TRUMP 14 722

see Big Lie 5

under DOJ investigation

see spiritual --> civil war

see truth social

see racism

an raw 6 23

no lnx

let’s review.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) calledDaniel Penny a “hero” after the 24-year-old former Marine killed street performer Jordan Neely on a subway despite the fact New York Police Department sources said Neely had not become violent that day, May 1, nor had he threatened Penny.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has vowed to pardon Daniel Perry, who in April was convicted of murdering Garrett Foster in July 2020 during a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin, Texas, after Perry texted a friend, “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work, they are rioting outside my apartment complex," anddrove his car threateningly into a crowd before shooting Foster.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was among Republican officials who mocked the assault last October on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sharing conspiracy theories about the right-wing vigilante who fractured Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer.

In November 2021, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), tweeted an altered anime video showing him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) with a sword to the neck, earning him a formal censure from the then-Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives … and pats on the back from Republican colleagues.

The 2020 Republican National Convention glorified a white couple who, on the lawn of their St. Louis mansion, brandished firearms at peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Republican support for violence is so prolific, it has become a staple of campaign ads. Vice, for one, sees this as evidence vigilantism seeps up from the base, and incendiary media such as Fox News amplify it. While demagogues such as Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson have a history of inciting violence, the godfather of modern-day vigilantism is Donald Trump.

Vox counts more than 40 instances, from the launch of Trump’s presidential campaign in June 2015 to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, in which he encouraged or endorsed violence. Following his election, threats against Congress memberssoared more than tenfold to 9,625 incidents in 2021 alone. “Far-right terror,”says Vox, “is currently the most significant ideological threat in the US,” with a proliferation of right-wing threats against elected officialsacross the country. Axios published a roster filled with others.

In a notorious call for vigilantism, Trump praised child soldier Kyle Rittenhouse “as the ‘poster boy’ for the right to self-defense,” according to CNN. Weeks before traveling to Kenosha, Wis., in August 2020 where he killed two people with an AR-15-style rifle at a Black Lives Matter protest, the then-17-year-old Rittenhouse fantasized about shooting looters.

While the corporate media recognize the GOP has “made violence part of their brand,” it doesn’t answer the most important question: why this happened.

Trump’s scorched-earth racism is the pivotal factor. By winning the presidency in 2016, Trump blazed a social-media shortcut to power. His victory inspired a surge of fascist gangs such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, and obscure but even more violent outfits including Patriot Front, Resist Marxism, Rise Above Movement, Jericho March and American Guard.

Trump made it possible for any dime-store bigot to jump on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, demonize entire groups — particularly leftists like anti-fascists and BLM — and threaten violence. For those with persistence and a bit of prowess, social-media demagoguery was an easy path to notoriety, money and followers. Operating under the protection of the demagogue-in-chief, and indifference if not sympathy from elements of police, formed by the history of white supremacy, these new hatemongers were able to jump from virtual violence to the real world.

The violence began with a bang the night of Trump’s inauguration when a right-wing couple shot and nearly killed a left-wing protester in Seattle. Within months, far-right riots — and killings — took place in leftist bastions such as Berkeley, Calif., and Portland, Ore., culminating in the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a neo-Nazi rammed a crowd of counter-protesters with his car, killing Heather Heyer. The shock of the murder, and hundreds of neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” during a torch-light parade, put extremists back on their heels.

[White supremacists march on Charlottesville, Va., during the August 2017 "Unite the Right" rally that left a woman dead. Image via Karla Cote/Creative Commons.

But far-right gangs reconstituted themselves, aided by police in Portland who allowed the Proud Boys to turn the city into their fight club with almost no consequences. The George Floyd protests supercharged vigilantism as police aligned with the far right in seeing BLM and antifa as public enemy number one.

This time the explosion was even bigger: the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The only reason Trump’s attempted coup did not succeed is because his mob of thousands did not use guns, which convicted seditionist Stewart Rhodes regretted afterwards, against a police force who had every warning imaginable of the coming insurrection.

Far from squelching the taste for violence, the failed coup whetted the appetite of Republican politicians and voters alike for lawless justice.

This raises a more fundamental question. Why do GOP voters believe it necessary to circumvent legitimate channels to enact their vision?

It wasn’t always this way, and the growing desire for vigilantism is an ominous warning sign for the future of America. In short, there is a vicious cycle from media that stokes fears for profit to a middle class fed the message that those at the bottom are to blame for society’s woes to politicians who claim deep-rooted social problems can be solved through policing at home or abroad: the war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on terror.

A crucial similarity in criminalizing social problems is they are racialized, as well. Blacks are to blame for crime, Mexicans for illegal drugs, Muslims for terrorism. This approach begins with Nixon’s Southern strategy that delivered him the White House. He used coded racial appeals such as “law and order,” “war on drugs” and “benign neglect” toward the Black community to indicate Black people were a threat whom he would protect the “silent majority” of whites from.

Before winning the 1980 presidential race, Ronald Reagan used overt dog whistles, talking of “welfare queens,” “strapping young bucks” buying steak with food stamps, saying the Voting Rights Act was “humiliating to the South,” and kicking off his general election campaign with a segregationist friendly speech endorsing states rights near Philadelphia, Miss., site of the infamous murder of three civil-rights activists in 1964.

As the right’s racial rhetoric got hotter at the presidential level, with George H.W. Bush relying on the Willie Horton ad to win the 1988 contest by implying a victory by Democrat Michael Dukakis would mean “Black rapists running amok,” the era of hate radio simultaneously dawned after Reagan gutted the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.

Soon, Republican voters were sucking on vitriol from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin for decades. The relentless drumbeat that “real Americans” were under attack from feminists/Blacks/Muslims/Marxists/immigrants/Mexicans/queers — take your pick — stoked volcanic rage on the right.

But for years, Republican voters couldn’t adequately vent that anger. Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution that put Congress in the hand of the bomb-throwers in 1994, eight years of the Bush-Cheney “war on terror”, and the white backlash to Barack Obama under the banner of the Tea Party, were unable to satisfy the desire of a rabid right to not just defeat, but to smash their foes.

The torrent of right-wing hate helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in 1995 in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, but the atrocity undercut support for far-right extremism. The attraction of racial violence soared after the 9/11 attacks and exploded into a reinvigorated militia movement and a series of racist murders after Obama was elected.

On one side was Fox News incitement of viewer rage to stay relevant, profitable and powerful, and on the other was wild fantasies of the politics of revenge that government could not fulfill.

Enter Donald Trump. His 2016 campaign completed the electrical circuit triggering a bomb. Millions of Americans, saturated with racist grievances, could now take matters into their own hands. And many did. Trump promises even more unchecked violence if elected again in 2024, telling supporters a few months ago, “for those who have wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Trump has turned the party of law and order into one of lawlessness and chaos.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/trump-return-fox-they-rekindle-their-mutually-beneficial-relationship

https://www.alternet.org/trump-makes-it-embarrassingly-clear-he-doesn-t-know-the-difference-between-nato-and-nafta/

poss arrest

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-calls-gov-ron-desantis-make-sanctuary-state-donald-trump

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/right-wing-media-scramble-defend-trump-ahead-potential-indictment-and-arrest

mma 3 23

no twt

after former President Donald Trump predicted his own arrest and indictment, right-wing media pundits were quick to provide cover for him and attack an investigation that they claimed would help the 2024 hopeful’s reelection campaign.

On March 18, Trump posted to his Truth Social account that he was expecting the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office to indict and arrest him the following Tuesday, March 21. The posts came while a Manhattan grand jury heard testimony as part of an ongoing investigation into Trump allegedly paying hush-money to adult film actor Stormy Daniels in 2016 over an alleged affair[trmp twt caps]

in response, right-wing media have continued their pattern of defending Trump from various investigations and smearing Trump’s longtime associate-turned-witness Michael Cohen, who testified in 2019 that Trump had directed Cohen to repeatedly pay off women for their silence about their sexual relationships with him. Right-wing media outlets are claiming Bragg is backed by liberal philanthropist George Soros, accusing Bragg of running a politically motivated investigation that unfairly targets the former president, and claiming that an indictment of Trump would benefit his 2024 presidential campaign.

Right-wing media baselessly claim liberals are “weaponizing” the judicial system to punish political enemies

Right-wing podcast host Steven Crowder warned that arresting Trump would be “how you start a civil war," saying, “Not saying I want it [civil war], but I'm saying if you look throughout history, jailing political opponents is, kind of, one of the key items that pops shit off.”
Discussing a potential indictment, Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said that “it's so obvious that the Democrats here just want to stop the people from having a chance to re-elect Donald Trump,” and he called for Republican governors state attorneys general to indict “prominent criminal libs”: “You should find every stupid little fake misdemeanor charge and you should trump it up as high as you possibly can.”
One America News Network’s chief White House correspondent Chanel Rion suggested on Twitter that Trump would be a political prisoner and compared him to Jesus, Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, and nobel laureate Nelson Mandela.
Conservative radio host Jason Rantz tweeted “Donald Trump will be arrested on misdemeanor charges next week by far-left DA Alvin Bragg, who rarely charges and prosecutes FELONIES against dangerous criminals” before asking, “We’re supposed to pretend this isn’t political?”
On Fox & Friends Weekend, guest and attorney Sol Wisenberg characterized the charges as “a hyphenated term” that “starts with chicken and then it ends with i [and] t.” Wisenberg argued that such a case would never be brought against anyone other than Trump. “The question to ask yourself in a case like this: Would a case like this be brought against anybody else, whether he or she be president, former president, or a regular citizen? And the answer … is ‘no.’”
Newsmax host Tom Basile claimed that the investigation into Trump “appears to be the weaponization of our justice system for political purposes.”

Right-wing media claim Bragg is a “radical” leftist backed by George Soros who “has to pay his master back”

On Fox and Friends Weekend, Fox host Mark Levin attacked Bragg, saying, “What would you expect from a radical left-wing legal bomb thrower who’s inserted into this position by George Soros.” He accused Democrats of trying to “destroy the law and destroy the Constitution” and claimed, “Their whole goal is to destroy the civil society and the morality that undergirds.”
On Fox Business’ Varney & Co., host Stuart Varney suggested Trump’s purported indictment and arrest were a “setup,” before adding, “I’m going to editorialize: This looks like a political charge inspired by raw Trump hatred.” Varney’s guest Fox News contributor Charlie Hurt argued that Bragg was on a “political jihad” that is “insane.”
Newsmax and Daily Caller contributor Benny Johnson smeared the investigation as a “witch hunt” while rhetorically asking, “Is it any surprise that the driving force behind the Trump indictment witch hunt is a District Attorney in New York backed by none other than George Soros?”
Fox & Friends Weekend co-hosts Will Cain and Rachel Campos-Duffy accused Bragg of prioritizing “a weak case against Trump” over Black lives. Cain asked, “How many Black lives have you sacrificed under a higher crime city with increased murder rates to devote a limited number of resources to the priority of pursuing a weak case against Donald Trump?” Campos-Duffy said the political left doesn’t “really care about Black lives or the working class or the poor” and blamed the alleged indictment on “a George Soros-funded D.A.” who “has to pay his master back” by prosecuting Trump.
Fox News host Dan Bongino told his Fox Nation audience to “get the hell out of blue states as soon as you can” because “disgusting piece of garbage” Bragg “will find you and they will hunt you down if you’re a conservative.”
Right-wing radio host Bo Snerdley baselessly claimed that “Bragg along with other Soros-funded DA's” are prioritizing investigations into Trump while “releasing repeat-offending criminals with low or no bail, and failing to prosecute real crimes.”

Right-wing media figures argue Trump arrest would backfire and benefit him politically

Crowder speculated on his podcast that pursuing legal charges against Trump would start a civil war, stating, “Frankly, some of me thinks that maybe some people up top are saying don't do this because it will backfire. But if you arrest your political opponents, people who are actively seeking the presidency -- look, do you guys want to start a civil war? Because that's how you start a civil war.”
Salem Radio’s Eric Metaxas compared a potential Trump indictment to “what the British wished to do” with the Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He also claimed that indicting Trump “will dramatically clarify the narrative for anyone still on the fence. Time to choose. Tyranny will lose. Again.”
Right-wing host Todd Starnes tweeted, “The Manhattan District Attorney is about to guarantee @realDonaldTrump will win reelection in a landslide.”
On Twitter, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich said, “To arrest a former and future President is an act of hatred and poison and will further harden support for Trump while discrediting the left. Remember Hunter Biden!”
National Review’s Rich Lowry tweeted, “Alvin Bragg is engaged in election interference, in favor of Donald Trump.”
Conservative radio host Mark Simone tweeted: “Some now wondering if the DA is getting paid off to help Donald Trump get elected.”
Echoing a tweet shared by Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. claimed on Truth Social that arresting his father would “lead to landslide victory for Trump.”
Breitbart’s Joel Pollack predicted that a potential Trump indictment would result in a “red tsunami” in 2024. He also tweeted, “Arresting Trump over the Stormy Daniels settlement, while the serious charges against Biden et al. go unaddressed, will launch a new era of political conflict in the United States. Short of civil war, but with deep divisions that make ordinary government operations more difficult.”
On Truth Social, Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier said, “If Alvin ‘chipmunk’ Bragg indicts President Trump.. it’s over. We will WIN in a landslide and we will handle Alvin. Choose wisely.”

huh? rift?

protesters did not show up, trap tues?

https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/alex-jones-ive-got-issue-trump-calling-protests-against-his-arrest-hes-trying-use-public

an 3 23

a spokesperson for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hit back at Republican members of the House of Representatives on Monday after three committee chairmen sent a letter demanding Bragg’s testimony about a potential criminal indictment of former president Donald Trump — and made false claims about New York City crime in the process.

Bragg is investigating an alleged hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, and reports indicate an indictment is imminent. According to the New York Times, “Last week, senior officials from the district attorney’s office and the state agency that runs the courts had preliminary discussions to plan for a possible indictment and arraignment.”

Trump on Saturday took to his social media site Truth Social and appeared to confirm reports he “will be arrested on Tuesday of next week.”

In a letter released Monday,Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), House Administration Committee Chairmen Bryan Steil (R-WI) and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) requested Bragg testify "about what plainly appears to be a politically motivated prosecutorial decision.”

“We expect you will testify about what plainly appears to be a politically motivated prosecutorial decision,” the Republican leaders wrote.

The GOP chairmen then turned to bash the DA’s county, accusing Bragg of “adopting progressive criminal justice policies that allow career ‘criminals to run the streets’ of Manhattan.”

Responding to the letter, a spokesperson for Bragg “set the record straight about a few particularly egregious statements about the safety of our great city,” noting “homicides are down 32 percent in Manhattan” under Bragg “and shootings are down 14 percent.”

“We will not be intimidated by attempts to undermine the justice process, nor will we let baseless accusations deter us form fairly applying the law,” the spokesperson said.

“New York remains on the safest big cities in the U.S. with a far lower murder rate than the most populous cities where the Committee Chairmen hail from,}:” the spokesperson added.

The statement concluded:

In every prosecution, we follow the law without fear or favor to uncover the truth. Our skilled, honest and dedicated lawyers remain hard at work.

You can read the Republican leaders' letter here and Bragg’s spokesman’s full response here.

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an 3 23

no lnx

He's doing it for a reason': Maxine Waters thinks Donald Trump wants to incite political violence

Brandon Gage March 18, 2023

United States Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) appeared on Saturday's edition of The Saturday Show with Jonathan Capehart and warned that former President Donald Trump's ballistic Truth Social meltdown earlier in the morning could be a rallying cry for domestic political unrest.

"OUR NATION IS NOW THIRD WORLD & DYING. THE AMERICAN DREAM IS DEAD! THE RADICAL LEFT ANARCHISTS HAVE STOLLEN OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND WITH IT, THE HEART OF OUR OUR COUNTRY. AMERICAN PATRIOTS ARE BEING ARRESTED & HELD IN CAPTIVITY LIKE ANIMALS, WHILE CRIMINALS &LEFTIST THUGS ARE ALLOWED TO ROAM THE STREETS, KILLING & BURNING WITH NO RETRIBUTION.

MILLIONS ARE FLOODING THROUGH OUR OPEN BOARDERS, MANY FROM PRISONS & MENTAL INSTITUTIONS. CRIME & INFLATION ARE DESTROYING OUR VERY WAY OF LIFE..." Trump wrote on his Twitter knockoff app.

"NOW ILLEGAL LEAKS FROM A CORRUPT & HIGHLY POLITICAL MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEYS OFFICE, WHICH HAS ALLOWED NEW RECORDS TO BE SET IN VIOLENT CRIME & WHOSE LEADER IS FUNDED BY GEORGE SOROS, INDICATE THAT, WITH NO CRIME BEING ABLE TO BE PROVEN, & BASED ON AN OLD & FULLY DEBUNKED (BY NUMEROUS OTHER PROSECUTORS!) FAIRYTALE, THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!" Trump added.

READ MORE: Donald Trump predicts his arrest in typo-filled all-caps Truth Social meltdown

Jonathan Capehart and Waters – a frequent target of Trump's derogations during his term – discussed the real-world dangers of Trump's incendiary rhetoric.

"You had been warning everybody since the beginning of the Trump presidency about who he is. Your reaction to the breaking news this morning from the former president who says on his own social media platform that he will be arrested, he says this, on Tuesday," Capehart noted.

"Well, let me just say this, Jonathan. Constantly, as I travel around the country, people are asking me, when is he going to be arrested and indicted? Is he above the law, hasn't done enough so that the American people can have faith and confidence that the law applies to him also? Yes, I started very early warning the American public about this president I have never seen. Most people have never seen or believed that we would have a president who has acted in the way that he has, who has disrespected the Constitution of the United States of America, who has lied, who has tried to organize domestic terrorists. And some believe that he did organize them as they attacked our Capitol on January 6th. This president has conducted himself in a way that he does not deserve not to be arrested.He should be arrested. He should be indicted," Waters said.

"And the charges that he's being indicted on are minimal, as opposed to the charges that I believe he could have been indicted on. I don't know what's going to happen when he announces himself. It’s almost like he's attempting to organize his domestic terrorists to show up and to resist him being arrested," Waters added. "You have to be careful with him. He didn't just – yeah, go ahead."

READ MORE: Michael Cohen says 'run as fast as you can' if Donald Trump 'asks you to represent him'

After a brief interruption by Capehart, Waters sounded the alarm about Trump's behavior.

"Oh, I just wanted to, you know, have you to understand that perhaps he was trying to organize domestic terrorists, to protest his arrest. And I think we have to be careful about him making that announcement," she said. "He's doing it for a reason."

Capehart agreed.

"Right. And we are being careful about reporting that aspect of his Truth Social post. But I want to be clear, the former president has not officially been in indicted," he pointed out. "We, and as a result, we do not know what, if any, charges he could be indicted on until we hear from the Manhattan D.A."

Watch below via Mediaite or at this link.

READ MORE: Judge orders Donald Trump's attorney to hand over notes to DOJ

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an raw 3 23

before Donald Trump made his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger imploring him to find votes that would help him secure the state's electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election, the now-former president's own campaign staff had created a report that showed there was little to no evidence of voter fraud in the state.

Worse for Trump, according to the Washington Post, the Department of Justice obtained a copy of the internal document a month ago as part of it's Jan. 6 insurrection investigation

While the president was complaining there was widespread election tampering in Georgia, the report commissioned by his own campaign painted an entirely different story.

According to the Washington Post's Josh Dawsey, the Post obtained the secret report which shows that, "Researchers paid by Trump’s team had 'high confidence' of only nine dead voters in Fulton County, defined as ballots that may have been cast by someone else in the name of a deceased person. They believed there was a 'potential statewide exposure' of 23 such votes across the Peach State — or 4,977 less than the 'minimum' Trump claimed."

The Trump report also noted that they also found little evidence of voter fraud in Nevada, another state where the former president also contested the results after losing to President Joe Biden.

The Post is reporting the internal report is in the hands of the Department of Justice as part of the investigation into the Jan. 6 investigation.

According to Dawsey, "The 'Project 2020' report conducted by the Berkeley Research Group and a team of scientists has now been obtained by prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A copy was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it shows that Trump’s own campaign paid more than $600,000 for research that undercut many of his most explosive claims. The research was never made public."

The report added that "the Justice Department has sought and obtained multiple reports, emails and interviews from witnesses that show campaign officials analyzing, and often discrediting, claims that Trump was making publicly, according to several people involved in the investigation, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details. The Berkeley report was provided to the Justice Department earlier this month, one of the people said, after some people involved in its crafting received a subpoena."

an 3 23

an auditor responsible for overseeing Trump Media's books is ducking calls seeking comment on a pair of loans totaling $8 million that have fallen under investigation as possible money laundering.

Top executives at Donald Trump's social media raised concerns about the loans from Paxum Bank and ES Family Trust, which both are linked to an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, and it remains unclear whether the SEC-licensed broker-dealer who sourced the loans or auditor BF Borders completed any due diligence under anti-money laundering and “Know Your Customer” requirements, reported The Guardian. guk

"A person who picked up the phone at BF Borgers this week put a reporter seeking comment on hold until the line disconnected," the newspaper's Hugo Lowell reported. "On a subsequent call, the person said they would pass the request on to managing partner Ben Borgers."

The payments came as Trump Media, which owns the Trump Social platform, was running out of money in December 2021 and February 2022 as its planned merger with the blank check company DWAC was halted by an SEC investigation, and top executives at the fledgling tech company were so concerned about the origins of the loans they considered returning the money.

However, according to Trump Media co-founder turned whistleblower Will Wilkerson, chief financial officer Phillip Juhan ultimately decided not to return the money because giving up $8 million of the roughly $12 million of cash they had on hand would have put the company in a precarious position.

DWAC chief executive Patrick Orlando sourced the first loan, $2 million from Paxum Bank, just before Christmas 2021 and later charged a $240,000 finder’s fee to Trump Media, and he declined to provide requested information about the lender to company executives who voiced concerns.

Donald Trump Jr., who had taken a more actively role in the company since that summer, personally signed off guk? on the loan Christmas Eve 2021 in a communication sent to outside counsel, but Juhan raised concerns again about the sources of the loans on March 8, 2022.

"Our auditors require confirmation statements signed by all noteholders," Juhan wrote in an email reviewed by The Guardian. "We don’t have a contact for ES Family Trust other than the name of Angel Pacheco (Trustee). Can you provide contact info (email) so that our auditor (BF Borgers) can email this confirmation? Thanks!"

its unclear whether any further information or a signed version of the loan agreement were ever passed on to Juhan or the auditor, and the CFO and Orlando also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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https://www.alternet.org/send/trump-election-fraud/

600k$ study found zip

call to ga spkr special session will do all i can [vs no?]

https://www.alternet.org/msn/trump-prosecution-2659606325/

https://www.alternet.org/gop-lawmakers-offer-blistering-opinions-of-trumps-attempts-to-tank-ron-desantis/

rubber glue

rant j6 treason

https://www.alternet.org/trump-truth-social-2659516582/

no lnx

Trump demands J6 committee be prosecuted for 'treason' in off-the-rails posting spree

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 07, 2023

Republican 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump has spent the past 12 hours wildly posting falsehoods to his Truth Social account, insisting the cherry-picked video clips aired by propagandist Tucker Carlson on Rupert Murdoch’s far-right wing cable channel Monday night are proof he is “totally innocent,” calling for the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack to be prosecuted for “treason,” praising Speaker Kevin McCarthy for handing over the 41,000 or more hours of January 6 video to Carlson, and reposting video that appears to be of a naked Hunter Biden with a naked woman with their private parts blurred.

From just after 9 PM Monday to just after 9 AM Tuesday the twice-impeached ex-president who is under multiple criminal investigations posted 15 times to Truth Social.

Many if not most of his claims are falsehoods or lies, baseless allegations, or pro-Trump propaganda.

“Tucker Carlson a must watch tonight, Trump anxiously writes in one post. “Releasing more video which was ‘Hidden By The Crooked J 6 Unselect Committee.’ They should be prosecuted for their lies and, quite frankly, treason!” (Several words in that quote were all-caps.)

READ MORE: Trump Faces Being ‘Found Liable of Rape’ While ‘In the Midst’ of Multiple Investigations: Reporter

There is no evidence the January 6 Committee committed treason or anything close to any crimes.

In another angry post from Tuesday morning, Trump writes: “Everything is exposed on Hunter Biden’s Laptop from Hell, including massive crime by Joe and Hunter — But nothing happens, they just keep coming after me. The good news is that America won’t take it any longer!” (Several words in that quote were also all-caps.)

That post includes a repost of what appears to be the naked Hunter Biden video.

Other Trump reposts include multiple videos falsely claiming election fraud, an all-caps attack on “Ron DeSanctus,” and this (also all-caps) demand to release the hundreds of people arrested for crimes surrounding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol or the insurrection:

“Let the January 6 prisoners go. They were convicted, or are awaiting trial, based on a giant lie, a radical left con job. Thank you to Tucker Carlson and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy for what you both have done. New video footage is irrefutable!!!”

READ MORE: Pence Formally Tries to Wiggle Out of Special Counsel’s Subpoena as He Pushes Off Presidential Run Decision to ‘Spring’

(DOJ recently announced at least 1000 people have now been charged with crimes surrounding the January 6 attack on the Capitol. More than half have pled guilty.)

Also among Trump’s posts: two new videos of Fox Corporation’s propagandist Sean Hannity praising Trump, airing his recent interview with the ex-president, and attacking President Joe Biden. In one of those videos Hannity says “President Trump also unveiled some important policy ideas, from building new ‘freedom cities’ to new protections for parents, school choice, and much more.”

Trump also declares himself and “most others” are innocent, and calls for them to be released.

And in yet another post praising McCarthy, Trump, declaring his innocence, writes (again, in all-caps) “free at last!!!”

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no lnx

bAdSASH an 3 23

Donald Trump just called for another coup — and hardly anyone noticed

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 14, 2023

Donald Trump, the one-term ex-president who is running for the Republican nomination for president once again, on Monday advocated for yet another coup against the United States.

Trump is currently under at least four criminal investigations: his unlawful retention and refusal to return classified and other White House documents; his alleged election fraud attempts in Georgia; his alleged hush money payment to two women and the campaign finance issues those raise; and his alleged attempted coup, sometimes referred to as an “autocoup, or “autogolpe” – a self-coup – and the actions he took surrounding the January 6 insurrection.

After Trump’s expected GOP challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, was widely mocked two weeks ago for being unable to tell a reporter from a Murdoch outlet in the UK how he would handle the U.S. efforts to support Ukraine against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal war, Fox’s Tucker Carlson submitted written questions to all current and potential GOP presidential candidates.

DeSantis, in that now-infamous interview, had responded to the Ukraine question by telling the reporter: “Perhaps you should cover some other ground?” and, “I think I’ve said enough.”

READ MORE: Trump Falsely Says Mike Pence Is to ‘Blame’ for Violence on January 6

On Monday, sharing with viewers DeSantis’ new, written response, Carlson declared the Ukraine issue is the most important question of our time: “Until tonight, no one could really say with precision where he stood on the war in Ukraine, which is arguably the most important topic in the world.”

DeSantis’ response made news largely because it is in direct opposition to current U.S. policy. The far-right Florida governor declared the war against Ukraine a mere “territorial dispute” and not in America’s “vital national interests,” as NBC News reported. (Experts disagree with DeSantis’ position, with some calling the war against Ukraine a genocide.)

Trump’s response, however, should have drawn as much attention.

Carlson, in the video below, very specifically says he submitted six questions about Ukraine to Trump, DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Kristi Noem, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Greg Abbott, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, Chris Sununu, Asa Hutchinson, John Bolton and Vivek Ramaswamy. (Not all responded.)

According to the segment on his show Monday night, none those questions included a question about “regime change” in Russia.

And yet Trump’s, DeSantis’ and Pence’s responses did, so it’s possible Carlson wasn’t being fully transparent, although why he didn’t mention he asked that question seems important. And to be clear, the Biden administration has made clear regime change in Russia is not the goal.

So, first, here’s DeSantis’ response that mentions “regime change”:

“A policy of ‘regime change’ in Russia (no doubt popular among the DC foreign policy interventionists) would greatly increase the stakes of the conflict, making the use of nuclear weapons more likely. Such a policy would neither stop the death and destruction of the war, nor produce a pro-American, Madisonian constitutionalist in the Kremlin. History indicates that Putin’s successor, in this hypothetical, would likely be even more ruthless. The costs to achieve such a dubious outcome could become astronomical.”

READ MORE: Chasten Buttigieg Accuses Mike Pence of Using Couple’s Twins as a ‘Punchline’ in Homophobic Attack

And here’s Trump’s response that mentions “regime change”:

“Should the United States support regime change in Russia?”

“No. We should support regime change in the United States, that’s far more important. The Biden administration are the ones who got us into this mess,” Trump wrote.

“Regime change,” as most know, is the removal of a current government, often by force, which could also be called a coup.

If you google the definition of “regime change,” you’ll find this: “the replacement of one administration or government by another, especially by means of military force.”

Certainly not at the ballot box.

Some might say, as they often do, “Well, maybe Donald Trump doesn’t know what the term really means.”

He does.

May 27, 2019: Asked about his military buildup in the Middle East and his pull-out of President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, Trump told reporters, “We’re not looking for regime change. I want to make that clear.”

January 3, 2020: “President Donald Trump said Friday that America does not seek ‘regime change’ in Iran, less than a day after the U.S. launched an airstrike that killed the country’s top general, Qasem Soleimani.”

Donald Trump called for another coup Monday night.

Watch Carlson’s segment below or at this link.

READ MORE: Trump: ‘World War III Is Looming’ and We Are ‘Doomed’ if You Don’t Put Me Back in the White House

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an 3 23

fox News host Sean Hannity interviewed former President Donald Trump on Monday and, apparently, omitted crucial chunks of their conversation about Ukraine when it was broadcast to Hannity's radio audience.

Justin Baragona, the senior media reporter atThe Daily Beast, noticed the discrepancy on Tuesday.

"According to Trump, all he needed to do was let Russia 'take over' parts of Ukraine," Baragona explained. "Saying that Russia was going for the 'whole enchilada' with Joe Biden as president, Trump added that Russia 'took over nothing' while he was in the White House because Russian President Vladimir Putin 'understood' that 'he would have never done it.'"

Trump added, "that's without even negotiating a deal. I could have negotiated. At worst, I could've made a deal to take over something, there are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly, but you could've worked a deal."

But as Baragona pointed out, that is not what Hannity played.

"Instead, shortly after Trump says, 'I could have negotiated,' the audio quickly skips about 30 seconds of speaking time before picking back up where the former president pivots to his complaint that 'China no longer respects the United States,'" Baragona observed.

Baragona also noted that "besides asserting that he would have stopped Russia from invading Ukraine by making a deal to let them 'take over something,' Trump also said in the portion not aired by Fox that 'so many more people are dying than is being reported' while reiterating this 'would have never happened' under his watch."

aha trump claims to be their instrument of punishment

white grievance an extreme flavor of pseudo-populism? // qanon storm punishes

Kelly McClure @ Salon: “I am your retribution,” says Trump in his CPAC speech.

Kelly McClure @ Salon: “I am your retribution,” says Trump in his CPAC speech.

eg neglected legal end game hope h

final stage?

https://www.alternet.org/trump-manhattan-da/

https://boingboing.net/2023/03/06/trump-boasts-of-packed-audience-for-his-cpac-speech-photo-tells-a-different-story.html

https://boingboing.net/2023/03/06/trump-gave-an-unhinged-rant-at-cpac-about-his-friendship-with-putin-and-wwiii.html

an 323 maya

no lnx

'Populist and belligerent': Republican Party 'sad' state of division on full display at CPAC

Maya Boddie March 06, 2023

The 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference revealed the Republican party's undeniable current state of division, Axios reports.

Per Axios, the GOP was formerly "defined by its general ideological unity on three core conservative principles: free markets, a muscular foreign policy and traditional social values," but now the party's vocal MAGA members have "moved the GOP's center of gravity toward a more protectionist, populist and belligerent outlook."

The Daily Beast columnist, Matt Lewis, recently wrote:

It's easy to highlight how unstable the GOP has become in the last decade. But the most obvious changes involve tone, attitude, temperament, and sanity. Policy preferences have largely taken a back seat to nihilism, showmanship, and culture war battles that don't easily track with our recent past experience.

READ MORE: 'A professional grassroots huckster wing': GOP strategist torches CPAC 'scam'

According to Axios, former President Donald Trump invoked an extreme sense of division in the room during his speech, declaring, "We will expel the warmongers, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, we will throw off thepolitical class that hates our country."

He continued, "The Republican Party was ruled by freaks, neocons, open-border zealots and fools. We're never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush" — before he lambasted Senator Rick Scott's (R-FL) attempt to cut Social Security.

The potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate also surpassed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — who missed the conference for his book tour – by more than 40 percent in a straw poll.

In addition to disagreements over the existence of federal programs, Republicans' starkly different opinions on the war on Ukraine also emerged on stage.

cpac

https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-speech-lackluster-speech/

https://www.alternet.org/trump-emocracu-dangerous-system-cpac/

democ is dangerous?

trump twt pix groomer

https://www.alternet.org/trump-desantis-2659496252/

https://www.alternet.org/trump-biden-marxist-equity-squad/

// restitution?

only 30% of cable covered ?

re ohio sp bomb train

https://www.desmog.com/2019/05/30/trump-federal-railroad-administration-crew-staffing-self-regulation-rail-industry/

it's called the rule of law': Legal experts laud judge's ruling allowing deposition of Donald Trump

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

February 23, 2023

A federal judge has ruled that **Donald Trump**, the ex-president, and **FBI Director Chris Wray** can both be deposed in sworn testimony in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by former senior FBI official Peter Strzok...

see bomb train

mayor pete affirm action gay hire, calls out trump for dereg

let's start hanging fascists again t shirt

[[ an 2 23

ahead of former President Donald Trump's Wednesday visit to East Palestine, Ohio—where a Norfolk Southern-owned train transporting carcinogenic chemicals derailed on February 3, prompting a mass evacuation and release of pollutants—progressive critics highlighted the key role his administration played in making the fiery crash and its toxic aftermath more likely.

During his speech, Trump—considered a leading GOP presidential candidate for 2024 despite spearheading a deadly coup attempt following his 2020 loss—criticized how President Joe Biden's administration has responded to the environmental and public health disaster unfolding in East Palestine, a poor rural town of about 4,700 people located a few miles west of the Pennsylvania border.

But as critics noted beforehand, the Trump administration's gutting of train safety rules at the behest of railroad industry lobbyists was instrumental in creating the conditions for the derailment and ensuing chemical spill and burnoff, which has provoked fears of groundwater contamination and air pollution.

"He should be apologizing to that community for his administration rolling back rail regulations," progressive stalwart Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator, tweeted prior to Trump's address.

philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch made a similar point in an opinion piece published earlier this week.

"If residents of East Palestine—:{a:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:**:{ modern :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{news desert:(style="background-color:#ff6600;"):}:**of downsized or disappeared news sources, which allows misinformation to fester—truly knew the reality, a delegation of townsfolk would likely greet Trump with tiki torches and pitchforks," Bunch wrote, comparing the former president's visit to "the tendency of a criminal to return to the scene of his crime."

Bunch noted that "Trump acted specifically to sabotage a nascent government effortto protect citizens from the growing threat posed by derailments of outdated, poorly equipped, and undermanned freight trains that were increasingly shipping both highly flammable crude oil from the U.S. fracking boom as well as toxic chemicals like the ones that would derail in East Palestine."

"Trump had been in office for less than a year when he moved to killthe 2015 rule change initiated by the Obama administration that would have required freight trains to upgrade the current braking technologythat was developed in the 19th century for state-of-the-art electronic systems," wrote Bunch, who pointed out that this came after Norfolk Southern and other rail carriers donated more than $6 million to Republican candidates in 2016 and spent millions more on lobbying.

"With the investigation into the East Palestine wreck still in its early phases, it's not clear if the modern brakes—originally required for installation by 2021—could have prevented the toxic derailment or whether the specific Obama rule would have applied," Bunch continued. "But experts do believe the new brakes could have mitigated the wreckage—and thus the release of so many hazardous chemicals."

"The rule reversal wasn't the only time that Team Trump sided with Big Rail over the forgotten Americans who live on the wrong side of their tracks," he added. "In 2019, for example, the Trump administration moved to not strengthen but relax regulations on shipping fracked natural gas through communities like East Palestine. The same year, Trump's White House also killed an Obama-era proposal that would have required two crew members in freight-train locomotives."

Ahead of Trump's visit,More Perfect Union also argued on social media that the ex-president's "attempt to portray himself as a friend of the town and as someone who would have stood up to Norfolk Southern... couldn't be further from the truth."

As the progressive media outlet observed, the Trump administration "withdrew multiple rail safety recommendations and moved toward a 'self-regulatory approach' where rail companies could do as they pleased."

"It's no surprise that the Trump years were filled with dangerous deregulation," More Perfect Union asserted, describing his decision to nominate top rail industry executives to lead the Federal Railroad Administration and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration as "a prime example of the revolving door between business and government."

"The Trump approach to the rail industry was to let the companies do what they wanted, which was to avoid regulations, slash jobs, and extract profit," the outlet continued. "This approach, and rail companies' greed, has led to over 1,000 derailments each year. Some are massive catastrophes like East Palestine. But every single one is harmful. And if the industry isn't regulated and forced to change, we'll soon be seeing more disasters."

When Trump "pretends to care about rail workers, or the people of East Palestine, we can't believe him," More Perfect Union added. "His record tells a very different story, the story of his own role in creating this problem in the first place."

Even some conservative critics of Trump have questioned the sincerity of his visit.

"It's clear that it's a political stunt," Ray LaHood, a Republican ex-member of Congress who led the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) during former President Barack Obama's first term, told Politico on Wednesday. "If he wants to visit, he's a citizen. But clearly his regulations and the elimination of them, and no emphasis on safety, is going to be pointed out."

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wasted little time in doing exactly that, calling the GOP's indignation "fake" soon after Trump announced his travel plans.

Bunch acknowledged that "it's beyond hypocritical for Trump to bring his Harold Hill-huckster shtick to East Palestine when residents are still experiencing headaches and breathing foul air from the kind of catastrophe he didn't lift a finger to stop from the Resolute Desk."

"But also it's a bit baffling why Biden or his Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—who seems to be channeling**his inner McKinsey & Co**. these days—haven't gone to Ohio," he argued. "Especially when Trump and any other Republicans hoping to make political hay off of East Palestine's misery are coming to town empty-handed."

"None of the anti-Biden critics on this issue have offered a solution, because they can't," wrote Bunch. "The only fix for the kind of runaway abuses of modern capitalism that cause these environmental catastrophes isgovernment regulation, aided by empowering worker safety with strong unions—two things that the Trump-led GOP has opposed at every turn."

Even in the wake of the disaster, Republican lawmakers have refused to demand stronger regulations, as HuffPost reported:

Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), a vocal Biden critic who represents East Palestine, on Tuesday dismissed immediate calls for stricter rail regulations, saying actions toward accountability will hinge on the findings of a National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB] investigation into the derailment.

'That will dictate whether there are laws, regulations that need to be changed, whether there were rules that were violated,' he said during a news conference in East Palestine. 'We don't know any of that yet, and we won't know that until NTSB releases its report.'

Hours before Trump spoke, Buttigieg announced that he plans to travel to East Palestine on Thursday. His visit is expected to coincide with the publication of the NTSB's preliminary report about its ongoing probe into the crash.

On Tuesday, Buttigieg unveiled DOT's recommendations for improving the safety of the nation's rail system, though an inter-union alliance of rail workers immediately criticized the plan as inadequate.

Given the scale of the problems—and in light of the transportation secretary's ongoing refusal to exercise his authority to reinstate previously gutted rules along with his consideration of an industry-backed proposal to further weaken the regulation of train braking systems—union leaders have called for nationalizing the railways and implementing their proposed solutions.

Turner, for her part, emphasized that she has "been outspoken about the two years the Biden administration had [to] fix these problems."

"The Trump administration is at fault, as is the Obama administration," Turner contended, referring to the fact that the latter's regulations were also watered down in response to industry pressure.

"The Ohio GOP is to blame as well," she added, echoing recent reporting on Norfolk Southern's campaign to influence state-level lawmakers and officials. "Failure at every level of government and multiple administrations led to this."

ref dayton

https://www.daytondailynews.com/ideas-voices/marcano-the-importance-of-local-media-following-the-east-palestine-derailment/7ORSBKCMPZGLLPR6NAX3EWXNPA/

the Norfolk Southern train wreck near East Palestine has received its share of national news coverage.

The Washington Post covered a raucous town hall that the train company inexplicitly skipped. NPR’s “what to know about the derailment” provided an excellent primer on the wreck. CBS, CNN, NBC, and even Al Jazeera have covered the incident.

The train, pulling 150 cars, derailed on Feb. 3. Three dozen cars went off the tracks, and 11 contained hazardous materials — including five with the man-made, cancer-causing substance vinyl chloride. For the roughly 4,800 residents of East Palestine, on the Pennsylvania border some 40 miles west of Pittsburgh, the current short-term angst will soon turn to long-term worry.

But what happens when the story subsides and the big boys go home?

The Lisbon Morning Journal is the closest newspaper to East Palestine, about 13 miles away. The Salem News has covered the story, and they’re 30 miles away. Particle Media’s online site, Newsbreak, aggregates news content, so that’s useful.

But the train derailment highlights a problem that has affected small communities and areas from Tarboro, North Carolina, to Tucson, Arizona.

Some 360 newspapers closed from the start of the pandemic, according to a report published in the New York Times. The problem is so acute thatone in five Americans live in a news desert with limited access to local news, the Times reported.

Ohio has fared particularly poorly. Since 2004, the state has lost 32% of its newspapers, according to a study by Policy Matters. Most of those companies were run by small operators who cared about the communities they covered.

In years past, the Youngstown Vindicator would have unleashed its army of journalists to travel the 30 minutes to East Palestine. The Vindicator once had the staff and resources to support its 160,000 Sunday circulation product. But the newspaper collapsed under the weight of circulation declines and financial losses and closed in 2019, with a Sunday circulation of just 32,000.

The East Palestine train derailment lays bare what happens when the community loses its news sources.

Newsgathering goes far beyond the daily reporting of who said what at a press conference or who spoke to a crowd at a community gathering. That’s fairly simply blocking and tackling.

I wonder who will go more in-depth.

Who will tell the stories of the townspeople who will be scared for years by the wreck?Who will monitor whether residents start leaving, which would have a cascading effect on property tax revenue and the city’s school district? Who will chronicle the families and children who stay behind and worry about their health?

Who will monitor health department reports to see if residents start getting sick?

Who will act as a watchdog to monitor state officials, who will be charged with ensuring that Norfolk Southern makes restitution, in whatever form that takes? Who will file public records requests to examine the records of any settlements? If there are lawsuits, who will go to the courthouse and report on the findings?

Without reporters and news sources, the people of East Palestine don’t have an independent news source that keeps officials on their toes.

When people say that local media doesn’t matter, take a look at what’s happening a four-hour drive east of the Dayton area. The big boys will go home because they have so many other issues to tackle. Eventually, the citizens of East Palestine will feel the frustration of living in a news desert.

Somehow, we need to strengthen local news, not continue to watch it wither.

Dying newspapers mean there are fewer independent avenues to help communities, fewer ways to cover tragedy, and fewer ways to hold companies and agencies accountable through reporting.

Local news matters. Let’s do a better job supporting it.

Ray Marcano’s column appears on these pages each Sunday. He can be reached at :{raymarcanoddn@gmail.com:(style="box-sizing:content-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: ]]

https://www.alternet.org/what-donald-trump-knew-about-chinese-spy-balloon/

https://www.alternet.org/ann-couter-donald-trump-stupid/

an 2 23

During the United States' 2020 presidential race, Ukraine-born Lev Parnas was still an ally of then-President Donald Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. But that was before Russian forces, on February 24, 2022, launched a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine on orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

These days, Parnas regrets allying himself with Giuliani, Trump and the MAGA movement. And in an article published by Time on February 13, Parnas describes the role he played in Trump and Giuliani’s efforts to "undermine" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

"I was used by Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in ways that helped pave the way for Putin to invade Ukraine, my native land," the 51-year-old Parnas laments. "If Trump and Giuliani's plans had worked, the Ukrainians might not have had the necessary weapons, medical equipment, and other supplies they needed to fight back."

In 2021 and 2022, Parnas was found guilty on criminal charges that ranged from fraud to illegally funneling non-U.S. money to Trump's 2020 reelection campaign. He was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison but only served four and is now confined at home.

"My connection to Trump came through Giuliani, with whom I had done business, and through the large campaign donations I had made to Trump's campaign," Parnas recalls. "Giuliani, who desperately wanted to be secretary of state, recruited me to help him further Trump's interests overseas. I had no official position, but my primary task was to be their go-between with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs and government officials. In retrospect, I concluded that my real job was to help undermine and destabilize the Ukrainian government."

Parnas believes that Trump's disdain for Ukraine’s government and affinity for Putin was partly motivated by his animosity for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"Trump and Giuliani argued that Ukraine's leaders were corrupt and anti-American," Parnas explains, "but I believe there were other reasons Trump had it in for them.He viewed them as political enemies who had supported Hillary Clinton in 2016…. Trump acted on his hatred of Ukraine as he tried to improve his reelection chances in 2020. The plan that Giuliani and Trump put into operation was simple: Giuliani sent me to collect compromising information that the Eastern European oligarchs had on Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine to use against Joe Biden…. Trump didn't care if this made Ukraine vulnerable to Russia."

Although Parnas supported Trump in 2020, he applauds the Biden administration for helping Ukraine militarily in 2022 and 2023.

"Trump weakened Zelensky, but fortunately, Biden won the 2020 election, and Ukraine received a steady supply of weapons," Parnas writes. "Since my arrest, I have done my best to help the people of Ukraine with charitable works, but Giuliani is still peddling his version of events. And even now, Republican politicians are campaigning to stop the pipeline of weapons and medical supplies. They are just trying to please Trump, exactly as Giuliani does. And whether they realize it or not, they are making it easier for Putin and his gang to steal everything they can from Ukraine."

Read Lev Parnas’ full Time article at this link.

kos 2 23

...among Wednesday's posting frenzy that included scads of his typical whining, personal attacks, election lies, lame legal defenses, and pathetic self-exaltations, Trump re-posted a comment by one of his glassy-eyed cult followers that should concern every American.

It was an explicit call for, and advocacy of, violence and armed uprising against Democracy.The post was a reply to another Trumpist who speculated about the prospect of Ron DeSantis - or anyone other than Trump - winning the 2024 Republican presidential primary...

"Then they will have to figure out how to fight 80,000,000 + it’s not going to happen again. People my age and old will physically fight for him this time. What we got to lose? I’ll donate the rest of my time here on this planet to do it. And I know many many others who feel the same. They got my 6 and we Are Locked and LOADED"

There is nothing ambiguous about that comment. The poster is blatantly advocating an armed assault during the primary on behalf of Trump with his call to "physically fight" and be "Locked and LOADED." It is an open embrace of domestic terrorism. And Trump obviously agrees with this anti-American depravity.

This sort of unbridled hostility isn't new for Trump, After all, he gleefully watched as his cult followers engaged in a violent insurrection against the United States on January 6, 2021. He encouraged them as they threatened members of Congress and sought to hang his Vice-President, Mike Pence. He eventually told the rioters that he loved them. And he has since promised to pardon any of those who were arrested for their criminal conduct.

In the past couple of weeks Twitter and Facebook have restored Trump's accounts after having suspended him for inciting violence and disseminating dangerous disinformation about election fraud and COVID. That was a terrible mistake that could have been easily predicted to result in further harm to innocent people and to the nation.

Now Trump is proving that he is unfit to be permitted to spread his malicious lies and overt hate speech in public forums. He is telegraphing what he will advocate if/when he returns to social media platforms that are unwilling to take common sense measures to safeguard their users from his malevolence. And when he ultimately sinks to the depths that he is known to inhabit, Twitter and Facebook will share the blame for any harm that comes from it.

RELATED STORIES:

an 2 23 raw

A little-noticed nugget unearthed by the Jan. 6 committee found Donald Trump tried to profit off his election lies by trademarking one of his catchphrases about his loss.

The investigation dug up an email from former White House chief of staff Dan Scavino sent to Jared Kushner showing the former president wanted to obtain trademark protection for the phrase "rigged election," reported Los Angeles Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg.

“Hey Jared! POTUS wants to trademark/own rights to below, I don’t know who to see — or ask,” Scavino said in the email just days after the 2020 election.

Kushner then forwarded the message, titled "POTUS requests," to various White House aides urging them to take action.

“Guys — Can we do ASAP please?” Kushner said, highlighting the phrase "Rigged Election!" in the email.

Presumably, Goldberg wrote, the ex-president hoped to raise money by hawking merchandise based on his corrosive lie about the election while muscling other vendors out of the way.

"What’s especially galling about it is that Trump would have been profiting off an utter lie, a cynical political manipulation that threatened to undermine American democracy: the pretense that the 2020 election had been stolen from him," Goldberg wrote. "In the end, Trump did not successfully trademark the phrase, or perhaps was talked out of it by his lawyers. The rest of us can continue to sell 'Rigged Election' caps if we choose to."

an 2 23

On January 31, 2023, candidate and former President Donald Trump released a chilling video on the far-right video sharing platform Rumble, detailing what he called his plan to stop the “chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation of our youth.” Trump’s anti-trans screed came just days after a meeting with the creators of the online hate account Libs of TikTok, echoing their bigoted rhetoric, and could mark the start of a race to the bottom for the 2024 Republican primary. This raises the stakes for responsible media coverage of attacks on a vulnerable community throughout the next Presidential campaign.

Trump’s speech contained a number of policy proposals that would guarantee that trans minors have little recourse available for gender dysphoria, and appears aimed at creating a chilling effect where hospitals providing gender affirming care or teachers supporting struggling trans students might fear an investigation from a Trump Department of Justice — or the loss of federal funding.

Video

The former president proposed a potentially significant expansion of federal control of teachers in the form of a “new credentialing body” which “will promote positive education about the nuclear family” and “the roles of mothers and fathers.” He also promised an end to Biden administration policies, and the policies of several states, that allow people to select an “X” gender marker on identification documents, saying that he would “ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth,” an unprecedented step in rejecting the existence of trans people that historian Jules Gil-Peterson refers to as the state “trying to become cisgender.”

Trump’s series of proposals came just days after a meeting with Chaya Raichik and Seth Dillon, the far-right figures behind the Libs of TikTok cyberbullying account, which focused heavily on attacking teachers and children’s hospitals throughout 2022. Raichik, who appears to have close ties with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another potential 2024 candidate, has been on a recent tour of fringe media, including an appearance with Slightly Offensive host Elijah Schaffer where she said that she hoped to win “transphobe of the year” in 2023. Although anti-trans panic largely failed to resonate with voters in the 2022 midterms, Trump’s comments suggest that it will nonetheless play a key role in the 2024 Republican primary.

Anti-trans policies are not new for Trump, whose first administration threatened to “[define] transgender out of existence” by using Title IX to define sex as binary, fixed at birth, and defined by genitals. In just the first six months of his term, his administration rescinded Obama-era guidance to protect trans students from discrimination in schools, banned trans people from the military, and advanced an interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that would allow people to be fired for being gay. During his 2016 campaign, mainstream journalists were quick to brand Trump as pro-LGBTQ, as outlined by former Media Matters editor Parker Molloy. The New York Times called him “more accepting.” NBC News correspondent Hallie Jackson said he was “one of the more LGBT-friendly Republican presidents. A Meet the Press chyron called him “more accepting on ‘bathroom laws’.”

Former President George W. Bush: “fool me once — shame on, shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

takes 5th 1 23

https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-pleads-the-5th/

fb and twt?

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/if-meta-decides-allow-trump-back-its-platforms-it-will-be-putting-profits-ahead-users

an 1 23

former President Donald Trump in 2018 had an infamous press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Finnish capital of Helsinki in which he signaled that believed Putin's denials about having interfered in the 2016 election despite assessments to the contrary from American intelligence agencies.

Four-and-a-half years later, Trump is now touting his trust of Putin over American intelligence agencies as a source of pride.

In a post on his Truth Social account, the former president attacked former officials at the FBI and CIA whom he accused of trying to undermine his presidency by investigating his campaign's multiple contacts with Russian agents during the 2016 presidential race.

"Remember in Helsinki when a 3rd rate reporter asked me, essentially, who I trusted more, President Putin of Russia, or our 'Intelligence' lowlifes," he wrote. "My instinct at the time was that we had really bad people in the form of James Comey, McCabe (whose wife was being helped out by Crooked Hillary while Crooked was under investigation!), Brennan, Peter Strzok (whose wife is at the SEC) & his lover, Lisa Page. Now add McGonigal & other slime to the list. Who would you choose, Putin or these Misfits?"

Trump has repeatedly heaped praise on Putin over the years, and even called him a "genius" last year after he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has faced multiple setbacks over the past 11 months while costing the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians.

elect principal...

https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-2659323537/

https://www.alternet.org/trump/trump-bob-woodward/

sues tapes

an 1 23

no lnx

Corrupt, fixable and usable': Why Trump’s 'decades-old playbook' is finally losing its appeal

Maya Boddie

January 31, 2023

While former President Donald Trump pursues a third presidential run amid a flurry of criminal investigations, it’s clear that the effectiveness of his typical tactics of “defiance and counterattacks” is starting to dwindle, Maggie Haberman at the New York Times reports.

Haberman named nearly six current investigations facing Trump — from his pending classified documents case, rape accusations, potential indictment in Georgia following allegations that he attempted to overturn the 2020 election and more.

New York Attorney General Letitia James recently filed a $250 million lawsuit against Trump for “widespread financial fraud.”

READ MORE: Trump hits Bob Woodward with $50 million lawsuit for releasing audio of interviews

Sources close to Trump, Haberman reports, say the former president’s main worry is the potential of facing criminal charges, which “he has worked to avoid since the late 1970s,” under the guidance of his former attorney, the late Roy M. Cohn.

In an attempt to distract officials from pending litigation, Trump has kept Cohn's legacy alive by attempting to ambush the legal system while finessing his way around potential consequences.

“Always distraction, and apparent scorched earth and counterattacks at the start, and after much passage of time, settlement as quietly as possible,” First Amendment attorney and New York Democratic activist Victor A. Kovner said. “And the counterattacks as scurrilous as possible. Mostly from the Roy Cohn playbook.”

Trump has continuously engaged in harmful tactics such as calling Black prosecutors like Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis “radical, vicious and racist,” or accusing the Department of Justice of partisanship.

[READ MORE: How a Kansas mayor pulled off a 'coup' using Trump-like tactics: report

As lawsuits come for Trump, he has proceeded to file a few lawsuits himself — most recently against Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.

But former attorney and FBI official, Chuck Rosenberg, told Haberman that this approach is losing its power.

“You can wear down a private party if they do not have the same resources as you, or you can settle a civil case and make it go away, but criminal cases are not about money,” Rosenberg said. “Criminal cases are about liberty and justice, and it is really rather difficult — if not impossible — to wear down federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. and make them go away.”}:

Rosenberg continued, “I think he thinks that everything can be bought or fought. And that is just not true.”}:

[READ MORE: 'Acting in bad faith': Trump lawyer in 'judge’s sights' over courtroom stunts and 'frivolous' claims

In the past, and still, according to former Trump Organization employee Alan Marcus, “Trump views the judicial system as he sees everything else: corrupt, ‘fixable’ and usable as a bullying tactic.”

Marcus mentioned that when he worked under Trump in the 1990's, he noticed that Trump would quickly dismiss cases against him as a “waste of time and money” but proceed to search for a “friendlier” judge to take on the case.

Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks of South Florida, who fined Trump $1 million this month for his 2016 “frivolous lawsuit” against Hillary Clinton, likely would not be considered a “friendly” judges in Trump’s eyes.

“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” Middlebrooks said. “He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer.”

Trump dropped his lawsuit against Letitia James as a result of the $1 million fine, proving Haberman's point that Trump's “decades-old playbook” is becoming worn and torn.

READ MORE: Questions raised about former US attorney who knew the DOJ was protecting Trump

Trump hits Bob Woodward with $50 million lawsuit for releasing audio of interviews ›

Ex-prosecutor: Donald Trump keeps handing investigators 'incriminating evidence from heaven' ›

'He’s done. He’s over': Ann Coulter declares an end to Donald Trump's political reign ›

trump hires powerhouse attorney to go after former Manhattan prosecutor

Sky Palma Raw Story

January 23, 2023

Donald Trump has hired one of America's top trial attorneys to go after a former Manhattan prosecutor who allegedly defamed him, TMZ reports.

Joe Tacopina sent a letter to Mark Pomerantz, claiming...

dropped suit after hillary fail?

https://www.alternet.org/the-right-wing/letitia-james-trump/

co paid max fine 1.5$m for tax fraud?

rant devil terms

https://www.alternet.org/smartnews/trump-white-house/

does he just sit on twit and fox all day and try to relevant/ provocative?

https://www.alternet.org/i-have-info-on-everyone/

initially elite pastors not fans, bent to base?

demands loyalty, get back on side

https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-griping-evangelical-disloyalty/

trashes evang

https://www.alternet.org/trump-evangelicals-2659266228/

https://www.alternet.org/trump-karl-rove-biden-documents/

1 23 an

goes after lady ruby GA radical monsters hate am

an 1 23

The Jan. 6 insurrection testimony of General Mark Milley revealed that there were conversations among members of the Trump administration to court-martial retired military officers who criticized Trump’s handling of 2020 civil unrest in published op-eds, Insider reports.

A 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and top military aide to Trump since 2019, Milley’s testimony was part of a trove of documents the committee released earlier this week.

The testimony includes Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA) asking if Milley considered approaching former Trump advisor, Michael Flynn, about the administration's desire to enforce military action against the retired officers. Milley said he was “concerned about the politicization of the military” after op-eds “very critical of then President Trump” by retired military officers were published.

Milley said, "There was actually discussions with me: Bring him back on Active Duty, court-martial him, you know, make him walk the plank sort of thing, right? I advised them not to do that, because that would further politicize, in my personal view."

:{Retired military officers the administration targeted for court-martialing :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:were not named during testimony, but according to Insider, a few did publish op-eds criticizing the way Trump responded to nationwide protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

For Foreign Policy, retired Marine Corps General John Allen wrote, “Donald Trump expressed only the barest of condolences at the murder of George Floyd, but he also said nothing about the fundamental and underlying reasons for the unrest: systemic racism and inequality, a historic absence of respect, and a denial of justice.”

Allen also highlighted that Trump "threatened to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens."

Navy Admiral Mike Mullen said in his Atlantic op-ed titled “I Cannot Remain Silent” that he was “deeply worried that as [the military] execute their orders, the members of our military will be co-opted for political purposes.”

Mullen wrote, “Even in the midst of the carnage we are witnessing, we must endeavor to see American cities and towns as our homes and our neighborhoods. They are not 'battle spaces' to be dominated, and must never become so.”

Milley mentioned during testimony that he “was worried about the ‘broader implications’ of politicization of the military, taking action against retired officers who speak out shouldn't be done lightly," Insider reports.

https://www.alternet.org/unequal-justice-crime-and-punishment/

j6 comm good at narr]

...

Trump’s prosecution, at least at the federal level (he’s also under serious investigation in the states of Georgia and New York), now rests in the hands of the Justice Department and special counsel Jack Smith. The DOJ has received criminal referrals from the committee for four overlapping federal felonies committed by the former President:

Obstruction of an official proceeding, referring to the joint session of Congress convened on January 6, 2021, to confirm the election of Joe Biden, and the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify Biden’s victory;
Conspiracy to defraud the United States, referring to the former president’s multi-phase scheme to overturn the election;
Conspiracy to make a false statement, referring to the plan to submit false slates of electors to Congress and the National Archives; and
Inciting, assisting, or giving aid and comfort to an insurrection, referring to Trump’s incendiary speech immediately prior to the riot at the Capitol and his behavior during the riot.

The committee has also referred five of Trump’s former aides and associates to the Justice Department: John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Cheseboro and Jeffrey Clark. Trump, however, is the only member of the crew who has been referred for insurrection. The report singles out the ex-commander-in-chief on the insurrection charge, stating “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump.”

Although the referrals are non-binding, Smith is already in the thick of investigating the insurrection and the plot to overturn the 2020 election, presenting evidence to at least two grand juries. The special counsel is also leading the investigation into Trump’s removal of top-secret government documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Convicting Trump will not be easy, especially on charges related to January 6. Each of the felonies referred to the Department of Justice requires proof of criminal intent. The government will have to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump knew he had lost the election and was acting with a “corrupt purpose” to obstruct the work of the joint session of Congress or, on the conspiracy referral, that he had an intent to defraud the nation with the submission of fake slates of electors.

It will be particularly challenging to prove that Trump incited or assisted the insurrection as Trump would likely mount a First Amendment defense. In its landmark 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court articulated a two-part test for punishing incendiary speech, holding that the First Amendment protects advocating the use of force or lawbreaking “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” (emphasis added).

Still, it’s easy to understand why the committee chose to cite Trump for insurrection. Trump knew that members of the crowd who had gathered to hear him talk were armed when he urged them to march to the Capitol to “fight like hell.” And amid the ensuing melee, he accused Pence of cowardice for not using his authority as Vice President to change the outcome of the election, seething in a Tweet, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution…USA demands the truth!” Almost immediately after the Tweet was posted, the report notes, “the crowd around the Capitol surged, and more individuals joined the effort to confront police and break further into the building.”

Should Trump be tried and convicted of insurrection, he would face a prison sentence of up to ten years. He would also be barred from holding federal office for life.

So, what are the odds that Trump is finally held to account? Will Jack Smith prove to be Trump’s Porfiry Petrovich, the police investigator who brought Raskolnikov to justice, or will he turn out to be another Robert Mueller? We may have the answer in a matter of months.

an ah 12 22

No one can accuse the January 6 Select Committee’s final report of not being comprehensive; the report, which National Public Radio (NPR) has published in its entirety on its website, is 845 pages long. One of the many things the Committee covers in the report is the fake electors plot of late 2020, which found MAGA Republicans in swing states circulating bogus Electoral College documents in an effort to give electoral votes that now-President Joe Biden legitimately won to Donald Trump.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark the morning after Christmas 2022, attorney/columnist Philip Rotner examines what the January 6 Committee’s final report has to say about that plot and lays out some reasons why it makes a strong argument for criminally prosecuting Trump.

“On December 14, 2020,” Rotner explains, “Republican operatives in at least five states — each of which had already officially certified Joe Biden as the winner — forged and submitted to Congress and the National Archives fake Electoral College certificates purporting to certify Donald Trump, not Biden, as the ‘duly elected’ winner. The left-leaning watchdog group American Oversight first blew the whistle on the fake elector scheme in March 2021, but it wasn’t until Rachel Maddow devoted a series of shows to it in January 2022 that it really captured public attention.”

The attorney/columnist continues, “The fake electors were hardly the worst of what Trump visited on us. For sheer journalistic sex appeal, a scheme by a bunch of unknown, bumbling state functionaries to phony up some documents just can’t compete with a president siccing an armed mob on the Capitol. But the fake elector scandal, while not the most shocking of Trump’s predations, has long looked like the straightest route to cracking open the entire 2020 election scheme, and to getting Donald Trump indicted and convicted of a crime — at least until the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents scandal was revealed, but that’s another story.”

Rotner stresses that if Trump was a “knowing participant” in the “fake elector scheme,” that would be damning whether or not he honestly believed that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

“Even if he really, truly believed the election was stolen, it would not be a defense to criminal charges for participating in a fraudulent scheme to submit forged documents as the official results of state presidential elections,” Rotner argues. “To the contrary, his belief that he was stealing back a stolen election would be highly incriminating proof of his motive, not a defense…. If it can be proved that Trump intentionally participated in the scheme to try to pass off forged documents as official state documents, and then use the phony documents to overturn an election, it wouldn’t make any difference why he did so. The act of participating in the scheme, in and of itself, regardless of his purported reasons for doing so, would still run afoul of all kinds of state and federal criminal laws.”

Rotner continues, “The path to prosecuting Trump for the fake elector scheme — either as a standalone crime or as a crucial element of a larger conspiracy to overturn the results of a presidential election —became much clearer last week with the publication of the final report of the House January 6 Committee.”

The January 6 Committee’s final report, according to Rotner, shows that “the scheme went all the way to the top, right up to Trump himself” and that “while some of the lower-level participants in the scheme — most likely some of the state-level GOP operatives who actually signed the phony certificates — may have been duped into believing that that it was acontingencyplan, the higher ups who created and executed the scheme knew better."

“According to the report, by December 8, 2020 — less than three weeks after (attorney Kenneth) Chesebro first laid the groundwork for the scheme in a November 18 memo — ‘President Trump had decided to pursue the fake elector plan and was driving it,’” Rotner notes. “By mid-December, Trump had enlisted the assistance of RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in the scheme, worked with Rudy Giuliani on its implementation, and been informed that litigation would be filed in four states ‘to create a pretext to claim that it was still possible for the fake electors to be authorized retroactively.’ So, it appears that the previously missing link — the link between the fake elector scheme and Trump himself — is no longer missing. Trump not only ‘participated’ in the fake elector scheme, he orchestrated it.”

last jan 6 hearing damning, charges

hope hicks herschman asked no violent statement

https://www.alternet.org/send/trump-j6/ rant admits lost

https://www.alternet.org/Bank/trump-j6-2659006394/

wanted 10k nat gd walk to capitol?

an 12 22

The final report released by the Jan. 6 committee this week says that Donald Trump – who has spewed election fraud claims for two years now – was even stunned by an election fraud claim from one of his former allies, Sidney Powell, the New York Times reports.

Just weeks after the 2020 election, Powell, who's also a former Trump lawyer, said on a conference call that “communist money had flowed through countries like Venezuela, Cuba and perhaps China to interfere with the election.” According to Insider, Powell also believed technology company Dominion Voting Systems was in conspiracy with Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013.

Former Trump aide Hope Hicks said in response to Powell, the former president “muted his speakerphone and laughed at Powell, telling the others in the room, ‘This does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’”

NYT noted that, however, Trump proceeded to instigate the rioters by saying he “likes the crazies.”

Last month, Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said, "Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

And the Daily Beast reports that Powell finds herself now on Trump’s “no-go list” and he no longer takes calls from the lawyer.

Dominion Voting Systems has since sued Powell and Giuliani for spouting “baseless voter fraud claims that hurt its business.”

The Jan. 6 committee wrote in its final report that, “Donald Trump was no passive consumer of these lies. He actively propagated them. Time and again President Trump was informed that his election fraud claims were not true. He chose to spread them anyway. He did so even after they were legally tested and rejected in dozens of lawsuits.”

dead -enders

an ah 12 22

After the 2020 presidential election, Fox News’ Sean Hannity was more than happy to have attorney Sidney Powell on his show and let her promote the false claim that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. Powell, Fox News, Newsmax TV, One America News (OAN) and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani have all faced major defamation lawsuits from Dominion Voting Systems, which many MAGA Republicans falsely accused of helping Democrats steal the election.

But when Hannity sat for a deposition on December 21 in connection with Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News, he was in no hurry to promote the Big Lie. Hannity, under oath, was asked about Powell’s Dominion-related claims and admitted, “I did not believe it for one second.”

Dominion’s defamation lawsuits against Fox News and others are civil lawsuits, but lying under oath in a deposition is a criminal matter. And legal experts have argued that Hannity, during that deposition, obviously wasn’t about to risk criminal charges. Promoting nonsense on the air to drive ratings is one thing; lying under oath is quite another.

Hannity’s critics on the left, along with Never Trump conservatives, have been slamming the far-right Fox News host for giving Powell a platform in the first place. But Trump loyalists, according to the Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo, are lambasting Hannity for rejecting the Big Lie during that December 21 deposition.

“Sean Hannity, once the most important mouthpiece for Donald Trump, seems to be increasingly on the MAGA World outs,” Petrizzo explains in an article published by the Beast on December 29. “And a new revelation that Hannity doesn’t buy the Big Lie isn’t helping. In a just-released deposition surrounding Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit, the Fox News star said he’d never believed — not ‘for one second’ — baseless election fraud claims stemming from the 2020 election. That stance, directly at odds with many of his prime-time segments and the beliefs of many of his closest allies, has put Hannity in an awkward position.”

The MAGA Republicans who believe that Hannity has betrayed Trump, Petrizzo reports, include attorney Lin Wood, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, radio host Stew Peters, and Steve Bannon (host of the “War Room” podcast and former White House chief strategist in the Trump Administration).

Wood told the Beast that he is “very disappointed” and “unhappy” with Hannity. And Lindell told the Beast, “Sean Hannity is disgusting. He’s a terrible journalist that does not do his job or his diligence…. He doesn’t seem to have any concern over any election problems in the country, and it’s disgusting.”

Another far-right Trump devotee who is attacking Hannity is conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.

Petrizzo observes, “Bannon wrote that Hannity should face ‘accountability’ for ‘TERRIBLE advice’ to Trump, while Posobiec has taken a series of jabs at the Fox News host, including posting a picture of Hannity alongside CNN host Don Lemon and Michael Avenatti. Trump superfan Bill Mitchell responded to Hannity’s deposition remarks by writing, ‘And just like that, Hannity ends his career.’ Hannity’s also been called a ‘fraud’ by conservative commentators. Far-right radio host Stew Peters has labeled the Fox News host a ‘clown’ following his voter fraud boomerang. ‘He regularly washes and dries Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer’s jock straps,’ Peters told The Daily Beast.”

Even Trump himself, according to Beast sources, is apparently angry with Hannity. One source in “MAGA World,” Petrizzo reports, told the Beast, “In terms of direct contact with Sean, I think it’s been a while.”

A Trump adviser, also quoted anonymously, told the Beast, “Hannity was his lapdog for years, but just like everyone else who’s been Trump’s bitch at one point or another, the second Trump finds a reason to throw them in the garbage, he takes it.”

https://www.alternet.org/trump-taxes-2658994775/

audio

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/hang-pence

mAGA Capitol rioter 'can't believe' that he is 'going to jail' for 'NFT salesman' Donald Trump

Brad Reed Raw Story

December 15, 2022

Notorious Capitol rioter Tim Gionet, better known by his Twitter name "Baked Alaska," was suddenly filled with regret over his life decisions after watching former President Donald Trump hawk digital trading cards...

https://www.alternet.org/trump-documents-2658993473/ aide admits destroyed recs

1 min on ---? 17 counts?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-neglected-cover-trump-organizations-multiple-convictions-tax-fraud-0

https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/nearly-half-trumps-posts-truth-social-week-after-election-pushed-election

https://www.alternet.org/2022/12/donald-trump-north-korea-debt/

an 12 22

nowhere to go to up the ante?

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday morning raged on his anti-Twitter app Truth Social about non-existent "fraud and deception" in the November 8th midterm elections – and he proposed scrapping the United States Constitution as a means to reinstall himself into the presidency. Trump also called for a do-over of the race that he lost in a landslide to President Joe Biden.

"So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution," Trump "truthed."

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in either the 2020 or 2022 elections, let alone that which was pervasive enough to affect the results.

"Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!" Trump added. The authors of the Constitution – many of whom were traffickers of enslaved human beings – only wanted white male landowners to vote.

an 12 22 // morano lockdown BS

A new analysis is explaining how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) could use the COVID-19 pandemic to his advantage if he opts to run for president in 2024.

"The federal COVID response has become a red-meat issue for the party's base, and DeSantis' 2020 actions are much more aligned with the GOP's tone today," Axios’ Caitlin Owens reports.

Owens also noted that the Republican governor has admitted he wished he'd pushed back against Donald Trump and his administration during the critical moments when he disagreed with the former president's course of action in responding to the pandemic. As Owens notes, this includes "the Trump administration's calls for lockdowns early on in the pandemic."

Multiple political strategists weighed in with their predictions about a possible 2024 presidential run for DeSantis, explaining why COVID could be a key platform issue for the Florida governor.

Republican strategist Alex Conant, who worked with Sen. Marco Rubio's (R-Fla.) election campaign back in 2016, noted how DeSantis' conservative values appear to align more with the party.

"DeSantis is a conservative rock star in large part because of how he handled COVID in Florida," said Conant. "He'll certainly make the implicit contrast with Trump. Whether he makes an explicit contrast at some point depends on how the campaign plays out."

A number of other strategists also pointed out different ways DeSantis could use the pandemic against Trump. Brendan Buck, a former adviser to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, recalled the COVID shutdown in 2020 and how Trump initially aligned with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Republicans have widely condemned.

"He introduced the country to Dr. Fauci, and the far right is not going to forget that. Not that Trump handled the pandemic like Dr. Fauci would have wanted him to, but if you're looking at a way to hit him from the right, that's a big fat target," said Buck.

Although Trump was widely popular among Republican voters, Conant noted that the COVID-19 pandemic response was the biggest drawback of his presidency.

"Trump's handling of COVID is clearly one of the president's biggest vulnerabilities with independent voters and conservative voters for very different reasons," Conant said. "No one is going to forget putting bleach in bodies and downplaying the initial threat, and conservatives won't forgive him for pushing some of the more restrictive policies.”

Matt Gorman, a former Republican campaign operative, also offered a brief take on how the political battle could play out. "Trump benefits if you're chasing him down every rabbit role and fighting with him everywhere. If you be strategic and fight with him on terms favorable to your candidacy, that is where you can take advantage of him," said Gorman.

"COVID is one of those examples where, when it comes to DeSantis, where he could fight him on favorable ground," Gorman added.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/donald-trump-want-a-chaperone/ at all times

https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-launches-presidential-run-with-climate-fallacies/

e&e

former President Donald Trump is returning to the campaign trail with his energy and environmental legacy in tatters.

Trump’s policies to boost fossil fuel production, roll back environmental standards and stymie international climate action largely have not survived, less than two years after the Republican left the White House. Some were unwound by President Joe Biden, others tossed by the courts and a few nixed by Congress.

But in announcing his third run for president Tuesday, Trump returned to his familiar rhetoric on climate.Namely: ridiculing efforts to reduce planet-warming emissions from oil and gas production, which scientists say is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. “The Green New Deal and the environment, which they say may affect us in 300 years, is all that is talked about,” Trump said, inaccurately describing the timeline for climate impacts, which are already occurring. “They say the ocean will rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years, but don’t worry about nuclear weapons that can take out entire countries.”

Trump accused Biden of ignoring the threat of nuclear war with Russia, predicted gasoline prices would rise and argued that the country would be better off if his own energy policies were still in place. By focusing on climate policies, Biden “has intentionally surrendered our energy independence,” Trump said.

Trump’s rhetoric dismissing the value of any climate action matches how his administration governed, according to experts. He sought to undermine U.S. climate action in general — and unwind the policies of President Barack Obama, who many Republican voters blamed for killing coal jobs.

“For the Trump administration, their regulatory agenda was overwhelmingly negative. And that really was a departure [from past Republican presidents],” said Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The administration of former President George W. Bush, for instance, wanted to implement market-based systems to achieve some environmental protections, he said.

“They had an agenda,” he said. By contrast, “the Trump agenda really was overwhelmingly: Roll back Obama regs.”

Trump enters the 2024 campaign as the favorite for the GOP nomination. He’s not a lock, and some Republicans are already turning to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

But some observers think that’s a distinction without a difference. Trump’s influence over the Republican Party is evident in how his challengers have sought to frame themselves: Trumpism without Trump.

“Would it be terribly different under DeSantis? Not necessarily,” said Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “The two have different styles, but substantively they don’t seem that far apart.”

Trump’s influence over climate policy isn’t totally gone. His appointees continue to constrain Biden’s actions. The Supreme Court is the most dramatic example, where Trump appointed three of the six justices who voted in West Virginia v. EPA to limit the federal government’s authority to regulate carbon pollution from power plants.

With 234 confirmed judges, Trump reshaped the entire federal judiciary to be more hostile to climate action. That’s already had implications for Biden’s policies. It was a Trump appointee — Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana — who first ordered Biden to resume leasing federal lands and waters for fossil fuel development (*Energywire*, June 16, 2021).

Trump appointees still matter outside the judiciary, too. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission may soon lose its chair — and Democratic majority — leaving Trump’s two Republican appointees in a deadlock with the commission’s remaining two Democrats. Chair Richard Glick, a Democrat, is set to leave by the end of the year after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) blocked his reconfirmation over climate disputes. That could hamstring Biden’s renewable energy agenda (:{Energywire:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Nov. 11).

But few of Trump’s climate policies remain intact.

Biden tightened Trump’s lax vehicle pollution standards, one of the most consequential U.S. climate regulations. He rejoined the Paris climate agreement. And he’s made it more difficult for new fossil fuel development on federal lands.

Bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate voted to strike down Trump’s loosening of methane pollution rules under the Congressional Review Act. And a week after Trump left office, a judge struck down EPA’s “secret science” rule — one of several conservative attempts to constrain federal rulemaking itself.

That rule would have constrained regulators from considering studies that haven’t published their raw data. The Trump administration also sought to exclude some benefits of air regulation from consideration (:{Greenwire:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, June 9, 2021). Critics also saw Trump’s move of the Bureau of Land Management headquarters to Grand Junction, Colo., as an effort to cull federal workers.

Republicans likely will continue to focus their ire on the federal workforce. Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, newly elected as a Republican representative for Montana, has already signaled that he wants to rein in federal workers.

That’s a prominent focus for Republicans, said Wallach of AEI, because theysee the secret to making agencies more GOP-friendly is “somehow getting a handle on the deep state.”

“That’s definitely going to be of big interest in another Trump administration,” he said, “but probably in a DeSantis administration — or whoever — as well.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/donald-trump-kari-lake-installed/

It’s been nearly a week since **Donald Trump** had dinner at his home at **Mar-a-Lago** with antisemite and white supremacist **Nick Fuentes**, and yet he continues to refuse to denounce him or his extremist views.

“The former US president was urged publicly and privately to denounce Fuentes in the aftermath of the dinner,” The Guardian reports Monday.

Multiple advisers have urged Trump to denounce Fuentes, who has a long history of promoting white supremacism, but he has been “rejecting” their advice “over fears he might alienate a section of his base, two people familiar with the situation said.”

Fuentes, according to Trump, came to dinner at the behest of **Kanye West**, the former president’s invited dinner guest. He says the disgraced artist did not tell him in advance he was bringing “friends.” In addition to Fuentes, those friends reportedly include **Milo Yiannopoulos**, who has advocated for older men having sex with young teen boys, and Trump 2016 aide Karen Giorno, who was reportedly involved in a pay-for-pardon scheme.

West has also been increasingly viewed as antisemitic, especially after threatening to “go death con 3 on Jewish people.” That remark “conveyed a clear violence to many who saw it,” The Times of Israel reported last month.

Trump has a long history of refusing to denounce white supremacists and white nationalists. His refusal to denounce former KKK leader David Duke, when still a presidential candidate in 2016, has become an infamously defining moment for Trump.

“I don’t know anything about David Duke,” Trump told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with ‘white supremacy’ or ‘white supremacists,’” Trump insisted. “I know nothing about white supremacists.”

ALSO IN THE NEWS: Watch: Chasten Buttigieg Says Tucker Carlson Is Focusing on ‘Hate’ After Host’s Latest Anti-Gay Attack on His Husband

“I have to look at the group,” Trump continued, when asked he would condemn white supremacists and say he does not want their vote. “You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about?”

That’s extremely similar to Trump’s initial response when news broke he had dined with Fuentes.

Trump on his Truth Social platform described the white supremacist as someone “whom I had never met and knew nothing about.”

On MSNBC Monday morning, Politico’s Jonathan Lemire noted, “this strain of white nationalism is becoming more central to what today’s Republican Party is about.” He added that Trump is “trying to play to the lowest common denominator to try and keep some supporters in check.”

Fuentes is not just a white supremacist, a white Christian nationalist, a Holocaust “denier,” and a supporter of authoritarianism – along with holding other extremist views. He is a political commentator who has a large following and is seen as the head of a white supremacist movement. Fuentes is also the founder of the annual America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), a white nationalism alternative to the already extremist Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL)last year warned Fuentes is “a white supremacist leader and organizer and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP.”

But ADL also notes Fuentes “promoted election fraud narratives and encouraged his adherents to participate in nationwide “Stop the Steal” protests,” and “served as an organizer and speaker at many ‘Stop the Steal’ protests,” which may be yet another reason Trump has refused to denounce him.

On Friday, right-wing Washington Examiner political correspondent Byron York took to Twitter to warn that former President Donald Trump's increasingly open fraternization with white nationalists like Nick Fuentes is a crisis for the Republican Party.

"Trump, Kanye, Nick Fuentes — No longer a disaster waiting to happen," wrote York. "Now just a disaster.

This comes after Fuentes reportedly traveled to Trump's Mar-a-Lago country club residence in Palm Beach, Florida for a meeting — after which pro-Trump rapper Kanye West claimed that Trump was "really impressed" with the far-right activist.

Fuentes first gained prominence after his participation in the 2017 white supremacist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted in the murder of a counterprotester. He leads a movement known as the "Groyper Army," an association of extremist internet trolls whose mission is to inject white nationalist ideology into the mainstream of political debate. Fuentes was active in politics during the 2022 midterms as well, with failed Washington Congressional candidate Joe Kent seeking his endorsement.

Kanye West himself, who also goes by the mononym Ye, has come under heavy fire in recent weeks for promoting anti-Semitic beliefs, including a social media rant in which he said he was going to go "death con 3" on Jewish people.

All of this comes as Trump is preparing for his third consecutive run for president in 2024, which has conservative forces unsure whether to fall in with the base or back him once more.

yells at kanye b/c might run against him? also milo

an 11 22

Former President Donald Trump hosted notorious Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes for dinner this week -- but now he's issued a statement saying he had no idea who Fuentes was before sharing a meal with him.

In a statement posted by Axios' Jonathan Swan, Trump emphasized that Fuentes was a guest of rapper Kanye West and not someone whom he'd personally invited to his resort.

"Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago," Trump said. "Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about."

Trump notably did not condemn Fuentes' views about the Holocaust or his belief that America should reinstate racial segregation.

Additionally, Trump did say that he invited West to dinner with him despite the fact that West has drawn outrage in recent weeks by spouting openly anti-Semitic rhetoric, starting with a tweet last month in which he threatened to go "death-con 3 on Jewish people."

Trump has a long history of refusing to condemn the behavior of overt racists while also denying that he knows their true views, such as when he said in 2016 he did not know former Klan leader David Duke's views well enough to justify disavowing his support.

11 22 rww

shane Vaughn rejoiced over former President Trump’s announcement that he is running for president again in 2024: “God’s anointed servant is rising up from the ashes.”
Eric Metaxas was on hand for Trump’s announcement and declared that “when I think how this country has suffered these two years I get choked up thinking how good things were under Trump.”
Jarrin Jackson is confident that Trump will win in 2024 because “the people who love Jesus are going to be doing what they need to be doing.”
Ali Alexander proclaims that Trump can only win if he hires Alexander: “Trump cannot Beat the Fraud without me. Don’t mean to sound arrogant but I’m the only one in the movement to demonstrate it since November 2018.”
Vincent James thought that Trump’s announcement speech was “dog shit”: “People don’t want elegance, people want revenge. … People are looking for Trump to go Mussolini mode.”
Milo Yiannopoulos had a similar reaction: “Trump supporters want HEADS ON PIKES AND THE ENEMY’S LOVED ONES WEEPING OVER THEIR BATTERED CORPSES.”
Finally, Nick Fuentes attacked Trump’s speech as “one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my entire life”: “This was awful. It’s hard to imagine how it could have been worse.”

Tags: Ali Alexander Donald Trump Eric Metaxas Jarrin Jackson Milo Yiannopoulos Nick Fuentes Shane Vaughn Vincent James Election 2024 Leftovers

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/how-news-outlets-handled-trumps-2020-coup-attempt-their-reports-his-2024-run

11/15 announces, stephen schwarzman hard no

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/facebook-fact-checkers-donald-trump/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/ivanka-trump/

11 22 an ah

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised that if he won, there would be a strict separation between his businesses and his political activities. But according to reporting in the New York Times, foreign officials from six different countries “spent more than $750,000” at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. “when they were seeking to influence his administration, renting rooms for more than $10,000 per night.”

Times journalists Luke Broadwater and Eric Lipton, in an article published by the Times on Monday, November 14, report, “The governments of Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and China spent more money than previously known at the Trump International Hotel at crucial times in 2017 and 2018 for those countries’ relations with the United States, according to the documents, which were obtained by the House Oversight Committee and released on Monday.”

The foreign officials, according to Broadwater and Lipton, were big spenders.

“The Malaysian prime minister, for instance, hired a $1500 personal trainer during his stay at the Trump hotel in 2017,” the Times journalists note. “The Saudi Ministry of Defense rented several suites, costing $10,500 each, with rooms reserved under the name ‘His Excellency.’ Qatari officials spent more than $300,000 there in the weeks leading up to a meeting with Mr. Trump in 2018."

Broadwater and Lipton add, “The documents build on the public record of how Mr. Trump’s hotel brought in millions during his presidency from foreign governments. The Oversight Committee has previously estimated that the hotel received more than $3.75 million from foreign governments from 2017 to 2020, raising concerns about possible violations of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause.”

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, the New York Democrat who chairs the House Oversight Committee, told the Times that the documents “sharply call into question the extent to which President Trump was guided by his personal financial interest while in office rather than the best interests of the American people.”

“It paints an extremely troubling picture,” Maloney commented to the Times.

Broadwater and Lipton report, “The (House Oversight) Committee disclosed the latest documents as it released a letter from Ms. Maloney to the National Archives seeking additional documents about the Trump hotel and communications with foreign governments. The National Archives confirmed on Monday that it had received the letter. Ms. Maloney said the additional documents were needed to ‘determine whether former President Trump distorted U.S. foreign policy to serve his own financial interests at the expense of the American people and in violation of his oath of office.’”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/coup-plotters-reunion-ginni-thomas/

an 11 22 badash

Political experts are warning about a group of nearly 60 far-right wing politicos including **Ginni Thomas**, **Matt Schlapp**, and **Cleta Mitchell** who reportedly will issue a letter calling for the House and Senate to delay votes on leadership positions including Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader.

Axios’ Jonathan first reported the news, posting at least part of the letter and the list of signatories (below).

Some of the other more recognizable names on the letter include **Mark Meadows**, the former Trump White House chief of staff; **Cleta Mitchell**, the attorney who The New York Times calls the “architect of Donald J. Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election”; former Trump attorney **Jenna Ellis**; former U.S. Senator and former Heritage Foundation president **Jim DeMint** (R-SC); former Trump deputy campaign manager **David Bossie**, the right wing activist and head of the organization responsible for the **Citizens United** Supreme Court lawsuit that made countless billions of dark money in political elections legal.

Also, white supremacist and disgraced former U.S. Congressman **Steve King** (R-IA); convicted felon and disgraced former U.S. Congressman **Steve Stockman** (R-TX), right-wing religious extremist **Kenneth Blackwell** of the **Family Research Council**, which is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups, and others.

“The Republican Party needs leaders who will confidently and skillfully present a persuasive coherent vision of who we are, what we stand for, and what we will do,” the letter reads. “Many current elections are still undecided. There should be no rushed leadership elections.”

“Conservative Members of the House and Senate have called for the leadership elections to be delayed,” it adds, not naming which ones. “We strongly urge both Houses of Congress to postpone the formal Leadership elections until after the December 6 runoff in Georgia and all election results are fully decided.”

Experts are weighing in and issuing warnings.

“Note at least 3 people on this letter–Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis, and Cleta Mitchell–are almost certainly subjects of the Jan6 investigation,” observed civil rights and national security journalist **Marcy Wheeler**. “So this is partly a crime-protection racket, signed by Clarence Thomas’ spouse.”

HuffPost’s White House correspondent **S.V. Dáte**, who once in a press conference asked Donald Trump if he regretted “all the lying,” likened the list to “a coup-plotters reunion.”

Politico Senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney, who has done extensive reporting on the January 6 insurrection, commented, “some of these people are experts at seeking delays of elections.”

Investigative journalist and columnist Dave Troy, who has done extensive reporting on Vladimir Putin, noted: “All this makes me ask is what these clowns (Ginni Thomas, Cleta Mitchell, Mark Meadows et al) are planning between now and December 6, and how to stop whatever it is. Are they planning to poison someone? What is it this time?”

“Why aren’t these people in jail, anyway?” he also asked.

The American Independent’s senior political reporter Emily C. Singer simply called it a “who’s who of insurrection supporting Republicans.”

“So you’re telling me that Ginni Thomas, Mark Meadows and Matt Schlapp want to interfere in an ANOTHER election,” wrote Attorney Adam Cohen of Lawyers for Good Government. “Folks, even if the Democrats retain the House, we cannot rest. Because these people won’t.”

Read the letter below or at this link.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/trump-communist-rant/

https://boingboing.net/2022/11/08/trump-repeats-prison-rape-threat-against-journalists-has-plans-to-brutally-imprison-significant-numbers-of-reporters-says-rolling-stone.html

PA rally nickname

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/donald-trump-right-wing-rage/

In his speech at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania on Saturday night, Donald Trump couldn't help but take a shot at Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) who will likely be his main competition should they both run for the GOP's 2024 presidential nomination.

That shot by the former president, who will be holding a rally in Florida on Sunday that DeSantis was not invited to, set off a wave of anger by conservatives who aren't interested in an internal GOP war several days before the midterms.

Promoting his strong polling numbers for the 2024 nomination, Trump told the crowd, "There it is, Trump at 71. Ron DeSanctimoniousat 10 percent. Mike Pence at 7–oh, Mike Pence doing better than I thought.”

Trump's dubbing DeSantis as "DeSanctimonious, -- reminiscent of his calling Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) "Lying Ted" and labeling Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as "Little Marco" -- set off a furious backlash against the former president with one prominent critic calling the slur "weak."

As documented by the Daily Beast's Zachary Petrizzo, the conservative response was to fire back at Trump for creating more discord.

According to Petrizzo, conservative gadfly Matt Walsh lashed out, calling it a "dumb nickname" and then added, "Trump isn’t going to be able to take this one [DeSantis] down with a dumb nickname. He better have more than that up his sleeve. Also, nice job launching your public attack against the most popular conservative governor in America three days before the midterms when we’re all supposed to be showing a united front.”

Human Event'spublisher Will Chamberlain sneered at the comment ("This is just weak"), before predicting "Calling it now, DeSantis is going to run, and he’s going to beat Trump badly.”

Normally Trump-supporting Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) sided with DeSantis, writing, "Or… Ron De…SaidNoToFauci… that’s another angle.”

According to Petrizzo, the nickname and attack on DeSantis also irritated Red State editor Jennifer Van Larr, who first wrote, "Enough, Trump. Stop. Move on,"with fellow Red State writer Scott Morefield adding, "Other than being an extremely effective governor and taking one leftist scalp after another, what has Ron DeSantis done to earn Trump’s scorn here right before an election? It’s inexcusable and just shows this has always been about him."

You can read more here.

xian nat'l

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/ron-desantis-2658611577/

trump

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/watchdog-group-14th-amendment-challenge/

Bobb turns/defects? refuses immunity ~ kash

all but announced for 2024 as desperate ctr-pgm or legal sanctuary?

icn 11 22

Douglas Brinkley Rates Presidents for Their Environmental Records, Calling Nixon a ‘Reluctant Environmentalist’ and Donald Trump ‘a Zero on This Issue’

BY DAVID SHRIBMAN

The Rice University historian talks about his forthcoming book “Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and the Great Environmental Awakening...

an 10 22

A presidential historian has offered a blistering assessment of former President Donald Trump's role in influencing political violence and normalizing violent rhetoric.

On Friday, October 28, Michael Beschloss made an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Beat” where he weighed in on the assault of Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “We’re in a time where violence islicensed and encouraged by an ex-president of the United States,” Beschloss said during the broadcast.

“An awful lot of people are encouraged by a former president to think the way you get your political goals — which may be an authoritarian, even fascist, society — is by encouraging violence,” he added. “That’s the climate we’re in.”

Paul Pelosi's attack has caused quite a stir as reports suggest it is politically motivated. Per HuffPost, "Suspect David DePape was after Speaker Pelosi, who was not at the San Francisco home at the time, according to a source briefed on the attack. The Republican Party has long demonized Pelosi in comments and political ads."

Reports have also indicated that DePape has a history of circulating conspiracy theories. Speaking along the same lines, MSNBC’s Katie Phang also spoke during the segment and emphasized that threats against politicians are at an all-time high.

On Friday, per the news outlet, authorities also indicated that "U.S. Capitol Police launched investigations into 1,820 threats and concerning statements in just the first three months of this year."

Speaking to Phang, Beschloss also chimed in saying, “You and I look at the 45 presidents of the United States ― all but about one have taken it seriously that part of their job was preserving public safety."

“Once again, Donald Trump as an ex-president and a president is in a dark category of his own,” Beschloss added. He said Trump “encouraged violence at his rallies” beginning back in 2015 during his campaign, and “did this periodically as president of the United States.”

Phang also highlighted remarks from presidential historian Jon Meachamwhere he issued a stern warning.

“One of the marks of the end of a republic is the normalization of political violence,” Meacham said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” on Friday. “It just is. And everybody needs to remember, including us, that what we say matters, that words have consequences, and that things that seem improbable one hour can happen in the next.”

“Violent acts can change history,” he added. “And a mature democratic society ― lowercase ‘d’ ― has to have a way where we mediate our political differences without political violence.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

10 22

Former President Donald Trump is not done spinning conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. In fact, he recently took those unfounded claims to a new level.

According to HuffPost, the former president participated in a podcast discussion with Dinesh D’Souza, a far-right commentator and known conspiracy theorist who was pardoned by Trump in 2018 after admitting to illegally donating to a Republican political candidate.

During the discussion, Trump attempted to spin a new bizarre claim insisting "people voted 28 times in the 2020 election to cheat him out of a second term in office, HuffPost reports.

At one point, D’Souza asked the former president: “It seems to me that what you’re saying is that you think that there was cheating all different ways."

Trump responded with a reference to D’Souza's documentary titled, "2,000 Mules," before claiming some voters cast multiple votes.

“Yeah, ‘2,000 Mules’ was one way,” Trump replied. “That was a very conclusive way because you were taking government tapes. ... And then, of course, they voted six, seven, eight times. As much as they could in the local area. Some of the people went back, I guess they said 28 times in one day, to vote at different places.”

Although Trump has lauded D'Souza's film, which claims to uncover incidents of voter fraud, it has been described as "endlessly debunkable” by fact checkers.

Trump did not offer a reference for the quoted figure. However, HuffPost notes that "an executive producer of '2,000 Mules' claimed on Fox News earlier this year that the average amount of visits by said mules was 38."

Trump also insisted the so-called "ballot stuffers" refrained from overdoing the scheme so it wouldn't be uncovered. “They’re very smart,” he said.

Although Trump was defeated two years ago, he is continuing to spread lies about the 2020 election as he mulls another run in 2024.

igor salon

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/dress-rehearsal-for-2024-senate/

Former President Donald Trump is already laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the Pennsylvania Senate race, viewing the election as a "dress rehearsal for Trump 2024," according to Rolling Stone.

Trump last month met with Republican allies at Trump Tower to demand they "do something" about the Senate race between Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Republican challenger Mehmet Oz, claiming that there was a "scam" happening in Philadelphia and elsewhere around the state.

"During our briefing, he was concerned that 2020 is going to happen again in 2022," Michael Caputo, a former Trump administration official who attended the meeting along with Bradford County Commissioner Doug McLinko and retired CIA officer Sam Faddis, told Rolling Stone. "Our team encouraged him to be concerned … [Furthermore], I'm advising Republicans to recruit and train election observers and a team of attorneys to oversee historically problematic precincts," Caputo said.

The meeting was one of several in which Trump has discussed plans to challenge the 2022 midterm results, and not just in Pennsylvania, four sources told the outlet, discussing "scorched-earth legal tactics they could deploy."

TrumpWorld is planning "aggressive court campaigns" if there is any hint of doubt about the results, according to the report. Trump himself has been briefed on plans in multiple states, including in Georgia, but he has been particularly fixated on the Pennsylvania race. If Oz does not win or the results are close, sources told Rolling Stone, Trump and other Republicans are already planning to "wage a legal and activist crusade against the 'election integrity' of Democratic strongholds such as Philly," according to the report.

One source told the outlet that Trump is particularly focused on Pennsylvania because he sees the Senate race as a "dress rehearsal for Trump 2024."

Trump during the September meeting urged GOP allies to work to limit mail-in voting in the state, pushing debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen in Philadelphia and demanding officials focus on the heavily Democratic and diverse area, according to the report. Trump has asked several advisers what Republicans are doing to prevent Democrats from "steal[ing] it in Philadelphia [like] they did last time," sources told the outlet.

Numerous Trump allies are ready to help wage another campaign to stoke doubt in election results before any votes are even cast.

"It's important to prepare for legal fights that will inevitably arise," Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House spokesman who now works at the America First Policy Institute,told Rolling Stone. "The effort that the Center for Election Integrity is focused on started at the beginning of this year…We've been seeding efforts across the country in important states…[because] having people on the ground locally is key to these efforts — because if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."

MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who has spent millions pushing lies that voting machines flipped votes from Trump to President Joe Biden, also vowed to fight over the 2022 results.

"No matter what happens, I'm not giving up on getting rid of those voting machines … I will not stop until the machines are gone," Lindell, who is facing a $1 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, told Rolling Stone.

Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who has likewise poured his own money into the "Big Lie" crusade, has teamed with former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn to form the so-called America Project.

"We have made proper preparations for post-election challenges if necessary, but our overwhelming focus is on having a clean, transparent election, which obviates the need for post-election legal scuffles," Byrne told the outlet.

The Republican National Committee is already involved in the race, pushing the state to stop counting mail-in ballots that are missing handwritten dates.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year ruled that tossing such ballots would result in "disenfranchising otherwise qualified voters" over a "meaningless requirement" that does not affect the voters' eligibility. The Supreme Court last week tossed the court's decision but did not rule on whether the ballots are required to be counted. A state court previously ruled that undated ballots can be counted and the state's Supreme Court in 2020 ruled that such ballots should be counted that year but not in future elections.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman issued guidance urging counties to count the undated ballots but the RNC and a group of Pennsylvania Republicans sued last week, asking the state Supreme Court to rule that the undated ballots should not be counted. The lawsuit is led by attorneys Kathleen Gallagher and john Gore, who previously represented Pennsylvania Republicans in their attempt to overturn the 2020 results over late-arriving mail-in ballots.

It's a trend that could play out across the country as numerous election deniers seek midterm wins, including Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and New Hampshire Senate candidate Don Bolduc. And pro-Trump media has boosted the message.

"If it is fair, Kari Lake's going to win," Fox News host Tucker Carlson said recently.

Pro-Trump radio host Mark Levin accused Democrats of "trying to steal the election for Fetterman," citing the dispute over the undated ballots.

The Rolling Stone report noted that Trump's obsession with bolstering the Republican legal infrastructure to challenge the election stands in stark contrast with the "relatively small sums" he has poured into the campaign to boost Oz's chances. His super PAC has spent just $770,000 on TV ads for [OZ?] Trump, compared to $34 million from the Senate Leadership Fund, which is allied with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Some Republicans have taken notice.

"There's a lot of people that were Trump supporters, who backed him through thick and thin," a Pennsylvania Republican attorney told Rolling Stone. "That's not lost on them."

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/j6-committee/ subpoena

why did he want us out of afghan and somalia? before end of term? he had no other accomplishments?

oversight connolly

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/trump-organization-billed-secret-service/

an 10 22

Colorado Republican United States Senate candidate Joe O'Dea revealed on Sunday's edition of CNN's State of the Union that he will “actively campaign against” former President Donald Trump if he mounts a White House bid in 2024.

“I don’t think Donald Trump should run again,” O’Dea said. “I’m going to actively campaign against Donald Trumpand make sure that we’ve got four or five really great Republicans right now" who could defeat Trump in the GOP primary.

“They can run and serve for eight years,” O’Dea predicted of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, ex-South Carolina governor and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. “I’m going to do my job as a U.S. senator to make sure that they have good campaigns in the primary here so we have a good selection of candidates for 2024.”

On Monday, Trump attacked O'Dea on his Twitter copycat app Truth Social as a Republican In Name Only and proclaimed that his Make America Great Again movement only elects the best and brightest people.

"There’s thisRINO character in the Great State of Colorado, Joe O’Dea, that is running against the incumbent Democrat for the United States Senate, who is having a good old time saying that he wants to 'distance' himself from President Trump, and other slightly nasty things. He should look at the Economy, Inflation, Energy Independence, defeating ISIS, the Strongest EVER Border, Great Trade Deals, & much more, before he speaks. MAGA doesn’t Vote for stupid people with big mouths," Trump wrote. "Good luck Joe!"

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/donald-trump-intentional-and-premeditated/

an 10 22

Former President Donald Trump and his aides crafted a proclamation that he won the 2020 election days before it took place, according to an email obtained from the National Archives by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-California), who serves on the bipartisan nine-member panel, stated at Thursday's hearing that "the draft statement which was sent on October 31st declares 'we had an election today and I won.'"

Trump wrote to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton that "the Ballots counted by the Election Day deadline show the American people have bestowed upon me the great honor of reelection of President of the United States."

While prepping victory speeches in advance is not unusual under normal circumstances, Lofgren noted that Trump's instructions to Fitton signify an "intentional" and "premeditated" effort to subvert the democratic process.

"The Fitton memo specifically indicates a plan that only the votes counted by the Election Day deadline – and there is no Election Day deadline – would matter," Lofgren said. "Everyone knew the lawful counting would continue past Election Day. Claiming that the counting on Election Night must stop before millions of votes were counted was, as we now know, a key part of President Trump's premeditated plan."

Watch below or at this link.

10 22 hearing subpoena dt &? "They do expect it to be a unanimous vote by the committee, but what we saw here today was Liz Cheney really lay out Donald Trump — and I use the word coconspirators," Gangel reported. "Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, John Eastman, Jeff Clark, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, and Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff who's refused to testify."

an 10 22

swap docs

...The report states, "Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims," before adding, "In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla."

The Times reports that the former president's aides "never pursued" his plan, and that the episode "...demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show."

The report adds, "Mr. Trump floated the idea of offering the deal to return the boxes in exchange for documents he believed would expose the Russia investigation as a 'hoax' cooked up by the F.B.I. Mr. Trump did not appear to know specifically what he thought the archives had — only that there were items he wanted."...

an 10 22

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was part of the CARES Act of 2020, was launched under former President Donald Trump in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and continued into the Joe Biden era. Some PPP loans were investigated by federal officials and flagged for potential fraud. But according to a Project on Government Oversight (POGO) report released on Thursday, October 6, the Trump Administration eliminated an abundance of flags during its final weeks in office.

Truthout’s Sharon Zhang reports that according to POGO’s report, Small Business Administration (SBA) officials “eliminated 2.7 million flags between December 2020 and January 2021, as the Administration was in its lame duck period.”

In an article published on October 6, Zhang notes, “Special preference was given to the largest loans, which often also went to the largest corporations. On January 16, 2021, four days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s SBA wiped 99 percent of special review flags — which were given out to every loan above $2 million for separate investigatory purposes.”

Zhang notes that according to POGO, the Trump Administration “appeared to have favored the very largest loan recipients.”

“Trump continually gave huge financial favors to large corporations during his time in office — and though most large corporations were exempt from receiving PPP loans, some large corporations managed to skirt the rules and receive loans anyway,” Zhang observes. “Out of the $800 billion given out in the program, flagged loans accounted for at least $189 billion. Because the vast majority of PPP loans — 95 percent — have been forgiven, it’s likely that many of these loans that had previously been flagged have been forgiven entirely.”

Zhang points out that a National Bureau of Economic Research study released in January 2022 “estimated that only between about a quarter and a third of PPP loans went to saving workers’ jobs.”

“The rest — about 66 to 77 percent — went to business owners and people like shareholders,” Zhang reports. “Many loans went directly to the rich. Several billionaires or companies owned by billionaires received loans, like Republican fundraiser Joe Farrell or Kanye West’s apparel company, valued at $3 billion. One loan, POGO found, went to a hotel owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican who is the richest man in the state and a former billionaire.”

Zhang adds, “The loan was worth $8.9 million and appeared to have been flagged eight times by the SBA. Another loan with nine flags, worth over $5 million, appears to belong to a Kentucky hospitality corporation whose annual revenue of $850 million would likely make it too large to receive a PPP loan.”

an 10 22

**Donald Trump** on Tuesday petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in his classified documents case, and reverse a ruling from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed the U.S. Dept. of Justice access to the more than 100 classified and top secret documents federal agents recovered from his Mar-a-Lago residence and resort.

Trump is asking the nation’s highest court to order a special master to continue to inspect the 103 classified documents, despite the special master emphatically stating the government, not Trump, gets to decide what is classified and what is not, especially when Trump refused to provide a list of what he considered declassified.

The lawsuit, which is a massive 240 pages, mostly made up of other documents including the now infamous FBI photo of the classified documents on the Mar-a-Lago rug, is addressed to “The Honorable Clarence Thomas, Circuit Justice for the Eleventh Circuit,” and refers to the former president as “President Trump.”

The lawsuit also mentions the contents that federal agents took, including “89 empty envelopes,” while not noting they were classified document envelopes.

“As part of the 11th Circuit’s decision, the panel allowed the criminal investigation to use the seized documents, something [Judge] Cannon had previously barred,” The Washington Post notes. “Trump’s filing seeks only to reverse the appeals court’s ruling on the special master’s access to the documents, not the part of the decision concerning the investigation.”

n korea = commie?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/donald-trump-kamala-harris-sympathizer/

55 crimes

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/watchdog-staggering-donald-trump-accusations/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/donald-trump-endorses-jair-bolsonaro/

tish james, 3 kids

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/trump-fraud/

david corn

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/qmaga-how-qanon-maga-and-christian-nationalism-are-a-recipe-for-fearmongering-madness-journalist/

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-executive-nick-cleggs-latest-comments-suggest-trump-will-likely-be-back-platform

https://www.mediamatters.org/msnbc/msnbcs-chris-hayes-its-tom-fitton-who-ended-putting-donald-trump-arguably-most-acute-legal

// alex clinton sock drawer taylor branch pvt tapes

CHRIS HAYES (HOST): What is sort of remarkable, honestly, is that in most cases, Trump actually has kind of a fine-tuned antenna for just how close he can get to the line without crossing into outright easily provable crimes. That has saved him many times before. But this time, it appears that he stepped right over that line, the crystal clear line that his lawyers told him were there. And to understand why that finally happened, you have to look at who he's actually listening to. Because he was ignoring his highly qualified White House lawyers, Pat Philbin, Pat Cipollone, Eric Herschmann. Instead, he was reportedly taking the advice of this guy.

[...]

So that's a guy named Tom Fitton. He's like a second, third tier conservative activist. Head of the right-wing group, Judicial Watch. They've been around for forever. A somewhat ludicrous figure honestly. I put him in the, like, Ginni Thomas category of the American right. Imagine a more senior James O'Keefe on steroids [literally].

...

Now, I should note here, Tom Fitton is not a lawyer. He's just a dude with some big money right-wing donors, I guess. But he's been giving Donald Trump a lot of legal advice that the ex-president is actually listening to. Since as early as February, Fitton has reportedly been calling Trump, telling him it was a mistake to give the records from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives, that his team should have never let the Archives quote, "strong-arm" him into returning them. Fitton said the records belonged to Trump, citing a 2012 court case involving his organization that he said gave the former president authority to do what he wanted with records from his own term in office. He suggested to Trump that if the Archives came back, he should not give up any additional records. Trump, quote, "began obsessing over Fitton's arguments, complaining to aides about the 15 boxes that were handed over" and "even asked Fitton at one point to brief his attorneys." I'm sure that they loved that one. As one person close to the ex-president put it, quote, "The moment Tom got in the boss' ear, it was downhill from there." You know, it's like the Overstock guy or the Pillow guy.

So Tom Fitton, professional right-wing scandal monger, appears to have facilitated the kind of black and white commission of an easily provable crime that Donald Trump on his own had so far managed to avoid.It's really an amazing feat, of all people, it's Tom Fitton who ended up putting Donald Trump in arguably the most acute legal peril he has ever been in. Well played.

mma 922

JAKE TAPPER (HOST): Former President Trump addressed supporters during a rally for Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance, during which there were many bizarre moments, including what many observers have noted appears to be echoes of the propaganda put out by adherents of the deranged and occasionally deadly QAnon conspiracy theory, propaganda that Trump has repeatedly and unequivocally shared in recent weeks on his social media account. CNN's Sara Sidner joins us now live with more on this. Sara, can you point to the things that Trump said or did that are linked to the QAnon conspiracy?

SARA SIDNER (CORRESPONDENT): Yeah, Jake, you know, this weekend Trump made a very ominous and dark speech about the decline of America. And while doing so, music began playing. And the music sounded exactly like a song called, "WWG1WGA," "Where We Go One, We Go All," it's what that stands for. It's a slogan that was co-opted by QAnon conspiracy theorists and used over and over and over again. For some in the QAnon world, this was another symbol, a wink and a nod to them that Donald Trump is a believer in their outlandish conspiracies.

...

These are not at all the first links that Donald Trump has made with QAnon, but this past week have been the most overt. We were able to speak to a Trump spokesperson who responded to questions about the song that was played,saying it was not a QAnon song at all, but a song called "Mirror" and then said this, that, "The fake news, in a pathetic attempt to create controversy and divide America, is brewing up another conspiracy about a royalty free song from a popular audio library platform."

Now, the way that Media Matters, a group which tracks right-wing political extremists in media, saysTrump has posted or reposted more than 100 messages linked to QAnon since the beginning of the year.

an 9 22

A former Republican congresswoman is blasting a recent speech from former President Donald Trump, calling it "humiliating" and referring to the event as a "QAnon Fest."

Barbara Comstock, who served as a GOP representative from Virginia from 2015 to 2019, spoke Sunday evening following the former president's speech. The event, which took place in Youngstown, Ohio, was a rally in support of Senate candidate J.D. Vance, someone who Trump has boosted heavily in recent months.

The speech was largely full of most of the same rhetoric that has been heard from Trump since he left office, and Comstock told CNN anchor Jim Acosta that the event was a "contribution to [Democratic challenger] Tim Ryan." She went on to say that Trump made "J.D. Vance look like a mouse, not a man."

"It was humiliating," Comstock added. "It was a QAnon fest, it was playing this strange QAnon music, they were all sort of, you know, bowing - I think Marjorie Greene was there talking about the one true leader." The event featured a number of bizarre outings, such as one moment when the rally attendees raised their hands to the former president in an apparent show of loyalty.

However, Comstock noted that, while Trump has often pushed the size of his rally crowds, the event was lightly attended.

"I think this is the last gasp of a dying cult...J.D. Vance is really a shell of a person to be there, bowing and scraping to somebody who he rightfully attacked just a few years ago," she said.

Watch video below or at this link.

an 9 22

The former leader of the free world spoke for 103 minutes at a Saturday campaign rally in Ohio.

As his long-winded speech began winding down, dramatic music played while Donald Trump continued speaking.

"This is deeply, deeply weird," tweeted Tom Nichols of The Atlantic.

"It really is Jonestown-level stuff. These people are worshiping a real estate developer from Queens who can barely hold a thought in his head," he wrote. "This is beyond un-American. It's psychotic."

The conservative writer suggested Democrats run ads featuring Trump's Youngstown rally.

"I think Democrats should run clips of the weird culty shit that just happened at the Trump rally and ask: "Is this the party you want running the country? Trump is the best weapon Democrats have," Nichols wrote.

Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey sounded alarmed.

"Astonishing Trump language. The crowd is similar to a Nuremberg rally in 1936," he wrote.

"A lawless Trump in office in the 2024 election would slide us into autocracy and deny our Constitutional safeguards. This is our greatest danger as a nation since 1860," McCaffrey warned.

Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote, "Very scarily and tragically, this will only get worse…"

"A rally or a death cult?" wondered Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen. "This is seriously strange. Also: notice the empty seats."

Will Bunch, a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote, "Fascism...now with music!"

Watch below or at this link:

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/trump-accused-of-extortion-over-attempt-to-force-cnn-sale-to-rupert-murdoch-new-book-2658253590/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/donald-trump-full-presidential-pardons/

~ Biden sp on save democ called out trump maga

bunch of deflective desperate twtstorms?

Former President Donald Trump on Monday called for a redo of the 2020 election in an angry rant on his financially imperiled Twitter knockoff app Truth Social.

:{At 11:39 a.m., Trump stated that he should be declared the winner of the contest that he lost in a landslide to President Joe Biden:

So now it comes out, conclusively, that the FBI BURIED THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY BEFORE THE ELECTION knowing that, if they didn’t, 'Trump would have easily won the 2020 Presidential Election.' This is massive FRAUD & ELECTION INTERFERENCE at a level never seen before in our Country. REMEDY: Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election, immediately!

Trump's outrage stemmed from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's revelation to podcaster Joe Rogan last Thursday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned Zuckerberg that articles relating to Hunter Biden's laptop were pieces of Russian propaganda. Facebook then suppressed posts about the president's son and his computer.

The FBI said in a statement after Zuckerberg's interview with Rogan that it "routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats."

The FBI also told Fox Business that "foreign threat indicators to help them protect their platforms and customers from abuse by foreign malign influence actors."

an 822

In an editorial titled "Donald Trump Is Not Above the Law" on Friday, The New York Times editorial board called for the former president to be prosecuted.

This comes as the Justice Department is advancing a criminal investigation into highly classified documents improperly concealed by the former president at his Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida — but, the board wrote, he should also face charges for his role in inciting the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

"Mr. Trump’s unprecedented assault on the integrity of American democracy requires a criminal investigation," wrote the board. "The disturbing details of his postelection misfeasance, meticulously assembled by the Jan. 6 committee,leaves little doubt that Mr. Trump sought to subvert the Constitution and overturn the will of the American people. The president, defeated at the polls in 2020, tried to enlist federal law enforcement authorities, state officials and administrators of the nation’s electoral system in a furious effort to remain in power. When all else failed, he roused an armed mob that stormed the Capitol and threatened lawmakers."

"This board is aware that in deciding how Mr. Trump should be held accountable under the law it is necessary to consider not just whether criminal prosecution would be warranted but whether it would be wise. No American president has ever been criminally prosecuted after leaving office," said the board. "When President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, he ensured that Nixon would not be prosecuted for crimes committed during the Watergate scandal; Ford explained this decision with the warning that such a prosecution posed grave risks of rousing 'passions' and worsening political polarization."

This time, however, exonerating a former president from such serious allegations simply for his stature is a "far greater risk," the board argued: "Mr. Trump’s actions as a public official, like no others since the Civil War, attacked the heart of our system of government. He used the power of his office to subvert the rule of law. If we hesitate to call those actions and their perpetrator criminal, then we are saying he is above the law and giving license to future presidents to do whatever they want."

"No one should revel in the prospect of this or any former president facing criminal prosecution," concluded the board. "Mr. Trump’s actions have brought shame on one of the world’s oldest democracies and destabilized its future. Even justice before the law will not erase that stain. Nor will prosecuting Mr. Trump fix the structural problems that led to the greatest crisis in American democracy since the Civil War. But it is a necessary first step toward doing so."

You can read more here.

who were 2 pol apptee?

an 8 22 ah

Since leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump hasn’t been shy about lambasting former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr— who he now despises for refusing to go along with the Big Lie and Trump’s false, totally debunked claim that widespread voter fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election. Trump now views Barr as a Republican who, like former Vice President Mike Pence, didn’t have the courage to stick by him.

But before the election, Barr’s critics often slammed him for being a Trump loyalist who defended Trump vigorously after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his final report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Attorney Neal Katyal, in an op-ed published by the New York Times on August 30, offers some reasons why a recently released March 24, 2019 memo paints such a troubling picture of Barr and his relationship with then-President Trump.

The memo, released by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on August 21, details Barr’s justifications for the DOJ clearing Trump of obstruction charges. These days, Trump views Barr as a traitor to the MAGA cause. But in 2019, he praised Barr as someone who had the backbone to come through for him in a way that former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions didn’t.

“The memo released last week by the Justice Department closing the book on the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election is a frightening document,” explains Katyal, a former solicitor genreal who is often featured as a legal expert on MSNBC. “Critics have rightly focused on its substance, slipshod legal analysis and omission of damning facts. But the process by which that memo, sent in March 2019, came to be is just as worrisome.”

The attorney continues, “Delivered to the attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, the memo was written by two political appointees in the Justice Department. Mr. Barr used the memo to go around the special counsel regulations and to clear President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice. If left to fester, this decision will have pernicious consequences for investigations of future high-level wrongdoing.”

Katyal goes on to offer some more reasons why he finds the March 24, 2019 memo so troubling.As Katyal sees it, the memo is an example of the United States’ system of checks and balances being undermined during the Trump years.

“The 2019 memo tendentiously argued that Mr. Trump committed no crimes — leaving the final decision on the matter to Republican-aligned appointees instead of to the independent special counsel,” Katyal notes. “The challenge in devising the regulations was to develop a framework for the prosecution of high-level executive branch officials — which is harder than it sounds, because the Constitution requires the executive branch to control prosecutions. So, we are left with one of the oldest philosophical problems: Who will guard the guardians?”

During Mueller’s investigation, many MAGA Republicans tried to paint him as a Democratic partisan — even though the former FBI director was a conservative and a lifelong Republican who had been on very friendly terms with the George W. Bush Administration. But during the Russian investigation, Mueller’s admirers often praised him for valuing country over party. When Democrats and Never Trump conservatives used the word “institutionalist” to describe Mueller in 2017 or 2018, it was meant as high praise.

A special counsel in a federal investigation, Katyal stresses, needs to be someone who is independent rather than partisan — which Special Counsel Mueller was. But Barr, Katyal laments, undermined Special Counsel Mueller’s work in the end.

“We created the role of special counsel to fill a void — to concentrate in one person responsibility and ultimate blame so that investigations would not be covered up from the get-go and to give that person independence from political pressure,” Katyal writes. “It is outrageous that Mr. Barr acted so brazenly in the face of this framework. The point of requiring a special counsel was to provide for an independent determination of any potential criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Trump. But the political appointees in his Justice Department took what was the most important part of that inquiry — the decision of whether he committed crimes — and grabbed it for themselves. This was a fundamental betrayal of the special counsel guidelines not for some principle, but because it protected their boss, Mr. Trump.”

ref

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/bill-barr-donald-trumpjustice-department-mueller-obstruction-memo

bill **Barr** played a starring role in the January 6 committee’s public hearings this summer when he declared in videotaped testimony that Donald Trump’s election fraud claims were “bullshit,” “completely bullshit,” “stupid,” “crazy,” “complete nonsense,” and “a great, great disservice to the country.” But it’s important to remember that for the majority of the time he was serving as attorney general, Barr operated the Justice Department like it was the 45th president’s personal law firm and his title was “chief footstool to Donald Trump.” Yes, whether he was claiming, with a straight face, that the FBI had violated Trump’s “civil liberties,” using the DOJ to try to kill a rape defamation suit against the president, or attempting to bury the “urgent“ whistle-blower report that became the basis of the House’s first impeachment proceedings against Trump, Barr made his loyalties very, very clear. But in case you needed further evidence that the former AG was a total hack, today’s your lucky day!

On Wednesday, the government released the 2019 DOJ memo Barr used as justification for not charging Trump with obstructing the Mueller investigation, despite the fact that the special counsel found numerous instances of obstruction by Trump that could have resulted in him being charged with a crime, from firing FBI director James Comey and telling a White House lawyer to fire Robert Mueller to warning witnesses not to flip. Yet the memo, which was written, at Barr’s request, by Steven Engel, the former assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, and Ed O’Callaghan, the principal associate deputy attorney general, insist none of that was worth taking legal action, a conclusion they came to based on what some say was a twisting of facts and legal falsehoods.

For starters, the memo argues that obstruction charges are usually brought when an individual blocks the investigation and prosecution of an underlying crime, and since the Mueller probe did not establish one, they shouldn‘t charge Trump. That, of course, is not how the law works, which is why if you hide evidence from the cops about an attempted murder that didn’t actually result in someone being killed, you’d very likely still be in trouble. Then, there’s the memo writers’ claim that because other people didn’t go along with Trump‘s attempts to obstruct justice, he shouldn’t be charged. This is, once again, not how the law works!

As former Veterans Affairs employee and Mueller, She Wrote podcast host Allison Gill tweeted Wednesday, “That would be like if I told the getaway driver to blow up the bank and [if] they didn’t, I’m off the hook.” The memo also wildly asserts, without evidence, that Trump did the things he did, like asking White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, “not for an illegal purpose, but rather because he believed the investigation was politically motivated and undermined his administration’s efforts to govern.” It also cites the fact that Trump never literally used the word fire to McGahn when he was talking about Mueller, probably because he operates like a mafia boss who speaks in code. (In sworn testimony, McGahn said Trump called him at home and told him “Mueller has to go” and “call me back when you do it.”) As for Trump then instructing McGahn to lie about trying to get Mueller fired, we already know the Barr DOJ’s thoughts there, given that while testifying, Barr told lawmakers it was “not a crime” for the president to demand staffers lie to investigators.

Responding to the memo on Twitter, Norm Eisen, an attorney and former U.S. ambassador, wrote: “No wonder a series of judges have slammed Barr for dishonesty in connection with all this. It’s garbage. Anyone else woulda been prosecuted. Barr should be disciplined.” Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor and former prosecutor, told The New York Times: “It reads more like a defense lawyer’s brief than a full and balanced analysis citing the legal authorities.” Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor, described the memo as a “get out of jail free” card, telling The Times: “It’s hard to stomach a memo that amounts to saying someone is not guilty of obstruction for deliberately trying to induce witnesses not to cooperate with law enforcement in a major criminal investigation.”

Last year, two federal courts concluded that Barr had already decided not to charge Trump before commissioning the memo, and signed it after informing Congress of his decision. When it was released in redacted form in May 2021, Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote, “The agency’s redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum, and the excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the Attorney General to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time. The fact that [Trump] would not be prosecuted was a given.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/bill-barr-should-be-disciplined/

Legal experts are reviewing a legal memo that served as the basis for Attorney General Bill Barr deciding to not charge then-President Donald Trump with obstruction of justice, and they are calling it “garbage,” “disingenuous,” a “total whitewash,” and “ass-covering.”

The memo, published Wednesday afternoon by The New York Times, is dated March 24, 2019.

“For the reasons stated below,” it reads in part, “we conclude that the evidence described in Volume II of the Report is not, in our judgment, sufficient to support a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt that the President violated the obstruction-of-justice statutes. In addition, we believe that certain of the conduct examined by the Special Counsel could not, as a matter of law, support an obstruction charge under the circumstances. Accordingly, were there no constitutional barrier, we would recommend, under the Principles of Federal Prosecution, that you decline to commence such a prosecution.”

Norm Eisen, a well-known Harvard-educated attorney, former U.S. Ambassador, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and a CNN legal analyst calls the legal memo “garbage.”

“No wonder a series of judges have slammed Barr for dishonesty in connection with all this,” Eisen writes. “It’s garbage. Anyone else woulda been prosecuted. Barr should be disciplined.”

Attorney Andrew Weissman calls the memo “disingenuous” and a “total whitewash.”

He adds: “note no discussion of Barr telling Special Counsel Mueller that he should make the decision whether Trump obstructed justice. Why? Because new DOJ memo reveals they thought Mueller Report could be read to say he did obstruct! So Barr shd say the opposite.”

CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig calls the memo “ass-covering.”

“To recap,” he writes, detailing these bullet points:

“Mueller failed by refusing to state a conclusion,” “Barr publicly distorted Mueller’s findings,” “DOJ drafted this flimsy, ass-covering memo,” “Barr misled a federal court about this bogus memo,” “Garland appealed on Barr’s behalf, and lost.”}:

This is a breaking news and developing story.

jnz backtrack?

https://boingboing.net/2022/08/22/alex-jones-begs-for-forgiveness-in-panicked-emergency-message-to-trump-video.html

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/barr-burning-man/

no lnx twt

Appeals court orders release of secret memo Barr 'used to undercut the Mueller report'

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams August 21, 2022

A federal appeals court on Friday ordered the release of a 2019 memorandum about whether then-President Donald Trump obstructed Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)—the watchdog fighting to reveal the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) memo prepared for then-Attorney General Bill Barr—celebrated the ruling as a win.

"Attorney General Barr cited this memo as a reason not to charge President Trump with obstruction of justice," said CREW spokesperson Jordan Libowitz in a statement. "The American people deserve to know what it says. Now they will."

The unanimous ruling from three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed a lower court's opinion about the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel memo—a redacted version of which was made public last year.

D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, joined by Judges Judith Rogers and David Tatel, outlined how the DOJ tried to conceal most of the memo "based on the deliberative process privilege, which protects records documenting an agency's internal deliberations en route to a governmental decision," but the lower court judge, Amy Berman Jackson, rejected that argument.

Jackson determined the DOJ failed to show that the privilege applied—specifically, she found that the department "had not identified a relevant agency decision as to which the memorandum formed part of the deliberations," Friday's ruling highlights.

"The department's submissions, the court explained, indicated that the memorandum conveyed advice about whether to charge the president with a crime. But the court's in camera review of the memorandum revealed that the department in fact never considered bringing a charge," it continues. "Instead, the memorandum concerned a separate decision that had gone entirely unmentioned by the government in its submissions to the court—what, if anything, to say to Congress and the public about the Mueller report."

As Bloomberg detailed:

Srinivasan... wrote that any analysis in the memo about bringing obstruction charges was more like a "thought experiment."

Srinivasan noted that the department expressed "regret" about leaving a "misimpression that an actual charging decision was under consideration," but he wrote that it missed opportunities to address the true purpose of the memo.

The court rejected the government's request for another chance to make the case for keeping the full memo secret. Srinivasan wrote that the Justice Department might have successfully argued to keep the memo sealed if it had revealed the public messaging purpose from the beginning and then tried to invoke what's known as the deliberative process privilege, but that it was too late now.

The DOJ has a week to consider appealing the latest decision. The Washington Post reported that spokespeople for the department and Barr declined to comment.

Politico noted Friday:

Trump was never charged in Mueller's probe and the special prosecutor's final report declined to opine on whether what he did in response to the investigation amounted to a crime.

However, some Trump opponents have called on the Attorney General Merrick Garland to reconsider the issue now that Trump is no longer president. Release of the long-sought DOJ memo could fuel those calls and draw more unwanted attention to Trump's potential criminal liability at a time when he is besieged by a slew of other legal woes relating to his handling of classified government records, his role in inspiring many of those involved in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and his broader efforts to overturn Joe Biden's win in the 2020 presidential election.

As Common Dreams reported Thursday, a federal judge gave the DOJ a week to propose redactions to the warrant affidavit containing the information that led to last week's search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida home.

an 8 22 tom b raw

According to a deep dive by the New York Times, Donald Trump and his former White House Chief of staff rushed to get private FBI files redacted so the former president could declassify them and turn them over to journalistssympathetic to his administration.

The report states that work was completed just three days before Trump left office but was abandoned by Meadows after he was advised he could and government officials could be in conflict with privacy laws.

According to the report, "In Mr. Trump’s last weeks in office, Mr. Meadows, with the president’s blessing, prodded federal law enforcement agencies to declassify a binder of Crossfire Hurricane materials that included unreleased information about the F.B.I.’s investigative steps and text messages between two former top F.B.I. officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who had sharply criticized Mr. Trump in their private communications during the 2016 election."

The Times reports that FBI officials were concerned about releasing anything from the files, but that Meadows, "dismissed those arguments, saying that Mr. Trump himself wanted the information declassified and disseminated."

According to the report, "Just three days before Mr. Trump’s last day in office, the White House and the F.B.I. settled on a set of redactions, and Mr. Trump declassified the rest of the binder. Mr. Meadows intended to give the binder to at least one conservative journalist, according to multiple people familiar with his plan."

That plan was set aside after Meadows was warned off, with the Times reporting, "Justice Department officials pointed out that disseminating the messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page could run afoul of privacy law, opening officials up to suit."

The report adds that those files were not ones that were recently seized at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort just over two weeks ago.

You can read more here.

1m$ maralago BS

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/trumps-fundraiser/

mueller?

an 8 22

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) search of Mar-a-Lago was specifically focused on the recovery of a "personal 'stash' of hidden documents" reportedly kept by former President Donald Trump, according to two high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials.

Speaking to Newsweek, inside sources shared details about the FBI's investigation. The FBI agents reportedly justified the highly publicized search by going "into Trump's residence on the pretext that they were seeking all government documents, says one official who has been involved in the investigation."

"They collected everything that rightfully belonged to the U.S. government but the true target was these documents that Trump had been collecting since early in his administration," said the source, who spoke anonymously.

A former official for the Trump administration also shared details about the specific documents that were being sought.

"Trump was particularly interested in matters related to the Russia hoax and the wrong-doings of the deep state," one former Trump official told the news outlet. "I think he felt, and I agree, that these are facts that the American people need to know."

Another official, who also opted to remain nameless also weighed in on the classification status of the documents and the legal requirements for those documents.

"All official documents, regardless of classification, are required to be returned to the Archives under the Presidential Records Act," one official said. "And surely the FBI was going about its business of retrieving everything."

Explaining the sensitive nature of the documents, one official also explained why these documents are particularly important.

"What we're talking about here is not just documents that the Archives was seeking to fulfill the provisions of the Act," one official said. "They were also after some number of documents that they considered more sensitive, but also documents that they felt the former president had no intention to return."

favorable? / judge ruled house could have tax docs?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/allen-weisselberg-negotiating-plea-deal/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/donald-trump-sportswashing-saudi-arabia/

an 8 22

no lnx twt

Donald Trump peddles conspiracy theory about FBI 'planting' evidence, took passports?

Igor Derysh and Salon August 10, 2022

President Donald Trump and his lawyers pushed a conspiracy theory that FBI agents may have "planted" incriminating evidence while executing a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

FBI agents on Monday executed a warrant at Trump's Palm Beach home, meaning that a judge found enough probable cause to approve the search. Agents investigating presidential documents that Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago, including classified materials, removed 12 boxes of items from Mar-a-Lago after Trump turned over 15 boxes of materials to the National Archives earlier this year, according to the Washington Post.Trump attorney Christina Bobb told the outlet that the search warrant indicated that the FBI is investigating possible violations of the Presidential Records Act and laws related to the handling of classified material. Trump has thus far refused to release his copy of the search warrant even though it could provide transparency on what agents were searching for.

Bobb said that she was not allowed to observe the search, as is common during such FBI operations. But Trump and his lawyers have seized on that fact to push a conspiracy theory that the FBI may have "planted" something without providing any evidence to support their claims.

"The FBI and others from the Federal Government would not let anyone, including my lawyers, be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on Mar-a-Lago," Trump said on his Twitter knockoff Truth Social. "Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing[CCTV?] , taking or, hopefully not, 'planting.' Why did they STRONGLY insist on having nobody watching them, everybody out? Obama and Clinton were never 'raided,' despite big disputes!"

Bobb, a former TV host at the right-wing outlet OAN who joined Trump's legal team, made a similar claim on Monday, citing only the fact that she was not allowed to observe the search.

"There is no security that something wasn't planted," Bobb said in an interview, adding, "I'm not saying that's what they did."

"At this point, I don't necessarily think that they would even go to the extent of trying to plant information, I think they just make stuff up and come up with whatever they wantand that's the way that they will have to proceed in order to actually try to indict the president because they don't have anything," she said.

Fellow Trump attorney Alina Habba told Fox News that she was also "concerned that they may have planted something. You know, at this point, who knows? I don't trust the government and that's a very frightening thing as an American."

Trump's right-wing allies have parroted this evidence-free claim to their followers.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., cited his distrust of the government to suggest that the FBI "may put something" in the boxes they removed from Mar-a-Lago to "entrap" Trump.

"I think there is an extremely high probability that the FBI planted 'evidence' against President Trump," tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. "Otherwise WHY would they NOT allow his attorneys or anyone watch them while they conducted their unprecedented raid? They know the consequences of an empty handed power move."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and Trump ally Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, both discussed their belief that the FBI may have "planted evidence" on Kirk's show Monday.

Trump's defenders on Fox News have also echoed the claim.

"They could have easily negotiated the return of documents like that without guns and warrants. What the FBI is probably doing is planting evidence," Fox News host Jesse Watters said without any evidence. "We also have a hunch they doctored evidence to get the warrant."

Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt suggested that FBI agents may have dumped "backpacks" full of incriminating evidence at Mar-a-Lago.

"His lawyer said they brought in backpacks, what was in those backpacks?" Earhardt said. "Did they bring those in to fill them up or did they have something in there?"

Agents raided Mar-a-Lago because they believed Trump did not turn over all classified information he had taken to his home, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump's lawyers had been in discussions with federal officials about the records for months. Trump attorneys in June showed investigators a basement room where boxes of materials were being stored. The Justice Department directed Trump's team to secure the room, prompting them to add a padlock to the door. It's unclear what triggered Monday's raid.

Legal experts pushed back on the claims. Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig called the idea that FBI agents "may" have planted evidence "ridiculous."

"How would anybody even know at this point?" he questioned. "If you're going to fabricate some accusation, at least wait until you might plausibly have a basis for it."

Former federal prosecutor Richard Signorelli condemned Trump's attorneys for pushing the claim.

"These are baseless lies but unfortunately will be believed by deranged, ignorant MAGA cult members," he tweeted.

Defense attorney Ken White noted that forbidding anyone from observing their searches is standard practice.

"Law enforcement does not let anyone, including lawyers, observe what they're doing during searches," he wrote. "They typically remove everyone from the searched area. This has always been the case. This is the latest 'it's an outrage when the typical happens to me.'"

Former federal prosecutor Michael Stern suggested that TrumpWorld is trotting out the claim because the FBI may have found damaging evidence at his home.

"I have written hundreds of search warrants. Lawyers and people whose homes are being search[ed] are routinely not present during the search," he wrote. "That Trump is now talking about 'planted' evidence means he knows there is something damning they found."

Following the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) search of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, Republican lawmakers are reportedly looking to shift the focus from the relentless Trump-centric news cycle.

According to HuffPost, Republicans are responding to the search on Trump's property by criticizing an unrelated topic: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Per the news outlet, Republican lawmakers are "desperate to change the subject to something else ― anything else" and are now focused on "pushing an extremely weird and false talking point: Tens of thousands of tax collectors are coming for you."

On Monday, August 8, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) shared his reaction via Twitter as he pivoted to concerns about the IRS. “The FBI raiding Donald Trump is unprecedented,” he tweeted. “The Biden Admin has fully weaponized DOJ & FBI to target their political enemies. And with 87K new IRS agents, they’re coming for YOU too.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) also tweeted his complaints about the United States justice system as he shared his disapproval of the IRS. “One more example of our two-tiered system of justice,” tweeted Johnson. “Who do you think they’ll weaponize the 87,000 IRS agents against? The answer is obvious. Their political enemies.”

On Tuesday, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) tweeted to criticize Democrats' passing of new legislation to provide funding for more than 80,000 agents.

“Senate Democrats just passed their insane tax-and-spend package, which includes funding for more than 87,000 new IRS agents — more than State, DoD, and CBP combined,” Cammack tweeted. “This nonsense +wild weaponization of the FBI + Democrats’ inflation, crime, border crises = @HouseGOP landslide.”

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) also warned American citizens about the IRS and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) echoed a similar sentiment. "If the FBI can raid the home of a former US President, imagine what 87,000 more IRS agents will do to you,” tweeted Banks.

“The same Democrats cheering on the FBI raiding President Trump’s house are trying to give the IRS 87,000 new agents and an additional $80 billion,” tweeted Boebert. “And we’re supposed to believe they won’t alsoweaponize the IRS?”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also expressed frustration as news about the FBI's search continued to circulate online.

“The @FBI raid on President Trump was approved by Director Wray, who also claimed that the illegal FISA warrants used to spy on Trump were constitutional,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who voted in favor of confirming FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Today’s raid is outrageous and unjust, but predictable.”

“Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times from 3rd world Marxist dictatorships. But never before in America,” tweeted Rubio.

Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) also argued that the FBI's actions were an example of "inconsistent and partisan" action. “The inconsistent and partisan application of the law by the FBI has gone too far,” argued Harshbarger. “The Democrats, for too long, have used our government agencies from the FBI to the IRS to target their political opponents.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/trust-the-plan-qanon-conspiracy-theorists-believe-mar-a-lago-search-will-benefit-trump/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/lock-and-load-maga-extremists/

[[an 8 22

A new report is shedding more light on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) findings during the search of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. According to CNN, new about the FBI gaining access to Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage.

During Wednesday's segment of CNN's "At This Hour" with host Kate Bolduan, Katelyn Polantz offered a brief update on what transpired at the former president's estate on Tuesday, August 9.

"There were new details about FBI's Florida home," Bolduan said. "CNN has learned from investigators that the former president or his team did not return the government documents that were taken when they left the White House."

Polantz chimed in with further details about what was retrieved during the search. "It's been two days since the search and we are learning more about what prompted it in Mar-a-Lago on Monday," Polantz explained.

"So, law enforcement had serious concerns about what was happening there on the Trump side," she noted. "Back in January, the national archives went to Florida to reclaim 15 boxes of records from the Trump presidency that were not Trump's to keep. So, we knew that."

Polantz added, "And then that incident launched this criminal investigation into the handling of classified records. Then this week, of course, the DOJ goes back in with a search warrant for more boxes and documents and those records, if they had gotten out, could have national security implications and that's according to our sources now."

The CNN correspondent went on to share details about the surveillance videos the FBI gained access to at the former president's estate. "So we also know in this investigation that federal authorities subpoenaed and received access to Mar-a-Lago's surveillance videos so that they were able to understand the security around these documents in recent weeks," she said.

"On top of that, sources tell Pamela Brown, Caitlin Collins, and I that they weren't being entirely truthful with them in recent months as law enforcement was working on the problem where Trump still had these presidential records in his possession," Polantz said, adding, "So, on the Trump side of things, we now understand that advisers around him thought the investigation until essentially Monday was stalled out; that it had gone silent."

She also noted the angle Trump's team may take in an effort to defend him. "Now their argument, we believe, will be that Trump didn't keep documents with national security secrets at Mar-a-Lago because when he was president they're saying he declassified them," she said.

Polantz concluded with a small disclaimer as she emphasized that direct details about the nature of the investigation still remain unknown. "But just a reminder here, we don't fully know what the Justice Department is investigating. That's how these things work. Investigations take time and happen in secret and we are looking for more, but right now most of those details are under seal."

Watch the video below or at this link.

---

Indiana Rep. Banks facing 'insurrection' ballot challenge

By TOM DAVIES, Associated Press -2 22

Provided by Associated Press

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — An Indiana congressman who was rejected by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the top Republican for the committee investigating last year’s U.S. Capitol insurrection is fending off an effort to remove his name from this year's election ballot.

The challenge to Rep. Jim Banks’ candidacy is at least the second across the country against a Republican House member citing a portion of a post-Civil War amendment to the U.S. Constitution pertaining to insurrections against the United States.

Banks, an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump and leader of the influential Republican Study Committee, has denounced the ballot challenge as frivolous.

It was filed by a long-shot Democratic candidate for Banks’ congressional seat and likely has little chance of success when it goes before the state election commission on Friday, a former longtime commission member said.

A similar challenge is pending against North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who spoke at the rally supporting Trump before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot that interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

The Indiana challenge petition filed byDemocrat Aaron Calkins claims Banks is ineligible to be a candidate because of a “violation of the 14th Amendment supporting an insurrection.” The filing with the state election commission didn’t include additional information supporting the claim against Banks and Calkins didn’t return a telephone message from The Associated Press seeking comment.

The 14th Amendment says no one can serve in Congress “who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress ... to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”

an 8 22

House Republicans, including **Rep. Jim Banks** (R-IN), the chair of far-right Republican Study Committee, traveled to **Donald Trump**‘s Bedminster, New Jersey golf resort one day after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago home to urge him to announce his 2024 run for president.

Congressman Banks is a far-right Republican who spread Trump’s “Big Lie,” the false claims about the 2020 election, objected to the certification of the election results, and falsely claimed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was to blame for the January 6 insurrection.

Tuesday night Rep. Banks posted a photo of himself and other members of the House Republican Study Committee at Bedminster, “House conservatives are united in standing with President Trump. We will Make America Great Again!”[twt pix rsc]

CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa&...">writes, “Conservative House Republicans have publicly and privately rallied behind Trump in the past 24 hours, including the visit below to Bedminster, where several GOP lawmakers encouraged him to jump into the 2024 race.”

Trump “told the group he ‘has made up his mind’ about his long-teased run, and ‘enjoyed encouragement’ from them to ‘get the decision out sooner rather than later,'” the New York Post adds Wednesday morning. Banks also told Fox News that Trump “said we are going to like his decision and it is only a matter of time before he will make that decision known.”

Rep. Banks has falsely claimed he is the ranking member of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack in a letter to the U.S. Dept. of the Interior in an effort to obtain information about the investigation.

Far right Republicans and Trump supporters have been passionately defending Trump after the FBI executed its search warrant and confiscated reportedly ten cartons believed to include classified documents from Mar-a-Lago that were required to be sent to the National Archives.

an 822

Veteran journalist Sarah Posner, who has spent years writing about religion and the Christian right, has an explanation for the outraged response from some Trump supporters over the FBI executing a legal search warrant on Mar-a-Lago.

Hours after the news broke, Florida Republican state representative Anthony Sabatini called for “an emergency legislative session” to “Sever all ties with DOJ immediately” over the FBI executing a legal search warrant of Trump’s home. “Any FBI agent conducting law enforcement functions outside the purview of our State should be arrested upon sight,” he wrote, apparently unaware of the U.S. Constitution.

Tuesday night Trump supporters formed a small convoy driving outside Mar-a-Lago, some with Trump banners, Trump flags, or the American flag, – even one vehicle painted with the American flag – to show their support for the former president who might be facing legal consequences, as video from NBC 6 reporter Cristian Benavides shows.

[twt]

"the GOP position is that Trump is above the law,” writes The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. “That’s what the GOP position on Trump was throughout his presidency, and that’s what it is now. Say it that way. Don’t let Republicans get away with using fake outrage to obscure this fundamental reality.”

Posner has written two books on the Christian Right including “UNHOLY: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, And the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind.”

In response to Sargent’s remarks she advises: “Remember too that much of Trump’s base believes that God anointed him, that it’s God’s will that he be back in the White House. And that they need to engage in ‘spiritual warfare’ with ‘demonic’ enemies of Trump — keep this in mind as right-wing influencers call for civil war.”

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Monday night tweeted, “The FBI is raiding President Trump’s home in Maralago! This is therogue behavior of communist countries, NOT the United States of America!!! These are the type of things that happen in countries during civil war. The political persecution MUST STOP!!!”

Tuesday morning CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan :{posted a:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{ graph:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}: and noted the “big spike in tweets referencing ‘civil war’ right after the news of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago broke last night.”

Dr. Caroline Orr Bueno posted an image of a large number of tweets that mention civil war and other related calls, including: “I already bought my ammo,” “Civil war! Pick up arms, people!” “Civil War 2.0 just kicked off,” “Let’s do the war,” and “One step closer to a kinetic civil war.”]]

docs destroyed, dumped in toilet, he ate some?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/ivana-trump/

buried for tax break?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/russian-state-television-our-friend/

"news dump" salon

Axios on Monday published photos showing former President Donald Trump's handwritten notes flushed down a White House toilet that were obtained by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

White House staff "periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper," according to an excerpt from Haberman's upcoming book "Confidence Man" published by Axios earlier this year. The report raised concerns that Trump may have illegally destroyed records that are required to be preserved.

Trump at the time called the report a "fake story," issuing a statement calling the claim "categorically untrue and made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book."

Haberman turned the photos over to Axios to corroborate her reporting. One photo shows a White House toilet with an unintelligible note, a source told Haberman. Another photo shows a note with Trump's handwriting thrown into the toilet on an overseas trip. It's unclear what the note says but it mentions the name of Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., the No. 3 Republican in the House.

"The document dumps happened multiple times at the White House, and on at least two foreign trips," according to the report.

"That Mr. Trump was discarding documents this way was not widely known within the West Wing, but some aides were aware of the habit, which he engaged in repeatedly," Haberman told Axios. "It was an extension of Trump's term-long habit of ripping up documents that were supposed to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act."

The National Archives previously reported that some of Trump's White House documents had to be taped back together after they were destroyed. Other records and gifts were improperly taken from the White House to Trump's residence in Mar-a-Lago.

Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich did not specifically deny the content of the photos but pushed back on the report.

"You have to be pretty desperate to sell books if pictures of paper in a toilet bowl is part of your promotional plan," Budowich told Axios. "We know ... there's enough people willing to fabricate stories like this in order to impress the media class — a media class who is willing to run with anything, as long as it anti-Trump."

Haberman on CNN called her reporting "gross and important."

"The point is about the destruction of records which are supposed to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act, which is a Watergate-era creation," she said. "It's important because who knows what this paper was? Only he would know and presumably whoever was dealing with him, but the important point is about the records," she added....

china lie

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/pro-trump-company-agrees-to-pay-211335-fine-for-false-claim-its-apparel-was-made-in-america/

an raw 8 22

Former President Donald Trump spoke for nearly two hours in his closing address at the CPAC summit in Dallas.

In Trump's view, America has been destroyed in the 18 months since he left office, with out-of-control crime, inflation, and oddly enough unemployment, which Trump estimates to be three times the official number.

Trump took the stage to the song "God Bless the USA" and began by thanking the "proud patriots" in attendance.

Trump said he was proud to be joined by Rep. Ronnie Jackson (R-TX), who was his White House surgeon.

"He was an admiral, a doctor, and now he's a congressman," Trump noted, saying he asked him which was the best.

"And he sort of indicated doctor, because he loved to look at my body. It was so strong and powerful," Trump said.

Trump then introduced Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

"This is no time for complacency," Trump warned. "We have to seize this opportunity to deal with the radical left socialist lunatic fascists. We have to hit them very, very hard. It has to be a crippling defeat."

He went on to complain about Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) for supporting the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed a procedural vote after Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote while Trump was speaking, resulting in harsh words for GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

"But McConnell is the most unpopular politician in the country, even more so thancrazy Nancy Pelosi, and something has to be done," Trump urged.

Trump said Biden "surrendered our strength and our everything [in Afghanistan], they surrendered our dignity."

Michael Hardy, senior editor at the Texas Monthly, was one of the local journalists covering the speech.He said that line had "echoes of the Nazi 'stab in the back theory' of losing WW1."

Trump then described crime in "Democrat-run (sic) cities" in very dark terms.

"The streets of our Democrat-run cities are drenched in the blood of innocent victims," Trump claimed. "Bullets are killing little beautiful little children who never had a chance. Car jackers lay in wait like predators."

Hardy described that as "some literal blood-and-soil rhetoric."

And Trump went on saying "we need to courage to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done," which Hardy said "is a rallying cry for street violence and worse."

Trump went on to call for a military takeover of San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Portland.

"Trump's rhetoric is significantly more extreme than even a few years ago," Hardy said. "This might be most frightening speech I've ever heard. Full-on, unapologetic fascism. Trump has either been reading Mein Kampf or having someone read it to him."

Trump repeated his lies about election fraud and teased a 2024 presidential comeback.

Former RNC official Tim Millersaid, "I know everyone in the DC GOP is just hoping Trump will die but it’s impossible to watch this CPAC speech and not come to the conclusion that he’s going to run and be very hard to beat in a primary. Sorry to be the bearer of bad weekend news."

After his speech, Trump danced on stage to the song "Hold On I'm Coming" by Sam and Dave.

"Don't you ever feel sad; lean on me when times are bad," Sam and Dave sang. "Then the day comes and you're down; in a river of trouble and about to drown. Just hold on, I'm coming. Hold on, I'm coming."

You can watch his speech here.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/trump-toilet/

A history lecturer is expressing concern about the Republican Party's agenda and how it could lay the foundation for a far more radicalized second term for former President Donald Trump.

In a new op-ed published by The Guardian, Andrew Gawthorpe, a history and international studies lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, cited an Axios report as he detailed the political party's "core plan" as the 2022 midterm elections approach.

"At the core of the new plan, as reported by Axios, is theintention to strip away employment protections from thousands of senior civil servants, eliminating at a stroke a large chunk of the civil service’s expertise and institutional memory," Gawthorpe wrote. "This would allow them to be replaced with a ' cadre' loyal to Trump’s America First agenda,most of them likely to be 20- and 30-somethings with no experience in government who would owe their newfound prominence to Trump alone. Ideologically zealous and loyal to a fault, they would set about trying to reshape the government in Trump’s image."

He went on to note the distinct change in Trump's proposed agenda as he compared this situation to his first presidential term.

"What seems to have changed in the interim is Trump’s desire for revenge. According to the Axios report, Trump’s top priority in a new administration will be to “clean house” in the intelligence community, DoJ and FBI. Loyalists will be installed in the place of current leadership. Why these places? The standard conservative critique of the civil service is that everyone in it is a liberal, but that certainly isn’t true of these agencies. Rather, they’re the places you need to corrupt if you’re bent on breaking the law and persecuting your opponents. Trump – notoriously thin-skinned, impulsive, and vengeful – wants to do just that."

Gawthorpe also highlighted the bigger issue with the radicalized agenda.

"But this isn’t just a problem limited to Trump. The conservative movement as a whole increasingly dreams of turning the state against its enemies. The people at the heart of the movement today are more likely to idolize the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán than they are Ronald Reagan," he said.

"They aren’t animated by the belief that the job of government is simply to get out of the way – instead, they want to use it to impose a radical agenda on American society," Gawthorpe wrote. "And the recent overturning of Roe v Wade provides a blueprint for how a compliant conservative judiciary can enable government officials to take away even the most fundamental of human rights."

He concluded with his perspective of what a future Republican presidency could look like given the current political climate of the party.

"Although Trump would bring his own particular set of grievances to the venture, any future Republican president is likely to follow a similar blueprint," he wrote. "Given the sheer scale of changes they want to impose on America, today’s conservatives act more like revolutionaries. And like all revolutionaries, they want to seize control of the state and launch an offensive on as many fronts as possible. If Trump’s first term isn’t to appear to future historians as a grim prelude to something far worse, they must never be allowed to do it."

ny post BS

former President Donald Trump is set to return to Washington, DC, later this month for the first time since leaving office, according to a new report.

The 45th president’s visit will be centered around a July 26 event for the America First Policy Institute, where he will be giving a keynote address, Axios reported Thursday.

While the event is invitation-only and will not be open to the public, it will be livestreamed and open to the press. The specific location of the event has not yet been released.

Trump’s remarks are scheduled for 3 p.m. on the second day of theresearch institute’s policy summit, which is reportedly set to highlight lowering energy and gas prices, bringing down inflation, combating crime and the border, as well as the “control” of children’s education, according to the report.

Other attendees and guest speakers are expected to feature former Trump administration officials including but not limited to former senior counsel Kellyanne Conway, former National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe,former Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf,former National Economic Council DirectorLarry Kudlow, former Domestic Policy Council Director Brooke Rollins,as well as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga..

current members of Congress including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), James Langford (R-Okla.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) are also expected.

an 8 22

During 2008’s Republican presidential primary debates, the candidates were mocked for constantly mentioning President Ronald Reagan — who, at 93, had died four years earlier in 2004. The word “overkill” was used by pundits to describe the ways in which those candidates found a way to work Reagan’s name into the conservation whether they were discussing national defense, terrorism, the federal deficit or infrastructure. But times have changed; in the 2022 midterms, the person who countless Republican candidates are wrapping themselves around isn’t Reagan, but former President Donald Trump — whose “dark” outlook and obsession with “fear, grievances and hate,” according to Never Trump conservative Peter Wehner, now motivates most of the Republican Party.

In an article published by The Atlantic on August 2, Wehner argues, “For all the defects Donald Trump has as a politician, he does possess certain skills, among them an almost preternatural ability to tap into the sensibilities — the id — of the American right. More than any other Republican candidate in 2016, Trump was in sync with the base of the party. He still is, as he prepares for what looks like another run for the presidency.”

Wehner continues, “Returning to Washington, D.C. for the first time since he left the White House in the aftermath of the violent assault on the Capitol, Trump gave a speech last Tuesday to the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). It was billed as a policy address on public safety. But everyone knows that policy doesn’t interest Trump in the least. What he cares about is the performative part of politics, inflaming people’s passions, creating chaos and conflict. Politics is a stage on which his disordered personality plays itself out.”

Many polls have been showing Republican primary voters moving away from Trump where the 2024 presidential election is concerned. They are coming to the conclusion that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would be better able to take on a Democratic presidential nominee, be it President Joe Biden or someone else. But here’s the caveat: Those voters haven’t abandoned Trump’s ideas or the MAGA movement. The decidedly MAGA DeSantis, a far-right culture warrior, is often described as a younger, more focused and disciplined version of Trump.

Wehner stresses that regardless of whether or not Trump runs for president in 2024, his “undisciplined” AFPI speech in Washington, D.C. vividly illustrates the mindset of today’s GOP.

“Despite the speech’s unruliness,” Wehner explains, “certain themes in it are worth examining, because they signal what a Trump campaign might look like. And even if he doesn’t run, they reveal the mindset of the American right. These are the pillars of the GOP.”

The Republican “pillars” that Wehner is referring to are “fear, grievances and hate.”

“If the hallmarks of Ronald Reagan’s speeches were optimism, hope, and a sense of limitless possibilities, Trump’s speeches are the antithesis,” Wehner warns. “Trump is a genius at tapping into fear. In his AFPI speech, for example, he portrayed America not as a great nation facing significant challenges, but as a dystopia, hellish and desolate — a ‘cesspool of crime’ on the edge of extinction. Trump spoke about streets ‘riddled with needles and soaked with the blood of innocent victims,’ a nation being terrorized by ‘drugged out lunatics’ and ‘sadists who prey on children.’ He invoked violent gangs ‘laughing as they bludgeoned the life from their helpless victims’ and described a woman being repeatedly stabbed and ‘bleeding to death in her own bathtub.’ He claimed that America’s largest cities are ‘literal war zones.’”

The “American carnage” theme that Trump used during his inaugural speech on January 20, 2017, according to Wehner, was present during his AFPI speech — only this speech was “bleaker, its portrait of America more terrifying.”

Trump told the crowd, “We have blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable, because of the Democrat Party’s effort to destroy and dismantle law enforcement all throughout America. Our country is going to hell.”

“In the world according to Trump,” Wehner writes, “the choice is a stark one: Support him, and you defend civilization — oppose him, and you invite savagery…. Whether Trump wins or not (in 2024), he has left an imprint on the Republican Party. In 2016, Trump was the outlier, a political freak. Today, his inclinations, his enmities, his style of politics define the GOP.”

Wehner continues, “Even the person widely seen right now as the most formidable challenger to Trump, Florida Gov.Ron DeSantis, is ‘diet Trump,’ in the words of one. Whoever leads the Republican Party in the years ahead,the fear, grievances and hate Trump poured into the cauldron won’t dissipate anytime soon.”

a n fears losing fox?

spox sg

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/stephanie-grisham-trump/

gleefully rewind jan 6

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/donald-trump-asks-absolute-immunity/

civil suits

an 7 22

it not quite clear what, exactly, former President Donald Trump was doing and privately saying inside the White House during the five long, violent hours when more than 2,000 rioters invaded the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.

It’s a key timeline that the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is set to explore on July 21, 2022 during its latest – and possibly last – public hearing.

At the heart of the issue is Trump’s precise engagement, if any, with the rioters and several fringe nationalist militia groups, including the Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, that stormed the Capitol.

Amy Cooter, a senior lecturer in sociology at Vanderbilt University, embedded with militia groups, mostly in Michigan, from 2008 through 2012. Knowing who these groups are – and how they have changed over time – makes it easier to understand the Jan. 6 attacks, Cooter said.

“Fifteen years ago, people thought of these groups as being niche, crazy people. That’s not really what I saw in my fieldwork – I saw people who were just more willing to be open about their political perspectives than maybe more mainstream Republicans were at the time. It seemed to me, both then and now, that their concerns resonate with a broad swath of the population,” Cooter said in a recent interview.

We asked Cooter to explain what drives these groups and their complicated relationship with Trump and the government.

What is your understanding of how Trump is seen by these nationalist groups?

Traditionally, militia groups have been very opposed to the federal government, regardless of whether we’re talking about Democrats or Republicans. However, with Trump, they really found sort of a mouthpiece. Not all of them truly liked him, but they really want somebody who speaks out against immigration and has a nationalistic and isolationist perspective. Trump gave them a sense of legitimacy. But there didn’t seem to be too many formal connections, as far as we know.

How does leadership and hierarchy work within these groups?

Many of these groups present themselves as top-down organizations with centralized leadership and then different state-level structures. But the degree to which that is reality varies enormously, especially with the Three Percenters but also with the Oath Keepers.

There are groups that kind of fit the stereotypical top-down model that make it easy to activate them for action. There are other groups who maybe were completely oblivious to this Jan. 6 plan.

What do you mean by activate? That sounds similar to language Trump used during a presidential debate in September 2020, to “stand back and stand by.”

Militias always see themselves as prepared for action. Usually, this means they’re prepared to defend themselves and their communities in the event of a natural disaster, or some kind of invasion. But as we saw leading up to Jan. 6, some of these groups were clearly planning more than just a defensive stance.

What was Trump getting from these groups, and what were they getting from Trump?

They get from Trump this idea that someone finally represents their interests, someone finally sees the state of the nation as they do, even though not all of them completely agree with him. They see it as an opportunity to push things in the direction that they would prefer.

I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that Trump sees an opportunity for a private armyfrom them. In 2018, he pardoned the Bundy ranchers, who were arrested for arson on federal land. Not a lot of people paid attention to this, but that was a signal to these groups that he had their back and would expect them to have his back in the future.

I think that Jan. 6 is really kind of proof of that, that he has activated people who in some cases do have military or police experience.

How have you seen these groups evolve over time, since you began researching them?

Before Trump, there had been very clear-cut tensions between different groups. That boundary has broken down substantially, and most groups have been pushed more toward an extreme than used to be true – in no small part because of how Trump and others in his administration legitimized the core fears that different groups had about being invaded.

Since Jan. 6, the groups as a whole have declined in size. Many of these people were really surprised at how Jan. 6 played out and were quite embarrassed –or they were appalled that it didn’t go far enough.

Now, many people have taken a step back even from these groups altogether. But the folks that have stuck around continue to be quite radical, and probably even more radical than they were before. Especially thinking about what is going to happen with the midterm elections, we are going to see a lot of invigoration.

Amy Cooter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Vanderbilt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

NO LNX

TRUMP 13 BAK HALF

an 7 22

Donald Trump has lost the confidence of both of the major newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Under the headline, "The President Who Stood Still on Jan. 6," The Wall Street Journal editorial board harshly criticized the former president.

"No matter your views of the Jan. 6 special committee, the facts it is laying out in hearings are sobering. The most horrifying to date came Thursday in a hearing on President Trump’s conduct as the riot raged and he sat watching TV, posting inflammatory tweets and refusing to send help," the editorial board wrote.

"The committee’s critics are right that it lacks political balance," the newspaper wrote. "Still, the brute facts remain: Mr. Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution, and he had a duty as Commander in Chief to protect the Capitol from a mob attacking it in his name. He refused. He didn’t call the military to send help. He didn’t call Mr. Pence to check on the safety of his loyal VP. Instead he fed the mob’s anger and let the riot play out."

The editorial concluded, "Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr. Pence passed his Jan. 6 trial. Mr. Trump utterly failed his."

Trump was also criticized by the NY Post editorial board under the headline, "Trump's silence on Jan. 6 is damning."

"As his followers stormed the Capitol, calling on his vice president to be hanged, President Donald Trump sat in his private dining room, watching TV, doing nothing. For three hours, seven minutes," the editorial board wrote.

"There has been much debate over whether Trump’s rally speech on Jan. 6, 2021, constituted “incitement.” That’s somewhat of a red herring. What matters more — and has become crystal clear in recent days — is that Trump didn’t lift a finger to stop the violence that followed," the NY Post wrote. "And he was the only person who could stop what was happening. He was the only one the crowd was listening to. It was incitement by silence."

The tabloid concluded he is unfit for office.

"His only focus was to find any means — damn the consequences — to block the peaceful transfer of power.

There is no other explanation, just as there is no defense, for his refusal to stop the violence," the newspaper wrote. "It’s up to the Justice Department to decide if this is a crime. But as a matter of principle, as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again."

edit bd

...

Last night’s hearing, however, suggested one more layer.

A cover-up of the congressional coup.

READ MORE: Eighth January 6th hearing provided the 'starkest illustration' yet against Donald Trump: journalists

By the Congress.

Hinting hard

The goal appears to have been getting enough members of the US Congress to vote to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The GOP had a Senate majority at the time. They could have, in theory, overruled the will of the people, at least temporarily. Ultimately, however, just 147 Republicans, including eight senators, objected.

I don’t know, had they amassed enough votes in the Senate, where things would have gone after that. Perhaps it would have triggered the 12th Amendment. Perhaps it would have thrown the process back to red states that Joe Biden had won, where friendly Republican legislators would have fixed things so Trump could stay in office.

[READ MORE: Watch: Outtakes of Trump on January 7th — he can't say the election's over

In any case, the former president spent a lot of time talking about congressional Republicans and talking directly to congressional Republicans to such a degree as to suggest there was another layer of his grand seditious conspiracy that’s only now coming into light. That’s certainly what the J6 committee has been hinting hard at.

Co-conspirators?

Last week, the panel’s Stephanie Murphy said Trump met in late December with US Reps. Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Brian Babin, Jody Hice, Louie Gohmert, Andy Harris, Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar, Scott Perry and Jim Jordan. Margaret Taylor Greene was there. So were Mike Pence, Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani. (Seven of these members asked for pardons. Ditto Meadows, Giuliani and Greene.)

They tried getting the former vice president to go along with the conspiracy. It called for him to reject the count all by himself or send it back to the states where state GOP legislators were waiting.

Pence had refused before. I’m guessing those at the meeting expected him to again. He did. The next step was finalizing a scheme to bring tens of thousands of Trump loyalists to the capital, including armed paramilitaries (eg, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers), in order to terrify not only Pence but GOP senators into reinstalling Trump.

Terrifying GOP senators

According to the J6 committee’s Elaine Luria, Trump was told 15 minutes after returning to the White House after his speech on the Ellipse that the US Capitol was under siege by an armed mob. After the briefing, Luria said, Trump began calling GOP senators for the purpose of persuading them to overrule the results of the election.

On the one hand, the former president had insurgents sacking and looting the seat of government, threatening lawmakers with death – in Mike Pence’s case, with hanging from a makeshift gallows. (It was revealed last night that Pence’s Secret Service detail believed they were going to die. They sent messages of love to their families.) On the other, Trump pushed GOP senators by phone to get on board.

During that time, White House staffers tried and failed to persuade Trump to respond to the assault. (He did not issue orders to anyone, not the secretary of defense, the secretary of homeland security, the attorney general, no one.) Instead of telling them to go home, as staffers had hoped, he posted a tweet accusing Pence of betrayal.

After “pouring gasoline on the fire,” as witness Sarah Matthews said, the former president made more phone calls to Republican senators. Later that evening, after Trump had called for the insurgents to go home, Rudy Giuliani made even more calls to Republican senators.

Indeed, the J6 committee’s Adam Kinzinger named them. They were: Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Bill Hagerty, Tommy Tuberville and Lindsey Graham. Of that number, only three voted to overturn the results of the election: Cruz, Tuberville and Hawley.

The cover-up

Giuliani also called US Rep. Jim Jordan.

Jordan, as I wrote last week, was nominated to serve on the initial select committee to investigate J6. Speaker Nancy Pelosi vetoed his nomination, though. Good thing she did. The current committee would have been compromised by the presence of a congressman who was a serial witness to the serial crimes under investigation.

Jordan was nominated by Kevin McCarthy. As the J6 committee reminded us last night, the House minority leader talked to Trump after the attack. He said Trump said he had “some responsibility” for J6. McCarthy said he told Trump that the House Democrats were likely to pass an impeachment resolution and that he should resign.

Trump didn’t resign, of course.

Perhaps the fix was in.

Implication by omission

Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the J6 committee, reminded us that the committee’s work goes on. Hearings will resume in September, she said. Then the Wyoming congresswoman used some curious math:

Today, we know far more about the president’s plans and actions to overturn the election than almost all members of Congress did when President Trump was impeached on January 13, 2021, or when he was tried by the Senate in February of that year.

Fifty-seven of 100 senators voted to convict President Trump at that time, and more than 20 others said they were voting against conviction, because the president's term had already expired.

Cheney said “almost all,” I think, because a dozen GOP members had been deeply involved in or material witnesses to Trump’s conspiracy.

She said “57 of 100,” I think, because it takes 67 senators to remove and convict a president. She said “more than 20 others,” because she’s apparently giving these GOP senators the benefit of the doubt.

But that still leaves around 20 unaccounted for. Why?

Perhaps because some, or all, of these 20 or so Republican senators had been in contact with the former president as the insurrection was unfolding and therefore potential co-conspirators in the crime.

Perhaps because some, or all, of these 20 or so Republican senators voted against conviction, thus taking steps to cover up the crime.

In any case, it was implication by omission.

The appearance of a conspiracy

We know at least six of them were evidently in both camps. On the evening of J6, Rudy Giuliani called Blackburn, Hawley, Cruz, Hagarty, Tuberville and Graham hoping they would object to the vote count. (Three did.) This same group voted to acquit Trump of treason.

If that’s not a rigged outcome, it sure looks like one.

Liz Cheney seemed to be inviting us to put the former president’s second impeachment trial in light of what we know now.

She seemed to be asking us to consider what it means when at least a dozen sitting members of the House were material witnesses as well as grand jury members deciding on an indictment (impeachment).

She seemed to be asking us to see that at least six of those Senators were materially involved in a crime of which they sat in judgment.

If that’s not a conspiracy, it sure as hell looks like one.

READ MORE: Video shows Josh Hawley running to evade the rioters he had earlier praised

1st fox cracks? JT is "fig leaf" and nc is straight news

7 22

Fox News legal analyst recently voiced his concerns about the revelations that have come to light in wake of the latest House Select Committee hearings. According to Jonathan Turley, the revelations were both “breathtaking” and “disturbing.”

On Wednesday, July 12, Turley appeared on Fox News where he weighed in on the recent hearings as he explained to viewers why the revelations are so damning. "You're in the Oval Office and people seem to be actually chest pounding," Turley said. "So this is very disturbing. All of these details should disturb everyone."

Per Rolling Stone, the legal analyst also shed light on what he described as an "unhinged” meeting between former Preside Donald Trump, a number of his allies, and other White House officials as they mulled over "ways to salvage an election victory for the president."

The committee also highlighted a text message from former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, who provided damning testimony last month as she painted a disturbing picture of an unhinged West Wing under Trump's leadership.

In addition to Turley's remarks, Fox News' Neil Cavuto also weighed in with a critical assessment of Trump describing him as 'unstable' before asking former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Tom Dupree if the people close to Trump were engaging in 'illegal, criminal behavior' by pushing to keep him in office.

Dupree, in turn, said that “people giving him this advice were coming pretty darn close to that line, if not going over it.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/donald-trump-boasts-path-reinstatement/

Wisconsin State Supreme Court on Friday ruled 4-3 that drop boxes for absentee ballots were illegal and declared that President Joe Biden's victory over former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election was illegitimate.

Biden won the popular vote in the Badger State and was thusly awarded its 10 Electoral College votes.

The decision "has critical implications in the 2024 presidential race, in which Wisconsin will again be among a handful of battleground states," noted the Associated Press.

[READ MORE: Boris Johnson couldn’t escape accountability – unlike Donald Trump: journalists

Tony Evers, Wisconsin's incumbent Democratic governor who is seeking reelection, condemned the court's transparently partisan opinion.

“Politicians should not be able to abuse their power to prevent eligible voters from casting their ballots or cheat by changing the rules just because they didn’t like the outcome of the last election,” he said. “Today’s decision is another in a long line of Wisconsin Republicans’ successes to make it harder for Wisconsinites to exercise their right to vote, to undermine our free, fair and secure elections, and to threaten our democracy.”

Justice Rebecca Bradley, who sided with the majority, asserted that the court was acting to prevent fraud, which she baselessly claimed had impacted the results of past contests – including the race in 2020.

“Thousands of votes have been cast via this unlawful method, thereby directly harming the Wisconsin voters,” Bradley wrote. “The illegality of these drop boxes weakens the people’s faith that the election produced an outcome reflective of their will. The Wisconsin voters, and all lawful voters, are injured when the institution charged with administering Wisconsin elections does not follow the law, leaving the results in question.”

[READ MORE: Right-winger wants January 6th hearings nixed 'out of respect' for Donald Trump 'mourning' Shinzo Abe shackleford]

Trump's attorney Christian Bobb expanded on this false narrative and went so far as to proclaim that the outcome of the 2020 election could be reversed.

"Joe Biden cheated, so they could either withdraw their electors or they could actually decide to award Trump electors, although I would anticipate they would just withdraw the electors," she said on the Right Side Broadcasting Network. "If that happens from three different states, three different resolutions go into Congress – and I'm sorry I'm sort of summarizing this, it's a complicated issue – but it would have to go into the US Congress whether they want to accept the resolutions, whether they want to act on them or not. So it's a complex issue that needs to be handled complexly by different state legislatures and the US Congress."

Bobb then suggested that if "many many elected officials" sign on, Team Trump's dream of overturning the 2020 election can be realized.

Bobb's hot take on RSBM motivated Trump on Saturday to boast on his Truth Social app that he will be president again if the GOP retakes Congress.

[READ MORE: Russian propagandists whine that 'the way we elected' Donald Trump is impossible in Great Britain

"The Wisconsin Supreme Court has just declared the 'Unlock' Boxes, or Ballot 'Stuffing' Boxes, to be ILLEGAL. Everybody knows what went on with the $417,000,000 that little Mark Zuckerberg 'INVESTED' in the corrupt 2020 Presidential Election, and that doesn’t even include the big Wisconsin Nursing Home Scandal where close to 100% of the residents voted (always is MUCH lower number). It’s now up to Robin Vos to do what everybody knows must be done. We need FAIR and HONEST Elections in our Country," Trump rambled.

"Other States are looking at, and studying, the amazing Wisconsin Supreme Court decision declaring Ballot Boxes ILLEGAL, and that decision includes the 2020 Presidential Election," he continued. "Speaker Robin Vos has a decision to make! Does Wisconsin RECLAIM the Electors, turn over the Election to the actual winner (by a lot!), or sit back and do nothing as our Country continues to go to HELL? Brave American Patriots already have a Resolution on the Floor!"

There is no mechanism in the Constitution that provides a framework for nullifying a duly completed and certified election, let alone installing a loser back into power. Even if Republicans retake control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the November midterms, impeaching and removing Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (requiring 67 Senators to agree) would hand the presidency to whomever the House Speaker is at that time. In theory, that person could tap Trump to be their veep and immediately resign, but the Senate would first have to approve of Trump's nomination.

Granted, Republicans could indeed drum up some cockamamy scheme to petition the right-wing United States Supreme Court to consider its position to oust Biden in exchange for Trump, in a manner similar to the North Carolina "independent legislature theory" case that the Court has agreed to hear in the fall session. Notably, the courts have so far thrown out Trump's challenges to the 2020 election, including his invocations of executive privilege to prevent evidence of his coup from surfacing.

READ MORE: Why Donald Trump may not 'need a mob' to steal the 2024 election: columnist

Nevertheless, one must contemplate the possibilities, no matter how implausible they seem. Is what Trump wants impossible? No. Is it far-fetched? Quite, although it is, without question, on par with this current timeline.

an 7 22

no lnx

When Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona famously told President Richard Nixon, during the Watergate scandal in 1974, that he could not count on his support, it was obvious that he prioritized country over party — and Goldwater was by no means the only conservative Republican who felt that way. Nixon, realizing that both Republicans and Democrats were likely to remove him from office if an impeachment trial were held in the U.S. Senate, resigned; Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as president on August 9, 1974.

But much has changed in the Republican Party since 1974. Even after the January 6, 2021 insurrection, countless Republicans remain loyal to former President Donald Trump — including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. And journalist Mark Leibovich slams them as examples of pathetic careerists in a scathing article published by The Atlantic on July 7.

The article’s headline is not subtle: “The Most Pathetic Men in America,” and Leibovich makes no effort to hide his disdain for Trump’s army of enablers in the Republican Party.

Leibovich recalls seeing Graham and McCarthy in public places in Washington, D.C. during Trump’s presidency, noting, “I would sometimes see them around the lobby or steakhouse or function rooms, skipping from table to table and getting thanked for all the wonderful things they were doing to help our president. They had long been among the most supplicant super-careerists ever to play in a city known for the breed, and proved themselves to be essential lapdogs in Trump’s kennel.”

READ MORE: Are we supposed to believe Republicans were duped?

The journalist adds, “McCarthy is a good bet to become the next speaker of the House in the likely event that Republicans win a majority in November. Graham remains perhaps Trump’s closest collaborator in the Senate, a frequent golf partner and nuanced handler of the presidential ego.”

Leibovich slams Graham and McCarthy as examples of “the slavishly devoted Republicans whom Trump drew to his side,” stressing that they were hardly alone in that regard.

“It’s been said before, but can never be emphasized enough: Without the complicity of the Republican Party, Donald Trump would be just a glorified geriatric Fox-watching golfer,” Leibovich writes. “I’ve interviewed scores of these collaborators, trying to understand why they did what they did and how they could live with it. These were the McCarthys and the Grahams and all the other busy parasitic suck-ups who made the Trump era work for them, who humored and indulged him all the way down to the last, exhausted strains of American democracy.”

Leibovich applauds the “handful of brave Republicans” who have been “willing to speak the truth about Trump in public,” including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. But he laments that they are the exception rather than the rule and predicts that Trump will have no shortage of sycophants if he runs for president in 2024.

READ MORE: Conservative insider denounces Republicans who wanted Trump to provide pardons for their involvement in his election scheme

“McCarthy will not be winning any Profile in Courage Award anytime soon,” Leibovich writes. “In fairness, that could make him a good fit for the cowardly caucus he is so eager to lead. Soon enough, 2024 will not be a long way away, and Trump is well-positioned to claim his third consecutive Republican presidential nomination. Again, Trump will do as he pleases and take what he can take. Because really, who’s going to stop him?”

Former President Donald Trump now has a new stream of income that appears to play on his political aspirations for the purpose of personal gain.

According to The Washington Post, Trump is now being paid to make public speeches with ticket prices costing anywhere from approximately $55.00 for general admission to VIP tickets as high as a reported $800 each and “presidential” tier tickets priced at $3,995 each.

While many would assume these funds would be going toward the former president's political action committee, which has raked in more than $100 million, The Post's Josh Dawsey, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Sarah Fowler have revealed the funds are actually going into Trump's personal pocket.

READ MORE: How Washington’s ‘supplicant super-careerists’ became ‘essential lapdogs in Trump’s kennel’: journalist

"Instead, it was a for-profit show, more like a rock concert," the writers reported. "The proceeds benefit Trump personally as part of a multimillion-dollar deal to speak at the events, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations."

They also noted: "The program, the 'American Freedom Tour,' is the work of a longtime motivational-speaker promoter with a trail of bankruptcy filings and business disputes across the country. A Trump adviser said very little vetting was done on the organizers."

Larry Ward, a Republican consultant and spokesperson for the political tour, has shared details about Trump's new venture but refrained from offering details about the financial aspects of it. "The tour was inspired by a nation of disappointed voters and a love for President Donald J. Trump,” he said

Taylor Budowich, a spokesperson for the former president, has also echoed similar sentiments. “There is a tremendous demand for President Trump in every corner of the country and he is driven by his love for America to continue leading the MAGA movement into 2022 and beyond by sharing his America First vision in front of massive crowds,” Budowich said.

READ MORE: Trump loyalists move ahead with 'sham' election project designed for voter intimidation: report

Although some argue that these types of paid events are nothing new, Mark K. Updegrove —author of “Second Acts: Presidential Lives And Legacies After The White House— explained how Trump's venture differs.

“Paid presidential speeches are nothing new. It’s nice work if you can get it,” said Updegrove, who also serves as president of the LBJ Foundation. “The difference here is Trump is doing this under the guise of a political rally. There might be a little deception there.”

Jeffrey A. Engel, director of Southern Methodist University's Center for Presidential History, also highlighted the problematic conflict of interest in Trump's case.

“You have a person who is effectively running for president who is accumulating financial IOUs,” said Engel. “Donald Trump has never cared if his financial dealings appear improper. Trump plays by different rules.”

READ MORE: Real estate firm connected to Trump Organization held in contempt for failing to submit business documents

The latest report comes as speculation looms about Trump potentially running for re-election in 2024. Although he has not yet officially announced his presidential candidacy there is chatter about him possibly doing so "unusually early."

an 7 22

Fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat provided fascinating insight — and a terrifying prediction about future Republican Party violence — when she was interviewed by CNN's Jim Acosta on Saturday.

On Tuesday, Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that on Jan. 6, Trump was "irate" when the Secret Service would not drive him to the Capitol and lunged for the steering wheel of his presidential limousine.

Acosta began that interview by noting that weeks before Hutchinson's testimony, Ben-Ghiat had informed his audience that Trump had to go to the Capitol for the phase of a coup where the new order would be announced. Acosta described her analysis as "almost clairvoyant."

"And we have since learned that Trump did try to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6, but his Secret Service stopped him," Acosta said. "Ruth, what is your reaction to everything we learned this week, including this new CNN reporting that seems to back up what Cassidy Hutchison was saying?"

"I'm really disturbed, not surprised, about the role of violence," the New York University professor replied.

"It was very telling to me that Trump said chief of staff Mark Meadows, who seems to have been like the control center of this operation, she said that when the violence broke out, he didn't seem concerned at all, and he didn't seem perturbed, and that's because violence was part of the plan. It has to be in a coup," she explained.

"That's also why Trump wanted the, you know, weapons detectors removed, and so the other thing that stands out is that not only did he want to be driven there to the Capitol and be at the head of this, you know, violent thug march into the Capitol, but Ms. Hutchinson testified that there were conversations about him entering the chamber," she continued. "And what that says to me is first, you know, you've neutralized the presidential chain of succession. They were going to do something to Pence, they were hunting Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi, speaker, and so he was going to also have fixed the problem with the electoral counts because Pence wasn't there, and then he was going to declare himself at the head of this violent mob in the chamber as a legitimate president, and that's where that phase of the coup would have ended."

"It's extraordinary what we're learning from these hearings," she said.

Acosta asked Ben-Ghiat to compare Trump to other leaders she has studied.

She said Trump, "and his party are behaving in a desperate way, and when autocrats think they're going down, they will do anything -- and we've seen Jan. 6 -- to stay in power. What's really extraordinary is how Trump, who came from outside politics, put the GOP in such a state of authoritarian subjection and discipline that the whole party is completely compromised. We're learning from these hearings just how many people were involved," she said.

"And unfortunately, I think we can expect more extremist behavior, aggressive behavior from the party because they are acting out of fear. They're guilty, and their coup failed, and they've been exposed to the world by these hearings, and so they are -- they're in emergency mode," Ben-Bhiat warned.

Watch:

an 722

Former President Donald Trump is celebrating July 4th by raging against his detractors on his Twitter-knockoff app Truth Social.

In a trio of angry rants, Trump railed against Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) – the vice-chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol – for suggesting on Sunday that the bipartisan panel is likely to make multiple criminal referrals to the Justice Department to indict Trump for trying to overthrow the federal government.

Trump rehashed his "no collusion" defense to then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller's 2019 report on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign's ties to Russia, referred to the "Fake Unselect Committee" as a "witch hunt," repeated his lie that the 2020 election was stolen, expressed how disappointed he is in the state of the country, and conceded that he is not, in fact, the president.

READ MORE: Washington Post: DOJ 'should conduct a criminal investigation' into Donald Trump

Post number one, 9:28 a.m.:

Warmongering and despicable human being Liz Cheney, who is hated by the great people of Wyoming (down 35!), keeps saying, over and over again, that HER Fake Unselect Committee may recommend CRIMINAL CHARGES against a President of the United States who got more votes than any sitting President in history. Even the Dems didn’t know what she was talking about! Why doesn’t she press charges instead against those that cheated on the Election, or those that didn’t properly protect the Capitol?

Post number two, 10:00 a.m.:

Why doesn’t the highly partisan Unselect Committee of political Thugs, the same people (all Trump haters & profiteers - books, speeches, etc.) that were involved with Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax # 2, the 'No Collusion' Mueller Report and, overall, the GREATEST WITCH HUNT IN THE HISTORY OF THE USA, go after the people who have been rioting, burning down cities, leading the massive crime wave, & killing many all over the U.S., including drug & human traffickers? No, let’s get 'Trump'!

Post number three, 10:20 a.m.:

I know it’s not looking good for our Country right now, with a major War raging out of control in Europe, the Highest Inflation in memory, the worst 6 month Stock Market start in History, the highest Energy Prices EVER, and that is the Good News. Happy Fourth of July!!! ((Don’t worry, We will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and remember, none of these terrible events would have happened if I were President!!!))

an 6 22 no twt

former President Donald Trump joined Newsmax for an interview that aired on Thursday morning in which he spewed out a laundry list of bizarre accusations against ex-White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, whose sworn testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol on Tuesday was absolutely devastating for Trump.

A visibly agitated Trump complained about Hutchinson's recounting of his behavior during the insurrection.

"Some whack job can stay this stuff and get away with it, and other things, that I wanted guns at my rally. Okay, now I'm speaking, why would I want guns? I don't want people having, standing with guns in my rally," he said on Wake Up America.

READ MORE: Legal experts weigh in on Donald Trump's possible witness tampering

Hutchinson recalled that Trump believed that his armed supporters were "not there to hurt me."

Trump maintained that "this woman, she wanted to work for me after January 6th. She was a big Trump fan. She wanted to work for me in Florida and we chose not to bring her down because I got very bad things."

Next, Trump repeated what he said on Tuesday – that "I hardly knew her," even though his and Hutchinson's West Wing offices were only a few yards apart. "And I said, 'well if she's no good, I got somebody called up, numerous people, that she's not good.''"

Trump then refused to say "why she's not good, plenty of reasons... she was not respected by the people in the White House. So they thought she shouldn't go down. I was going down to Florida with a group of people, great group of people, patriots, and her name was thrown out there and they said, 'stay away from her.' They said bad things about her."

Hutchinson's strange story about Trump trying to hijack his motorcade, which was told to her by Trump's then-deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato, made him particularly upset.

"And then I see her, and again, I hardly know who she is. And then I see this woman getting up and she's making up stories, like one after another, but the craziest of all was that I tried to commandeer – they used that word – I tried to commandeer a car with Secret Service agents telling them to take us down to the Capitol," Trump said. "It was totally false, and that a person can get away with it... and then I watch the Times and The Washington Post, and I get reviews on MSDNC, and CNN, they hardly even talk about the fact that she's been totally discredited."

That is untrue, given that so far, nobody has refuted Hutchinson's damning statements under oath.

Watch below via Vox's Aaron Rupar:[twt]

trump's reaction rekindled widespread suspicions that he is attempting to engage in witness tampering in order to obfuscate the truth.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/eric-holder/

smoking gun jan 6 trump crime

mo brooks sends email how to sedition from trump? admin?

CDV note sys

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/donald-trump-an-american-monster/

quite long]

...Dowd surmises that it never occurred to Donald Trump that a president openly plotting a seditious coup "would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title." The House Jan. 6 committee's first prime-time hearing, she writes, played out as "a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Mary Shelley could have appreciated":

In his dystopian Inaugural speech, Trump promised to end 'American carnage. 'Instead, he delivered it. Now he needs to be held accountable for his attempted coup — and not just in the court of public opinion.

...But who created this American monster? Donald Trump was not built by a deranged scientist in a secret lab. He is not an orphan, and did not emerge out of nowhere. He was the almost inevitable result of a decades-long assault by the "conservative" movement aimed at ending American democracy (especially multiracial democracy) and replacing it with a pseudo-democratic authoritarian state, perhaps organized under the system political theorist Sheldon Wolin described as "inverted totalitarianism."

As part of that long-term assault, most or all the historic victories of the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the gay rights movement, the labor and environmental movements and other struggles for human dignity and a more just society are being rolled back. If this project succeeds, America's already threadbare social safety net will be virtually eliminated. White Christian fascists and corporate plutocrats will forge a ruling coalition with near-total dominion over American life and society. The separation of church and state, along with the guarantee of free speech and most of the Bill of Rights, will disappear.

There is no longer a "normal" or "traditional" version of the Republican Party for so-called conservatives to return to. Even those conservatives who have disavowed or denounced the Trump movement are implicated in his rise. They are like political Dr. Frankensteins, horrified by what they have created but unable to kill it. Over the course of decades, they painstakingly built the monster and created the blueprint for American fascism.

As Wajahat Ali wrote this week in the Daily Beast, some of Trump's "most prominent enablers" are now trying to distance themselves from the "ongoing, concentrated, right-wing effort to overturn the 2020 election":

Even though most of these ex-Trumpers will fail up in their careers—as is often the case in Washington, D.C. — it's important for the rest of us to recognize them as utterly complicit actors who deserve to wear that MAGA hat on their heads until the end of time….

If you believe that there is a 'team normal' in the modern GOP, then you'll also probably believe that fewer doors and arming teachers will reduce mass gun shootings, banning books will save your child from being transgender, and climate change is a hoax created by China.

Either way, you're not acknowledging that the GOP is now a weaponized cult that no longer produces 'rational' Republicans, but instead caters to the festering, fevered paranoid swamp of dangerous conspiracy theories and white supremacist ideologies. This persistent right-wing disinformation has now radicalized its base, in which many members believe violence is necessary to 'take back' their country. The reality is that Team Normal and Team Crazy both play for the GOP, wear the same uniforms, and, for now, worship the golden calf known as Trump.

Ultimately, Donald Trump is not some type of monstrous Other or outsider. He was not conjured up in some other dimension ruled by Lovecraftian demons, only to descend on America out of the ether to sow destruction, chaos, misery and death.

In reality, Donald Trump — as a man, a symbol and a political leader — and everything he embodies is the product of our society, driven by extreme social inequality, consumerism and greed, unfulfilled dreams, widespread alienation and loneliness, anti-intellectualism, racism and white supremacy, the cult of the spectacle, our fetish for violence and a range of related antisocial and anti-human values and tendencies.

In a recent essay for ScheerPost republished at Salon, Chris Hedges offers a powerful diagnosis of our corrupt and failing American political system, arguing that the House Jan. 6 committee will do nothing to correct it:

The two established wings of the oligarchy, the old Republican Party represented by politicians such as Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, and the Bush family, are now united with the Democratic Party elite into one ruling political entity. The ruling parties were already in lockstep for decades on the major issues, including: war, trade deals, austerity, the militarization of police, prisons, government surveillance and assaults on civil liberties. They worked in tandem to pervert and destroy democratic institutions on behalf of the rich and corporations. They desperately work together now to stave off the revolt by enraged and betrayed white working men and women who support Donald Trump and the far right.

There are other systemic failures as well. America's mainstream news media, through both habit and laziness, have approached Donald Trump, and American politics more generally, as a running narrative of "great men" (and, more recently, "great women"), singular figures who are the main characters in an unfolding drama largely independent of history, culture or economic reality.

This partly explains the media's obsession with polling and public opinion, the addiction to horserace coverage and the drive to identify "winners" and "losers" on a daily basis. Of course the mainstream media is also driven by profit, and compelled to shape the news so as not to offend advertisers or alienate the political establishment and other social and cultural elites.

Media practitioners are also trained to avoid moral language when describing domestic politics, although they routinely use such language when discussing foreign affairs, and especially Americans' official enemies. The result is that most mainstream American political journalism remains an exercise in stenography and superficial commentary, almost always bending the knee to such totems as "moderation," "normal politics," "fairness" and "balance," concepts that were likely never helpful or transparent and are now totally inadequate to the task of confronting America's democracy crisis.

Many in the media still refuse to see the Trump movement and the modern Republican Party as destructive revolutionary forces, rather than as traditional political movements with an investment in the existing system. At this point, the media's willful or compulsive refusal to comprehend the nature of the threat has become a pathology. Journalists at mainstream outlets would benefit greatly from reading "The Authoritarian Playbook: A Media Guide," a new report from the nonpartisan nonprofit group Protect Democracy. It offers the following advice:

To the extent that the authoritarian playbook has a central theme, it is that democratic erosion is a process of power concentration and consolidation. While all political actors seek to accumulate power, authoritarians, uniquely, seek to entrench that power and protect it from external checks. Experts generally agree that democracies don't tend to die at the hands of individuals alone. Rather, contemporary attacks on democracy only succeed when they are coordinated, systemic, and undertaken by broad parties or movements.

If Donald Trump the American monster is somehow banished from American political life — through criminal prosecution, advancing age or some other force — another such monster will rapidly appear. In fact, Ron DeSantis and other leading Republican-fascists are eagerly waiting for Trump to leave the stage, and could well turn out to be more competent and more effective than him. Trumpism is a hydra-headed movement, no longer dependent on Trump as an individual: Chop off one of its heads and another will grow. The only long-term solution is to drain the swamp that birthed the monster.