Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: January 23, 2021 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Return from Market with Black Cat by Atelier de Jiel
Good Afternoon!!
The shocks to the system from the ousted madman and his crazy coup attempt are still coming. I’m sure you’ve heard about the story that broke in The New York Times last night. It seems Trump actually tried to get the Justice Department to overturn the election results in Georgia. I don’t know what he planned to do in the other states he lost. Will we learn more as time goes on?
The New York Times: Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General, by Katie Benner
The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.
The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.
The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1919-1920
The answer was unanimous. They would resign.
Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud.
More details:
When Mr. Trump said on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought that he might allow Mr. Rosen a short reprieve before pressing him about voter fraud. After all, Mr. Barr would be around for another week.
Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the next day. He wanted the Justice Department to file legal briefs supporting his allies’ lawsuits seeking to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate not only unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, but also Dominion, the voting machines firm….
Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would make decisions based on the facts and the law, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately told Mr. Trump: The department had investigated voting irregularities and found no evidence of widespread fraud.
But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.
The Washington Post followed up with more background: Trump entertained plan to install an attorney general who would help him pursue baseless election fraud claims.
“Before the insurrectionist assault on the US Capitol, there was an attempted coup at the Justice Dept. — fomented by the President of the United States,” former Justice Department official David Laufman wrote on Twitter….
Throughout his four years in office, Trump persistently pushed the Justice Department to make moves to benefit himself and his friends, though his moves in his final days in office threatened to be particularly damaging. Even former attorney general William P. Barr — who had been one of Trump’s most loyal and effective Cabinet secretaries — had publicly broken with the president on the issue of voter fraud, declaring publicly that investigators had found no evidence of substantial malfeasance that might affect the result of the election.
Barr’s statements angered Trump, who, along with his allies, had been waging a public campaign to get Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate election fraud. The men’s relationship was near a breaking point. Trump already had been angry that his attorney general had not taken public steps in two other investigations that might have helped his chances of winning: U.S. Attorney John Durham’s examination into the FBI probe of his 2016 campaign, and the Justice Department’s probe of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son. On Dec. 14, Barr submitted a resignation letter indicating he would leave the department two days before Christmas.
For the last month of the Trump administration, Rosen would be in charge.
Barr was confident that Rosen shared his views and would thus not succumb to any pressure campaign to upend the election results, people familiar with the matter said. But soon, there emerged a bizarre plot to go around him, the people said.
Clark, the people said, somehow connected with Trump and conveyed he felt fraud had impacted the election results. Then Clark began pressuring Rosen and others to do more on voter fraud — such as holding a news conference to announce they were investigating serious allegations, or taking particular steps in Georgia — though Rosen refused.
Jeffrey Clark has been a busy little bee, according to The Daily Beast: DOJ Attorney Linked to Trump AG Plot Also Intervened in E. Jean Carroll Case.
Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department attorney who reportedly schemed with the president to oust the acting attorney general, also played a leading role in bringing the DOJ to the president’s defense in a defamation case filed against him personally….
By Mimi Vang Olsen
Clark also served as one of the lead attorneys for Trump in the suit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist who accuses him of defamation. Trump has denied Carroll’s claim that he raped her in a Manhattan department store decades ago.
The Justice Department made the controversial move in September to defend Trump in the lawsuit, which was filed against him in his personal capacity, saying Trump was “acting within the scope of his office as President of the United States.” Clark appears to have signed off personally on the decision for the DOJ to intervene, according to the court documents. Carroll wrote on Twitter Friday of Clark, “This is the chump who filed the DOJ case against me, saying it was the President’s job to slander women. The Trump Presidency was corrupt right down to the core of its spleen.”
Now that Trump is gone, House Democrats are working to finally get access to Trump’s tax returns. The Washington Post: Biden administration weighs turning over Trump tax returns to House Democrats.
House Democrats have renewed their long-stalled demand for Donald Trump’s federal tax records, but the Biden administration has not decided whether it will drop its predecessor’s objections and release the Treasury Department records to investigators, Justice Department attorneys told a federal judge Friday.
U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden declined Friday to lift a stay on a pending House lawsuit. Instead, the judge agreed to give Treasury and Justice Department officials two weeks to report back to him, acknowledging that President Biden’s team was just settling in after the inauguration this week.
McFadden also kept in place an order requiring the government to give the former president’s lawyers 72 hours’ notice before releasing his tax return information to allow them to file a request to block the release.
Tiger Cat with Bird, American Folk Art Painting by Diane Ulmer Pedersen
Separation-of-powers issues that have slowed the case “may fall out” now that Trump is no longer in office, the judge noted.
“It would be a former president trying to stop a political branch, rather than one branch suing another. At least that’s my instinct,” said McFadden, a 2017 Trump appointee to the federal bench in Washington.
House General Counsel Douglas N. Letter agreed, saying, “We’re not dealing with a president anymore. We’re dealing with a former president.”
The House has been stymied for months, “numerous investigations have been obstructed,” and “enough is enough,” Letter argued, saying, “The statute here is clear. ‘Shall’ means ‘shall,’ and therefore the Treasury Department should turn over these materials . . . and that should be the end of it.”
Speaking for the Justice Department, attorney James J. Gilligan said the agency has so far not been able to confer with new Treasury Department leaders, “so we still have no idea whether any decision has been reached . . . whether any decision is imminent . . . or even . . . under active consideration.”
Gilligan said he could not guarantee a decision in two weeks but called a delay and the notice requirement a way to balance the interests of all sides.\Trump attorney Patrick Strawbridge supported maintaining the notice requirement to preserve the former president’s right to his day in court to object to any handing over of records.
McFadden said he agreed, adding that he was thinking of “entering an order along those lines if there is a change of view from the Treasury. But I’d love for all of us to agree together on a path forward. Then we can try to get some resolution here.”
Separation-of-powers issues that have slowed the case “may fall out” now that Trump is no longer in office, the judge noted.
“It would be a former president trying to stop a political branch, rather than one branch suing another. At least that’s my instinct,” said McFadden, a 2017 Trump appointee to the federal bench in Washington.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
In the comments to Dakinikat’s post yesterday, we were discussing the potential effects of Biden’s executive order on discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. This is from The Wall Street Journal: Joe Biden’s First Day Began the End of Girls’ Sports.
The order declares: “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the rest room, the locker room, or school sports. . . . All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.” The order purports to direct administrative agencies to begin promulgating regulations that would enforce the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision Bostock v. Clayton County. In fact, it goes much further.
In Bostock, the justices held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited an employer from firing an employee on the basis of homosexuality or “transgender status.” Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for a 6-3 majority, took pains to clarify that the decision was limited to employment and had no bearing on “sex-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes”—all regulated under Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments. “Under Title VII, too,” the majority added, “we do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.”
The Biden executive order is far more ambitious. Any school that receives federal funding—including nearly every public high school—must either allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face administrative action from the Education Department. If this policy were to be broadly adopted in anticipation of the regulations that are no doubt on the way, what would this mean for girls’ and women’s sports?
“Finished. Done,” Olympic track-and-field coach Linda Blade told me. “The leadership skills, all the benefits society gets from letting girls have their protected category so that competition can be fair, all the advances of women’s rights—that’s going to be diminished.” Ms. Blade noted that parents of teen girls are generally uninterested in watching their daughters demoralized by the blatant unfairness of a rigged competition.
I’d love to get your reactions to this story. Will there be any legal organizations willing to defend biological women in this context?
More stories to check out today:
Jane Mayer at The New Yorker: Why McConnell Dumped Trump.
George T. Conway, Jr.: Former president, private citizen and, perhaps, criminal defendant: Donald Trump’s new reality.
Greg Sargent at The Washington Post: Josh Hawley’s ludicrous clean-up act is in full swing.
HuffPost: An FAA Employee And QAnon Follower Was On The FBI’s Radar. Then He Stormed The Capitol.
Business Insider: The Bidens were reportedly left waiting outside the White House on Inauguration Day because Trump sent the staff home.
The Daily Beast: Bats, Bear Spray, and AR-15s: The Terrifying Arsenals of Capitol Rioters.
Quinta Jurecic at The Atlantic: Don’t Move On Just Yet. Could a truth and reconciliation commission help the country heal?
Eric Wemple at The Washington Post: Maybe Joe Biden can rescue Saturdays.
That’s it for me. Please share your thoughts and links in the comment thread if you have the time and inclination. Have a great weekend, Sky Dancers!!
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Sky Dancing 
Oh wow, I love this weekend’s selection of cat pix.
Me too! I love the two calicos with the calico guinea pig. And the white and red cats painting must be by Franz Marc — I enjoy his work; there’s something about his technique that implies an inherent numinous energy in the animals and plants he paints. Sad that he was killed so early in life.
It is by Franz Marc. WordPress deleted my caption again! WTF
BB, Though you might like to read this …
I’m not really up on Boston restaurants. Many have closed down though.
On a lighter note – Who would have ever thought that Bernie Sanders could spread joy and laughter across the country? 😂 The memes are so much fun, even for someone who always cringed when viewing his face. LOL
I’m surprised by all the laughter at Bernie’s practical garb at the Inauguration, but then I’m from the Pacific Northwest, where non-practical clothing has traditionally been scorned. At least it used too. I’m also astonished at all the people wearing gloves in the cold but not hats. What are they thinking? (shiver)
Different take on the QAnon stuff
That’s interesting. IOW, conspiracy theories have a long history. With social media & the internet, they can spread like a (groan) plague.
During the Dark and Middle Ages, they were the mainstream so you can’t really call them conspiracy theories in our current sense. They only really were diminished by the Enlightenment. And, specifically, the whole idiocy about accusing outgroups of sacrificing children, using their blood, doing unmentionable atrocities, nothing new about that. What’s new is *not* seeing it as truth. Read just about any historian of the pre-Renaissance.
Agree with you on the trangender EO.
It’s great that Biden reversed the Dump’s dump on trans civil rights, such as their ability to serve in the military, like anyone else.
It’s not so great the Order was so poorly thought out that it’s going to make a mountain of problems down the road.
Rape survivors can’t choose their medical professionals? Say what? Women as the *only* athletes who have to compete outside their class? Or are college baseball players going to start winning all the Little League championships now?
In the UK, which has been at this a few years longer than the US, male sex offenders suddenly tend to discover they’re women during their court cases so that they’re then placed in women’s prisons. What could possibly go wrong? (It’s not the fault of trans people that male sex criminals exist, but it’s not up to women to suffer the consequences of bad law either.)
It’s so pathetic that women don’t have a home anywhere. The Repubs want everyone in Stepford Wives boxes, no other weirdness allowed. The Dems are generous: you can choose your own gender box. Nobody pushing to get rid of being boxed in.
Agree on trans-rights. No one should be off a job, that they can perform, because of their gender identity or denied housing, etc. We lost a number of excellent people in the military under the former rules.
But I am concerned about the problems you express, Quixote. I am worried about the effects on Title 9 and that women and young girls have safe places. I am not sure that all the complexities of the situation — and how it might be misused — have been thoroughly considered by the Biden administration.
I thought the addition of omni-sex bathrooms and changing rooms for those who do not identify with their biological sex was a practical solution, especially in school situations.
As adults, some trans-women look so feminine that no one would notice them going into a woman’s restroom or care.
I am also concerned about allowing teens younger than 18 to be treated with hormones and sex-change surgery. We generally do not allow young teens to engage in contracts and this might be hard or impossible to undo later. Teens can be socially influenced and for many their gender idenity might be in flux during pre-teen and teen years. A few may live in homes where one or more parent really wanted a child of the opposite sex and has pushed their child in that direction. I have read of at least one young woman in Britain who has sued because she underwent such treatment, which has had permanent effects on her life. Are there adverse effects to waiting until one is 18-21? What safe guards could be used to make sure the teen is making an informed and free decision?
Keira Bell won her case, and you’ll find an excellent article and interview at the link.
Gender Noncomformity is central here. I was always labelled a tomboy, wanted to be a boy because they could do so many more things than girls can, and I still dress very much in tailored clothes because all the pinks and frills look ridiculous on me and I feel ridiculous in them. We’re still on the frontiers of figuring things out on this. Never once did I want a penis on me but damn it would’ve been nice to be able to do all the things the boys could do without always being the first girl to do this and that and be stared out.
Yep. If we were kids today we’d be transed.
I was the same way. As a young girl. I was a tomboy and I wanted to be a boy because boys had so much more freedom. Personality psychologists have studied this. Everyone has stereotypical characteristics of the opposite sex, some more than others. But whether a person lives up to society’s gender stereotypes is very different from deciding that a person who doesn’t “fit” them is really not a biological woman..
NW Luna, thank you for the link about Ms. Bell!
Being a kid is hard. It was bad enough when I was young, but I think the pressure on young people to look picture perfect has intensified. There are young people having plastic surgery to fit someone’s idea of beauty. No wonder there are young teans uncomfortable with their bodies.
Trans people definitely shouldn’t face discrimination in jobs, housing, or anywhere, unless there is a reason to differentiate on biological sex. Differentiation is not discrimination, nor is it transphobic.
The issue is complicated by the ~85%-90% of biological males who ‘identify as a woman’ but don’t have and do not plan to have any hormonal or surgical treatment. So these biological men are insisting on using female bathrooms, changing rooms, showers, etc., and to be in women’s rape-relief shelters and to do intimate exams on rape victims. That’s just plain wrong.
The problem with the “gender-neutral” restrooms is that these euphemistically named places will have males in there too. Send your little 6-yr-old daughter in to use the bathroom on her own after a male has just gone in? Not all men (or even most) are pedophiles, but ~98% (IIRC) of pedophiles are men. How can we tell the difference given that one can just “self-ID” as a woman? We can’t.
It’s only been about 100 yrs since women had access to toilet facilities just for women in public places. Much less since we’ve been allowed to have our own women’s sports teams in any organized fashion. Now they’re being taken away from us. Write your Reps and Senators! Women need same-sex spaces and sports.
Agreed.