(the title quote is from Henry V Act II Scene 2)
If donald trump's call to Insurrection back on January 6 - to block Congress from its constitutional duties to confirm the 2020 election results - looks and smells and quacks like a coup attempt, that's because it was.
More documentation is getting out, and the paperwork is showing that trump and his inner circle knew what they were doing to start a riot at Capitol Hill and force his own Vice President Pence to throw out the results for Biden to allow trump to steal the Presidency. One of trump's lawyers involved in the planning (John Eastman) drew up a six-point memo laying out how it could work: It probably wouldn't, since the end result would have been civil war; still, the fact they were finding any rationale at all is horrifying.
Along with that, Adam Serwer at The Atlantic pointed out all the other things we've learned trump did to cheat the American people that came close to subverting everything (paywalled):
Prior to November, the possibility of Trump attempting a coup was seen as the deranged fever dream of crazed liberals. But as it turns out, Trump and his advisers had devised explicit plans for reversing Trump’s loss. Republican leaders deliberately stoked election conspiracy theories they knew to be false, in order to lay a political pretext for invalidating the results. Now, more than 10 months after the election, the country knows of at least five ways in which Trump attempted to retain power despite his defeat.
1. Trump tried to pressure secretaries of state to not certify.
Trump held early leads in vote counts in several states—not because he was ever actually ahead but because of discrepancies between when states count mail-in ballots and Election Day ballots. This so-called blue shift was written about long in advance of Election Day, and was partially the result of Trump’s own attacks on voting by mail. Nevertheless, Trump made this a key part of his election conspiracy theories (as many predicted he would), insisting that Democrats were somehow inserting fraudulent ballots into the vote count in the presidential election (something they apparently forgot to do in close House and Senate races, in which Democrats did worse than polls had anticipated). To help substantiate these falsehoods , the Trump campaign attempted to pressure secretaries of state to either not certify the results or “find” fraudulent ballots...
The most infamous of these attempts was trump's call to Georgia's Secretary of State Raffensperger, which got caught on tape and which should have led to trump getting arrested for election interference and harassing a state official. Last I heard the attorney investigating the matter is getting stonewalled by the same guy trump threatened, alas...
2. Trump tried to pressure state legislatures to overturn the results.
Trump personally attempted to coerce state legislators to overturn election results in a few states that voted for Biden, on the dubious legal theory that such legislatures could simply ignore the results of the popular vote in their own states. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia, Trump publicly urged Republican-controlled statehouses to “intervene to declare him the winner” and tweeted, “Hopefully the Courts and/or Legislatures will have the COURAGE to do what has to be done to maintain the integrity of our Elections, and the United States of America itself...”
Thankfully that attempt at social media bullying didn't go very far. Some of the state legislators made a show of it but none of them did it in sufficient numbers to pull it off. Nobody wanted to be the ones held accountable by their state voters afterward.
3. Trump tried to get the courts to overturn the results.
...As part of this effort, we can include the baseless “Kraken” lawsuits, filled with conspiracy theories about vote changes. Trump attempted to coerce the Justice Department into providing him with a pretext to overturn the results, but his attorney general, Bill Barr, refused to do so. Had DOJ leadership acquiesced, it would have lent credibility to Trump’s other corrupt schemes to reverse his loss. In a meeting with the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, according to contemporaneous notes taken by Rosen’s deputy, Trump said, “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me...”
If you kept track of trump's lawsuit efforts, well... There were 61 lawsuits overall (last count) and the only one his lawyers won was a procedural move to force a ballot count to end early. All that did was end that ballot count in favor of Biden. Everything got dismissed or turned down in court because trump's lawyers could not prove any massive vote theft/fraud had happened.
Leading up to one of the craziest things I've ever seen in political history:
4. Trump tried to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the results.
It is hard to pick the most ridiculous means of executing a coup, but insisting that the vice president has the power to unilaterally decide who won an election is up there. Trump publicly hounded Pence to reject the results prior to the traditionally ceremonial electoral-vote count in Congress, and Pence reportedly took that demand seriously enough to seek advice from (former VP) Dan Quayle on the matter, “asking if there were any grounds to pause the certification because of ongoing legal challenges,” according to Costa and Woodward. That this got so far is profoundly disturbing, but even more disturbing is Eastman’s memo, which shows that the Trump team had thought very deliberately about how this scheme would work...
Quayle's advice to Pence to not knuckle under to trump's bullying is pretty much how we survived this ordeal. But look: When Dan FREAKING Quayle (he of "Potatoe" infamy, Murphy Brown bashing, and misquotes of folly) is the goddamned VOICE OF REASON in this entire Kabuki dance, you know damn well that History has given up and gone off to get drunk at a nearby pub. You can't make this shit up.
5. When all else failed, Trump tried to get a mob to overturn the results.
At the rally prior to the vote count in Congress, Trump urged the crowd to act, saying, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The explicit goal of the rally and subsequent riot was to pressure Congress, and Pence in particular, into overturning the election results. Trump told his followers, “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election...”
trump and his defenders can try to repaint his rally all they like, but trump laid it out there to his riled-up mob that they had to pressure Pence to "do the right thing" (i.e. throw the results out and let trump "win"). And that's what happened when that mob crossed the streets to Capitol Hill and smashed/bullied their way in.
This is all out there now. Hundreds of cases are going on right now, with tens of trump's arrested rioters pleading their way to guilty charges to avoid harsher sentences. More and more reporting is digging up details like Eastman's memo showing just how everyone in trump's circle was plotting this out. More "revelatory" books like Bob Woodward's Peril is showing how insane the whole thing surrounding trump's election shenanigans was.
And there might be even more getting out there. Biden's administration is thinking of taking the unusual step of removing "Executive Privilege" of trump's White House documents so that the Congressional committee investigating the Insurrection can review them. To refer to Betty Cracker's take at Balloon Juice (she links further to the Washington Post article, but it's paywalled be warned):
The article cites a bunch of experts, including lawyers who served Democratic administrations and in pre-Trump Republican White Houses, and the consensus seems to be that post-executive privilege isn’t a thing. Unsurprisingly, one of the two go-to celebrity Trump-defender legal beagles disagrees:
“There is an unbroken tradition of deference by the incumbent presidents to their predecessors,” [GWU Professor Jonathan] Turley said. “In the past, incumbent presidents would generally support their predecessors in restricting access, despite partisan differences. It appears we may be poised here to shatter that tradition.”
In the past, incumbent presidents weren’t dealing with predecessors who claimed they won an election they lost and incited violence to cling to power. Dump those docs...!
I'm with Betty on this. A lot of our political structure is/was based on previous behavior as much as the written laws, but that was all based on Good Faith between parties to uphold the spirit of the Law as much as possible. trump went out of his way to destroy all that Good Faith, proving full well that "tradition" and respect for predecessor's guidelines should not apply to himself. Well, that's his petard getting hoisted now: Biden should not respect any preferential protections to the man who disrespected the office of the Presidency.
And it came out during this evening that the Congressional committee is taking that next step into the inner circle of trump's final days, with their subpoenas of people who had to have been in the room for the planning stages when all that shit went down (via Claudia Grisales at NPR):
The Democratic-led House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has issued subpoenas to four former Trump administration officials, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and strategist Steve Bannon.
The panel also issued subpoenas Thursday to former Trump White House deputy chief of staff for communications Dan Scavino and Kashyap Patel, who served as chief of staff to then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.
The subpoenas — the first issued by the select committee — compel the four to produce sought-after documents relevant to the deadly attack by Oct. 7, and then sit for a deposition the following week, on either Oct. 14 or 15...
"The Select Committee is investigating the facts, circumstances, and causes of the January 6th attack and issues relating to the peaceful transfer of power, in order to identify and evaluate lessons learned and to recommend to the House and its relevant committees corrective laws, policies, procedures, rules, or regulations," Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement.
In individually addressed letters, Thompson details further why the recipients are believed to have key information for the panel.
Thompson tells Meadows, for instance: "You were the President's Chief of Staff and have critical information regarding many elements of our inquiry. It appears you were with or in the vicinity of President [Donald] Trump on January 6, had communications with the President and others on January 6 regarding events at the Capitol, and are a witness regarding activities of that day..."
There is no doubt that these witnesses will fight appearing before Congress to the last letter, apostrophe, and comma on the paperwork, but they are on notice: These witnesses either have to double down being on the side of Head Insurrectionist trump facing justice sooner rather than later, or speak to what they know and try to walk away without jail time for what they did nearly destroying America for that con artist.
If they're any smarter than the low-level foot soldiers already pleading out for their roles in the January 6th Insurrection, they'll testify. If they're any greedier (and sadly they might be) they'll try to ride this grift far past its expiration date, still dooming themselves but the rest of us in the process.
Gods, I do want to see justice moving a little faster than this...
1 comment:
If they ignore subpoenas, throw. them. in. jail. They don't have the protection of a corrupt sitting president any more, and they had to know that would eventually be the case.
This shit has to be investigated and rooted out because they are still doing it right now. Witness the effort and money being spent by these same criminals to elect similarly deranged and corrupt candidates as secretaries of state so they can bollix upcoming elections in their favor.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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