Related reading
Response to a thoughtful comment
I get very few comments here, I don’t know why. When I get a comment I always reply to it, as we all should when someone takes the time to express themselves to us.
I got a comment earlier today from Pasco Cruz, in reference to my recent post about the Federal Election Commission’s 2-2 vote not to prosecute Trump for the campaign finance violation his former attorney pled guilty to. Pasco wrote:
Non disclosure agreements are in no way illegal and the prosecutors literally made-up a charge that didn’t exist of “interfering with an election”. Any other lawyer should have mopped the floor with that case and thrown it right into the dumpster where it belonged, but Cohen was dumb enough to hire and trust Clinton operative and super slimey attorney Lanny Davis who was clearly working against Cohens best interests and helped to railroad him in an ruined his life all to try to make Trump look bad in the end, which really didn’t even work since Stormy Daniel’s has since come out and said she never even had sex with Trump.
There are legitimate things to rag on Trump about, but this story was made for low IQ simpletons to follow and get hyped up about. Anyone who still talks about it and cannot see it for the sloppy political hit job it was, is pathetic.
Fair enough. I took a moment to see what was on the DOJ website about the Michael Cohen plea, what the actual charges he pled guilty to were, and replied:
Pasco:
Thank you for this well-written and authoritative-sounding comment. The Cohen hush money payments to Stormy Daniels (“Woman 1”) and a former Playboy model (“Woman 2”) were found to be a violation of campaign finance laws, and Cohen was prosecuted by Jeff Sessions’ DOJ. To dismiss Cohen’s conviction for “interfering with an election” as a political hit job to hurt Trump, requires leaving out many important details. Cohen pled guilty to:
tax evasion, making false statements to a federally-insured bank, and campaign finance violations. The plea was entered followed the filing of an eight-count criminal information, which alleged that COHEN concealed more than $4 million in personal income from the IRS, made false statements to a federally-insured financial institution in connection with a $500,000 home equity loan,
and, in 2016, caused $280,000 in payments to be made to silence two women who otherwise planned to speak publicly about their alleged affairs with a presidential candidate, thereby intending to influence the 2016 presidential election.
(the whole DOJ plea announcement, including all the sordid details of the campaign finance violation [which involve the National Inquirer and David Fucking Pecker], is at https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/michael-cohen-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-eight-counts-including-criminal-tax)
Of course it is legal, as you say, in most cases, to pay someone you had sex with to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The payment itself was not the crime — it was paying them as part of a political campaign to hide facts that would have certainly hurt the candidate.
If two women Trump paid (through Cohen) in October 2016 for their legally-binding promise to remain silent had been free to talk publicly about having extramarital sex with Trump right before the election, he likely would not have won the Electoral College vote. Their legally enforceable silence had great political value to Trump, well in excess of the $280,000 he had Cohen pay them.
As you say, there are legitimate things to rag on Trump about, and one of them was his deliberate delay in appointing a quorum on the FEC, disabling the agency that oversees campaign finance violations. Trump left the FEC without any ability to investigate or enforce campaign finance law, after Cohen pled guilty to campaign finance violations he committed at the request of Individual One (Trump).
The recent 2-2 vote among Trump’s December 2020 FEC appointees, the recusal of one and abstention of another, probably tells us more than we’ll ever know about the political fix at the FEC that kept Trump safe from being indicted in connection with that crime.
Peace and keep reading!
Looking on the Bright Side
A friend, depressed by the depressing political news that is fed to us steadily, asked me to only send her news items that contained a ray of hope. I mustered a little hope, which I will describe below.
It may seem only a small glimmer of a bright side, though all hope can be seen that way. This bright side could be the cusp of a political tipping point in our violent clash of cultures. It is nice to imagine that our Department of Justice will now pursue justice, cast a careful eye over the evidence of the Mueller and subsequent Senate investigations. A legal examination of a series of very openly transactional quid pro quos is certainly in order.
It is worth pointing out again, humans are not often ruled by reason or logic. If we were, it would be hard for nationalist racism and fascist logic to prevail in so many countries worldwide. There would be no debate, in a reasonable world, about the right of everyone to live free of terror and violence. In most places that’s a proposition you will need to fight about.
Of course, we have never lived in a calm or reasonable world, and those of us who hope for rational public debate that ends with more fairness for everyone will be waiting a long time. Here in the US we’re at the mercy of a no-compromise/filibuster political party that is anti-debate and has the means to stop any important political discussion before it happens. That we may not succeed in convincing adversaries this fierce of anything they don’t already believe doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to act.
We need to keep in mind that it is impossible to convince anyone of anything just by clearly presenting the facts. The facts never add up to much, if you already hold a strong opinion about the matter.
At a time when a lie carries as much weight as an indisputable truth, and Big Lies have often changed the course of history, we must be creative in how we present our accursed “facts.” We have to take care to avoid sounding smugly superior (as the rest of this sentence no doubt fails to do) to those who fervently worship at the altar of powerful emotion, low-information voters of unshakably held opinions, based strictly on faith, which they believe to be infinitely superior to fallible human “rationality”.
The biggest obstacle to convincing anyone of things that are otherwise true and urgent (like the need to take energetic action to avoid total climate catastrophe) is the ease of spreading even the most easily disprovable lies in siloed, algorithm-driven echo chambers on “social media”. One of our two major parties is now, officially, the Party of the Big Lie (Trump, the loser, actually won — in a landslide), at a time when spreading a lie to millions who will never see the lie contradicted has never been easier.
The most important measure to reverse this pernicious, increasingly deterministic trend, is holding liars accountable for spreading lies. There is currently no price to be paid for spreading even the most obvious lies. In fact, in Trump’s GOP, aggressively promoting a featured lie is a certain path to promotion. See how quickly anyone who calls out the lie is attacked and unanimously canceled by quick voice vote.
There is a simple test for weighing the value of absolute “free speech,” including demonstrable lies, against speech that should be actionable in court — the harm that the false speech causes. It is the same test applied to all other free speech [2].
Under our current law you can’t shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theatre when there is no fire, because a panicked stampede is predictable if you do. Free speech does not protect an American’s right to use words to inflame hatred in a way that predictably leads to violence. Violence-provoking lies should be treated the same way in the on-line world.
How about this for a single, absolute ground rule:
promoting, supporting or endorsing an incendiary lie over “social media,”
AND
refusing to publicly retract the lie when confronted with evidence that it is a lie, and called on it by the platform’s monitors, means that you forfeit your right to use the platform.
Period. Sounds fucking simple enough, no?
Of course there will be violent contention about what is “incendiary” as well as the definitions of “promoting” “endorsing” and any other words chosen.
It is often easier to see the incendiary nature of a lie after the fact, looking at events in light of the lie. That’s why Twitter banned Trump for life after his long, lie-filled speech on January 6th sent thousands down to the Capitol to violently interrupt the counting and final certification of Electoral College votes against Trump. When Trump eventually went on Twitter to disperse his mob, he told them they were right to be angry, that they’d been cheated, the election stolen from them all, that they were special, that he loved them, to never forget this day, but that it was time for them to go home in peace.
Twitter immediately did what it probably should have done years earlier — took away the platform Trump used on January 6th to remind rioters in the Capitol that Mike Pence had betrayed them. If they’d found Pence, and strung him up, would our discussion today be much different? Hard to know, though I think probably not, at least among Trump die-hards, now the dominant strain of the GOP.
The full damage of a lie is not when it is first told. The real harm sets in each time the lie is replicated, insisted on, every time someone else is converted to belief in something that is destructively false.
The predictable growth cycle of a lie is its most dangerous aspect.
Justifying the January 6 riot at the Capitol requires endless new lies — BLM did it, antifa faked it by posing as a MAGA mob, there was no riot, only Trump supporters died (so where’s the harm? That one trampled to death? shit happens) the cops were lying, only a few of the 140 “injured” were seriously hurt, the “lost eye” story is bullshit, the cop who was “killed” died of a natural heart attack, the videos of the rampage were fake, the protesters were law-abiding, nonviolent tourists, for the sake of our country we need to just move on, there’s no need for a Commission, radical Democrats are just trying to get revenge out of blind hatred of Trump, like they always do, and so on.
While we live in this Age of Trump, the age of wildly insane lies taken, literally, as gospel, the only good political news I see at the moment is the heavy shit storm gathering over the head of the defeated former president who insists he actually won in a landslide. The evidence of Trump’s lifelong pattern and practice of cheating and obstructing justice is rapidly mounting. His day of reckoning in several different courts of law approaches.
I don’t see how he beats the rap in the upcoming Georgia criminal case, where he violated the election meddling statute with great thoroughness and specificity– and is recorded doing so. His best hope may be a stand-off between Ron DeSantis’s Florida troops and federal forces in an interstate extradition battle.
A criminal conviction and more major losses in civil court (where cases are decided, 99% of the time, based on the evidence), plus the conclusions of the January 6 Commission, should loosen Trump’s death-grip on all but the diehard 39% of his cult of personality. Full public disclosure of the extent of Trump’s corruption and contempt for the law will give his many mostly silent, terrified enemies on the right a shot of courage.
Revelations from the likely Rudy Giuliani prosecution should have a similar effect, even in our arational nation. I think bad news in court for Trump could sway many “swing voters” away from his party. When he had an attorney general who would constantly fix things for him, Trump didn’t need to worry about the law coming down on him. Now he has great reason to worry about the law finally catching up with him, after a long life of getting away with whatever he wanted because he’s super smart, and a big star, and, when you’re like that, you know, they let you do it.
The pieces seem to be nicely lined up for an obstruction of justice case:
Former White House Counsel Don McGahn will finally testify under oath that Trump asked him to create false records of their conversation about firing Mueller. Having Trump’s first White House lawyer testify that Trump told him to create a false record is a firm building block for an obstruction of justice prosecution.
Trump’s most competent and accomplished enabler, Bagpiper Bill Barr, the AG who advised Trump to have his people defy all subpoenas and muzzle critics, is in the federal court record as a man judges found “lacks candor”. Three federal judges, in three different cases, concluded that Barr’s rationalizations were not credible and his legal reasoning was in the service of partisan politics. Barr was most recently found “disingenuous” when he tried to illegally conceal other records, falsely classified as “deliberative memos” drafted the day he misleadingly told America and the world that Mueller’s report had found basically nothing on Trump.
Barr’s demonstrated lack of candor, and his relentless. public re-election campaign-related criminal investigation into the the origins of the Mueller “witch hunt” require a DOJ re-examination, based on the actual documents. The same goes for Barr’s rationale for falsely announcing that the Mueller Report basically exonerated Trump for both criminal conspiracy with a foreign power and obstruction of justice. Barr’s conduct was an integral, and crucial, part of that obstruction of justice.
Barr’s repeated untruthfulness, including his lies about the secret Mueller “memo” he classified as supposedly used in his deliberations to declare Trump “exonerated” as he’d promised to do before Trump hired him, will come into play in the obstruction of justice case against Trump.
Add to that all the evidence that has come out since Mueller concluded he had insufficient evidence to find “criminal conspiracy” between Trump’s campaign and the Russians. We have more details about Trump’s corrupt quid pro quo pardons to Manafort and Stone, both of whom lied to Mueller for Trump’s sake, to cover up their closely coordinated work with the Russians. The secret internal polling data that Manafort gave Putin (via Kilimnik) steered Russian influence efforts toward American voters in close districts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three states that gave Trump his Electoral College victory [2].
There are a hundred other related details including Trump’s partially successful attempt to disrupt a joint session of Congress (mission accomplished) to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the election he still claims he won in a landslide (70% of Republicans polled believe Trump won in a landslide). How about his enlistment of Republican allies like Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy, each of whom made pilgrimages to meet with him in Florida in a show of loyalty, to promote his Big Lie and continue to obstruct formation of a January 6 Commission?
Truly sickening that it is taking so long, but such is life in a democracy hovering on the brink of extinction. It takes time for a prosecutor to make a strong, airtight case ready to be tried in court. Hopefully the rule of law will prevail, before it’s too late for law.
[1]
outside of the unlimited dark money “free speech” of corporate persons, of course.
[2] Remember this?
The most important states, though, were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she’d have won the electoral vote, too.
source
drawing 2018
Heritage
Voting fraud conspiracist and Heritage Foundation (Mike Pence’s current employer) stalwart Hans von fucking Spakovsky rears his ugly head:
And in a March article for the New York Times, Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein outlined the role of Heritage Action in Georgia’s and Arizona’s voting restrictions, noting that at least 23 of the proposed state bills that dealt with voting had language that looked like that of Heritage.
They also wrote that Heritage plans to spend $24 million to change voting laws in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin before the 2022 election, and that the person behind the Heritage voting policies is Hans von Spakovsky, who mainstreamed the idea of voter fraud in the Republican Party, although experts agree it is vanishingly rare.
Hans von fucking Spakovsky [1]. Of whom a judge wrote, after dismissing his testimony as the biased presentation of a partisan activist posing as an expert witness:
The Judge, Julie Robinson, wrote von Spakovsky’s statements were premised on several misleading and unsupported examples and included false assertions. She said his generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws. Von Spakovsky maintains a database of what he calls some 1,300 cases of vote fraud
[since 1982, yo!, putting the prevalence of proven voter fraud in the 0.0001% category– ed].
A giant think tank that writes conservative laws that are introduced by party members in 47 states is a vital part of that political party. The highly partisan nonprofit Heritage Foundation (authors of the original Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as I recall) once again rolls out the discredited lies of von Spakovsky, who has been keeping the massive Heritage Foundation database of electoral fraud going back to 1982 (hundreds of cases!!! more than a billion votes, yes, but HUNDREDS of cases!!) to justify enhanced protections for “electoral integrity”.
These new Heritage Foundation approved laws make all the changes to state voting that Trump and the RNC went to court seeking last time. State and federal courts prevented GOP state legislatures from implementing measures to make it harder to vote the last time around. That’s why the Republican controlled states are busily tightening up their voting laws, to ensure minority freedom from majoritarian tyranny!
Lest we forget, Joe Manchin, the Voting Rights Act you support strengthening had its heart cut out by 5 Heritage Foundation embracing Supreme Court conservatives who overruled President George W. Bush, who had immediately signed the extension of the law that passed 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate.
Although there was no hint of this overwhelming bipartisan support in John Roberts’ infamous Shelby County decision, as he struck down the law citing lack of evidence of ongoing voter suppression, there had been 21 hearings where 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under pre-clearance were considered before the law was unanimously reauthorized by the Senate. As Dubya said (from RBG’s dissent) when signing the extension of the 1965 law:
recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.”
Nice try, Mr. Manchin, but you already face opposition from the Heritage Foundation and a couple of their senators on the other side of the aisle.
Hey, just because challenging drop-boxes, mail-in voting, illegally giving water to people waiting on line to vote, reducing voting hours to end at 5 pm and so on didn’t work to stop Trump’s defeat in 2020 doesn’t mean that implementing these measures into state laws won’t work like a miracle in 2022 and beyond!
These right-wing bastards are nothing if not persistent, and they fight, wielding every weaponizable lie, with the desperate fury of a dying breed.
Hans von fucking Spakovsky, former head of Trump’s secret electoral strategy conference of Republican state officials. I figured it was only a matter of time before he crawled back out from under his rock. Let’s see that handsome face one more time, Hans.
[1] As I wrote a few months back (before the 2020 election):
But here’s the really creepy part. A right-wing lawyer working for the Heritage Foundation is advising a group of Republican state attorneys general on how to use disproven legal theories about electoral fraud to take control of state elections and “safeguard the integrity of the upcoming election” to support the president and his followers. This man, Hans von Spakovsky, is the Heritage Foundation’s expert on voter fraud:
HANS VON SPAKOVSKY: All we have to do is look at the many cases, proven cases of absentee ballot fraud to understand that the problem with absentee or mail-in ballots is there the ballots that are most vulnerable to fraud, to being stolen. And they also…
ANDREA BERNSTEIN: Hans von Spakovsky who is well known to ProPublica’s Jessica Huseman.
JESSICA HUSEMAN: Hans von Spakovsky is a longtime voter fraud conspiracy theorist, and he got his start like many people who are now doing strange things in the world of voting in the 2000 election.
ANDREA BERNSTEIN: After that, he went to work for the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.
He eventually wound up at the Heritage Foundation where he became their resident expert in making thinly-sourced voter fraud claims.
ANDREA BERNSTEIN: In 2018, von Spakovsky was called in to be an expert witness in a federal trial over a Kansas law that required proof of citizenship in order to vote. Von Spakovsky was there to present data on noncitizen voting.
JESSICA HUSEMAN: The judge basically dismissed all of his testimony, called it cherry picked, called it biased. Said that he was more of an activist rather than an unbiased expert witness. And her opinion basically said that she gave his testimony no real credence in her decision.
ANDREA BERNSTEIN: The judge, Julie Robinson, wrote von Spakovsky’s statements were premised on several misleading and unsupported examples and included false assertions. She said his generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws. Von Spakovsky maintains a database of what he calls some 1,300 cases of vote fraud.
So, naturally, he is now working behind the scenes for Mr. Trump’s re-election. He has apparently been hosting Republican-only strategy meetings for state government officials involved in overseeing the 2020 election. The frequency of these meetings is increasing as the already contested election approaches, and officials of the Trump administration are involved in the strategizing.
ANDREA BERNSTEIN: Von Spakovsky’s meetings were attended by state, secretaries of state. These officials are often partisan but their job is to ensure the integrity of their state’s elections.
MIKE SPIES: The purpose of the meeting was essentially to sort of jointly strategize.
ANDREA BERNSTEIN: And, again, only Republican officials were invited to the meetings. Up until 2020, they met basically a couple of times a year in Washington. Republican congressional staffers sometimes came and on at least one occasion so did officials from the Justice Department, Trump appointees.
Spring evening, NYC
Purge, classic style
A purge is almost never a good thing, though in the sense of a good vomit after gross overeating or over-drinking, it makes a lot of sense. A new democratic government does well to purge diehard fascist members of the former government, but in general, purges are the work of autocrats who need to periodically weed out the disloyal and make terrifying examples of them. A frightful spectacle of vengeance deters those inclined to think for themselves instead of doing exactly what the leader demands.
When I hear the word purge I always think of the underground chamber where my favorite writer, Isaac Babel, was condemned, after a long stint in prison, one of millions of victims of Stalin’s purges. Babel pleaded with his interrogators, men who worked for Beria [1], Stalin’s chief of torture, to let him just continue writing. Babel’s mock trial was short, only a couple of minutes in that tiny, airless room, after which he was taken from that dark chamber and into a nearby courtyard for a couple of gunshots. A trunk of Babel’s unpublished writings, safeguarded by his friends, disappeared, never to be heard of again. That’s a purge.
Yesterday the GOP purged Liz Cheney from Republican leadership in a basement room at the Capitol, by a voice vote. This shouting out of “yay” or “nay” spared potential embarrassment for any individual Republican who would otherwise be on the record in favor of removing Cheney for the high crime of insisting that a violent riot, caused by Trump, watched worldwide on live television, had taken place on January 6, to support a lie that Trump had won the election in a landslide.
You don’t necessarily want your face attached to a vote to do that, since you can’t predict the future, so you meet in a large room in the basement, in a kind of lynch mob, and do it fast. The “yays” have it, Liz Cheney is purged. The whole thing took 16 minutes.
The problem with a purge that does not actually kill your enemy, as any good dictator knows, is that the opposition tends to organize around leaders who remain unbowed during a purge. Cheney, as hideous as her torture-endorsing right-wing politics are — and she is truly a chip off the old aptly named Dick Cheney — has taken a basic and principled position against perhaps the boldest single lie in American political history. Certainly the boldest lie ever told by a president who sent a mob to stop the certification of an election he lost, and, if they got lucky, lynch his vice president and decapitate the government by taking out the next two in line, Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Leahy.
“Stop the Steal”, in a nutshell, is the wildly counter-factual idea that Trump had the election stolen from him, by a bipartisan cabal of evil bastards, after four glorious years during which his ruthless enemies continually persecuted him for no reason except their radical hatred, that he actually won the 2020 election in a landslide, as he still insists he can prove.
How much courage does it take for a Republican to admit that the whole Trump thing, with its $50,000,000 ad budget to spread the infuriating lie (an ad buy that ended on January 6), with its $3,500,000 organizing budget to bring a massive crowd to Washington, DC to forcibly shut down Congress and “stop the steal,” is a lie? Trump’s claim that a rigged election was stolen from him is one of his trademark “transactional” lies, this one based on the paranoid fantasy of a former president who cannot accept the reality that he lost an election.
You would not think it would take much courage, but outside of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, you seldom hear a peep from the Red team to contradict the obvious lie of their vindictive strongman leader. It would be nice to hear from Reince Preibus, John Kelly, Mad Dog Mattis, Sessions, Barr, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Chad Wolf, former Trump cabinet members Elaine Chao and Betsey DeVos (both of whom resigned right after the January 6 riot) and many others, on this. The united cowardice and calculation of virtually all Republicans in support of America’s Greatest Lying Loser is hard to fathom.
We are balanced on the rim of an active volcano, all of us, along with our democracy. This is going to remain an ugly fight, but it is a crucial fight, existential.
I take a certain amount of consolation from the actual facts in evidence and from the general rule of actual proof in our legal system. Virtually every lawsuit based on a demonstrable lie must fail, as we saw over and over with the dozens of Trump/RNC election lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence of their claims. There are very few cases where a judge has the discretion, by ruling narrowly along an ideological crevasse (a Boof Kavanaugh speciality), to rule in support of ideology and contrary to the facts. It must be done with skill to avoid being overturned on appeal (unless you write for an unappealable court, of course, as Kavanaugh now does).
Our legal system is in many ways brutal, openly favoring the rights and privileges of the wealthy, and corporation persons, over everyone else. Criminal justice is applied in a systemically unjust manner that routinely incarcerates small-time criminals (disproportionately “non-white”) while leaving the most powerful criminals free to ply their lucrative trade. There is no legal enforcement of “ethics,” a concept applied on a strictly voluntary basis by anyone with the power to decide whether to abide by ethics recommendations.
For all its flaws, our legal system is bound by rules that even the most partisan judge cannot simply ignore. For example, you can insist on your deeply held opinion that Hillary Clinton is a vicious criminal who needs to be locked up. To lock her up you will need actual proof of a crime.
In the case of Trump and his loyalists, their crimes are many, and now shown with more and more powerful evidence. Now that Trump is no longer a sitting president (even Kevin McCarthy admitted yesterday that Biden is the actual president [2]) he does not have the shield of that OLC memo about not indicting POTUS.
Trump and his followers have been brazen, and relentless, but not always very smart. Even the purportedly brilliant legal mind of Bill Barr was addled, and not always smart, while he served as Trump’s zealous gunsel for the second half of Trump’s term. The entire story of Trump’s seamless obstruction of justice (new chapters written daily, stay tuned!) is now fair game for prosecutors and juries, and more and more facts, previously hidden (as part of the obstruction) are coming to light.
To take one thread as an example:
Former White House Counsel Don McGahn, interviewed under oath by Mueller’s investigators, recounted a shameless attempt by Trump to obstruct justice, followed by an even more shameless attempt by Trump to have McGahn create a lying record, denying that Trump ever made the first shameless ask.
McGahn’s public testimony under oath would have been deadly to Trump during the first impeachment trial (had Pelosi had the wisdom to allow an additional article of impeachment for Obstruction of Justice based, in part, on the ten examples Mueller laid out).
Even though Republicans under McConnell had the power to prevent all witnesses from testifying in the first impeachment “trial”, as they did, after vowing to work closely with Trump’s defense team, no chance could be taken that would allow McGahn (a right-wing zealot in his own right, promoter of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for Supreme Court) to be deposed or testify. Barr suggested Trump invoke an imaginary all-encompassing presidential immunity that covered anyone Trump had ever talked to from ever testifying to anyone. McGahn’s subpoena to testify was held up in court for two years. Until the other day, when his long refusal to obey the subpoena ended with a deal for McGahn to answer a few questions [3].
We now have published facts that were hidden from Mueller, from the public, some key facts were zealously hidden by our disingenuous former Attorney General. It now is possible, for example, to prove that Trump’s then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had a direct channel to Putin in his long-time friend Konstantin Kilimnik, and gave the Kremlin important secret polling data that allowed Russia to help Trump most efficiently. The facts are going to continue crushing Trump and his myrmidons in court.
It is dangerous, of course, to underestimate the power of organized rage and blind obedience in human affairs. Our experiment in democracy faces a grave danger from the forces of enraged white grievance and a party that now speaks for that grievance in one voice, “the yeas have it”. This free-floating anger has found an avatar in Donald Trump, an unapologetic hater, a man who will never, ever stop fighting.
It would appear, looking over his public history, that Trump, an angry bully since childhood, lives to fight. This fight-to-the-death-and-beyond spirit appeals to certain underdogs who feel that fighting is their only option. It also appeals to all cynical Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham types who simply attach themselves to what they perceive to be power, in any form. The fight is waged amid the silence of the mass of GOP officials and absurdist claims by little known partisans like Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), who insist, during public testimony, that footage of the “riot” was no different than what could be shot of any tourist group, they were just there enjoying themselves!
By not actually stringing Liz Cheney up yesterday after the mob shouted its approval of her being stripped of her party leadership position, Trump’s followers in Congress may have made a huge mistake. If I had to bet on a Republican presidential candidate for 2024, my money would be on Liz Cheney over DJT. For one thing, it may be very hard, no matter how strong and organized the denial is, for Trump to run against the findings of the eventual January 6 Commission, and the verdicts in state criminal courts of Georgia and New York. Last time Trump had the indomitable Bill Barr fixing everything for him, this time, no such luck for Donnie Bonespurs.
[1]
Naturally when Beria, one of history’s most infamous sadistic torturers and rapists, was eventually arrested (in one of Stalin’s final purges, I think) he cried, screamed and whimpered like a terrified baby. I guess it occurred to him that if “what goes around comes around” is true, he had a horrible death waiting for him. Which he sure enough did.
[2]
“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters after meeting with Mr. Biden and congressional leaders at the White House to discuss infrastructure spending. “I think that is all over with. We’re sitting here with the president today. So from that point of view, I don’t think that’s a problem.”
source
[3]
The House Judiciary Committee and the Biden administration have struck “an agreement in principle” to resolve a two-year-old fight over a subpoena for testimony from Don McGahn, a former White House counsel to President Donald Trump, lawyers said in a court filing on Tuesday evening.
Trump has not signed off on the deal, however, according to the status report submitted to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The former president could try to take legal action to block any testimony from McGahn, but the filing from the House and the Justice Department — now under the control of appointees of President Joe Biden — seems to try to head off such a move by noting pointedly that Trump “is not a party to this case.”
Truth vs. Propaganda (part 31)
As the battle for the “soul” of the Republican party (and our democracy) rages, let’s take a look at the sometimes subtle difference between a thing proven to be true and something widely believed to be true, although shown definitively to be false.
Let’s leave aside the contentious issue that is motivating the GOP’s energetic changes to voting and protest laws in so many states, The Big Lie. We can agree (hah, watch this NY Times move) that many see The Big Lie as the one about a rigged and stolen election, and constant violent rioting by protesters while millions of others, trusting in Trump, see The Big Lie as the one about the “rigged and stolen” election NOT being rigged and stolen and the liberal myth that police and right-wing militia violence is worse than that being constantly perpetrated by lawless Blacks and crazed antifa terrorists who are destroying our nation.
That kind of agree-to-disagree compromise, by the way, is the sort of meaningless question-begging truth-telling that minimizes truth itself.
The Big Lie seems too obvious a black and white, plainly true or clearly false wedge issue to resolve at the moment, beyond what each side insists is the case, no matter what objective facts exist. It’s like the controversy over the January 6 Trump-instigated riot at the Capitol [1]. We’d need an actual bipartisan (or better, nonpartisan) commission to get to the bottom of that one, and at least 39% of the population is dead set against that kind of thing. These investigations, they believe, are partisan witch hunts — like impeachments — designed to make our country’s greatest former leaders look weak and corrupt.
I saw a couple of items yesterday that struck me as good examples to look at when assessing what is actually true and what is the kind of exciting fiction that can be weaponized as propaganda. I will leave it to the reader to decide which is likelier true and which has a funny smell. The opinion silo you live in will play a large role in which way you go on these, but see if you can tell which of these counter-narratives are more likely true and which more likely propaganda.
On the perennial debate over whether unregulated gun ownership is a right or a privilege, American deaths by gun far outpace those of any other country (I think there is one Central American country, or possibly Sudan, in our league for gun deaths — oh, my! look, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela and Hondoras all beat us!). Simply a fact, we’re at the bottom of the pack worldwide for highest total killing by gun. We don’t include in our gun death statistics (at the insistence of the gun lobby) the tens of thousands of annual suicides by gun. Hear the familiar “guns don’t kill people, people kill people (including themselves, which doesn’t count)” mantra. Look at these two stories side by side:
Disapproval of Biden’s gun policies might well reflect a desire for a stronger stance. In April, a Morning Consult/Politico poll showed that 64% of registered voters supported stricter gun control laws. We have had an average of ten mass shootings a week in 2021, 194 in all. (A mass shooting is one in which four people are killed or wounded.)
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You can see a nice example there of how definitions are so important in any discussion. If you only shoot three people and grievously wound or kill them, that’s no mass shooting. Fair is fair. Let’s contrast this permissive attitude toward gun homicide and mass shooting with this recent example from another country:
In Russia, at least nine people were killed and 13 others hospitalized after a pair of gunmen reportedly opened fire at a school in the city of Kazan. Russian media reported one of the shooters — believed to be a teenager — was arrested by police while another attacker was shot dead by security forces. School shootings are very rare in Russia. Immediately after Tuesday’s assault, President Vladimir Putin said he had ordered Russia’s government to immediately begin work on tightening gun ownership regulations.
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Maybe Putin is lying when he says he ordered a tightening of gun ownership regulations, or maybe he actually did order it. Hard to know, but we’ll know by and by. When new Russian gun regulations are enacted it will be announced, and it will make world news.
Voter suppression to insure election integrity and electoral purity? All of the fire and fury in the lead up to the 2020 election was against the massive fraud that was predicted to result from mail-in voting and votes dropped into drop-boxes by people afraid of catching COVID-19 by showing up to vote in person.
The entire claim of a rigged election that could be stolen by Biden (the only way he could win, according to Trump) was based on the massive fraud that could be pulled off by voters not showing up in person to vote. That’s why Louis DeJoy removed high speed mail sorters and took mailboxes off the streets in Democratic leaning areas. Attorney General Bill Barr supported the unfounded claim, scoffing that the likelihood of such fraud was too obvious to need more than a snorted “it’s obvious” by way of explanation. A few months later, after all his thundering to the contrary, and threats of federal prosecution for anyone found guilty of voting fraud, Barr admitted that there had been no fraud on a scale that could have changed the results in any state. Then, a traitor to Trump, he quietly left the administration he had served so zealously.
The states that are making voter harder are all restricting mail-in voting, making dropping ballots into drop boxes harder, criminalizing giving water to people waiting on lone voter lines and enhancing the ability of strangers to challenge Black and brown voters, and the young (particularly hipsters), at the polls.
Only the last of these affect what Texas voter fraud conspiracist Russell J. Ramsland, Jr. laid out as the motherlode of voter fraud: electronic voting machines.
ADDISON, Tex. — Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.
At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors.
Briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air. Guests were asked to leave their cellphones outside before assembling in a windowless room. A member of Ramsland’s team purporting to be a “white-hat hacker” identified himself only by a code name.
I know, the wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream has a very familiar ring, but let’s look past that. Ramsland lost an election for state office and was convinced he’d been robbed by fraud. Couldn’t prove it, but was still convinced that he’d been cheated by cheaters. Several of his lies about electronic voting machines wound up coming out of the mouth of Trump and his allies after Trump “lost” the election. Oh, well — voting machines, mail-in, drop box, fraud is fraud!.
The real reason Republicans are intent on making it harder for poor people, people of color and young people (all predominantly Democratic voters) to vote is much more likely (in the absence of any credible proof of electoral fraud or problems with “voting integrity” or “ballot purity”) this:
Another set of data from Catalist, a voter database company in Washington, D.C., shows that the 2020 election was the most diverse ever, with Latino and Asian voters turning out in bigger numbers than ever before. Black voting increased substantially, while Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters had a decisive increase in turnout. The electorate was 72% white, down 2% from 2016 and 5% from 2008. Thirty-nine percent of Biden-Harris voters were people of color (61% were white); only 15% of Trump-Pence voters were POC (85% were white).
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Millions will be offended by the following paragraph, but I don’t think it will be for it’s lack of truthfully reporting known facts:
Indeed, it is more than a little odd that party leaders are bending over backward to tie their party to a former president who, after all, never broke 50% favorability ratings—the first time in polling history that had happened—and who lost both the White House and Congress.
The shit gets curiouser and curiouser, as Democrats Kirsten Synema and Joe Manchin continue to insist that the filibuster ensures bipartisan fairness in the crippled partisan Senate of Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer.
[1] Here’s House Minority Leader, Trump’s friend “My Kevin,” Kevin McCarthy, on January 13 and April 25th:
Good billboard ads
Illustrating that advertising can be used for good rather than strictly for evil, or the indifference of an honest buck. (Assuming the business they’re advertising is not some kind of Apple-type product, using iconic images of Gandhi, Einstein and Martin Luther King, in conjunction with a similar one of Apple’s CEO, to illustrate Apple’s world-changing genius).
These two signs will make some people think and feel just a little, a good thing in our brutally divided, black and white time of gathering violence and destruction. Friendship, pass it on. Not a bad message.
Check out the great documentary on Fred Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, an inspiring story of a great man. I knew virtually nothing about him before I saw the movie, but I have great admiration for him now. In the case of Jackie Roosevelt Robinson, consider for a moment that it was not until after World War II, the war we fought against fascist racism, that our national pastime was “integrated”. Robinson was chosen to be the major leagues’ first Black baseball player because of his toughness and his ability (which he had to promise to maintain) to be spit on and jeered as a “nigger” without retaliating (except, once in a while, on the base paths).
Obstruction of Justice 101
I buried the lede yesterday in writing about the Trump-appointed Federal Election Commission quorum voting 2-2 not to recommend prosecution of Donald Trump for the federal campaign-finance crime he ordered Michael Cohen to commit. The lede should have been:
Donald Trump successfully obstructs justice, again. Add another count to his federal indictment for obstruction of justice.
I laid out the mechanics of Trump’s latest daring escape from prosecution in the previous post. The rest of the story is the largely successful war Trump has been fighting, to this point, against all accountability for himself and, more scary still, against objective reality. The election that he lost, and fought and lost dozens of increasingly desperate fights over in court — and then incited a riot to try to overturn? He won that election in a landslide.
That millions of our fellow citizens now believe the deranged, conspiratorial myth that a powerful, bipartisan cabal of monsters, including diehard Trump supporters in various states Trump lost, stole the election from the beloved Trump is very troubling. I don’t know what the solution to that kind of mass delusion is. The only remedial action I can think of is a public accounting of Trump’s seamless obstruction of justice, conviction of which should land him locked up (“Lock him up! Lock him UP!”) and finally unavailable to terrorize his craven supporters and enablers in the upcoming national elections.
Obstruction of justice is the federal crime Trump must be tried for, in order to reaffirm the rule of law. Trump’s mouthpieces have regularly insisted that nobody is above the law, with the obvious exception, of course, of their peerless leader, and any one of his associates who has incriminating information about Mr. Trump.
Trump may have been “morally and practically responsible” (Mitch McConnell) for sending a tsunami of rioters down to the Capitol to violently disrupt a joint session of Congress and prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s “victory,” and that might be solid grounds for bipartisan impeachment, but as McConnell also made clear, the Democrats missed their deadline for legally filing the articles of impeachment (under a rule he just made up and guaranteed they’d violate by his refusal to take the articles sooner) and, since the shit don’t fit, we must acquit!
Any unbiased observer who has followed current events knows that the compulsively untruthful Trump engaged in a seamless pattern of obstruction of justice for his entire presidency, and beyond. He accomplished much of his obstruction, and escaped accountability for his violations of laws and norms, by terrifying anyone who challenged him in any way. He has an impressively consistent record of publicly and vitriolically punishing those he feels lack sufficient personal loyalty to him. Let’s look at that pattern and practice a bit.
Trump had a clear legal right to fire the FBI director, for example, unless he did it with a corrupt motive. It was the appearance of an attempt to obstruct the investigation into Flynn and collusion with Russia that led to Mueller’s appointment to investigate. The qualm some legal scholars expressed in bringing legal action against Trump for actions that appeared designed to obstruct justice, was the difficulty of proving an essential element of the crime of Obstruction of Justice, a corrupt intent behind any of Trump’s otherwise legal exercises of power.
A consistent pattern or practice of behavior in response to an ongoing situation can be used to show intent. Trump has been 100% consistent in his behavior, has, in fact, shown himself capable only of one set of reactions to anything he feels is a threat, criticism, or, worst of all, disloyalty. He reacts with rage and takes swift and brutal revenge. Here is a small sampling of his consistent pattern of behavior showing his ongoing intent to obstruct justice.
His expressed intent in firing Comey, to end the FBI investigation and conceal Flynn’s connections with Putin (a “fix” he promptly celebrated with Russians in the Oval office), was shown again when he made numerous attempts to fire Mueller, who was investigating the many ties between the Trump campaign and Putin. As Mueller’s “witch hunt” heated up Trump forced the “weak” AG Sessions to resign and replaced him with former short-time Bush 43 AG, crime cover-up expert Bill Barr (he put the Iran-Contra affair to bed forever), who wrote, in auditioning for the job, that the Mueller probe was an illegal incursion onto the powers of the Executive.
As soon as Mueller sent Barr his report, Barr immediately lied about the contents of the Mueller report as to Obstruction of Justice (the federal judges who later found that Barr had deliberately misled the public in relation to his dismissal of Mueller’s findings and the false classification of a DOJ memo to hide it from scrutiny, used “lacked candor” and “disingenuous” [1] to describe Barr). Barr supported Trump over and over, announcing investigations into the investigators who had “exonerated” Trump, declining to prosecute Trump allies, spreading unfounded lies about the likelihood of election fraud, authorizing (and lying about authorizing) the use federal riot troops to break up peaceful demonstrations.
Trump fired inspectors general (like the one investigating Mike Pompeo), intimidated witnesses (in real time) as they testified in the House against Trump allies and took swift, public revenge against several of those witnesses. Trump also rewarded several of his top campaign advisors with pardons, an open, facially legal, quid pro quo in exchange for them dummying up for Mueller investigators, withholding evidence Mueller would have used to make a criminal conspiracy case.
Facts have come out since Mueller submitted his report that provide several of the missing evidentiary links that forced Mueller to conclude he didn’t have a chargeable criminal conspiracy between Trump operatives like Paul Manafort and Vladimir Putin. That Mueller didn’t get the facts because Trump loyalists withheld information is another obstruction of justice, and these loyalists getting the pardons Trump held out to them as motivation to stay quiet, and lie if necessary, are also clear examples of obstruction of justice. We also have Trump’s assertion of an absurdly broad blanket protective privilege that Bill Barr made up to allow Trump to refuse all subpoenas for anyone who’d ever worked with him and to defy various court orders.
I am only touching the basics, which include the ten damning incidents laid out by Mueller in the report that Barr falsely claimed “exonerated” Trump, incidents set out in the short summary Bill Barr substituted his own disingenuous summary for the day after Mueller turned over the massive two-volume report. Mueller immediately objected, by letter, to Barr’s mischaracterization of the report, which he called “misleading,” but Americans were not told about Mueller’s objection until weeks later, once Barr’s lying characterization of the findings, and Trump’s continual lying about the “witch hunt,” and his “exoneration” had become the last word on the matter. Now, it turns out, Barr was lying about a confidential memo he claimed was a privileged part of his deliberations on whether or not to keep his promise to Trump and make the Mueller findings go bye bye.
The ease with which Trump evaded all responsibility for open and continuous obstruction of justice, including crushing numerous investigations into himself, top cabinet officials and allies, underscores the weakness of an idealistic belief in democracy.
A system that depends on the ethical behavior of government officials to carry out its functions is easy for unethical types to exploit, as we have seen here, increasingly, during the last decade, especially during the Age of MAGA. Look no further than McConnell’s refusal to allow Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court to be filled by an Obama appointee, or that well-qualified, moderate nominee even getting a hearing, as the Constitution requires.
If ethics oversight is cast aside, as it was repeatedly by Trump and his officials (Sessions, a Trump outlier who followed the sound legal advice of his ethics advisors, was cursed as a weakling and traitor and punished for following ethics advice) we’re in open seas. If ethical norms are routinely ignored, the field is clear for any corruption imaginable. Mike Pence’s crime, for which he was hunted to be strung up, was his “weakness” in following the law and not exercising a power he didn’t have by refusing to count the Biden Electoral College votes.
Trump raised the bar for bad Executive branch behavior from the standard “avoiding even the appearance of impropriety” to the almost insurmountable “incontrovertible proof of criminal wrong-doing that no jury anywhere could deny. Proof beyond a shadow of a doubt!” The matter of Trump’s guilt or innocence for violating the law (see, e.g. repeated Hatch Act violations during the 2020 campaign) longstanding customs and norms is as immaterial to Trump as the felony lies Mike Flynn pleaded guilty to telling the FBI were, in the end, to disingenuous Trumpist Bill Barr when he attempted to quietly bury the Flynn prosecution and conviction.
Hitler and his colleagues exposed the vulnerability of an idealistic democracy when they exploited and unseated the liberal Weimar Republic, high-minded in its “supine passivity” when actual fascists violently attacked it. The Weimar constitution, the most enlightened of its day, extended every civilized right to the accused, including those accused of waging violent revolution against the government, and a smart revolutionary could take advantage of these liberal rights.
Because the right-wing German judge who tried Hitler for his failed Beer Hall Putsch admired him, the future Fuhrer was given a platform to speak to the German people from the courtroom hours a day during his trial. Adolf emerged from the well-publicized treason trial a martyr for Germany, a patriot, and famous, particularly after writing his little read best-seller during his brief stay in comfortable quarters in Landsberg Prison [2].
So far, mostly, we still have the rule of law here in the USA. Even if some powerful criminals seem to constantly escape its reach, systemic injustice is widespread, and the wealthy have a tremendous advantage in court over everybody else, the rule of law has so far held here.
Things like the Federal Rules of Evidence prevent a judge from pulling a decision not based on evidence out of his partisan ass, except in the rare case (like the 10% of controversies in which Kavanaugh voted differently from Merrick Garland on the DC Court of Appeals) where judicial discretion can result in the desired partisan outcome.
You can have Trump-appointed, Federalist Society vetted, federal judges rule on cases involving Trump, but, to this point, they have not felt free to make up the law, except in rare cases.
When Judge Neomi Rao, the rabid Trumpist who was elevated to fill Boof Kavanaugh’s seat on the DC Court of Appeals, ignored existing law and invented a new legal doctrine to uphold Bill Barr’s decision to obstruct justice by attempting to throw out the Flynn guilty pleas, without a hearing, she was overturned by the full panel of appeals judges on her court.
When Trump lifetime appointee J. Nicholas Ranjan was asked to make a counterfactual finding in a case brought to severely limit mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, he dismissed the case not only for lack of credible evidence of potential fraud (or any evidence, actually, as he showed in detail) he spent 140 pages making his decision appeal-proof, giving endless legal and factual grounds that would instantly extinguish any chance of a successful appeal.
No matter how much Trump partisans in positions of public power may have wanted another result, in those voter suppression cases, in the 2020 election, they all, in the end, followed the law. Which is why the law in state after state is being changed to comply with what Trump wished had been existing law, which would have enabled him to stay in office regardless of election results, as far as his supporters can tell.
Which is why this latest obstruction of justice by Trump (disabling the FEC from performing any oversight function over elections or electoral campaigns until after he lost the election he “won in a landslide”) should be added to the long list and left to a jury, and the judges, to rule on, and without delay.
Anything less would amount to Obama’s “we, uh, tortured some folks” after Dick Cheney dragged America on his long, brutal trip to the Dark Side, cheered on by his lovely, torture-loving daughter Liz.
[1]
among the synonyms/common definitions for disingenuous:
insincere, calculating, deceitful, underhanded, hypocritical, duplicitous, sly, dishonest, pretending that one knows less about something than one really does, being a lying sack of shit, etc.
[2]
Landsberg, which was used for holding convicted criminals and those awaiting sentencing, was also designated a Festungshaft (meaning fortress confinement) prison. Festungshaft [de] facilities were similar to a modern protective custody unit. Prisoners were excluded from forced labor and had reasonably comfortable cells. They were also allowed to receive visitors. Anton Graf von Arco-Valley who shot Bavarian prime minister Kurt Eisner was given a Festungshaft sentence in February 1919.
In 1924 Adolf Hitler spent 264 days incarcerated in Landsberg after being convicted of treason following the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich the previous year. During his imprisonment, Hitler dictated and then wrote his book Mein Kampf with assistance from his deputy, Rudolf Hess.
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