This post will be brief, because I’m not feeling so great today.
By Olesya Hudyma, Ukrainian artist
January 6 investigation news is breaking constantly over the past few days. I know lots of other things are happening, especially in Ukraine; but it really feels to me as if we are building toward something big happening either in the committee or the DOJ. Here’s the latest:
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., suggested that the House Jan. 6 committee’s upcoming hearings will be dramatic and include explosive revelations that the panel has been piecing together behind the scenes for months.
“The hearings will tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House,” Raskin said Thursday at an event hosted by Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice in Washington.
Members of the committee plan to hold those hearings in June and aim to have a report out about their investigation by the end of the summer or early fall, said Raskin, who sits on the panel.
“No president has ever come close to doing what happened here in terms of trying to organize an inside coup to overthrow an election and bypass the constitutional order,” he said. “And then also use a violent insurrection made up of domestic violent extremist groups, white nationalist and racist, fascist groups in order to support the coup.”
Summer, window, red cat, by Vladiir A Abat Cherkasov
The plan was to use then-Vice President Mike Pence to try to get President Joe Biden’s electoral vote tally below the 270 majority needed for victory, Raskin said, which under the 12th Amendment would shift the contest to a vote in the House. If that occurred, he said, Republicans would have the majority to seize the presidency because the votes would be cast by the state delegations, and the GOP controls more state delegations than the Democrats do.
“It’s anybody’s guess what could have happened — martial law, civil war. You know, the beginning of authoritarianism,” Raskin said, speculating on what might have unfolded if the plan was successful. “I want people to pay attention to what’s going on here, because that’s as close to fascism as I ever want my country to come to again.”
“This was not a coup directed at the president,” Raskin said. “It was a coup directed by the president against the vice president and against the Congress.”
Wow!
There’s a lot of talk on Twitter about what happened with Mike Pence when he was removed from the House floor by Secret Service agents. Remember the story about how the agents tried to get him to get in a vehicle and he refused? He said “I’m not getting in that car.”
This is an incredible thing for a Vice President to say about a vehicle driven by his Secret Service agents during an assault on the Capitol while he's overseeing the vote count for a presidential election. Mike Pence owes Americans an answer, in public. https://t.co/k5tIjcM0Kn
“Tim Giebels, the lead special agent in charge of the vice president’s protective detail, twice asked Pence to evacuate the Capitol, but Pence refused,” the book says.
Pence reportedly told Giebels: “I’m not leaving the Capitol.” He was concerned that his 20-car motorcade leaving would “vindicate their insurrection,” Leonnig and Rucker add.
Giebels asked Pence to evacuate a third time but it was “more of an order than a request” as the agent believed Pence and his family were no longer safe where they were. They were evacuated down a staircase to an underground area of the Capitol. Pence’s limousine was waiting for them, but the then vice president reportedly refused to get in.
Some people are now suggesting that Pence suspected he would be prevented from returning later to certify the electoral votes. Recall that Chuck Grassley tweeted back then that he, not Pence, would handle the certification.
Mark Meadows, the final chief of staff for President Donald J. Trump, was told that plans to try to overturn the 2020 election using so-called alternate electors were not “legally sound” and that the events of Jan. 6 could turn violent, but he pushed forward with a rally anyway, the House committee investigating the Capitol attack alleged in a Friday night court filing.
Tohukiro Kawai, Japanese artist
In the 248-page filing, lawyers for the committee highlighted the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, a White House aide in Mr. Meadows’s office, who revealed new details about the events that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress by a pro-Trump mob.
“I know that there were concerns brought forward to Mr. Meadows,” Ms. Hutchinson told investigators at a deposition on March 7, adding: “I know that people had brought information forward to him that had indicated that there could be violence on the 6th. But, again, I’m not sure if he — what he did with that information.”
Ms. Hutchinson — who testified twice before the panel in closed-door interviews in February and March — said Anthony M. Ornato, the former White House chief of operations, told Mr. Meadows that “we had intel reports saying that there could potentially be violence on the 6th. And Mr. Meadows said: All right. Let’s talk about it.”
“But despite this and other warnings, President Trump urged the attendees at the January 6th rally to march to the Capitol to ‘take back your country,’” Douglas N. Letter, the general counsel of the House, wrote in the filing.
In the motion, the committee outlines seven “discrete categories of information” about which it seeks to question Meadows and argues that his claims of executive privilege should not preclude his testifying about those matters.
Cats on the porch, by Igor Selivanov
Those categories of information include testimony and documents relating to communications with members of Congress; the plan to replace acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen with Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark; efforts by Trump to “direct, persuade or pressure then Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally refuse to count electoral votes on January 6th”; and activity in the White House “immediately before and during the events of January 6th.”
The committee laid out new examples of warnings Meadows received before Jan. 6, 2021, along with a deepened understanding of his involvement with planning and coordinating efforts to disrupt the counting of electoral college votes in Congress.
Perhaps the most significant new piece of evidence presented by the committee is testimony from Hutchinson, who told investigators that her boss was informed “before the January 6th proceeding about the potential for violence that day,” according to the filing.
A former aide to ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows testified to the Jan. 6 Select Committee that Meadows met with several right-wing House members in December to discuss efforts to overturn the election, a new court filing reveals….
Driving the news: Cassidy Hutchinson, a former executive assistant to Meadows, testified that at least ten lawmakers – mostly members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus – met with Meadows on Dec. 21, 2020, according to the filing.
Tohukiro Kawai
She named Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Mo Brooks (R-Mo.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Jody Hice (R-Ga.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.), but said a “handful” of others were present or dialed in as well.
Some of the members professed belief in a legal theory that then-Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally reject electoral votes on Jan. 6, Hutchinson said.
There were multiple meetings of this kind with lawmakers during that period, Hutchinson testified. Some members, including Perry and Jordan, would “dial into meetings frequently.”
The White House Counsel’s Office also explicitly advised that another scheme planned by Trump allies was “not legally sound,” according to Hutchinson.
She testified that, in a December meeting that included Meadows, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s associates, the Counsel’s office raised concerns about a plan to have alternate electors cast votes for Trump.
The Jan. 6 committee has received apparently inconsistent testimony from key witnesses on a notable point: just how much effort it took Ivanka Trump to persuade her father to criticize the attack.
Garden Patrol by Anne Mortimer
Three months ago, the panel sent a letter to Ivanka Trump asking her to voluntarily cooperate with its investigators. Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said investigators wanted to ask her about former President Donald Trump’s behavior as the attack unfolded. The letter homed in on White House staffers’ efforts to get Trump to speak out against the unfolding violence.
That letter leaned heavily on testimony from now-retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who was formerVice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser on the day of the attack. Kellogg “explained that White House staff wanted the President to take some immediate action to quell the unrest,” the letter to Ivanka Trump said, adding that Kellogg thought she could help get Trump to make a statement aimed at stopping the violence“The testimony also suggests that you agreed to talk to the President, but had to make multiple efforts to persuade President Trump to act,” the letter continues. Then it quotes from the transcript of Kellogg’s interview.
“And so presumably the first time she [Ivanka Trump] went in, it wasn’t sufficient or she wouldn’t have had to go back at least one more time, I assume. Is that correct?” the transcript reads, quoting the investigator who was interviewing Kellogg.
“Well, yes, ma’am,” Kellogg replies. “I think she went back there because Ivanka can be pretty tenacious.”
But multiple witnesses have described that specific episode differently to the panel, according to two people familiar with the testimony to the select committee. Those other witnesses, including the former president’s daughter herself, have testified that Trump sent out a tweet supporting Capitol Police just a few minutes after she first went in and asked him to say something about the attack, the people said.
I’m watching CSpan this morning and it’s a painful display of an old white codger defense attorney objecting to every question put to MTG by the plaintiff’s lawyer. The defense is trying to wrap her entire career up in the first amendment. She’s cornered by the plaintiff’s lawyer and instead of giving yes or no answers, she’s just blathering on and basically committing perjury because the yes or no questions are backed up with evidence and her own words.
She just said she only supports “peaceful” protests while this is on the record.
The judge keeps telling her to answer yes or no and she’s now answering with “I don’t remember” most of the time. She doesn’t remember what she said to CNN when it’s clearly on the record. She doesn’t remember what she tweeted when it clearly came from her now-defunct Twitter account.
The Old Coot Defense lawyer is having difficulty looking at the pile of evidence of what MTG has said that clearly indicates she’s said things like calling Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi a traitor or posting and retweeting a lot of seditious tweets from others. She denies being aware of any of this and it was all supposed to be wild like spring break.
The judge tries to help #MarjorieTaylorGreene during her testimony by asking the attorney for the voters to rephrase his question that #Marge is clearly dodging about interference with the counting of electoral votes. pic.twitter.com/JsgaCywfeE
Controversial Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia on Friday faces a challenge to her reelection by voters and a supporting legal group, who are seeking to knock her off the ballot for her role prior to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Greene is answering questions Friday in an Atlanta court as part of the candidacy challenge. That makes her the first Republican member of Congress to testify publicly under oath about the Capitol riot, even as a Democratic-led committee back in Washington, D.C., has spent months investigating the attack.
Greene is in front of a judge because a handful of voters in her district, represented by a nonprofit called Free Speech For People, say Greene should be disqualified because they allege she encouraged and supported the rioters who stormed the Capitol.
Lawyers with Free Speech For People are leaning on a provision in the U.S. Constitution that forbids any member of Congress involved in an insurrection from serving in office. It’s a section of the 14th Amendment, passed in the years after the Civil War to prevent former Confederates from returning to their seats in Congress.
The legal theory is mostly untested in modern history because there hasn’t really been a serious insurrection since the Civil War.
Greene has long deployed violent rhetoric against her political opponents and has routinely spread false claims about the 2020 election, including in the leadup to Jan. 6, 2021.
Specifically, lawyers for Free Speech For People point to a tweet sent on Jan. 5, calling the next day a “1776 moment,” which is code for political violence in some far-right circles.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene fomented an insurrection on Jan. 6,” says Ron Fein, legal director for Free Speech For People. “She’s a danger in office to the entire republic.”
A potentially precedent-setting disqualification hearing is underway Friday in an Atlanta courtroom, aimed at determining if Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is constitutionally barred from running for reelection because of her role in the January 6 insurrection.
Greene is testifying as a witness during the marathon hearing — making her the first lawmaker to testify under oath about their involvement in the insurrection. She is currently on the stand, was sworn in and is being questioned by lawyers for the voter who challenged her candidacy.
At the disqualification hearing, Greene said under oath that she “had no knowledge of any attempt” to illegally interfere with the counting of the electoral votes on January 6.
Greene also testified that she believes President Joe Biden lost the election to Trump.
James Bopp Jr., Marjorie Taylor Greene's lawyer, said democracy and voting rights are at stake in his opening statement.
After resolving IT issues, Andrew Celli, one of the lawyers for the prosecution, continued to grill Greene about her social media posts.
Greene said the prosecution was speculating her intentions behind tweeting about expected “wild” protests in support of Former President Donald Trump on January 6. She repeated that she was encouraging attendance at a peaceful demonstration that day to support Trump. Greene said no one tweeted on her account without permission, but she cannot recall who was responsible for the tweets in question.
“I never mean anything for violence, my words never mean anything for violence,” Greene said.
Whoah! MTG just made a big mistake! She brought up Q Anon and said she didn’t believe it. And Old Codger is of course objecting while MTG just keeps whining about being persecuted. I’m pretty sure the defense didn’t want that subject introduced into the mix.
You may follow all the obfuscation with me here on NPR’s feed.
Good thing there’s all this evidence of everything she’s said and done. She sure seems to have a sudden bout of amnesia. Oh, and everything from CNN is a chop job on her.
Well, hopefully, somebody gets rid of her presence in Congress if not the Georgia voters, maybe they’ll toss her from the House. She’s out for lunch now.
The federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election appears to be gaining traction, with the Justice Department having brought in a well-regarded new prosecutor to help run the inquiry and a high-profile witness seeking a deal to provide information.
Alex Jones, the host of the conspiracy-driven media outlet Infowars and a key player in the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement, is in discussions with the Justice Department about an agreement to detail his role in the rally near the White House last Jan. 6 that preceded the attack on the Capitol.
Through his lawyer, Mr. Jones said he has given the government a formal letter conveying “his desire to speak to federal prosecutors about Jan. 6.”
The lawyer, Norm Pattis, maintained that Mr. Jones had not engaged in any “criminal wrongdoing” that day when — chanting slogans about 1776 — he helped lead a crowd of Trump supporters in a march to the Capitol as violence was erupting.
As a condition of being interviewed by federal investigators, Mr. Jones, who is known for his rants about the “Deep State” and its supposed control over national affairs, has requested immunity from prosecution.
“He distrusts the government,” Mr. Pattis said.
While convincing federal prosecutors to grant him immunity could be an uphill climb for Mr. Jones, his discussions with the Justice Department suggest that the investigation into the postelection period could be gathering momentum.
In the past couple of weeks, New York Times reporters have begun to write about an ongoing DOJ investigation of the organizers of the events of January 6, 2021. Undoubtably, the leaks are coming from people who have been subpoenaed by the Grand Jury, not from the DOJ itself.
On April 8, Alan Feuer reported that “Stop the Steal” rally organizer Ali Alexander is cooperating with the DOJ. From that piece:
Reading, by Berthe Marisot
Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer of pro-Trump events after the 2020 election, has agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department’s investigation of the attack on the Capitol last year, the first high-profile political figure known to have offered assistance to the government’s newly expanded criminal inquiry.
Speaking through a lawyer, Mr. Alexander said on Friday that he had recently received a subpoena from a federal grand jury that is seeking information on several broad categories of people connected to pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington after the election.
In a statement from the lawyer, Mr. Alexander said he was taking “a cooperative posture” with the Justice Department’s investigation but did not know what useful information he could give. He also disavowed anyone who took part in or planned violence on Jan. 6.
While it remains unclear what Mr. Alexander might tell the grand jury, he was intimately involved in the sprawling effort to mount political protests challenging the results of the election, and had contacts with other organizers, extremist groups, members of Congress and, according to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, White House officials during the period after Election Day.
This morning the New York Times published a story by reporters Alexander Burns and Johnathan Martin, who have a book coming out and apparently held back this scoop instead of publishing it in a timely way. That’s disgusting, but it’s still news now: ‘I’ve Had It With This Guy’: G.O.P. Leaders Privately Blasted Trump After Jan. 6. Burns and Martin write that immediately following the January 6 insurrection, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell intended to ask Trump to resign.
Painting by Sophia Oshodin
In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building, the two top Republicans in Congress, Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell, told associates they believed President Trump was responsible for inciting the deadly riot and vowed to drive him from politics. Mr. McCarthy went so far as to say he would push Mr. Trump to resign immediately: “I’ve had it with this guy,” he told a group of Republican leaders.
But within weeks both men backed off an all-out fight with Mr. Trump because they feared retribution from him and his political movement. Their drive to act faded fast as it became clear it would mean difficult votes that would put them at odds with most of their colleagues.
“I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, told a friend.
The confidential expressions of outrage from Mr. McCarthy and Mr. McConnell, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the immense gulf between what Republican leaders say privately about Mr. Trump and their public deference to a man whose hold on the party has gone virtually unchallenged for half a decade.
The leaders’ swift retreat in January 2021 represented a capitulation at a moment of extraordinary political weakness for Mr. Trump — perhaps the last and best chance for mainstream Republicans to reclaim control of their party from a leader who had stoked an insurrection against American democracy itself.
Read the rest at the NYT link above.
Adam Kinzinger says it’s true.
100 percent true. McCarthy was over Trump until he wasn’t, when he realized he needed him. This picture 👇👇 literally resurrected Trumps political life. Thanks Kev. https://t.co/aF6tcJSMB2pic.twitter.com/Gt7l9kxAFn
— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) April 21, 2022
There are no atheists in foxholes, they say, and as the riot unfolded at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, there was similarly no questioning of the higher power at work.
A bevy of Republican officials and figures in Donald Trump’s extended sphere of supplication reached out to the White House to try to persuade the president to take a firm stance against the violence. Most didn’t reach Trump directly, but even those who did clearly didn’t have much of an effect. In one widely reported example, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) implored Trump to demand that the rioters stand down, prompting Trump reportedly to reply, “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
McCarthy, at direct risk from the violence, was understandably infuriated. New reporting from the New York Times reveals just how angry he was — and how, for one final time in Trump’s presidency, frustration with Trump was dampened by enthusiasm from the president’s base.
From the first weeks after Trump declared his candidacy in 2015, the Republican establishment went through a repeating pattern. Frustration at Trump’s comments or behavior, an assumption that it would damage him politically, perhaps even irreparably — only to learn that Republican voters didn’t care and sided with Trump….
Jeanne reading, Camille Pissarro, 1899
The best way to track the evolution is by walking through what was said publicly and privately, a day at a time — and comparing it with what public polling showed about the views of the Republican voting base.
In the weeks before Jan. 6, support for Trump was already softening among Republican voters. YouGov, conducting weekly polling for the Economist, measured Trump’s favorability (a metric evaluating Trump personally, not his presidency) as slipping slightly. In the weeks before the election, three-quarters of Republicans viewed him very favorably, a figure that dropped to two-thirds immediately before the riot. We’d seen this before; when Republicans lost the House in 2018, Trump — the guy who pledged that the GOP would get tired of winning — saw his approval ratings slip. Perhaps the same effect was at play here, or perhaps Trump’s refusal to submit to reality was beginning to fatigue his supporters. It’s hard to know.
Then Jan. 6 happened, and Trump took a hit among Republicans. But that was it.
Congressional investigators entering the last stage of their probe are gathering new evidence about a crucial moment on the Jan. 6 timeline: the final, fateful phone call between Donald Trump and Mike Pence before a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol.
They’ve had a lot of success on that front — court records and Jan. 6 select committee documents reveal that the panel has obtained significant details about that call. In recent weeks, they’ve learned even more from several high-profile witnesses who were in the Oval Office while Trump berated Pence for refusing to overturn the election.
Yet one crucial gap remains. Top Pence aides say the former vice president was in his residence when the call came in. He then left the room and was out of earshot for 15 to 20 minutes. Those aides told the select committee that Pence never disclosed to them the contents of the conversation. More importantly, Pence’s aides say he never revealed how he replied to Trump’s intense last-minute pressure.
Seated Closer to the Light, Black Girl Reading, by Irina-Sztukowski
That gap of information looms as the House panel works to finalize a minute-by-minute account of Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, when he pushed Pence to prevent the transfer of power to Biden. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) has remained publicly undecided about whether to seek testimony from Pence himself, noting that Pence’s closest advisers have cooperated fulsomely. But investigators must also confront whether Pence’s side of that conversation — for which no Pence advisers were present — is significant enough to ask him to fill in the blanks.
It’s unlikely the committee will attempt to force Pence to testify. There are imposing legal obstacles for subpoenaing a former vice president, and the panel considers Pence a witness, not a target of their probe. Whether they ask for his voluntary help is another question.
An hour after the call, Pence would publicly declare what he’d privately told Trump for weeks: He would not assert unprecedented power to overturn the election.
Sen. Mike Lee says the text messages he sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows after the 2020 election don’t signal advocacy for overturning the results in favor of Donald Trump.
In his first interview since CNN last week revealed dozens of his texts to Meadows, the Utah Republican told the Deseret News on Wednesday his only goal was to figure out Congress’ role in a presidential election and sort through theories the Trump campaign pursued to challenge the outcome.
Lee said he has known Meadows for a long time and characterized his texts from Nov. 7, 2020, to Jan. 4, 2021, as having a level of informality that would be reserved for a friend.
“He knows that when I said things like ‘Tell me what we ought to be saying,’ what I was just trying to figure out was ‘What is your message?’ He knows me well enough to know that that doesn’t mean I will do your bidding, whatever it is,” Lee said in a 45-minute phone interview.
“Conversations I had with him at the time on the phone and in person, he knew that. He knew I was not there to do his bidding,” Lee said of his conversations with Meadows.
Lee said his texts to Meadows are being used out of context for “political motives” and were “leaked” during an important period of time in his reelection campaign. The messages were obtained by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and reviewed by CNN.
Sounds like ass covering to me.
Woman Reading on the Bench, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Donald Trump attempted a coup on 6 January 2021 as he tried to salvage his doomed presidency, and that will be a central focus of forthcoming public hearings of the special House panel investigating events surrounding the insurrection at the US Capitol, the congressman Jamie Raskin has said.
Raskin is a prominent Democrat on the committee and also led the House efforts when Trump was impeached for a historic second time, in 2021, accused of inciting the storming of the US Capitol by his extremist supporters who were trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
“This was a coup organized by the president against the vice-president and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Raskin said in an interview with the Guardian, Reuters news agency and the Climate One radio program.
Public hearings by the bipartisan special committee investigating January 6 and related actions by Trump and his White House team and other allies, chaired by the Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, are expected next month.
“We’re going to tell the whole story of everything that happened. There was a violent insurrection and an attempted coup and we were saved by Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with that plan,” said Raskin.
So big things are happening in the committee and DOJ. Now if Congressional Democrats would start speaking out and calling out their GOP colleagues, we might have a chance to save democracy in 2022 and 2024,
What else is happening? What stories have caught your interest today?
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Once again, I’ve reached the point where I can’t bring myself to watch the news on TV. I check Twitter a few times a day and end up frightened and depressed. On the days I write posts, I read a number of articles, but then I need hours of down time to decompress. When will there be some good news for those of us who want the U.S. to be a democracy?
When will Democratic leaders understand that we are facing the strong possibility of losing the House and Senate in November? When will the House January 6 Committee begin the promised public hearings? When will the Justice Department prosecute the powerful people who planned the Capitol insurrection?
How can the pandemic end when the GOP has become the party of removing all restrictions designed to reduce the spread of the virus?
I don’t know the answers to these questions; I only know that, in terms of democracy, our country has been losing ground since 2016 and–even with a Democratic president–we are still in grave danger from Trump and his GOP sycophants who are still trying to overturn the 2020 election.
In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, as well as on right-wing news outlets, allies of Mr. Trump — including the lawyer John Eastman — are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. Some of those allies are casting their work as a precursor to reinstating the former president.
The efforts have failed to change any statewide outcomes or uncover mass election fraud. Legal experts dismiss them as preposterous, noting that there is no plausible scenario under the Constitution for returning Mr. Trump to office.
John Eastman
But just as Mr. Eastman’s original plan to use Congress’s final count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the election was seen as far-fetched in the run-up to the deadly Capitol riot, the continued efforts are fueling a false narrative that has resonated with Mr. Trump’s supporters and stoked their grievances. They are keeping alive the same combustible stew of conspiracy theory and misinformation that threatens to undermine faith in democracy by nurturing the lie that the election was corrupt.
The efforts have fed a cottage industry of podcasts and television appearances centered around not only false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020, but the notion that the results can still be altered after the fact — and Mr. Trump returned to power, an idea that he continues to push privately as he looks toward a probable re-election run in 2024.
Democrats and some Republicans have raised deep concerns about the impact of the decertification efforts. They warn of unintended consequences, including the potential to incite violence of the sort that erupted on Jan. 6, when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters — convinced that he could still be declared the winner of the 2020 election — stormed the Capitol. Legal experts worry that the focus on decertifying the last election could pave the way for more aggressive — and earlier — legislative intervention the next time around.
The article quotes Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative lawyer who was consulted by Mike Pence when Trump was pushing him to refuse to certify the 2020 Electoral College results:
“At the moment, there is no other way to say it: This is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy,” said J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge, for whom Mr. Eastman clerked and whom President George W. Bush considered as a nominee to be the chief justice of the United States. “Trump and his supporters in Congress and in the states are preparing now to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in 2024 were Trump, or his designee, to lose the vote for the presidency.”
Eastman’s latest effort in Wisconsin:
ABC News reported yesterday that Trump coup memo attorney John Eastman met privately w/ the Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos to pressure him to decertify the 2020 results…
A former lawyer for Donald Trump has claimed attorney-client privilege over 37,000 pages of emails related to his dealings with the then-president, he revealed in a court filing Monday night. John Eastman, known for penning a memo outlining how Team Trump might overturn the 2020 election, was ordered by a judge in January to review and turn over more than 90,000 pages of emails to the House select panel probing the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. After reviewing a reported 1,000 to 1,500 pages per day for three months, Eastman made no claims over 25,000 other records, according to Politico. However, after his Monday filing, the House committee said it objected to “every claim” of privilege. All 37,000 pages will now be sent to U.S. District Judge David Carter, who in March called Eastman and Trump’s post-election activities “a coup in search of a legal theory,” for him to rule individually on each of them.
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) may have been in contact with Oath Keepers members during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
A newly released trove of text messages shows members of the right-wing militia discussing security for some top Donald Trump allies ahead of the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win, and Oath Keepers co-founder Stewart Rhodes asked an associate for Jackson’s cell phone number, reported Politico.
“Dr. Ronnie Jackson — on the move,” wrote an unidentified person. “Needs protection. If anyone inside cover him. He has critical data to protect.”
“Help with what?” Rhodes replied. “Give him my cell.” [….]
Kelly Meggs, an Oath Keepers member among six indicted on seditious conspiracy charges, mentioned on Jan. 3, 2021, that allies had discussed militia members “on the call with congressmen” and “wanted to say thank you all for providing and protecting us.”
What kind of data was Jackson trying to “protect?”
In pandemic news, yesterday a Trump-appointed judge struck down the mask mandate for airline passengers and crew.
This is Kathryn Kimball Mizelle. She is a Federalist Society judge who worked for Clarence Thomas. The American Bar Association said she is unqualified to hold office, but Republicans confirmed her anyway after Trump lost.
The coronavirus pandemic may feel like a past-tense phenomenon for many Americans, even though the dangers are real and ongoing. But a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump just did everything she could to send the nation back into chaos.
On Monday, Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Florida threw out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mask mandate for air travel and other forms of mass transportation. Deaths from COVID-19—and the mask mandates intended to prevent them—may be on the wane nationwide, but whatever you think about such policies, this is the latest and most egregious example of a judge acting as a partisan warrior in the COVID-19 culture wars.
Mizelle was appointed to the federal bench by President Trump in 2020. She was 33, and had been practicing law for only 8 years. She had never tried a case as a lead attorney. The Senate confirmed her even though the American Bar Association gave her a rating of “not qualified.” This nominee should have been rejected by the Senate not because of her judicial philosophy and not because of her age, but because she simply didn’t have the credentials and experience to be a federal judge with lifetime tenure.
Now she is substituting her opinion for that of scientific professionals at the CDC, and dictating health policy in America. The outcome could be disastrous, only serving to further embolden the right-wing activists who dispute the reality of this horrifically lethal pandemic.
Click the link to read the rest.
This could be a bit of good news:
Oh no, if it isn’t the consequences of Alex Jones’ own insane, conspiratorial actions. https://t.co/k7pgBC4cQ6
The conspiracy website Infowars has filed for bankruptcy protection as founder Alex Jones faces multiple defamation lawsuits tied to his false claims that the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a “giant hoax.”
According to documents filed Sunday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, three companies owned by Jones are seeking Chapter 11 protection, which would put civil litigation on hold while they restructure their finances.
Jones is being sued by the families of several victims of the 2012 attack that left 26 people dead, including 20 young children, in Newtown, in western Connecticut. It remains the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history. The 20-year-old gunman died by suicide.
But Jones falsely claimed the massacre was fabricated by gun control advocates and the mainstream media, who he said pursued a “false flag” operation staged by “crisis actors.”
The families accused him of grifting off those false claims while defaming their loved ones. Some said they were harassed and threatened after Jones ran online segments accusing them of being a part of a hoax, with one receiving hate mail referencing the Second Amendment, according to a 2018 CBS news segment. They rejected settlement offers from Jones….
Jones has been found liable in two separate cases, one in Texas, where he and Infowars are based, and another in Connecticut where the mass shooting occurred. Damages have not yet been decided in either case, but an initial amount of $725,000 has been paid into a bankruptcy trust managed by two retired judges, court records show, with an expected $2 million to be funded at a later date. The Texas court is expected to determine damages first, with jury selection scheduled for April 25.
Or maybe not so good news?
Why are people celebrating Alex Jones filing for bankruptcy? Do you think that means he is broke? Far from it. It’s a ploy to try to avoid paying current and future legal judgments against him. That is all.
If Russia were to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine it would, as CIA Director William Burns put it in public remarks last week, “change the world in a flash.” It might not, however, according to several experts, result in the direct military involvement of the west or a broader nuclear war.
Although nuclear weapons have not been used since the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the late summer of 1945, concerns about their use are higher than they have been in decades. CIA Director Burns, in remarks at the Georgia Institute of Technology last Thursday, said, “Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership…none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons.” On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy echoed this warning saying that the international community should be concerned about Russian use of nuclear or chemical weapons, saying, “We should… not be afraid but be ready.”
Senior U.S. officials with whom I spoke emphasized that Burns was not basing his comments on any new intelligence or other evidence that Russia was preparing to use nuclear weapons, but rather on a prudent analysis of Russia’s situation. They mentioned that Russian doctrine had a “lower threshold” for the use of nuclear weapons than other nations, but that it was “still pretty high.” According to that doctrine, there were two kinds of events that would warrant consideration of the use of nuclear weapons. One was if the Russian military was facing a massive defeat that threatened its ability to further defend its country. The other was if there was a direct threat to the regime in Moscow.
Read the rest at the Daily Beast link.
That’s it for me today. Now I need to decompress with an escapist novel. I hope you are all well and taking care not to overdose on the news.
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Maria Prymachenko – A Dove Has Spread Her Wings And Asks for Peace, 1982. This work of art was lost when Russians bombed The Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum to the ground on February 25th
It’s Monday Sky Dancers!
And Putin’s incompetent army from hell continues to focus on missile launches aimed at killing and terrorizing Ukrainians. Here are just a few of the headlines via Twitter. It’s time for NATO to do more.
Russia offered to spare the lives of Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Mariupol if they laid down their arms Sunday as the weekslong resistance in the besieged port city appeared to finally be coming to an end.
The offer, made “out of purely humane principles,” gave Ukrainian forces still fighting in the city until 6 a.m. Moscow time (11 p.m. ET) to surrender, the Russian military said in a statement reported by the news agency Tass.
There were no immediate reports of activity from Ukrainian forces in Mariupol. If it falls, it would be the first major city to be taken by Russian forces since the Feb. 24 invasion.
There was also no immediate response from Kyiv.
#Ukraine In Irpin, the Russian military killed at least 269 civilians and destroyed 30% of the city. Police shared these facts: – 8 people were tortured by Russians – 12 people who helped the Ukrainian army were shot dead – A citizen who refused to obey an order was shot by RU pic.twitter.com/51e7Tjp1nz
A Russian strike killed at least seven people in Lviv, Ukraine, on Monday. They were the first reported casualties of the war in the western city, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have fled the fierce fighting in other parts of Ukraine. https://t.co/qeq9MA4ecTpic.twitter.com/JMVEk8X1tD
Russian missiles struck Lviv on Monday, killing at least seven people in the first reported deaths of the war in the western city, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have fled to escape the fierce fighting in other parts of Ukraine.
The head of Lviv’s military administration, Maksym Koztyskyy, said three missiles hit empty military warehouses while a fourth hit a garage, killing and injuring civilians. He did not say whether all the casualties were from the garage strike, which hit a few hundred feet from a set of railway tracks.
“If the garage was the ultimate target, maybe they were aiming at the railway station,” he said. “There are no longer any safe or unsafe locations.”
The head of Ukraine’s railway service, Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, said he had no proof that the attack was aimed at the railway, which has some facilities near military sites.
Russia is leaking data like a sieve after Ukraine doxes Russian troops and spies: https://t.co/FyZZdZCIvI
NAMES, BIRTHDAYS, PASSPORT numbers, job titles—the personal information goes on for pages and looks like any typical data breach. But this data set is very different. It allegedly contains the personal information of 1,600 Russian troops who served in Bucha, a Ukrainian city devastated during Russia’s war and the scene of multiple potential war crimes.
The data set is not the only one. Another allegedly contains the names and contact details of 620 Russian spies who are registered to work at the Moscow office of the FSB, the country’s main security agency. Neither set of information was published by hackers. Instead they were put online by Ukraine’s intelligence services, with all the names and details freely available to anyone online. “Every European should know their names,” Ukrainian officials wrote in a Facebook post as they published the data.
Since Russian troops crossed Ukraine’s borders at the end of February, colossal amounts of information about the Russian state and its activities have been made public. The data offers unparalleled glimpses into closed-off private institutions, and it may be a gold mine for investigators, from journalists to those tasked with investigating war crimes. Broadly, the data comes in two flavors: information published proactively by Ukranian authorities or their allies, and information obtained by hacktivists. Hundreds of gigabytes of files and millions of emails have been made public.
Aid organizations say they're seeing signs that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is driving up global food prices and pushing millions of people into hunger.
One food price index shows that prices spiked 12% between February and March. https://t.co/JMHy4Ra8Rk
Aid organizations say they’re seeing signs that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is driving up global food prices and pushing millions of people into hunger.
A food price index tracked by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization shows that prices spiked 12% between February and March to its highest point since the index started in 1990.
Ukraine and Russia provide an outsized share of the world’s supply of key foods including wheat, corn, barley and more.
The impact on people who were already struggling to afford food has been severe, aid groups say. In Afghanistan a month ago, 55% of people were at crisis levels of food insecurity. Now the number has risen to 65%.
In some West African countries, including Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and Mali, 27 million people are currently going hungry.
Aid groups are calling on wealthy countries to immediately step up assistance.
Don’t like high food prices? Blame Putin and Texas Governor Gregg Abbot. This is from Salon: ‘”Political theater”: Abbott’s border stunt could raise food prices after causing $240M in damages. “This is not just a localized issue. It’s going to hit you in St. Louis or up in Seattle,” advocate warns.’
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott — who is running for reelection in the 2022 midterms — made it much more difficult for goods and produce to enter the United States from Mexico when he ordered “enhanced safety inspections” of commercial vehicles at the Texas/Mexico border. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee running against Abbott, has slammed the Republican governor’s political stunt as bad for business. And journalists Alicia Wallace and Vanessa Yurkevich, reporting for CNN in an article published on April 16, describe some of the difficulties that Abbott has inflicted on the supply chain.
“A week-long protest by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott against President Biden’s recent immigration policy reached a resolution on Friday, (April 15), but the gridlock it created has resulted in hundreds of millions of lost dollars and delays in shipments of everything from avocados to automobile parts that will have a longer-term impact,” Wallace and Yurkevich explain. “On Friday, Abbott reversed course on an order he put in place last week that required lengthier ‘enhanced safety inspections’ of commercial vehicles entering Texas. The efforts, he said, were to help stop the flow of illegal contraband and human trafficking.”
The CNN reporters add, “Abbott’s move, which Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller criticized as ‘political theater,’ ultimately created a logjam of trucks between the U.S. and its largest goods trading partner. Vegetable producers say their produce is spoiling in idling trucks and they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Some 35 percent of Americans—including 68 percent of Republicans—believe the Big Lie, pushed relentlessly by former President Donald Trump and amplified by conservative media, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They think that Trump was the true victor and that he should still be in the White House today.
I regularly host focus groups to better understand how voters are thinking about key political topics. Recently, I decided to find out why Trump 2020 voters hold so strongly to the Big Lie.
For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose. They know something nefarious occurred but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.
As a woman from Wisconsin told me, “I can’t really put my finger on it, but something just doesn’t feel right.” A man from Pennsylvania said, “Something about it just didn’t seem right.” A man from Arizona said, “It didn’t smell right.”
The exact details of the story vary—was it Hugo Chávez who stole the election? Or the CIA? Or Italian defense contractors? Outlandish claims like these seem to have made this conspiracy theory more durable, not less. Regardless of plausibility, the more questions that are raised, the more mistrustful Trump voters are of the official results.
Perhaps that’s because the Big Lie has been part of their background noise for years.
Remember that Trump began spreading the notion that America’s elections were “rigged” in 2016—when he thought he would lose. Many Republicans firmly believed that the Democrats would steal an election if given the chance. When the 2020 election came and Trump did lose, his voters were ready to doubt the outcome.
Or it’s about White Christianist Male Hegemony and they really don’t want to proudly state they are racist, homophobic, and misogynistic out loud in less technical–more graphic–words. By now, we all know where this big dose of white male grievance and whining comes.
Here is the doyenne of that. Lady Tuckums Carlson. He’s managed to produce the most homoerotic film in ages while remaining safely closeted at Faux News.
The promo for the new season of Tucker Carlson Originals incurred a veritable tsunami of mockery online for its montage of mostly shirtless men firing guns, wrestling, doing push-ups, swinging axes — and one stark naked fellow who was standing in front of some sort of machine that projected a red light onto his crotch.
Mediaite can now confirm that, yes, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson’s new special, “The End of Men,” does in fact promote “testicle tanning” as a way that men can raise testosterone levels.
Here’s my personal tribute to shrinking Tucker Carlson’s testosterone level some more!
All of this is encouraging me to write a book called “WTF is the matter with White Men?” My guess–but I would like to check with an expert–is not low testosterone.
Anyway, this is more than I can take and I have case studies to grade. Some of these folks really need to spend more time reading The Beatitudes and less time on Porn Hub and watching Fox news.
Anyway, I hope you have a good week. I seriously can’t watch the news anymore on TV so I’m glad we can get some glimpses of what we’re capable of and should be incapable of in the modern age.
Give yourself all hugs for me. And I need them all back at me too!!
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Once again, I’ve reached the point where I can’t bring myself to watch the news on TV. I check Twitter a few times a day and end up frightened and depressed. On the days I write posts, I read a number of articles, but then I need hours of down time to decompress. When will there be some good news for those of us who want the U.S. to be a democracy?
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