as it clearly applies only to passionate Trump voters, who are styled “domestic terrorists” if they so much as express their First and Second Amendment rights at school board meetings and some scared little cucks feel threatened.   The partisan memo, they made clear, is grounds for Garland’s removal as A.G.  

The rightwing echo chamber contends, in one endlessly amplified voice, that this intolerable memo is as explosive an affront to America as the loathsome Hillary Clinton murders in Benghazi, something so threatening to American decency and democracy that Garland must answer for it, publicly and under oath.   The NY Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns FOX and the Wall Street Journal, chimed in: 

Today Merrick Garland’s thuggishness and partisanship show him to be unfit for the Supreme Court and he is not ethical and committed to justice as Biden’s attorney general. He should go.  


A website called welovetrump expressed a similar statement,which came up number three on the Duck Duck Go search engine about yesterday’s hearing:

Attorney General Garland Won’t Deny Under Oath that Federal Agents May Have Incited January 6th. Something interesting happened this past week. Attorney General Merrick Garland was questioned about January 6th. Representative Thomas Massie from Kentucky had a straightforward question. Were federal agents present at the January 6th protest at …


Once Garland took his seat the GOP members of the committee began lustily pounding him with angry sound bytes for the right-wing echo chamber.

Tom Cotton kept calling Garland “judge” and told him, toward the end of his dressing down, that he thanks God that Garland was kept off the Supreme Court and that he thinks Garland should resign in disgrace.  Hawley was more superficially respectful, addressing Garland as General Garland, but his angry aggressiveness — in  defense of innocent parents merely expressing their understandable frustration with libtard cucks and making perfectly justifiable threats, was apparent.  He pointedly challenged Garland to call the guy on the poster behind him, the distraught father whose daughter was raped in a bathroom by a fake trans boy dressed as a girl AND WAS DRAGGED OUT OF THE SCHOOL BOARD MEETING BY SECURITY!!! a domestic terrorist [1].   

Lyin’ Ted began “For eight years under Obama the Department of Justice was politicized and weaponized.  When you came before this body during your confirmation hearing, you promised things would be different.” The four years with four Trump A.G.’s personally loyal to Trumpie, enabling their boss’s seamless obstruction of justice? Never happened, irrelevant, immaterial. How dare you?!! We’re talking about what that hateful black devil did!

Then, using his genius as a collegiate debater, Cruz forced Garland to admit that a fed up parent simply giving the Nazi salute at a school board meeting, especially if the smug, Nazi bastard deserved it, was protected expression under the First Amendment.   

I watched a GOP senator take one word from a statute — “annoy”– and focus on it to make the rest of the law Garland is intent on enforcing (to protect school board members from the physical rage of infuriated mobs) seem like liberal scolding — pricelessly sickening. 

Garland, they all agreed, owed Trump nation an apology.  Garland, who had no reason to apologize about the memo Republicans were flogging him over, acquitted himself as an earnest, mild-mannered, judicious man.   The most respectful thug ever.

The geniuses of the GOP on the Committee were on a mission unrelated to law or justice, they were busy making Benghazi-style talking points for their base (al-Q’eada, in Arabic). Roll clip three:

“This is shameful. Judge, this is shameful. This testimony, your directive, your performance is shameful. Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court. You should resign in disgrace, judge.”

source

Come on, wrestling fans, thirty words, each one a direct knee in the nuts!  Hard to improve on that one by Cotton. 

Hawley tried hard, probably got the one about pretending Garland had called the father whose daughter had been raped by an alleged fake trans boy in the girl’s bathroom a domestic terrorist in a playable byte for OANN, Breitbart, Der Sturmer, FOX, etc.

Lyin’ Ted got in a killer shot by making the Jewish jurist admit that a disgruntled guy at a schoolboard meeting who gives some smug putz the Nazi salute is exercising his First Amendment right of free expression, something the Department of Justice is sworn to protect. Garland acknowledged that simply giving the Nazi salute is indeed expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.

But what was your larger point, Lyin’ Ted, in making the Jewish A.G. tell America that he protects a Nazi’s absolute right to give his party’s heil Hitler salute anywhere and any place he so chooses?

All that poor guy did was give that smug school board the good old Nazi salute, no violence just a strong, constitutionally protected expression of his opinion.

What is America coming to, these senators wanted to know, when you can’t even give the Hitler salute or fly into an understandable rage after your daughter is raped in a school bathroom, by a rapist dressed as a girl?

Garland didn’t seem to have an answer beyond repeating that the DOJ is committed to making sure angry mobs don’t carry out threatened violence against school board members for things like insisting that American history courses include an accounting of slavery, segregation and violent mobs who attack and kill people they hate and never face justice.

The seething hostility of these Big Lie embracing partisans, one after another, is so reminiscent of Nazi judges and prosecutors barking dismissively at defendants during the Thousand Year Reich. They certainly deserve a big old Nazi salute!

Happy Halloween!

[1] Cotton also, inaccurately, said the high school girl

“was raped in a bathroom by a boy wearing girls’ clothes and the Loudoun County School Board covered it up because it would interfere with their transgender policy during pride month.”

The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia https://nyti.ms/3nHQvqh

The true story of that girl’s rape in a school bathroom is more complicated and has nothing to do with gay pride or liberals on school boards.

Mandate!

I feel like the former president, agitatedly tapping away at my phone… fucking depressing, but there it is, as I shop for a new computer to replace a mint condition macBook that has been rendered obsolete “to protect my privacy”…

When the candidate of White Nationalists, Militant pro-fetus Christian Conservatives, Climate Change Deniers, anti-government “Libertarian” billionaires, rich people who wanted a tax break and every fascist-leaning follower Steve Bannon could bring into the fold, narrowly became president in 2016, his party’s electoral mandate, as reflected in the Senate, was 51-49 [1].

It was no problem for this narrow Republican majority to give a $1,900,000,000,000 tax break to the wealthiest Americans and their favorite corporations. It was a simple matter for them to change the filibuster rules to ram a 6-3 Federalist Society Supreme Court down America’s throat, in perpetuity.

Now, with Democrats in the narrow majority, there is a sudden cry for “bipartisanship” in our deeply divided nation, a cry taken up by two suddenly supremely powerful cartoonishly corporate Democrats, oil baron Joe Manchin III and the narcissistic Sphinx of Arizona, a senator who only talks to big donors and the president.

I’ve got no news here, except that Americans will have to settle for a somewhat puny compromise Build Back Better Act that will leave prevention of climate catastrophe underfunded and several popular, long overdue programs cut entirely. Manchin (who appears quite vulnerable in Red West Virginia — GOP voters hate him for disloyalty to Trump, any other Democrat outpolls him as the “blue” candidate) announced he will go no higher than 1/4 of the bloated U.S. military budget, and won’t sign on to any Clean Energy initiative that threatens his coal business or those of his fossil fuel donors.

Biden has agreed to all of the right-wing moderate’s demands. It will still be great, Biden insists, his party’s chance to do anything dramatic rapidly slipping away, amidst routine, painless, phoned-in GOP filibusters of all legislation the majority party proposes.

After all, as McConnell points out, it’s not like the fucking Democrat [sic] party has a goddamned mandate in this deeply divided coin flip democracy , you snowflake cucks.

Lifting millions of American children out of poverty, keeping multitudes safe from the threat of homelessness, preventing the destruction of our planet? Not nearly as compelling, to corporate Free Market donors, as more profits for the greedy investor class that funds the whole shit show. Ask “centrists” Kyrsten and Joe III.

You know what I’m sayin’?

[1] from senate.gov

115th Congress (2017–2019)
Majority Party: Republicans (51 seats)
Minority Party: Democrats (47 seats)
Other Parties: 2 Independents (both caucused with the Democrats)
Total Seats: 100
Note: At the beginning of 115th Congress, there were 52 Republicans and 46 Democrats. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) resigned on February 8, 2017, and was replaced by Luther Strange (R-AL). Doug Jones (D-AL) subsequently won the special election held on December 12, 2017, to replace Sessions and was sworn into office on January 3, 2018.