That's Not the Best of Health, Y'all

I normally don't want to watch donald trump gaslighting / bloviating / spewing lies on national television, so I didn't watch this morning's Meet the Press to see this happen (via Laura Esposito at the Daily Beast):

The president, 79, furiously stormed off an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press after journalist Kristen Welker confronted him on his election conspiracies.

Trump began to sour on Welker after she pointed out in the interview that aired Sunday that there’s “no evidence” of rigged elections in the United States.

“Do you have evidence?” she asked after Trump slammed California’s elections as “rigged.”

The president then fired back: “All I have to do is look.”

When Welker replied: “That’s not evidence,” the interview took a turn.

“You’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked, and so is ABC and CBS and CNN one-sided crooked networks. Let’s call it quits, because I’ve had enough,” Trump raged. “Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

Confronted with questions he can't answer, confronted with even the simplest requirement that he present evidence of voter fraud - something he's NEVER been able to do since 2016 or 2020 - trump would rather attack his interviewer - especially when it's a woman - and later claim he "won" the argument even though he fled like a coward.

But that's not the thing that should be troubling today.

If you watch that video clip, as trump tries to get up to flee the scene, he cannot stand upright on his own. he has to put a hand on Welker's shoulder to maintain any balance, and as he shuffles away he's bent over like he's got back pain.

Add to this the reality that trump's had his third "annual" medical checkup in 13 months, trump keeps falling asleep at Oval Office gatherings to where Congress members are questioning Cabinet members about it, and growing rumors about CHF (congestive heart failure) and we're dealing with a clear constitutional crisis that nobody among the Republican ranks wants to deal with.

The moment where IT HAPPENS is coming closer by the minute.

The Corporate Media War On Facts and America (w/ Update)

I wrote awhile back about the blind eye of the national / mainstream media - especially the Beltway Media that tracks our political discourse 24/7 - and where I made observations about why that media behaved irresponsibly about the partisan nature of the Far Right. Fellow blogger Green Eagle posted this comment pointing out something I overlooked:

Here is the real reason: Before Ronald Reagan took office, over 80% of the press was owned by individuals and small companies. Thanks to Reagan's "deregulation" of the media, today, about 90% of the press is owned by large corporations or multi-billionaires, almost all of which are Republicans. When I hear people explain what causes the press to behave the way it does, I want to ask them, did you never have a job in your life? And if you did have a job, did you do what you wanted, or what the boss wanted? Our mainstream press is doing what the boss wants, period. That is the real, entire story of why Democrats will never get a fair break from the national media, whose owners cannot fathom the idea that things will not be better off if government gives them everything they want.

I've thought back to GE's comment recently because this weekend the owners of NBC proved that when they hired Ronna Romney McDaniel - the head of the Republican National Committee that just got booted out by donald trump in a hostile takeover - to be a regular contributor to their news division at an obscene salary of $300,000 as though there was nothing wrong with her.

Even though there is a shit-ton wrong with her: Above all, McDaniel's unwarranted and dangerous election denialism, willingness to do trump's dirty work, and attempts to undo the 2020 election results.

McDaniel's hiring is actually standard operating procedure in the national media workplace: Over the decades, the news networks routinely hired politicians and political handlers to work as pundits from both major political parties (and even a few Libertarians to spice up the crazy).

But McDaniel's hire set off fire alarms throughout the industry, because it threatened one thing: Defending - and worse, normalizing - trump and the Far Right's open war against democracy itself.

David A. Graham at the Atlantic documented the horror show (paywalled):

On Sunday, Meet the Press host Kristen Welker rightly raked McDaniel over her past election denialism. Chuck Todd, Welker’s predecessor at MTP, then said the network’s bosses owed her an apology for placing her in a tough position—he said he didn’t know whether to take McDaniel’s answers as honest. “There’s a reason why there are a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination,” Todd said on air.

Then, on Morning Joe today, the titular Scarborough said, “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring, but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons.” Co-host Mika Brzezinski said she hoped NBC would reconsider.

When that "Both Sideism" hack Chuck Todd is freaking out, when Far Right former congresscritter Scarborough is objecting on-air, you know the head honchos at NBC crossed a line. 

Graham posted his Atlantic article before major MSNBC figure Rachel Maddow got her two cents in, and oh yeah Maddow dropped napalm on the hiring (via Dominick Mastrangelo at The Hill):

“If you care what I think about this, the fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News — to me that is inexplicable,” Maddow said on her show. “You wouldn’t hire a wise guy, a made man like a mobster, to work in a DA’s office. You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener. And so, I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable...”

“And it’s not about Democratic party, Republican party, it’s not about partisanship or right versus left,” she continued. “It’s about our system of government and undermining elections and going after democracy.”

Maddow highlighted McDaniel’s role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and said NBC, like all news organizations, is currently tasked with “trying to cover an election … and cover bad actors who are using the rights and privileges of a democracy to end democracy...”

While McDaniel's first appearance on Meet the Press showed her reversing her stance and claiming the 2020 election "was fair," it still doesn't undo the actual damage McDaniel committed while serving as RNC Chair (and overlooks the possibility she can be charged in Michigan for her efforts to throw out thousands of votes). And even though trump kneecapped her and drove her from her leadership position among Republicans, you can guarantee that McDaniel - daughter to a powerful GOP political family, long-standing conservative on her own - will "carry the water" for a Republican Party that will spend most of the 2024 election cycle playing out trump's gaslighting over "unfair elections" and "stolen ballots."

Graham even wonders what actual value McDaniel has that would be of interest to the NBC bosses who signed off on her contract:

The problem is that McDaniel has no apparent value to viewers or the network. When outlets hire figures like her, they typically say that these people add perspective and insight that only insiders can provide. “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” the NBC political editor Carrie Budoff Brown said in a statement.

Sometimes, the private explanation is more mercenary. When CBS hired former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney in 2022, an executive bluntly told staffers that the network expected Republicans to capture Congress in that year’s midterm elections, and that Mulvaney would assist in getting “access.” Semafor’s Ben Smith has a related theory for this year: Many corporate leaders seem to have concluded that Donald Trump will win the presidential election, and so they’re trying to make moves to get in his good graces.

The problem is that McDaniel falls short both as an editorial offering and as favor-currying... McDaniel is not known for her strategic acumen or ideological fervor. She was chosen for the job for loyalty for Trump, and then discarded later when that loyalty proved insufficient.

McDaniel’s credibility is also in question. As Welker pointed out, she spent years indulging Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that January 6 insurrectionists were patriots. McDaniel’s explanation was not reassuring: “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team, right? Now I get to be a little bit more myself, right? This is what I believe.” In other words, Trust me, I was lying.

All of this makes it hard to take McDaniel’s on-air political commentary all that seriously...

...There are three kinds of prominent Republicans: Those who are in Trump’s good graces; those who have been cast out of Trump’s good graces; and those who have always loathed Trump. The third group has no truck with McDaniel, whom they see as a sycophantic sellout. (They note that she dropped her maiden name, Romney, in deference to Trump’s disdain for her uncle.) McDaniel herself is in the second group—she was available for the NBC gig because Trump demanded her removal as RNC chair, after all.

The Trump loyalists in the first group have no affection for McDaniel either. A top campaign official crowed to Politico’s Playbook about her getting caught in the crossfire. No one in Trump’s current orbit will want to appear close to McDaniel for fear of being cast out themselves. If Trump wins the election, McDaniel won’t be able to speak very effectively to his inner circle; and if he loses, she won’t be a credible voice in a post-Trump era of Republican politics.

This leaves McDaniel without any constituency...

In some respects it was never about McDaniel's place in trump's inner circle of power (she was easily dismissed like many others before her). If we look closely at McDaniel herself, all she presents - to the media and the nation watching her - is a consistent, hard conservative world-view of tax cuts to the rich (that ever-fixed mark she shares with her father), deregulations across the board, and slashing at social safety nets to make the poor suffer more.

It's a world-view consistent with the cruelty and self-serving interests of the corporate powers as well.

Like Green Eagle notes, our Beltway Media is corporate-owned and fixated on the narratives that serve their needs, rather than the factual reporting that the national audiences need to stay properly informed.

If the CEO and managers in control of NBC - and ABC, and CBS, and Fox, and C-Span for that matter, hell throw in ESPN and the Weather Channel while we're at it - want certain messages and narratives and explanations (and gaslighting) to get broadcast, they will hire the people - usually those within their own small circles of colleagues and party invites - that will shill those narratives while raking in annual salaries more than triple that of their standard employees (it doesn't help NBC's judgment when they've recently fired 100 people to clear payroll).

NBC is going to hire pundits who will gladly talk up "the benefits" of tax cuts for the rich and "reforming" Social Security and Medicare and all the other standard Far Right talking points, especially during an election cycle when they need to overwhelm the public forum with their skewed priorities. It's just that the CEOs and people who made this deal happen didn't pay attention to all the damage McDaniel is really threatening to inflict - the end of voting rights, the destruction of fair elections, the rise of authoritarian figures like trump seeking to burn the American Dream down to rule the ashes - as part of her messaging.

It's not shocking that NBC hired a prominent Republican. It's shocking that they hired one willing to destroy America.

Update: It's later in the day and the reports are out that NBC will sever ties with McDaniel, although it may be a messy situation because McDaniel will likely be looking for a lawsuit claiming her First Amendment rights were denied. This is going to cost the network a ton of money, as well it should, and the people involved are likely going to get "encouraged" to retire on their own terms in short order. But it remains a serious problem that the CEOs and company heads are going to try this again, hiring another "trump insider" who will shill the upper-class agenda of "SAVE US FROM DEMOCRATS TAXING THE RICH THEIR FAIR SHARE".

You Signed Up For This, Rudy, Time to Pay Up

If there's anything that gets you back into the rhythm of political blogging, it's a tasty uber-sized serving of schadenfreude. For example, watching one of donald trump's most loyal lapdogs in Rudy Giuliani get brutalized in a civil court case for defaming Georgia election officials over trump's "stolen votes" gaslighting (via Miles Park at NPR):

Former Trump campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay a staggering $148 million to two former Georgia election workers he spread lies about following the 2020 election.

The decision on Friday comes at the end of a week-long federal civil trial in Washington, D.C., where an eight-person jury heard from the workers — Wandrea "Shaye" Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman — about how 2020 election conspiracies spread by Giuliani and former President Donald Trump turned their lives upside down.

"I was afraid for my life," Moss said during her testimony on Tuesday. "I literally felt that someone would attempt to hang me and there was nothing anyone could do about it."

Jurors heard numerous violent and racist voicemails the women received, after Giuliani used his massive platform as a campaign attorney for Trump to spread lies about their actions as election workers in Georgia.

In the time after voting ended in 2020, Giuliani shared video from an absentee ballot counting facility in Fulton County, which he falsely claimed showed the two women cheating and scanning ballots multiple times to benefit Joe Biden.

A hand-count audit in Georgia found votes to have been tallied correctly in the 2020 election, and a years-long investigation by the Georgia secretary of state's office found the accusations against Moss and Freeman to be "false and unsubstantiated..."

In August, district Judge Beryl Howell found Giuliani liable for defamation, due to his lack of cooperation in the case, and Giuliani conceded as part of the proceedings that his statements about Moss and Freeman were false.

So the trial this week was only held to determine the damages Moss and Freeman were owed...

The penalties broke down to roughly $16 million per woman, and then an additional $20 million each for emotional damages, added to $75 million in punitive damages because Rudy was that huge a jerkass about all this.

Rumor has it Giuliani doesn't have that kind of personal wealth to pay out those damages. Granted, the lengthy appeal process will likely see the punitive damages reduced (and perhaps some of the emotional damages) but the appellate courts are loathe to overturn jury rulings, meaning at some point down the road he owes these women he victimized a shit-ton of money he doesn't have.

In most respects none of us should have any sympathy for Rudy. He intentionally went out of his way to attack these women - and wouldn't you notice how it's women he attacked, not the men who worked as elections officials in Georgia - as part of a massive scheme to overturn a legal election result not just in Georgia but across the United States.

(Remember kids, Giuliani was grandstanding in front of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia when the state of Pennsylvania confirmed the win for Joe Biden, effectively killing trump's gaslighting about "stolen votes" and subjecting Giuliani to public humiliation)

For all of Rudy's bluster during this trial in front of the cameras, he wasn't able to present honest evidence in the courtroom - or in ANY courtroom - that his (and trump's) lies about the elections results were real. For all the times Rudy said he was going to prove himself, that he was going to prove these women were part of a massive conspiracy, he never presented a shred of proof. And when he promised he was going to go on the stand and testify to his own defense, well of course he chickened out at the last minute and let the matter go to the jury, because even as a bad lawyer he knew the risks of being under oath and cross-examination.

Again, no sympathy for Rudy, because this sonofabitch signed up to be trump's bitch, and this is how everyone who lies and grandstands for that con artist ends up: Broke, facing jail time, and wondering how the hell their lives ended like this.

Giuliani volunteered for this, everyone. He happily went to work for donald trump knowing he was a bad boss with a long history of throwing lackeys under the bus to save his own orange hide. He willingly played the role of trump's Roy Cohn successor, the legal attack dog doing trump's bidding while trump plotted to subvert constitutional norms and overturn legal elections.

And what did it get Rudy? Failures in courtroom after courtroom trying to overturn election results without evidence to prove it. Getting tied up in fake electors schemes that currently has Giuliani facing thirteen racketeering charges in Fulton County Georgia.

That case, by the by, is likely why Rudy refused to testify in his own defense at the defamation trial: Anything he says under oath is admissible elsewhere. And according to reports, DA Fani Willis is not offering Giuliani - a major player in the conspiracy charges - a plea deal. Willis is also telling the state court that her office can take their case to trial within 30 days, depending at least on where things fit in trump's busy criminal trial calendar (this link is updated frequently, so save it to favorites, kiddos) for 2024.

So not only is Giuliani facing financial ruin over whatever years he has remaining, he's facing the reality that he's going to watch all of his wealth taken away from behind prison bars.

No sympathy for Rudy, though. He willingly signed up to work for a liar and a con artist. He willingly chose the path that Roy Cohn took, unloved and broken to the grave.

And he's still a freaking perv because of what we saw in that Borat movie. Gods.

Suffer, Rudy. You honestly earned this fate.

Losing It All In the Dirt Digging

(On a personal note, I will appear at the Bartow (FL) Writers Block and Street Fair as a local author this Saturday May 20th from 10AM to 6PM. It's a fund-raising effort for the local church charities, and it'll be  pet-friendly event with a ton of activities. I do hope to see some people there, and buy my books!) 

(Update: Again, many thanks to Batocchio at Crooks & Liars for adding this article to Mike's Blog Round-Up!)

One of the things expected from the US House Republicans this congressional cycle was a persistent wave of mudslinging "investigations" into conspiracy-driven wingnut allegations aimed at Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and the Democratic Party as a whole. 

Not because there was any well-known dirt or questionable conduct by Biden himself, but because the Republicans needed to demean him, ruin his public persona, and make it harder for Biden to run for re-election in 2024.

Look at the trend of Republican dirt-digging over the decades. The Far Right had Whitewater (and then Vince Foster's suicide) to harass Bill Clinton in the 1990s, they had BS on Obama's birth certificate in the 2010s that went nowhere, and then a Solyandra scandal that went nowhere, and then Benghazi to undermine Hillary Clinton for her 2016 run, and then Hillary's emails and private server that all turned into nothingburgers but arguably succeeded in throwing that election cycle to trump.

This time around, the House Oversight and other special committees were going after Joe for his son Hunter's possibly corrupt work with Ukrainian businesses. Which is, to be fair, leading up to a handful of misdemeanor charges and one felony tax dodge charge sometime soon. Frustratingly for the House GOP, they couldn't dig up any evidence Hunter's father ran interference for him.

In the aftermath of that failed press conference, the chair of the Oversight Committee James Comer went public with the admission that they couldn't get any whistleblowers in the federal agencies to step forward, and that his committee lost track of "a key witness" that would have tied the whole room together uh tied Hunter's corruption to Papa Joe's decades of Senate and Vice Presidential work.

The public mockery for Comer's mishandling of witnesses came quick (via Igor Derysh at Salon):

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo pressed Comer on the evidence on Sunday.

"You also spoke with an informant who gave you all of this information," she said. "Where is that informant today? Where are these whistleblowers?"

"Well, unfortunately, we can't track down the informant," Comer replied. "We're hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible."

The "Girlfriend From Canada" excuse and "The Dog Ate My Homework" excuse can only take you so far, bro.

Comer added that "no president has ever been accused of the things that the Biden family's been accused of."

Bro. I'm pretty fucking sure the trump family has been accused of more serious shitload of corrupt things during their years in the White House than Joe's.

"Hold on a second, Congressman. Did you just say that the whistleblower or the informant is now missing?" Bartiromo interjected.

"Well, we're hopeful that we can find the informant," Comer said. "Remember, these informants are kind of in the spy business, so they don't make a habit of being seen a lot or being high profile or anything like that."

Comer added that nine of the 10 informants "that we've identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens, they're one of three things. They're either currently in court, they're currently in jail, or they're currently missing..."

"It is stunning that some people are missing, that you need to the prove this," (Bartiromo) said. "Just stunning. A stunning breaking news story this morning that some of these people now may be missing," she later added as she wrapped up the interview.

Granted, until it's time to present this all in a courtroom, you don't want to leak the identities of people who are honestly exposing criminal misdeeds at the risk of their own lives. But Comer isn't exactly credible himself talking about "credible" people we have no idea who they are. For all we do know, Comer's "witnesses" are Far Right conspiracy buffs with no access to Biden's inner circles or even any ties to federal agencies under Biden's administration (then or now).

But if we're taking Comer's work seriously, then what Comer's admitting to is a terrible breach of investigatory procedures. One of the first things you gotta do when you're pulling witnesses together is that you gotta talk to them face-to-face as soon as possible, get their statements on record, verify the source(s), confirm they're in a position to know, etc. What Comer's admitting during that interview is that they didn't even have a handle on the informant to confirm the whistleblower was even real.

The House Republicans were charging ahead without having any evidence or witness to guide them. It's that whole "cart before the horse" and/or "get your damn ducks in a row" idiom (or metaphor, I'm not sure which) in real life.

I've represented #whistleblowers, especially within Intelligence Community (spies), for more than 25 years. Strange, I've never lost one.

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️https://t.co/OxtxEavVtB

— Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) May 14, 2023

At best, this was sloppy and incompetent. At worst, the House Republicans honestly didn't care if they had a witness/whistleblower at all. All they really wanted was the illusion that they had dirt on Biden.

Consider the other thing Comer said in that interview: Most of their informants were themselves facing criminal charges or currently in jail (as well as missing). We're talking about witnesses who won't exactly have honorable intentions to spill dirt or be considered reliable. But again, the facts were NOT at issue here. All Comer and the House GOP wanted were Big Lies about Biden to make Biden and the Dems look crooked, even if the facts proved otherwise.

When the House witch hunts inquiries into Joe Biden began, the Republican leadership all promised that they would have a number of key witnesses and whistleblowers to expose the fraud and danger of a Biden Presidency. They pretty much sent invites to every disgruntled federal employee from the FBI on down to the custodians at the American History museums to approach them with any scandalous whisper they could share. And yet, by all signs of things nobody did.

Consider this the Underpants Gnomes Congressional Inquiry. All they had going in for Step One was "Find incriminating dirt on Biden," and what they hoped for at Step Three was "PROFIT." They had nothing for Step Two.

For all the hopes and fantasies and conspiracy-mongering among the Republican faithful, there doesn't even look to be any large-scale corruption going on among the hated Democratic ranks. Whistleblowers and informants aren't stepping up because they're afraid to (compare to the numerous informants that cropped up during trump's misrule), there just aren't any real informants out there when it comes to Democratic governance.

Until Comer or Jim Jordan or Kevin McCarthy or anyone else among the House Republicans can present even one sliver of evidence of corruption, we shouldn't be taken in by their unfounded allegations about misconduct under Biden's leadership.

All the Republicans have anymore are the lies they keep telling themselves, even more than the lies they try to tell us.

It'd be funny and even pitiful, if it weren't so dangerous for the nation.

Revive the Mueller Findings. Charge Barr AND trump with Obstruction

It's been awhile since I wrote about the Mueller Report. It's been enough time for me to look back and kick myself for putting too much hope into what the investigations into trump's ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign would lead to. 

I had hoped by now we'd see harder sanctions against Putin for his meddling, more laws making it harder for foreign powers to intervene in elections, stuff like that. I don't think I've seen much activity from either the Biden administration or from Congress on those fronts.

I had hoped that Congress would have acted on Mueller's recommendations, on the evidence he found that trump obstructed the investigation at least five times, to impeach trump and have that on record. Granted, the Republican-led Senate back then would have given trump a pass like they did on the two Impeachment trials trump DID face, but for some reason Pelosi's Democratic House refused to go there. Instead, they impeached trump on other acts of misconduct he did in office, such as extorting Ukraine to interfere with the 2020 elections using a faked "investigation" into Joe Biden's son Hunter; and impeached trump for inciting insurrection when Congress tried to confirm the Electoral College votes on January 6th.

I understood back in 2019 when the Mueller Report was released that then-Attorney General Barr would redact and underplay the findings as much as possible: That Barr would weaken the impact of Mueller's work to spare his Overlord trump as much as the twisted Justice Department could allow. As a result, whatever value that Report had for America and for our legal system got diminished and buried.

Until earlier this May, when one of the judges still overseeing the legal handlings of Mueller's prosecutions tore Bill Barr a few holes and demanded an accounting (via Michael S Schmidt for the New York Times):

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department's obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation.

The department had argued that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of private advice from lawyers whom Mr. Barr had relied on to make the call on prosecuting Mr. Trump. But Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, ruled that the memo contained strategic advice, and that Mr. Barr and his aides already understood what his decision would be...

She also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the investigation's findings in a letter summarizing the 448-page report before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been exonerated.

''The attorney general's characterization of what he'd hardly had time to skim, much less study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,'' Judge Jackson wrote...

Essentially, Jackson's ruling - obstensibly to force the Justice Department to release the internal memos that covered Barr's actions - makes the case that Barr was covering for trump, had already made the legal decision to find in favor of trump, and was going out of his way to ensure justice would not prevail in this matter.

I'm not a lawyer, but to me that sounds a lot like Barr obstructed justice to protect trump from HIS obstruction charges.

We have a new President in Joe Biden. We have a new Attorney General in Merrick Garland.

We should have time on the clock for any and all Obstruction of Justice charges to get issued against William Barr and against donald trump.

This is an Accountability Moment that MUST be answered. Otherwise we risk another round of criminal acts by a corrupt Republican President without any means to stop him.

DAMMIT. Justice demands it. HISTORY requires it.

The Big Lie And the One Truth (w/ Update)

(Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for adding me to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round Up! As always, you're invited to leave a comment and visit the rest of the blog. Today (Wed. May 12) is looking like it's going to be an insane day...)

So the Republican downward spiral seems to be gaining speed. Via Zach Beauchamp at Vox: 

Remaining in the GOP’s good graces requires that elected officials either actively embrace lies about 2020 or, at very least, refuse to condemn them. As a result, 2020 conspiracy theories are exerting a dominant influence on the party — shaping both legislation and the base’s worldview...

From top to bottom, the GOP has been conquered by the Big Lie (note: trump claiming the 2020 results were stolen and that he won both the Popular Vote and the Electoral College). Much as North Korean state press proclaims that Kim Jong Il invented the hamburger, Republicans must now proclaim that was something fishy about Joe Biden’s victory...

Trump’s pronouncements, endorsed and spread by a number of prominent Republicans, radicalize the base — undermining faith in democracy itself. Republicans inclined to challenge this view realize they’re out of step with the party and mostly stay quiet; those that do speak up publicly, like Cheney or Raffensperger, get marginalized or stripped of their power. This weakens the constituency to challenge any future lies from Trump and other like-minded Republicans.

It’s a one-way ratchet, where a faction of the GOP elite led by Trump pushes the party further and further down an anti-democratic road. And there’s no obvious way to stop it...

What is happening now is that the Republican Party and all of its apparatus - not just the elected officials but the party handlers and above all their media punditry allies at Fox Not-News and elsewhere - are stuck defending an incredibly Big yet easily-disprovable Lie. 

They got stuck partly because they got stuck with a Big Lying Bullshitter in trump placing himself at the head of their table. trump came in lying on Day One, proclaiming himself the most popular and most beloved even at the emptiest Inauguration in memory, and forced not only his underlings to shill that lie but got the rest of the GOP to either buy in or stay silent (which re-enforced the lie's power).

I said it before: Once you become trump's Bitch you will ALWAYS be trump's Bitch. Once he gets you lying for him to prove your worth, he will make you lie even more with even flimsier bullshit until your reputation is worthless.

But this isn't entirely trump's fault the Republican Party has caught itself trapped defending an indefensible Big Lie.

The Republicans are stuck with the Big Lie because it happens to fit this One Truth:

The Republican Party cannot and will not share power with a Democratic Party they view as un-American and thus illegitimate.

Somewhere back in time - you can argue happening between the rise of the conservative Southern Strategy in the late 1960s or the rise of Saint Ronnie in the 1980s or the corruption of Newt's Contract On America in the 1990s - the Republican Party bought into the idea that only they were true God-fearing God-chosen Gun-worshiping patriots. (Letting the Far Right Christian forces take control of the Party had a lot to do with that mindset winning out)

The ongoing slander of accusing liberal Democrats of being Socialists or Communists or both from the 1940s grew like a cancer into the belief - even as Socialism faded and Communism collapsed in the 1990s - that Democrats are destructive and anti-American. It doesn't help that a lot of liberalism brought Blacks and Jews (and slowly among more Women) in large numbers into the Democratic ranks to where the Republican paranoia fell even more into racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism.

All of that fuels the fear and anger and paranoia of not only the Republican voting base but also a Republican leadership that has driven out any moderating voices and replaced them with more rabid and aggressive haters. It's gotten harder and harder for the GOP to even reconsider its world-view against Democrats because it keeps adding more members to their ranks who will never change their hatred of the Dreaded Other Democrats.

This Republican Truth - Democrats Should Never Hold Power That Rightfully Belongs To Us - fits easily into trump's Big Lie - Democrats Stole My God-Given Rightful Power - and now those two parts have fused into one.

But the Republicans have a problem. Where their One Truth was merely a world-view that did not expose itself to self-destructive implosion (Republicans could keep believing it and still function rationally in polite society), the Big Lie is a direct attack on the Real World that sooner rather than later is going to hit the Brick Wall of Unbreakable Facts. The Big Lie compels trump's believers into direct action - SEE the January 6th Insurrection - and these actions have legal consequences where the Big Lie has not and cannot prevail.

The Republicans are betting on their Big Lie carrying them forward into the future. But it's a Big Lie stuck in the past of a failed 2020 election, pushed constantly by a Big Liar in trump who cannot avoid his impending fate either in civil or criminal courts.

The Republicans' One Truth has become their Big Lie.

It's just a question now of when they pay for that lie, because it's too big to avoid.

One Sentence Explanation Why Republicans Are Still Pandering to trump's Coup Attempts to Subvert the 2020 Elections (w/ Update)

It is not that Republicans really believe Democrats stole millions of ballots, and it is not that Republicans can PROVE Democrats stole millions of ballots: It is that Republicans have to demonstrate to each other their absolute fealty to the GRAND FAR RIGHT NARRATIVE that Democrats/Liberals are all evil Commies, and so the Republicans must top each other with a kind of escalating madness to prove their loyalty to the cause even at the expense of making fellow Republicans look bad, which has the added benefit of forcing those other Republicans into acquiescing to that madness to keep the rest of the Republican Party in that downward spiral of "No, *I* can be crazier than thou!"

And there is nothing - outside of the courts just collectively going "fuck it, Contempt of Court for every one of these bastards for wasting our time" - that can compel them to stop that downward spiral.

Okay, that's two sentences, but it all needs to be said even with this third sentence.

(Updated 12/31/20): This is adding to the blog entry, but I saw this on The Atlantic by Peter Wehner and thought of placing it on a separate blog article but then realized it fits here better: 

Hawley knows this effort will fail, just as every other effort to undo the results of the lawful presidential election will fail... Every single attempt to prove that the election was marked by fraud or that President-elect Biden’s win is illegitimate—an effort that now includes about 60 lawsuits—has flopped. In fact, what we’ve discovered since the November 3 election is that it was “the most secure in American history,” as election experts in Trump’s own administration have declared. But this immutable, eminently provable fact doesn’t deter Trump and many of his allies from trying to overturn the election; perversely, it seems to embolden them...

It is one thing for Hawley to position himself as a populist, something he had done even before he was elected in 2018; it is quite another for him to knowingly engage in civic vandalism and, in ostentatiously unpatriotic ways, undermine established norms and safeguards. This is precisely what Senator Hawley is now doing—and he is doing so in the aftermath of Trump’s loss, when some political observers might have hoped that the conspiracy mindset and general insanity of the Trump modus operandi would begin to lose their salience...

What is happening in the GOP is that figures such as Hawley, along with many of his Senate and House colleagues, and important Republican players, including the former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, are all trying to position themselves as the heirs of Trump. None of them possesses the same sociopathic qualities as Trump, and their efforts will be less impulsive and presumably less clownish, more calculated and probably less conspiracy-minded. It may be that not all of them support Hawley’s stunt; perhaps some are even embarrassed by it. But these figures are seismographers; they are determined to act in ways that win the approval of the Republican Party’s base. And this goes to the heart of the danger...

The problem with the Republican “establishment” and with elected officials such as Josh Hawley is not that they are crazy, or that they don’t know any better; it is that they are cowards, and that they are weak. They are far more ambitious than they are principled, and they are willing to damage American politics and society rather than be criticized by their own tribe...

The weakness is how they abandoned their duties as party leaders to actually lead: The people in charge are supposed to correct possible errors, guide others to enlightened paths, set examples, and make sure things are done right. That may sometimes require getting into the pit of madness, sorting out the troublemakers to prevent them from making things worse, and getting back up on that horse to charge into battle.

The modern Republican Party does not want to correct their lies because that would kill the Narrative they've built this failing structure upon. The GOP leadership would rather pander and succumb to the followers who've gotten addicted to the Fox Not-News lies that feed their rage and foolishness.

Like I keep saying about the Republicans, it's now trumps all the way down. And they're dragging the rest of the nation down with them.

trump Lied, We Died. DO SOMETHING TO STOP HIM, America

So this dropped today (via Adam L Silverman at Balloon Juice, but seriously this should be on all the major Non-Right Wing news sites by now):

Lordy! There Are Tapes! Bob Woodward’s Rage Has Leaked To CNN & By Leaked I Mean Bob Woodward Gave CNN the Book and the Tapes

Whenever anyone tweets "Lordy" on Twitter it means someone has tapes of trump tripping over his own ego to expose his sins (we still haven't seen a hair of the reported Pee Tape though). When I saw it trend, I knew it was bad, but I had to find out how bad (from here Silverman reports from the original CNN source):

President Donald Trump admitted he knew weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death that the virus was dangerous, airborne, highly contagious and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” and that he repeatedly played it down publicly, according to legendary journalist Bob Woodward in his new book “Rage.”

"This is deadly stuff," Trump told Woodward on February 7.

In a series of interviews with Woodward, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known. “Pretty amazing,” Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times “more deadly” than the flu.

Trump’s admissions are in stark contrast to his frequent public comments at the time insisting that the virus was “going to disappear” and “all work out fine.”

The book, using Trump’s own words, depicts a President who has betrayed the public trust and the most fundamental responsibilities of his office. In “Rage,” Trump says the job of a president is “to keep our country safe.” But in early February, Trump told Woodward he knew how deadly the virus was, and in March, admitted he kept that knowledge hidden from the public.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward on March 19, even as he had declared a national emergency over the virus days earlier. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic...”

Well, we still had a national panic. And then the nation split into two factions: One faction that believed every word from trump that the panic was overblown and the whole thing was a hoax to make trump look bad; the second faction that realized real quick that trump was LYING as usual and did everything they could to self-quarantine and wear masks everywhere they had to go.

And because trump downplayed the crisis, because trump added confusion to the public awareness rather than giving honest warning to the hazards of COVID, because trump lied to the press and the public and everyone else, the United States is facing one of the highest death totals the planet will witness (nearing 200,000 total COVID-related deaths this September).

We're nearing the death count of our major wars, far higher than any terrorist attack or natural disaster.

Because trump lied. Because trump knew the virus would strike at people he did not have to care about, even though his OATH OF OFFICE should compel him to defend this nation from all threats.

There's a word for that.

Genocide.

And trump is doing everything in his power to cheat his way to another four years of this insanity, with an entire Republican Party willing to commit every sin to help him.

Gods help us.

Voting him and every GOP official out of power is the only way we're going to survive, for the LOVE OF GOD every honest American wishing to protect their loved ones need to understand that.

Republicans Without A Plan

There's a thing on Twitter about #WAP that's not exactly safe for work but it's out there and well-known.

What's also out there now is another WAP and this abbreviation stands for Without A Plan because that's where the modern Republican Party has led itself (via Annie Lowry at the Atlantic):

The GOP in general is remarkably quiet on how it would govern and what it seeks to accomplish in the coming years. Breaking with precedent, the party decided against producing an original platform for the 2020 convention. (Put differently: It no-platformed itself.) And Republican leadership has gone dark on a huge swath of issues: balancing the budget, reforming entitlement programs, tackling climate change, improving public education, reducing student-loan debt, and ameliorating racial inequalities—as well as getting the country through the pandemic and out of the recession.

With the planet burning, the virus killing, the economy collapsing, and millions of Americans preparing to vote, the country’s leading political cabal has moved into a queasy post-policy space: Its aperture has narrowed to just a few issues; its desire to try to pass major, proactive legislation has withered. This is not just proof that a man as interested in his own image as he is uninterested in briefing books should not be president. It is also a sign that American democracy is in peril...

What the Republicans did was posit a party platform that was copied and pasted from the 2016 agenda, and edited most everything out except for a new paragraph: RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda. Without clarifying exactly what trump's agenda really means.

Basically, the Republican Party is saying "We're gonna do whatever Our Lord and False Idol donald trump tells us what to do."

This is both refreshing and horrifying. Refreshing in that at least the Republicans have stopped pretending outright that they care about issues. Horrifying in that they're demonstrating they care only about appeasing a despotic wannabe who lusts after the money and the power.

Also horrifying is the implication that the Republican voting base is not expecting anything more out of the party leadership than the ongoing pandering to their partisan identity... and worse, pandering to the fears and racism that trump offers them in lieu of effective policies. Back to Lowry:

For the many Republicans who don’t benefit much from tax cuts, and never received the promised populist policies, identity politics and racial resentment are strong enough forces to tie them to the party. A study by the political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Jennifer McCoy, for instance, showed that Trump’s dog-whistling worked. In 2000, George W. Bush won two in three working-class white voters who evince considerable racial resentment, measured by asking them whether or not they agree with statements such as “If Blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” Trump got nine in 10 of them.

Trump electrifies the party’s broader base with revanchism, nativism, and white nationalism, catering to the anxieties of a historically hyper-dominant group fast becoming a minority. Just take a look at who is speaking at the GOP convention to see what red meat looks like for red America: the couple who brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis and Nick Sandmann of Covington Catholic High School, whose interaction with the Native American activist Nathan Phillips in front of the Lincoln Memorial went viral in 2019. Or, in the absence of a national 2020 manifesto, take a look at the Texas platform: Delegates picked top priorities including banning gender-confirmation procedures, protecting monuments, purging the voter rolls, and preventing teenagers from getting abortions or obtaining birth control without parental consent, all potent fronts in the culture war. “Policy doesn’t matter much” to winnable conservative voters, Brent Buchanan, a Republican pollster, told me. “It’s more about personalities and principles.”

This is, in many regards, the final victory of Roger Ailes and Harry Treleaven, campaign handlers for Richard Nixon back in 1968. If you read The Selling of the President, which chronicled the rise of television-based marketing of elections, you might remember the breakthrough Treleaven developed regarding the electoral process. It's not about the issues - although they matter - it's about the emotional appeal a candidate or party offers to potential voters. Lemme quote:

It was Treleaven, working on a 1966 Congressional campaign in Texas for this businessman named George HW Bush, who noted that "logical persuasion" was difficult to sell because he found "probably more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect." (p.45)  He found that image worked wonders, as long as he presented Bush as likable, hard-working, and expressing empathy for the voter...

The issues may be things that a party can rally around, but the driving force behind voter interest and voter turnout are the emotional and irrational appeals to that interest. The Beltway pundits may demand the candidates talk about "the issues" but when you watch and read how they cover the campaigns they almost always discuss non-issues about the candidates that cover personalities, follies, and worse.

When I look back at the Presidential campaigns I've witnessed, I've noticed the issues only mattered to a point: What mattered to the voters seemed to be the beliefs - based a lot on gut feelings - of which candidate appealed on an emotional level. It mattered if the voters had an irrational perception of the candidate, not the rational. A rational voter base would have swarmed to Hillary due to her experience and stances on issues that did resonate with Americans... but she couldn't achieve a majority vote because of the irrational fearmongering that had followed her for decades. Biden isn't as strong a candidate on paper when it comes to the issues... but his public persona is so likable he could (and did) make a few gaffes and still see his popularity polls go upward.

So it makes some sense, to be fair, that the parties find ways to appeal to not only their own bases on an emotional level, but also as many Americans as possible. It's a lesson learned from the 1970s, and it all depends - like the Republicans in 1980 with Reagan, with the Democrats in 1992 with Clinton - if the gamble pays off.

The problem is that since 1992 when Bush the Elder was losing control of the coalition that won them the 1980s, the Republican Party decided to pursue emotional prodding not through empathy or likability - although they'd LOVE to have another Reagan to come along and seduce the masses again - but through demonization of the Other. It had been there with the dog whistles on race and abortion under Reagan, but when Bush signed off on battling Dukakis with the Willie Horton ad, it was like a dam bursting loose.

The Republican turn to mudslinging (also known as Swiftboating when it was Kerry they insulted in 2004) came at the same time the Republicans were losing ground with their actual agendas of gay-bashing, tax-cutting, deregulating, and more. The views of the voting base shifted from conservative to liberal, even as the Republicans clung harder to their tax-cut Utopia ways. By 2012, their own strategists were warning the party that the younger more Progressive voters were going to outnumber the older more Republican voters by 2024 (2028 at the latest) and that no amount of irrational campaigning was going to win them over.

Instead, the Republicans doubled down. They focused on suppressing the voters they can't control - minorities, women, college-age blocs - and allowed their more racist leanings - expressed with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim fervor - to dominate their agenda in 2016.

That lead to trump winning.

And it lead to the Republicans realizing that, even as they race towards that demographic brick wall in 2024, this is the only way left for them to win.

It's not much of a plan: Stoke outrage and let Overlord trump reap the benefits.

The horrifying thing is if they can drive enough Americans insane to make it work again in 2020.

We dare not let them.

Just the Facts Jack In This Age of trumpian Bull

One of the more frustrating things about The Darkest Timeline has been how trump would take to his Twitter account to post and retweet nonfactual statements, wild accusations, and straight-up lies.

However over the past week or so, trump has gone overboard pushing a discredited conspiracy theory about former Congresscritter-turned-MSNBC-talking-head Joe Scarborough, a story involving a staff worker who died at a district office back in 2001. It's gotten so bad that the woman's widower sent formal letters to Twitter and the press begging for the social media outfit to use its authority to delete the offending tweet(s).

The public outcry against trump's abuse of Twitter's code of conduct had been an ongoing protest ever since 2017 - no previous President Loser of the Popular Vote has been so vulgar towards the general population the way trump has - but this moment seemed to have crossed a line even for the notoriously lax Twitter bosses.

The next time trump went to Tweet an outrageous falsehood - about the legitimacy of vote-by-mail - Twitter took the extraordinary step of adding a footnote that basically accused the Tweet (and trump) of being wrong. Let's refer to Gilad Edelman at Wired for the rest:

What prompted Twitter to finally break the seal was a two-tweet tirade about the supposed dangers of expanding vote-by-mail during the coronavirus pandemic...

Later that evening, Twitter added a note to the bottom of the tweet: a big exclamation mark and a message reading “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” which linked to a Twitter Moment fact-check. “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud,” read the bold heading. Beneath it came some bullet points on vote-by-mail, followed by a curated feed of tweets picking apart Trump’s various recent claims about it...

The Twitter spokesperson said that flagging Trump’s vote-by-mail tweet was the debut of a similar policy to protect “civic integrity” by correcting false information about voting or the census. Twitter didn’t say so, but it surely helped that this particular tweet contained one nugget of rock-solid, certifiably false information: the claim that California was sending ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there.” In fact, ballots are going only to registered voters...

This is, for the most part, the first time trump has been contradicted in real-time pretty much to his face (nearly every other countering in the media has been indirectly through op-ed articles and pundit shows).

It's telling that Twitter still hasn't confronted trump on the personal attacks he's done on their service, which are offensive and wrong and deserve him getting his account suspended (AKA Twitter Jail). Still, any little bit helps... Because trump's response to getting punched back has been to lash out in full meltdown. Via Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair:

Trump threatened to regulate or shut down social media companies the day after being fact-checked by Twitter. “Republicans feel that social media platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” the president wrote in a post on Wednesday. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

Funny thing about the First Amendment, it's not on trump's side here:

The president, notes the Associated Press, does not have the power to “unilaterally regulate or close the companies, which would require action by Congress or the Federal Communications Commission,” and Trump’s call to expand regulation on such tech giants “appeared to fly in the face of long-held conservative principles on deregulation...”

Anything trump tries to do to punish Twitter will likely lead to lawsuits taking years to resolve, by which time trump could be out of office (and fleeing for a country without extradition).

The facts, obviously, aren't going to slow trump down on this. he's threatening to issue an Executive Order (remember when Republicans attacked Obama for his EOs?) to compel Twitter and other social media outlets - Facebook and YouTube, both services facing increasing pressure to police their websites for disinformation over COVID-19 and other conspiracy nutcase theories - to bend to his will. trump doesn't have the legal standing but he has the ego of the bully to make life harder for the companies attempting to curtail his - and his cronies' - ongoing efforts to gaslight the world.

But the facts should matter. And these social media sites have an obligation, not only to the First Amendment but also to the common interest of properly informing the public. Forcing trump to confront his falsehoods in real-time, cutting off the Russian bots trying to overwhelm our attention with disinfo, and making sure Americans have the correct facts ought to be their agenda here on out.

Because as we've seen with three years of trump's gaslighting, lies and disinformation kills.

Florida Pandemic Update: Republicans Caught Fudging the Numbers

This has been breaking since last night, via Langston Taylor at the Tampa Bay Times:

One day before a top Florida Department of Health data manager lost her role maintaining the state’s COVID-19 data, she objected to the removal of records showing people had symptoms or positive tests before the cases were announced, according to internal emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.

On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Gov. Ron DeSantis said she had been fired.

According to the emails, department staff gave the order shortly after reporters requested the same data from the agency on May 5. The data manager, Rebekah Jones, complied with the order, but not before she told her supervisors it was the “wrong call...”

The dashboard that Jones managed is the best official source for in-depth data on how the deadly pandemic is moving through the state. Studying it is the surest way to know where outbreaks are growing and where testing is being done. Without access to the data, Floridians would have to rely on the word of officials and politicians without being able to verify for themselves...

In her Friday email to subscribers of a COVID data listserv, Jones said she was reassigned on May 5 “[f]or reasons beyond my division’s control” and warned that whoever took over may be less straightforward.

“As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it,” she wrote.

“They are making a lot of changes. I would advise being diligent in your respective uses of this data.”

Jones also told CBS12 in Tallahassee on Monday that she refused to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen” the state...

DeSantis did this before when a medical expert challenged the narrative that the GOP Governor was trying to sell to the public a month ago. That narrative, by the by, is that "ALL IS WELL!" and we should re-open the entire state to business so that corporations can resume generating profits at the expense of everyone's health and safety.

For DeSantis to justify reopening just six weeks after shutting things down to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus, he has to have numbers showing a consistent decrease in infectees getting reported. If there's even one day of the numbers going up, it breaks the count and resets to a new one. Given how the virus can flare up - even in contained locations like Singapore and South Korea, a surge can happen - it's next to impossible for the numbers to behave the way DeSantis wants.

So he'll do the next best Republican thing he can think of: Lie about the numbers. And he can only get away with that if he can control the data.

There's a huge problem to all this: Florida, like a lot of places in the U.S., does not have enough testing kits and resources to check the population on a regular basis to identify and isolate hot spots at a given notice. Without that, a high number of our neighbors and coworkers and family members are going to be walking around spreading COVID without warning until it's too late. Flare-ups will be unavoidable.

This is also in violation of what had been a strong set of transparency rules - the famed Sunshine Law - that is supposed to keep our leaders accountable to the voters.

And because DeSantis will now be lying about the numbers, they will be uncountable. Leaving him and his Republican cronies unaccountable.

This is a major scandal for Florida. Our own leadership is intentionally working to hide or fake the numbers of an ongoing health care crisis just so they could force a lot of poor residents back to work, just so the rich can get richer while the rest of us get sick and risk dying.

What the hell can the residents do to fight back against their own government?!

Tell It to the Judge, trumpshirts

There's a lot going on today so I may blog more than once, just letting you know.

One thing I'm waking up to is a follow-up on a thing I blogged last week, about how Attorney General Barr (trump's Roy Cohn) forced the withdrawal from Michael Flynn's plea bargain in order to force the judge overseeing the matter to end the case. In order to make it look like Flynn should never have made a plea deal in the first place, in order to make it look like Obama's Department of Justice and Mueller's investigative team entrapped Flynn without cause.

You have to remember, Flynn was a major contact between a lot of foreign players, not only Russia but also Turkey, and was getting caught in a lot of questionable plots to where the entire Intel Community was waving red flags about him. Flynn was also one of trump's inner circle handlers, which made the connections between trump and Russia a lot harder to ignore.

One of the earliest moves Mueller made during the inquiry into what and how Russia did to meddle in the 2016 election, the special prosecutor was able to get Flynn to plead down to "lying to investigators" in order to avoid jury trials over some of the more flagrant stuff Flynn - and his son - was caught doing. It was a foundation on which a lot of other cases and plea deals involving trump's people was based.

When trump was able to get Barr set up as Attorney General, Flynn changed his mind on the deal, and had been trying to wrangle his way out of it. The move Barr pulled last week was the final step - so it seemed - to let Flynn off the hook. No deal, no case, and then trump and his buddies can start claiming everything Mueller did was a conspiracy, a setup by Obama and the Deep State (the whole #Obamagate thing we've been seeing re-emerge this past week by Russian Twitter Bots) to destroy trump's God-approved destiny.

However, like a lot of trumpian schemes, this one wasn't thought out well enough. Judge Sullivan overseeing this matter had ways to keep the case going, and last night he used those steps and even opened up the availability of another weapon to hold Flynn (and Barr) accountable. To Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine:

First, earlier this week, a retired judge and two former U.S. Attorneys pointed out that this apparent legal coup does not have to end the matter. In an op-ed, the three legal eminences argued that the court has the power to bring in outside legal advisers to argue the case, even if the government has dropped its prosecution, and potentially still sentence the defendant.

Then, earlier this evening, the New York Times reported that Barr’s lawyers misled the court about the testimony of a key figure in the Flynn case. The Justice Department told the judge, Emmet Sullivan, that FBI notes indicated its agents only interviewed Flynn in order to trap him into lying. An FBI agent involved in the Flynn interview told the Department this wasn’t true, a fact the DOJ failed to include in its request to let Flynn go.

Then tonight, Judge Sullivan dropped a bomb. He announced that he would not simply rubber stamp Barr’s maneuver to free Flynn. Instead, he is bringing in a judge to review the case and provide the pushback against Flynn’s defense lawyers that is missing now that the DOJ has essentially joined in with Flynn’s legal team.

What may matter even more is the judge Sullivan picked for this job: John Gleeson, a former mob-busting prosecutor and, more to the point, one of the co-authors of the Post op-ed urging Sullivan to take this step...

I'm not there in person to witness much of this, but I get the impression that Sullivan is pissed.

I get the impression that Sullivan did not like getting lied to by Barr and the DoJ lawyers undercutting their own plea deal. That Times report that lawyers misled the judge on testimony is usually the point where said judge throws people into jail for contempt of his/her court.

I recall Sullivan is someone who, when AG Barr redacted the Mueller Report, fought to get parts of it unredacted for his review of Flynn's plea deal (The Justice Department refused). Sullivan did confront Flynn back in 2018 with the words "you sold out your own country," reportedly due to information Sullivan has on Flynn's corruption that hasn't been made public (yet).

And we're looking at the possibility that Sullivan can add charges regarding Flynn's misconduct in his courtroom. The reality that Flynn changed his testimony - at least once - while the plea deal was still on the table makes him open to a contempt of court perjury charge. Via Adam Gabbatt at The Guardian:

...Sullivan... said he had asked John Gleeson, a former federal judge in New York, to recommend whether Flynn should face a new criminal contempt charge for perjury. Gleeson has also been asked to make the case for why the DoJ’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case should be rejected...

What this does mean is that Flynn's lawyers have more work on their hands. This means Barr and his DoJ team cannot wash their hands of this and walk away. This is being done with an outsider in Gleeson who can't be pressured by Barr or trump to play their game of "loyalty or fired."

What this means is that trump, his inner circle of corrupt bastards, and his Russian cronies cannot pretend this whole thing was a manufactured Obama/Hillary trap. Sullivan seems dead set on making sure someone - Flynn - is held accountable for the sins they caused.

This puts the pressure back on trump. Sure, he could pardon Flynn, he's done that for a number of people undeserving of mercy. I do question if a pardon frees someone held on a judge's contempt order, but we'll find out. And the pardon runs the risk of Flynn being vulnerable to further testimony without Fifth Amendment protections. It also means Flynn has to admit he did (some) of the things he's being pardoned for, meaning trump can't hide the connections his 2016 campaign had with foreign powers (especially Russia).

trump and Roy Cohn Bill Barr are not going to sweep this under the rug like Putin hoped they could.

As Though Wiping Away Every Sign of trump's Crimes

This was a hammer dropped today: Attorney General William Barr, in an attempt to negate the early parts of the Mueller investigation into criminal ties between Russia and everyone in trump's Inner Circle, forced the Department of Justice to withdraw from the plea deal agreement with Michael Flynn. Via Emptywheel:

In advance of a status report due tomorrow, Brandon Van Grack withdrew from the Mike Flynn case... (Emptywheel quotes from the AP Newswire for more details)

Van Grack was apparently the point person on the Flynn courtroom case, and without him the government can longer proceed...

While Van Grack has withdrawn from all Flynn-related cases before Emmet Sullivan, he has not yet withdrawn from two other open cases he’s on, and he signed his withdrawal FARA Chief.

As noted in this post, Sullivan has discretion over whether to accept this withdrawal...

Sullivan is the trial judge overseeing all this, including the plea deal. The deal itself apparently is far enough along that the judge can still accept it, but without a prosecutor to argue for that it's unlikely to happen.

Emptywheel covers a lot of the issue with the case standing in a separate article:

Note that just Acting US Attorney Timothy Shea signed this filing, which may create a similar kind of dynamic at the DC US Attorney’s Office regarding this action as Barr’s interference in the Roger Stone sentencing did. Barr transparently removed the Senate approved US Attorney for DC, installed his flunky, and then had his flunky renege on statements that DOJ (even DOJ under Barr) had made in the past. It is a breathtaking abuse of power, and it’s likely that Sullivan will regard it as such.

I encourage you to follow Emptywheel's link, because she lays out the three key parts of Shea's arguments and then spells out how each of them are flawed, and how Barr's DOJ is making arguments that already failed in Sullivan's court room and still fail a lot of legal logic anyway.

This kind of self-sabotage to a court matter that had been in the works for years is an obvious attempt by trump to get his cronies to sweep away the history of his involvement in Russia's actions against the United States during the 2016 elections.

trump has always been upset about the situations involving his campaign helpers like Paul Manafort - found guilty in a trial early on - or Roger Stone - who also risked a trial and was found guilty as well - because while they didn't directly prove what trump did to cheat, the close interconnection of criminal to criminal - all of it tied to either trump or Russia - was a guilt-by-association that could dog trump for whatever time he's got left before his scams run out.

As such, trump would scream and proclaim it was all a conspiracy, all a witch hunt pushed by a Deep State that favored the "more evil" Hillary and Obama.

And now, with the likelihood that Flynn - who had been caught in a web of backroom deals and crazy plots - will walk away with a clean slate, trump is likely going to crow the whole thing was never real. Unlike the risk of pardoning his cronies - because those pardons could compel them to testify against trump himself later on - this creates the wriggle room trump and his media allies can use to hammer at critics until the media - and the rest of the nation - give up and look away from these eyesores.

Criminals love to deny that the crimes they committed - even when caught - never really happened. Even with the pile of bodies and burning wreckage left in their wake.

trump just happens to be at the head of a crime cartel able to force those lies onto our entire nation.

he and his cronies would wipe away every last shred of evidence from the history books if they can.

We dare not let them.

Accountability Moment 2019: trump and the Republicans Have to Answer for Their Sins

This is just one step, there are more to come, but the Democrats in the U.S. House announced two articles of Impeachment on President Loser of the Popular Vote donald trump. Via Andrew Prokop at Vox.com:

Both articles are based on the Ukraine scandal, meaning the party decided not to introduce any articles of impeachment solely based on the Mueller report, as some had pushed for...

Articles of impeachment are essentially the “charges” against the president that the House of Representatives is considering approving. The final House votes on impeachment will be a yes or no vote on each article. If even one is approved, Trump is impeached — and the Senate will then hold a trial to determine whether to remove him from office.

Article I, abuse of power, addresses Trump’s general underlying conduct in the Ukraine scandal. It alleges that Trump abused his power by trying to pressure Ukraine’s government into announcing an investigation into the Bidens by withholding both a White House meeting and military aid.

Article II, obstruction of Congress, is about how Trump responded to Democrats’ impeachment inquiry over the Ukraine scandal. It alleges that Trump obstructed the probe by urging witnesses not to cooperate and government agencies not to comply with subpoenas...

Some observations were made that Democrats left several other impeachable offenses - some related to Mueller's findings that are tangent to what trump did/is doing to Ukraine - off the table (for now), and that somehow these two articles may not be enough to sway Republicans either in the House or Senate. Which, of course, will never happen. The Republicans are too far gone into their sealed bubble of disinformation that all of them attack these proceedings as partisan and deny any merit to the facts at hand.

To anyone arguing that Democrats are doing this as a "coup attempt," trying to overturn the 2016 election results or subvert the coming 2020 election, I counter thus: Democrats could have done this to Bush the Lesser after 2006 over mismanagement of the War on Terror and his torture regime or even on mishandling the response to Hurricane Katrina... but they never did. Impeachment may be partisan but it has to be based on provable crimes. If Democrats are making official impeachment articles against trump, it's because trump IS GENUINELY BREAKING THE RULES AND ACTING AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION. Sheesh.

It's unlikely the wingnut Republican Senate will follow through on any impeachment and remove trump from office: They still have ways to profit from his misrule after all. Which is why this still feels like a half-accomplished thing. The best news about all of this is that it will be on the record: trump committed impeachable acts... and the Republicans refused to hold him accountable. The GOP is going to have to own this vote, and there are far too many people in favor of impeachment who will hold THEM accountable if they fail to hold trump accountable.

Get the goddamn vote out, America. The Republican party needs to answer for their sins.

A Nation Divided By The Comfort of Right Wing Lies

As the impeachment proceedings into trump's scandalous behavior with Ukraine soldier forward, the likelihood of it ending in peace and with some national solace in justice served grows less.

Mostly because the Far Right of this nation will never believe the truth of it. Via David Frum at The Atlantic:

...Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, opened today with a statement attacking media reporting on the Trump administration. He singled out six stories for attack...

Nunes can complain about this story, but it has since been corroborated by the haul of text and other evidence uncovered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Trump lied about the deal again and again, on Twitter and from his own lips. For Nunes to suggest that Trump was somehow a victim of false reporting on the Trump Tower Moscow project is to endorse that lying.

Nunes knew that his intended audience would not bother to review the history as you and I just did. Nunes is not interested in talking with anyone who is interested in checking claims, or verifying statements. He is talking only with people locked into a closed and sealed knowledge system.

This closed knowledge system entraps millions of Americans in a universe of untruth, in which Trump is a victim and the allegations against him are “fake news.” The prisoners and victims of this system live in a dreamworld of lies. Yet it would not quite be accurate to describe them as uninformed. They are disinformed, and on a huge scale. The false-knowledge system supported by Nunes is closed and sealed, but also vast and intricate.

The Ukraine allegation against President Trump is simple and straightforward. It can all be summarized in a few sentences of plain English: Trump wanted dirty help for his 2020 reelection campaign. He sent messages demanding that dirty help to the Ukrainians directly on the phone and via his henchmen. He stalled military aid to extort the help. The Ukrainians nearly surrendered, until the whistle-blower report reached Congress on September 9 and knocked loose the aid on September 11.

Now watch Fox News or read the pro-Trump websites. Suddenly the story becomes very long and very complicated. It can hardly be summarized at all; it can only be alluded to indirectly by a litany of callout phrases: “Burisma.” “Hunter Biden.” “Where’s the whistle-blower?” “Vindman’s conflict of interests.” “Star chamber.” “#coup has started.” The intricate tale is animated by a burning rage of injustice against “fake news”—most of that “fake news” (like the story about Trump Tower Moscow) in fact true and corroborated...

The House Republicans’ underlying argument is too jumbled and confusing even to be agreed with. It can only be absorbed. It is to be repeated, not to be analyzed. It is not even really an argument at all. It is a hypnotic litany, a creed of faith—a faith all the more compelling for defying sense and experience.  

At Fox News, on talk radio, and on the web, American conservatives have built a communications system that effectively consolidates in-group identity. Much of the time, the talkers and listeners do not themselves understand what they are saying. They use key words and phrases as gang signs: badges of identity that are recognized without necessarily being understood.

This system of communication tightly bonds in-group members. That bond, in turn, exerts tremendous power over American politics.

The price paid for this achievement is that the communications system lacks any means to convince nongroup members. How can you convince people when they cannot understand what on Earth you are talking about?

Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and the others have fenced off conservative Americans from the rest of American society. Within that safe space, insiders hear only what is familiar and comforting. When those protected insiders step outside into the larger world, they find themselves completely unprepared for it. To those not immersed in the fantasy franchise, people like Devin Nunes sound like crazy people. Which in turn, of course, only drives them crazier...

Frum knows the world of which he speaks: Formerly a speechwriter for Dubya (infamously responsible for the Axis of Evil speech), he's since moved away from a Republican Party he can't even speak to anymore.

But it's not even with the upper echelons of the Republicans. Buzzfeed is reporting now how Facebook, a social app with millions plugged in, is inundated with fly-by-night pro-trump groups that form, spread false reports about the impeachment hearings, and close out before the company can close them down. Staying on just long enough to convince the MAGA crowds and confuse the rest.

The entire Republican Media Bubble is self-sustaining now. Holding the pundits and politicians accountable won't stop the GOP base from perpetuating their own bullshit.

The only thing the rest of us can do is vote the bastards out of power. Prevent them from causing more damage within our legal and political and economic systems.

It won't stop their bullshit or their hatred of fellow Americans. It might not even make us safer, because they've been riled up now to the point of violence.

But it's the only way to bring the United States back to some level of sanity.

Gods help us.

This Week In Exposing Trump's Sins Part 146: The Quids And the Quos Meet the Pros

Update: A big hello again to everybody linking in from Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Thank ye, Tengrain! Please take a moment to peruse, add a comment, and if you're having difficulty with the comment section you can tweet me @PaulWartenberg with suggestions. Also, good luck on NaNoWriMo this last week of writing!

How bad has trump's week been going so far?

His daily helicopter screamfest to the media had to come with notes handwritten in 60 point font size.

And oh GOD, someone put the lyrics to a Ramones backbeat.

It does not help trump or his Republican lackeys when it got out this week from key testimony on Tuesday - from Lt. Colonel Vindman, State Dept. official to the VP's office Williams, Special envoy to Ukraine Volker, and NSC advisor Morrison - that trump's dealings with Ukraine were to cut off aid to that nation in order to squeeze their newly elected President Zelensky into publicly announcing questionable investigations into the Biden family.

It especially hurt to have Volker - who Republicans hoped to be on trump's side of the investigation - confirm some of the details of the scandal and that trump's actions looked "inappropriate" and indefensible.

It really hurt because Volker provided more links to Gordon Sondland, supposedly the Ambassador to the EU but had been a major part of trump's outreach to Ukraine (nowhere near Sondland's orbit of responsibility). So with Sondland in the crosshairs, rather than take the fall into traffic Sondland took control of the dumptruck and proceeded to drive all over trump, Pence, Sec of State Pompeo, Rick Perry, Chief of Staff Mulvaney, Rudy Giuliani, and random Red Shirt guy who got beamed down to the planet to demonstrate how dangerous the episode was. To quote the Vox article from Zack Beauchamp:

Sondland’s testimony, which kicked off Wednesday’s impeachment hearings, lays out a clear timeline of Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden. And it leaves absolutely no doubt as to what was going on.

“I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a ‘quid pro quo?’” Sondland says. “The answer is yes...”

With just that one paragraph, Sondland gave evidence that confirmed the Quid (Ukraine military aid) and the Quo (sham investigations into Hunter Biden) had a Pro (everyone from trump on down was working the scam behind closed doors until the Whistleblower kicked them open). Back to Beauchamp:

Sondland’s testimony also makes clear this was not some kind of rogue operation masterminded by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani alone. He provides extensive documentation, including contemporary emails and text messages, showing that his own personal efforts in service of arranging the quid pro pro were authorized at the highest levels of the administration...

This is it. It’s the ballgame. Sondland’s testimony is the whole scandal in a nutshell: It makes clear that the president of the United States masterminded a conspiracy to use US foreign policy as a tool to cement his own hold on power...

The timeline of the scandal as described in Sondland’s testimony begins on May 23, three days after President Zelensky’s inauguration. Sondland had attended the inauguration in his official capacity and, on May 23, met with Trump to brief him on the new Ukrainian leadership.

The meeting, which included other US officials who worked on Ukraine, didn’t go as planned. Sondland and his team were attempting to arrange a meeting between Trump and Zelensky, which the latter badly wanted as a sign of his political strength. But Trump kept trying to force them to work with Rudy.

“President Trump directed us to ‘talk with Rudy.’ We understood that ‘talk with Rudy’ meant talk with Mr. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer,” Sondland said. “We could abandon the efforts to schedule the White House phone call and White House visit between Presidents Trump and Zelensky, which was unquestionably in our foreign policy interest — or we could do as President Trump had directed and ‘talk with Rudy.’ We chose the latter course, not because we liked it, but because it was the only constructive path open to us...”

But the key issue here is not Sondland’s own culpability. It’s the president’s and the White House’s. And on that front, Sondland is relatively credible — he’s testifying against his own interest, as he’s still the US ambassador to the EU and thus serves at the pleasure of the president. What’s more, some of his testimony here is supported by email and text records.

So after meeting with Trump, Sondland’s testimony goes on to say, he began working with two other high-level US officials — Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and US Ambassador to Ukraine Kurt Volker — on coordinating the Trump-Zelensky meeting and other Ukraine issues. Perry and Volker were in charge of communicating directly with Giuliani, according to Sondland, but it becomes clear through these contacts that Giuliani is communicating the president’s desire for a meeting-for-investigations quid pro quo.

For example, in a July 10 White House meeting on Ukraine policy, Sondland testifies, “I recall mentioning the prerequisite of investigations before any White House call or meeting.” On July 19, Sondland sends an email to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and other high-level officials in the Trump administration documenting his work in arranging a quid pro quo — an exchange of hosting Zelensky at the White House for the investigations Trump wanted...

The Ukrainians were fully aware of this. Sondland cites an August 10 text from Andriy Yermak, a high-ranking aide to Zelensky, as proof. In that message, Yermak commits to holding a press conference — a key demand of Giuliani and Trump’s — that would announce investigations into “Burisma and election meddling...”

Other witnesses on Wednesday confirmed the Ukrainians awareness: Contacts from both State and the Pentagon (DoD) testified to their Ukrainian connections asking repeatedly why their needed military aid against Russia's border war with them was being delayed so long.

Everything here is a Quid Pro Quo. Or, if you want to describe this in modern legal terms, bribery and extortion.

And yes, Laura Ingraham, bribery - and the punishment for it - is in the Constitution.

Granted, there's more testimony to come - there's a key one going on RIGHT NOW with Fiona Hill already tearing trump and his corrupt administration a new hole - but there's enough here already to begin straight-up impeachment counts in committee and passing it on for a floor vote in U.S. House. We impeached Clinton on less, for God's sake.

But let's be realistic as well. There is no Smoking Gun moment like in Watergate when Republican Senators went to Nixon and told him "It's over, we can't back you." Today's Republican party leadership is craven and greedy and amoral to the point of immorality. Given the option of removing trump to get Pence installed - even as Pence is facing impeachment charges as well - the GOP has instead double-downed on defending the Shitgibbon all the way... even as his leadership has them flying off the cliffs to rocky doom below.

The best thing about these impeachment hearings is the Truth: Real Truth as based on Fact. The facts are trump is corrupt, that he is using foreign policy to extort personal and political favors from allies, that he is coordinating ANOTHER campaign to subvert the 2020 elections with fake scandal and constant lies, that everything Mueller could prove in his Report was real (Mueller just couldn't find the Pro between the Quid and the Quo).

These Facts are out here now. Democrats know full well the demons they're up against and now there's documentation backing them up. Republicans have to defend an indefensible argument, and defend an openly corrupt regime.

This all matters in one way: The 2020 Elections. trump and the GOP can try to avoid accountability all they want, but they STILL have to convince voters to keep them in power. It's up to us, every American registered to vote, every American who NEED to vote, to go to the ballots in 2020 and KICK. EVERY. CORRUPT. REPUBLICAN BASTARD. OUT. OF. OFFICE.

Elections matter, America. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, it is up to YOU to stop trump from dragging us deeper into Hell.