MEADOWS 2 COS

no lnx

SEE PARDON TRUMP ED F MARTIN

trump coup, but turned over docs at 1st?

SEE CPI TRUMP SAVE AM PAC 1 MILL$

SEE CLETA Cpi VOTER SUPPRESS BIG LIE ILLEGALS

bak 8 22

meadows520

freedom caucus --> mick mulvaney? --> scott perry

like ginni TP roots ~ BO racism // wht supr?

cleta

6? house reps subpoena jan 6 5 22

===

GEORGIA CASE FANNI GONE BUT REBOOT 1025?

---

AN 11 25

President Donald Trump went on a Sunday night pardon spree, granting full clemency to at least 77 individuals involved in promoting alternate electors in battleground states after the 2020 election, including former Trump attorneys John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, according to Axios.

Announced by U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, the pardons cover potential federal offenses but exclude Trump himself and do not affect ongoing state prosecutions in Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan.

Others who received pardons include attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, attorney and Acting Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget Jeffrey Clark, and attorney and former Trump strategic advisor Boris Epshteyn.

Legal experts describe the action as largely symbolic, given the absence of federal charges against the recipients, but critics excoriated the pardons on social media.

One wrote on X that this move means the country is "waving goodbye to democracy again."

Chef Courtney Brown wrote that"AmeriKKKa has lost its way! This is an absolute disgrace!"

"The fact that NO ONE will be held to account for conspiring to illegally keep Trump in office is one of the most distressing and infuriating consequences of the 2024 election," posted another critic on X.

An x user by the name of America First Democrat posted, "So basically no one who participated in efforts to illegally overturn the 2020 election can be held accountable? The lawlessness of this administration knows no bounds."

Retired Naval reservist and self-described "JFK Libertarian" David Rouse said, "This only reflects #Trump's total disdain for the #Constitution he swore to "protect, preserve, and defend". Pardoning his accomplices in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 fair election that he lost, makes a mockery of the #Rule_of_Law and endangers us all!"

Tech CEO Simon St-Onge wrote, "When people see injustices, criminals pardoned because they know the leader, they lose faith in the justice system, and take their own defence in to their own hands. That’s a premise for barbarism and violence, and war amongst citizens. We should never tolerate injustice, I pity America, the land of the free is no longer so. It will take years, to make it great again. The USA is alone now, with a few other countries lead by autocratic leaders, demented narcissistic men, like Trump and Putin, devoted to themselves, and themselves alone."

"It's about the political whims of Donald Trump," said MSNBC's justice and intelligence reporter Ken Dilanian.

---}:

Cleta Mitchell’s New Dark Money Elections Group Raised $3.9 Million in Its First Full Year of Operations - EXPOSEDbyCMD

JUL 2025

Insurrectionist and voter suppression advocate Cleta Mitchell formed a new dark money group in 2023 to channel funds to organizations that promote the Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election and spread misinformation about the threat of widespread noncitizen voting.

Housed in the offices of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), the Foundation for Accountability Integrity & Research in Elections Fund (FAIR Elections Fund) brought in $3.9 million between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024, and disclosed $2.1 million in expenses, more than three-quarters of which was disbursed in grants to other organizations.

The FAIR Elections Fund has no website as of publication. A Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis of the group’s first tax filing, recently made public, offers the first internal look into Mitchell’s group since she disclosed leading it in biographies and news reports.

The group’s IRS filing says that it made no payments for salaries or other compensation, while claiming Mitchell is working 50 hours per week for the group. This raises the question of who is paying Mitchell for her work.

Mitchell has worked to manufacture a crisis around noncitizens voting and partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to push for model bills and amendments to state constitutions banning it — despite the fact that evidence of noncitizen voting is scarce. “Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare,” the Brennan Center reported in 2024.

A senior legal fellow at CPI, Mitchell launched her previous project, the Election Integrity Network (EIN), with the help of the right-wing group, which was founded and led by former U.S. senator and congressman Jim DeMint and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows (also an insurrectionist). In 2023, EIN moved out of the CPI constellation of nonprofits and is now “administered and managed by the Virginia Institute for Public Policy with Virginia Institute president Lynn Taylor also serving as EIN’s Chairman as Cleta Mitchell retains an active EIN role as its founder,” according to a 2023 booklet obtained by CMD.

EIN’s latest IRS filing shows that as of December 2023 it was still registered at CPI’s office address, with just $213 left in the bank.

Serving on the FAIR Elections Fund board of directors alongside Mitchell, its president, are Vice President Heather Honey, Vice President Daniel Bean, Secretary Don Workman, and Treasurer Pat Corrigan.

Honey, also an executive director at the Election Research Institute, is a close ally of Mitchell who worked with her to sow doubt about the efficacy and trustworthiness of the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which has resulted in many states opting out of this interstate effort to help ensure accurate voter rolls.

A 2024 analysis by Votebeat and Spotlight PA found that conclusions in Honey’s report on ERIC “are false, often based on out-of-context examples, and… are frequently not backed by the data she presents.”

The IRS filing shows that the FAIR Elections Fund paid $121,284 to Honey’s organization Verity Vote LLC for “consulting.”

Vice President Daniel Bean is an attorney who represented Trump advisor Andy Surabian when he was subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Secretary Don Workman is a partner at Baker & Hostetler and was a partner at Foley & Lardner, the Washington-based law firm that Mitchell was forced to resign from after she participated in the infamous post-2020 election phone call in which Trump urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to claim victory in that swing state.

Treasurer Pat Corrigan runs Compass Direct LLC, a fundraising company that works for CPI, where his brother Edward is president. Given Corrigan’s role as treasurer, he is likely the one tasked with raising funds for the organization.

$1.6 Million in Grants

The FAIR Elections Fund distributed $1.6 million in grants in 2023-24 to 10 allied groups.

The FDRLST Media Foundation, which publishes the right-wing web magazine The Federalist, received $400,000, the largest grant. In 2020, The Federalist falsely accused Democrats of trying to steal the election in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania during extended vote counting in the days following the presidential election.

The pro-Trump outlet also published a column EIN’s Kerri Toloczko misinforming readers that noncitizen voting is a crisis that needs to be addressed through federal legislation. Since 2019 it has run nine pieces by Mitchell on noncitizen voting, purging voter rolls, and voting by mail.

EIN’s administrator, the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, received the next largest grant of $325,000. The Institute held its fifth Election Integrity Summit on May 16, and holds “infrastructure trainings” twice a month.

The FAIR Elections Fund funneled its third largest grant of $300,000 to the State Freedom Caucus Foundation, the sister organization of the State Freedom Caucus Network (SFCN). CPI incubated SFCN, which Meadows launched in 2021. From the beginning, the group has touted “election integrity” as a priority.

The network has been deployed to ban noncitizens from voting at the federal level as well as at the state level in places like Missouri.

Mitchell also spoke at the 2024 State Freedom Caucus Network Summit, where Wyoming State Freedom Caucus Chair Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R) said she “shared some shocking statistics about American elections and illegal immigration.”

The Immigration Accountability Project (IAP) received $150,000 from the FAIR Elections Fund, the IRS filing shows. IAP President Chris Chmielenski collaborated with Mitchell and Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, to work a room of 150 attendees at ALEC’s 2024 Annual Meeting to approve an Only Citizens Vote Coalition model bill banning noncitizen voting, The Guardian reported.

The FAIR Elections Fund, Immigration Accountability Project, and Election Transparency Initiative are all members of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, with Mitchell serving as a “co-convener.”

Also receiving FAIR Elections Fund grants between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024 were the Tea Party Patriots Foundation ($100,000); Citizen Outreach Foundation ($89,100); John K MacIver Institute for Public Policy ($75,000); Strong Communities Foundation of AZ ($75,000); Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty ($75,000); and Wisconsin Voter Alliance Corp ($25,000).

In November, Wisconsin voters passed a ballot measure to change one word in the state constitution to prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in any local, state, or federal election. The right-wing MacIver Institute and Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty were proponents of its passage.

Funding is Dark

Despite the new IRS filings, funding information about the FAIR Elections Fund is scarce. The organization is not required to disclose its donors, and a CMD search of the filings only identified a single contribution of $795,000 from CPI, which does not note the original source of the funds. A CMD analysis of CPI’s known funders is available here.

alternet-lno lnx

Supreme Court delivers massive blow to Mark Meadows

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows' mugshot (Photo: Fulton County Sheriff's Office)

Carl GibsonNovember 12, 2024

Despite the Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows isn't catching a break from Republican-appointed justices in his own criminal case.

CNN reported Tuesday that Meadows' request to have his Fulton County, Georgia election interference case moved to federal court in Washington, D.C. has been officially denied, meaning the door has closed on his last-ditch effort to move his case out of the Peach State. Meadows had hoped to have his state-level case moved to the federal court, with his attorneys arguing that Meadows' acting on orders from then-President Donald Trump's were part of his official duties as chief of staff.

“This court reiterated that the threat posed by prosecutions against federal officers for actions relating to their federal functions does not evaporate once they leave federal office,” Meadows’ legal team stated in a filing to the Supreme Court this summer. “A White House Chief of Staff facing criminal charges based on actions relating to his work for the president of the United States should not be a close call.”

READ MORE: US appeals court shuts down Mark Meadows' attempt to move GA election interference case

Meadows' argument already fell flat in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, however, with a three-judge panel denying his petition for an en banc hearing by the full circuit earlier this year. Chief Judge William Pryor previously ruled that Meadows' case should remain in the Georgia state court system, saying "the events giving rise to this criminal action were not related Meadows’ official duties."

Now, Meadows' fate will depend on an Atlanta jury after the Georgia Court of Appeals rules on whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis can continue prosecuting the case. Willis — who won her own reelection last week — has previously survived Trump's attempt to have her removed from the case, as his lawyers argued that her romantic relationship with then-special prosecutor Nathan Wade constituted a conflict of interest.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee previously ruled that either Wade or Willis had to step down from their role this summer, prompting Wade to submit his resignation almost immediately following McAfee's decision. But Trump's lawyers successfully appealed that decision to the Georgia Court of Appeals, which is expected to issue its own ruling on whether Willis can remain on the case next spring.

With Trump preparing to enter the White House again in January, Meadows was likely angling for a presidential pardon if his case was moved from state to federal court. But because Trump cannot end state-level investigations with a pardon, both the president-elect and his former chief of staff still have to contend with the Fulton County case regardless of whether Willis remains on the case or a new prosecutor is assigned.

READ MORE: 'No trial until 2025': Political scientist hedges bet on 'untested constitutional theory' in GA case

Trump's attorneys in Georgia had previously argued that his criminal trial should be put on hold until January of 2029 if he were to win the election, saying that the duties of the presidency take precedent over an individual state's prosecution. Judge McAfee has yet to officially reschedule the trial, though it's expected his lawyers will be successful in preventing the case from moving forward until Trump leaves office.

CNN reported that Meadows has already struck out in his attempts to move his Arizona criminal case to federal court, with a judge ruling against him in September. Meadows is facing multiple felony charges in the Grand Canyon State for his alleged attempts to interfere with the 2020 election in the state President Joe Biden narrowly won four years ago.

Click here to read CNN's report in full.

READ MORE: GA reporter: Here's what happens with Trump's Fulton County trial after Fani Willis decision

Highly-classified intel on Putin and Russia went missing in Trump’s final White House days - Alternet.org

an 12 23

in January 19, 2021, his last full day in office, then-president Donald Trump signed a memorandum ordering the declassification of “a binder of materials” containing raw Russian intelligence and various reports so highly-classified it was kept in a safe inside a vault at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

That 10-inch deep binder has been missing since Trump left the White House, according to a detailed CNN report which reveals the existence of the binder for the first time, outside of a memoir by Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

“The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN,” the news network reported Friday. Its disappearance has been “raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.”

READ MORE: White Supremacist Who Dined With Trump Calls for ‘Death Penalty’ for Non-Christians: Report

“The binder was last seen at the White House during Trump’s final days in office,” CNN’s report continues. “The former president had ordered it brought there so he could declassify a host of documents related to the FBI’s Russia investigation. Under the care of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the binder was scoured by Republican aides working to redact the most sensitive information so it could be declassified and released publicly.”

In his memorandum, Trump states that he ordered the binder brought to the White House.

“At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” the memo states.

“Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public,” Trump continued. “I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.”

Under Crossfire Hurricane, the Bureau investigated the links between Donald Trump, the Trump campaign, and Russia, and whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia’s efforts to attack the U.S. election process to help Trump get elected. Special Counsel Robert Mueller took over the investigation in what the nation later learned was a highly-controlled effort that Trump “tried to seize control of … and force Mueller’s removal.”

Trump’s top and most loyal advisors, including Attorney General Bill Barr, tried to stop Trump from declassifying the binder, which Trump believed exonerated him from allegations Russia had helped him win the 2016 election, allegations proven by the Mueller investigation and by a Senate Republican-majority Intelligence Committee investigation.

READ MORE: ‘Thoughts and Prayers’: Moms Group Releases ‘Devastating’ Ad on Sandy Hook Anniversary

Copies of the binder were made, to hasten the DOJ’s work to redact its declassified contents as necessary for national security so it could be released.

Cassidy Hutchinson, whose testimony before the nation during a primetime televised hearing of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack’s riveted the nation, “testified to Congress and wrote in her memoir that she believes Meadows took home an unredacted version of the binder. She said it had been kept in Meadows’ safe and that she saw him leave with it from the White House,” according to CNN.

“’I am almost positive it went home with Mr. Meadows,’ Hutchinson told the January 6 committee in closed-door testimony, according to transcripts released last year.”

“A lawyer for Meadows,” CNN adds, “however, strongly denies that Meadows mishandled any classified information at the White House, saying any suggestion Meadows was responsible for classified information going missing was ‘flat wrong.'”

Read the entire CNN report here.

===

1123 fani says no deal with trump rudy MM

---

ymail 1123

Public Citizen has been attacked by a far-right entity associated with Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff and one of the MAGA operatives charged in Georgia for conspiring to carry out Trump’s attempted coup.

Please stick with me for more about this attack.

The Supreme Court’s absurd and anti-democratic Citizens United ruling in 2010 has allowed corporations to spend literally as much as they want bankrolling political candidates and distorting our elections.

In response, Public Citizen launched a nationwide campaign for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

We also brought together a broad network of local and national organizations to push government agencies, corporations themselves, and shareholders for disclosure of corporate political spending.

That network — which Public Citizen leads to this day — is called the Corporate Reform Coalition.

Here’s where Mark Meadows comes in.

Meadows — amidst being one of Donald Trump’s chief lackeys and sorting through legal difficulties arising from the plot to overthrow the 2020 election — has found time to be part of a far-right outfit that has sponsored an array of reactionary enterprises in Washington, D.C.

One of those extremist entities is the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), which claims to be “the one new conservative organization the Left fears most.”

To give you a taste of how the AAF spends its time, after President Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, the group loudly repeated a Republican lie that she had called the judicial system “unfair” to sexual predators.

The Meadows-backed AAF also went after Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin — who had been nominated for a position within the Federal Reserve, and who has the temerity to think that fossil fuel companies have something to do with climate change — for missing a paperwork deadline when they were reeling from their son’s suicide just two weeks earlier.

And now the Mark Meadows-backed American Accountability Foundation has attacked Public Citizen through the Corporate Reform Coalition that we lead.

The Meadows-linked AAF issued a 79-page screed that denounces the Public Citizen-led Corporate Reform Coalition as a “motley crew” that is “ideologically motivated to suppress the speech of conservatives.”

But it is not a violation of anyone’s “free speech” rights to want to know how much billionaires and Big Business are spending to essentially buy politicians — Republicans AND Democrats — and to overrun our democracy.

In fact, the Supreme Court justified its travesty of a ruling in Citizens United in part by alleging that the way to address concerns about corporate money in politics is requiring disclosure of that spending.

The Court’s majority seemed to think that existing law required disclosure of corporate political spending. That was wrong. And Public Citizen has been working to mandate disclosure of corporate political spending ever since.

Of course, Public Citizen is not intimidated by — or afraid of a fight with — Donald Trump, MAGA zealots like Mark Meadows, or obscurely named right-wing front groups.

---

1123 Fani says no deal to top 3, trump rudy and MM

silent, hunkered, HE HAS FLIPPED?

an 6 23

former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), a close ally of former President Donald Trump, reportedly testified before special counsel Jack Smith's grand jury investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

This comes after Gingrich was also targeted for testimony in the election interference probe going on in Georgia — and he further came under fire for appearing to advocate violence in response to the FBI's search for classified documents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago country club.

Speaking to CNN, correspondent Sara Murray outlined the role Gingrich may have played in the plot to undermine the 2020 election.

"A source tells me that former Speaker Newt Gingrich was testifying before the grand jury," said Murray. "He spent half a day in front of that jury, and of course those proceedings are behind closed doors. We don't know exactly what prosecutors asked him."

However, Murray noted, the House January 6 Committee turned their sights on Gingrich last year.

"According to documents the committee was able to uncover, they say Gingrich was allegedly in communication with senior advisers to Donald Trump about the television strategy around the 2020 election including, you know, ads that would push some of these false allegations of election fraud," said Murray. "The January 6th Committee also alleged that Gingrich may have played some sort of role in coordinating some of these slates of fake electors that we saw in a number of battleground states that Donald Trump lost, but of course wanted to continue to try to contest. One of the people that Gingrich was in touch with was Mark Meadows,which of course, we reported also, has testified recently before these grand juries as part of the ongoing special counsel probe."

"I think, you know, one of the things that's striking ... is of course we're waiting for a potential indictment in the classified documents case," said Murray. "It looks like that could be looming kind of at any point, and it seems clear that these two probes could be moving on different time lines. You know, it's relatively late in the game to see a big name like Newt Gingrich going in before a grand jury. We also learned in recent weeks, prosecutors have been interviewing new witnesses, and of course we reported yesterday that just a couple of weeks ago,Steve Bannon got a subpoena for testimony and documents."

Watch below...

===

an 8 23 no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/trump-fake-elector-prosecutions-congress/

Trump fake elector prosecutions could soon ensnare members of Congress

Matt Laslo

August 04, 2023

WASHINGTON – The justice system is closing in on former President Donald Trump, and soon, some expect that dragnet will ensnare elected members of Congress.

Before lawmakers left town for a month-long recess, Raw Story caught up with two Republicans the U.S. House January 6 select committee named as central to the scheme to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to certify slates of fake electors after Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

The two lawmakers were dismissive and said no prosecutors, either local or federal, had contacted them in their quest to hold fake electors and their enablers accountable.

“Not me. I've gotten nothing,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) –who allegedly tried to pass Wisconsin fake electors to Pence — told Raw Story at the Capitol. “There’s nothing to come after me for.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI)

Johnson also dismissed the fake elector case in Michigan as “absurd.”

Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) – chairman of the House Freedom Caucus – also brushed aside concerns and said he hasn’t been contacted.

“No,” Perry – who the January 6 select committee flagged to the House Ethics Committee for refusing to sit for an interview – told Raw Story while walking to the Capitol. “I don’t have any concerns.”

Others aren’t so sure. During the Jan. 6 select committee proceedings, formerRep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) accused Perry of asking Trump for a pardon after the failed insurrection.

ALSO READ: Mark Meadows ‘flipped hard’ on Trump: ex-January 6 committee adviser

“Look at the congressmen and their text messages, they obviously were in some coordinating function. The issue is, does it rise to the level of indictment?” former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) – who served as an adviser to the Jan. 6 committee –told Raw Story this week. “But as this testimony comes out, I think they're going to get on one of those things called a Pucker Factor 10. I think they're going to be biting buttonholes in their underwear when the actual evidence comes out.”

Perry and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exchanged at least 62 text messagesbetween the 2020 election and President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. In one exchange, Perry informed Meadows they’d begun the “cyber portion” of their efforts to overturn the election results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona.

Hot pursuit of fake electors

In July, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped felony charges on 16 Republicans she alleges were at the center of her state’s fake elector scheme. Last week, the Associated Press reported the FBI and Justice Department questioned Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe earlier this year.

The scheming around fake electors is also central to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump. He dubs the “criminal scheme” to send slates of fake electors to Congress the “Wisconsin Memo.”

“The plan began in early December,” the indictment reads, “and ultimately, the conspirators and the Defendant’s Campaign took the Wisconsin Memo and expanded it to any state that the Defendant claimed was “contested” — even New Mexico which the Defendant had lost by more than ten percent of the popular vote.”

The indictment then quotes a Dec. 6 email from former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that accompanied the Wisconsin Memo.

“We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states,” Meadows is quoted on page 23 of the indictment as sending campaign staff.

Then, on Dec. 27 – just over a week away from the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. – the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, told Trump, according to the indictment, “that the Justice Department could not and would not change the outcome of the election.”

“Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump is quoted as replying.

The evidence speaks for itself, Riggleman tells Raw Story.

“To quote Hunter Thompson: facts are a million-pound s— hammer. And fact-based insights based on data is a 2-million-pound s— hammer,” Riggleman said.

All eyes are now watching to see if other state attorneys general follow Michigan’s lead and seek prosecutions for those involved in the fake elector plot, including Republicans on Capitol Hill.

“I give credit to the attorney general because people are not above the law, and they broke the law,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) recently told Raw Story. “These are people that lied about the most important thing, which is our democracy.”

From Your Site Articles

Ginni Thomas 'may have crossed the line' into criminality with fake electors plot: former federal prosecutor ›

Special counsel gives two fake Trump electors immunity to compel testimony ›

Michigan AG indicts 16 people in Trump fake electors plot: report ›

Day 5 offers new evidence — and new mysteries

Lisa Rubin

As at prior hearings, the House select committee offered new evidence today, including evidence of GOP congressmembers’ consciousness of guilt. (You don’t ask for a pardonunless you think there’s a decent chance you broke the law — and could be prosecuted.)

But some of the new evidence was just as puzzling as it was tantalizing. Consider two examples.

First, the committee asserted today that lawyer Ken Klukowski, who served in the Justice Department for a hot minute, collaborated with John Eastman and Jeffrey Bossert Clark on aspects of Trump’s scheme. But how did Klukowski come to DOJ, where, as Liz Cheney noted, he was specifically assigned to Clark, in the first place?

one clue comes from the Dec. 28, 2021 email the committee showed today, in which GOP activist and Family Research Council fellow Ken Blackwell advocated that Eastman and Klukowski brief Pence and his team. That email was sent to two people: Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff, Connie Hair, and Ed Corrigan, the president and CEO of the Conservative Partnership Institute, or CPI. If CPI sounds familiar to you, it should. It’s where Mark Meadowsis now a “Senior Partner,” and it was the beneficiary of a $1 million donation from Trump in the weeks after the select committee was created.

What sway, if any, Corrigan and Hair had over Pence and his staff is unknown. But it bears noting that Corrigan had prior experience filling administration jobs for Trump; as his CPI bio reads, he led “the personnel selection process for all domestic policy departments” for Trump’s 2016 transition.

Second, the committee noted, in describing the run up to the Jan. 3, 2021 Oval Office meeting, that Jeff Clark was already being referred to asthe acting attorney general on White House call logs late that afternoon. The absence of call logs for Jan. 6 itself has already been thoroughly explored, but is it possible that such logs for other, significant days reveal more than we would have expected? Looks like we’ll have to wait at least until hearings resume next month to find out.

---

99d ago / 9 22 access

The key role played by Ken Klukowski

Lisa Rubin

In November of last year, the House select committee issued a subpoena to Kenneth Klukowski, a lawyer and former aide to Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark. And in its press release, the committee was fairly transparent as to why: Klukowski “was:{**involved in drafting a letter**:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:that urged legislatures in certain states to delay certification of the election.” He also helped Clark prepare for the now-infamous Jan. 3, 2021 meeting. That, of course, was the meeting at which all assembled but Clark said they would resign if Trump fired Rosen and made Clark acting attorney general.

But who is Klukowski?

For starters, he’s a guy with a long history in the conservative legal and political worlds, including with Team Trump. In November 2016, Politico reported thatKlukowski, who was then senior counsel at director of strategy at the First Liberty Institute, joined the Trump transition team as an advisor on “protecting constitutional rights.”By 2018, while still at First Liberty, he argued, in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner in support of an Oregon couple that refused to bake a same-sex wedding cake. Unsurprisingly, Klukowski, a former Family Research Council director, was named as a member ofthe “Christian legal army” in The Nation’s reporting on those lawyers’ growing influence in state attorneys generals’ offices and federal courts.

Klukowski’s relationships with key Trump world figures are also substantial. A former senior legal editor at Breitbart, he hasknown former Trump advisor Steve Bannon for years. (Here’sthem talking together on Breitbart.) And connections between Klukowski and Trump attorney John Eastman date back to at least 2012.”He even appeared with another Trump campaign lawyer, Sidney Powell, on talk radio in 2018.

Yet Klukowski did not join the Trump administration until late August 2019, when he joined OMB as a special counsel underthen-general counsel Mark Paoletta, who later became embroiled in the withholding of aid to Ukraine underlying Trump’s first impeachment. (Today, Paoletta and Klukowski havereunited in private practice at Schaerr Jaffe, a boutique law firm well stocked with conservative legal stars.) And he didn’t leave the White House for the Justice Department until mid-December 2020, which begs the question: Why would anyone, much less someone with a plum White House gig, take a job expected to last little more than a month?

As expected, the committee has some answers.

First, Klukowski “parachuted into the Department... with only 36 days left until [the] inauguration” and then “drafted th[e] Georgia letter with Mr. Clark” just days before the Oval Office showdown between Clark and his DOJ bosses.

Second, Klukowski worked with his old friend Eastman, includingafterhe joined DOJ, to quietly aid Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Ken Blackwell, a GOP activist and former Ohio Secretary of State, suggested Pence and his staff would benefit from a briefing from Eastman and Klukowski. Still, Blackwell cautioned they not “overexpose Ken given his new position.” Klukowski’s value, apparently, was as both a willing soldier for Trump, and an under-the-radar insider.

As Cheney summed up, the evidence shows “Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the Vice President to overturn the election.” And that determination, coupled with reporting that federal law enforcement seized electronic devices from Clark’s home yesterday, is not a good development for Klukowski.

===

mma 922 https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-producer-lynda-mclaughlin-texted-trumps-chief-staff-push-debunked-claims

Newly released text messages show that the executive producer of Sean Hannity's radio show, Lynda McLaughlin, asked then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for a meeting with President Donald Trump to share “hard data” that “show[ed] proof of the fraud” being pushed by the White House, Fox News, and the entire right-wing media in the 2020 election.

CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter reported on the text messages, taken from a new book by former January 6 committee staffer (and former congressman) Denver Riggleman; as noted in the block quote below, CNN independently verified the messages as well.

Hannity Producer's Big Ask: In early January 2021, during the politically turbulent time before Joe Biden assumed the office of the presidency, the executive producer of Sean Hannity's radio show sought to meet directly with then-President Donald Trump.

The producer, Lynda McLaughlin, texted Mark Meadows, the former acting chief of staff, with a big ask, claiming she had "hard data" which "show[ed] proof of the fraud" — evidently about the 2020 election. McLaughlin characterized the dubious information as "irrefutable" and wanted to take it straight to Trump.

"Mark -- are we able to present our data to POTUS?" McLaughlin asked.

…

The messages underscore the intimate relationship that Hannity, his team, and the right-wing media writ large shared with the Trump White House. The cozy relationship exposed in the messages lays bare that in many cases, right-wing media outlets and personalities not only positively covered the Trump White House, but actively worked arm-in-arm with it.

For instance, when McLaughlin texted Meadows introducing herself ("Hey it's Lynda from Hannity") and told Meadows she was "rallying the troops," Meadows replied by thanking her for her "wonderful" contribution and connecting her with the Trump-supporting Rep. Jim Jordan. "Jim Jordon [sic] will gladly coordinate with the House team," Meadows texted McLaughlin. "Do you need his contact?"

CNN also reported that “Meadows seemed to stop responding to McLaughlin later in the conversation, after she asked to meet with Trump.”

This is not the first time McLaughlin has been directly involved in stoking right-wing conspiracy theories of election fraud. In December 2020, McLaughlin, as part of the so-called “Data Integrity Group,'' testified to the Georgia Senate Judicial Subcommittee that the group had proof of votes being taken from Trump and given to Joe Biden.

During the hearing, McLaughlin never revealed her connection to Hannity.

Hannity later lauded his producer for her strong efforts to overturn the election [audio]

HANNITY (HOST): On December 30th, there is this really incredible group. Lynda McLaughlin works with them, our own Lynda, Data Integrity Group, they actually gave Senate testimony on December 30th about Georgia for example, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Elections. Let's see, the people you have involved in this seem pretty impressive to me. You've got one guy is a data scientist with over a decade experience in a lot of industries, what we have here is fraud that we can prove in this election and then I begin to look at the background and the people, one is a nine-year veteran of the US Navy, worked as an electronic warfare technicians, cryptologic technician whatever the hell that is, Arabic linguist, worked at the NSA as a mission manager, later worked as a CIA contractor at the Counter-terrorism Center. And I'm like, "wow."

On January 2, 2021, the claims were amplified by far-right The Epoch Times and its affiliated NTD YouTube channel.

McLaughlin appeared in an interview with The Epoch Times, released on its site on January 5, 2021, in which she suggests election fraud occurred in Pennsylvania as well.

Justin Mealey and Dave Lobue, other members of the “Data Integrity Group,” also appeared on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business show on January 5: vid]

the claims from the Data Integrity Grouphave been debunked.

All together, this is another example of the close relationship between Fox News personalities and the Trump White House.

===

an 9 22

After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was among the many MAGA Republicans who aggressively promoted the Big Lie — claiming that the election had been stolen from Trump and aggressively looking for possible ways to keep Trump in the White House. One of the fellow Trump supporters Meadows worked with during that period, according to CNN reporter Zachary Cohen, was Republican operative Phil Waldron.

“As allies of then-President Donald Trump made a final push to overturn the election in late-December 2020, one of the key operatives behind the effort briefed then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about his attempts to gain access to voting systems in key battleground states, starting with Arizona and Georgia, according to text messages obtained by CNN,” Cohen reports in an article published by CNN’s website on September 26. “Phil Waldron, an early proponent of various election-related conspiracy theories, texted Meadows on December 23 that an Arizona judge had dismissed a lawsuit filed by friendly GOP lawmakers there. The suit demanded state election officials hand over voting machines and other election equipment, as part of the hunt for evidence to support Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.”

Cohen continues, “In relaying the news to Meadows, Waldron said the decision would allow opponents to engage in ‘delay tactics’ preventing Waldron and his associates from immediately accessing machines.Waldron also characterized Arizona as ‘our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade,’ referring to similar efforts in other states like Georgia. ‘Pathetic,’ Meadows responded.”

According to Cohen, those previously unreported text messages “shed new light on how Waldron’s reach extended into the highest levels of the White House and the extent to which Meadows was kept abreast of plans for accessing voting machines — a topic sources tell CNN, and court documents suggest, is of particular interest to state and federal prosecutors probing efforts to overturn the 2020 election.”

Cohen describes Waldron as a “retired” U.S. Army colonel with ties to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

According to Cohen, Waldron has “emerged as a key figure in the broader scheme to overturn the election and was the architect of several extreme proposals for doing so” — including “a PowerPoint presentation.”

“Waldron also helped draft language for an executive order directing the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines on behalf of the White House,” Cohen reports. “Trump never signed the order, siding with White House lawyers who insisted the idea was legally perilous. But there is evidence that his closest allies, including Meadows, continued to entertain similar pitches from Waldron in the lead-up to January 6, (2021) as they sought to validate conspiracy theories about foreign election interference.”

===

an 8 22

Former President Donald Trump and his inner circle of allies continue to circulate claims that declassified documents were removed from Mar-a-Lago during the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) search of his estate.

In fact, according to HuffPost, former Trump official Kash Patel recently echoed that same argument during an interview with Fox News' Mark Levin.

“In October of 2020, President Trump put out for the world to see, a sweeping declassification order, and he did it via social media — every single Russia-gate doc, every single Hillary-gate doc, everyone,” Patel said on Sunday.

On Oct. 6, 2020, Trump actually did tweet, “I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!”

However, previous remarks debunking that claim are now circulating again on social media. Per HuffPost, later that month Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff under Trump, "conceded in a sworn declaration to a federal court that Trump’s tweet was not an order to declassify or release those records."

In a sworn statement, the former Trump White House chief of staff wrote, “The president indicated to me that his statements on Twitter were no self-executing declassification orders, and do not require the declassification or release of any particular documents."

Meadows added that "the tweets 'related to authority' the president had delegated" to U.S. Attorney General William Barr pertaining to records.

The sworn statement was written after a judge demanded that an explanation be provided on why the former president's tweets appeared to contradict the White House stance on declassifying Russia-related documents.

In addition to recalling Trump's tweets, Patel – who stepped in as acting chief of staff after Meadows' departure — also claimed that he "had witnessed Trump declassify 'whole sets of documents' in December 2020 and January 2021 while Trump was 'on his way out.'”

However, HuffPost notes that he previously said "the administration 'failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings.'” Declassification is not a process that can be completed in secret.

Watch Patel's Fox News appearance below or at this link:...

===

===

wait till end to avoid blowback?

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.

===

Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show

By Jonathan Karl

https://books.google.com/books?id=vogzEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA268

meadows asked Mark Martin NC regent law school to help; pat c not in mtg; eastman offered 2-----

===

https://www.justsecurity.org/77681/mark-meadows-timeline-the-chief-of-staff-and-schemes-to-overturn-2020-election/

Former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was directly involved at major intersections of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. What follows is a detailed timeline of all the publicly available information.

The timeline shows why Meadows may face :{significant criminal exposure}: for directly participating in a scheme to pressure the Justice Department to investigate baseless election fraud claims. The timeline also describes a :{“parallel track”}: reportedly created by Meadows and Rudy Giuliani, and Meadows’ repeated involvement in Donald Trump and the Trump campaign’s political efforts.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent Meadows a :{request}: to appear for a transcribed interview several weeks ago. The evidence below raises, among other questions, whether Congress should coordinate with the Justice Department so as not to tread on any potential criminal investigation, whether the House and Senate committees investigating these matters should make a criminal referral to the Justice Department in the course of their oversight work, and why there is no indication that the Justice Department has started such a criminal investigation on its own initiative. Notably, Meadows would have more difficulty resisting a subpoena to appear before a grand jury than he would a request or subpoena to appear before Congress. Also significant, Meadows may have greater legal exposure than others involved because he presumably understood well when Attorney General William Barr and others informed him that the allegations of widespread election fraud were without any foundation.

Nine highlights from the Timeline below:

1. :{Meadows and Giuliani created a “parallel track” to raise election fraud claims

}::{2. Trump campaign staff followed up on “Meadows’ theory” that tens of thousands of “illegal aliens” voted in Arizona

}::{3. Meadows helped introduce President Trump to DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, who was plotting to oust the acting attorney general and use the Justice Department to overturn election results in Georgia

}::{4. Meadows expressed upset, along with Trump, in response to Attorney General Barr’s having told the Associated Press there was no election fraud that could have affected the outcome in the election

}::{5. Meadows made a surprise visit to Georgia where he met with the Secretary of State’s lead elections investigator. Trump called her the next day on Meadow’s suggestion and in the call urged her to find fraud in Fulton County

}::{6. Meadows arranged and participated in the call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”; and during the call Meadows asked the Georgia officials to share voting data even after they told him they could not because it was protected by law

}::{7. In several communications with the Justice Department—in violation of White House and DOJ contacts policies—Meadows pressured the Department to investigate baseless allegations of election fraud

}::{8. Then-Acting Secretary of Defense’s chief of staff Kash Patel says he spoke to Meadows “nonstop” on Jan. 6

}:9. In his final days in office, Trump hoped to issue a preemptive pardon for Meadows, Giuliani and possibly himself

Timeline

Election night: As results are coming in, Giuliani proposes, “just say we won” in several swing states. Meadows :{reportedly }:thinks the plan is incoherent and irresponsible.

Meadows thought Giuliani’s argument was both “incoherent and irresponsible,” Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker :{report}:. “We can’t do that,” Meadows said, raising his voice. “We can’t.”

On Nov. 4, 2020: The morning after the election, “Cleta Mitchell [is] dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia,” Jane Mayer :{reports}:.

In a :{radio show}:, Mitchell says Meadows, who she has “known for many years,” called her on the morning of Nov. 4 asking her to go to Atlanta “because he was worried about Georgia … because [Trump’s lead] kept shrinking.” “Probably if anybody else had called me, I would have said you’re two months late, but because it was Mark Meadows and I love the president, I said yes I’d go help.”

Mitchell does not explain how the chief of staff would have a role in such a political assignment. She appears to alternate between saying she was working on behalf of the president/administration and on behalf of the campaign. She states that she worked in Georgia from Nov. 4 to Jan. 8 and did so on a volunteer, unpaid basis.

Note-1: Mitchell later participates, along with Meadows, in the Jan. 2 phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger (see entry for Jan. 2 below).

Note-2: For background on Mitchell: Michael S. Schmidt and Kenneth P. Vogel, :{“Trump Lawyer on Call Is a Conservative Firebrand Aiding His Push to Overturn Election,”:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:400"):}: New York Times; Jane Mayer, :{“The Big Money Behind the Big Lie,”:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:400"):}: New Yorker.

On Nov. 9, 2020: Meadows calls to inform Defense Secretary Mark Esper he is being dismissed for not being “sufficiently loyal.”

Around 1:00 PM, Esper’s chief of staff Jen Stewart receives an email that the president is firing Esper. At the same time, Meadows calls Esper to say “the president’s not happy… And we don’t think you’re sufficiently loyal. You’re going to be replaced. He’s going to announce it this afternoon” (Leonnig and Rucker book).

Four minutes later, :{Trump tweets}:: “I am pleased to announce that Christopher C. Miller, the highly respected Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be Acting Secretary of Defense, effective immediately.”

On or around Nov. 12, 2020: Meadows :{reportedly}: tells President Trump that Giuliani has asked him to look into allegations that tens of thousands of “illegal aliens” may have voted in Arizona. Trump campaign staff investigate “Meadows’ theory.”

Meadows tells Trump that Giuliani’s team has asked him to look into the issue. “Professionals on the campaign staff investigated Meadows’s theory,” Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker :{report}:, but it proves invalid (emphasis added). The vast majority of the cases were U.S. citizens living abroad who voted legally.

In mid-November 2020: Meadows and Giuliani create a “:{parallel track}:” in a joint effort to raise election fraud claims.

The Trump campaign sets up a team in Georgia. However, “a parallel track was underway from the Oval Office where Giuliani and Meadows, who was just returning to work after being sidelined by Covid, started bringing in their own people,” the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender reports in his :{book}:.

(Meadows :{returned}: to the White House on Nov. 16.)

In mid-November-December 2020: Meadows introduces President Trump to Jeffrey Clark who plots to oust the acting Attorney General and overturn results in Georgia. Meadows also introduces the president to Mark Martin, who has radical theories of how Pence can stop certification.

Bender reports that, :{according to DOJ officials}:, “Meadows had helped introduce Trump to DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark, who was putting together a secret plan to oust Rosen, the acting attorney general, and force Georgia to overturn its results” (emphasis added). Meadows denies any involvement.

Note: The New York Times :{reported}: that Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), a member of the Freedom Caucus that Meadows helped found, “first made Mr. Trump aware that a relatively obscure Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, the acting chief of the civil division, was sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s view that the election had been stolen, according to former administration officials who spoke with Mr. Clark and Mr. Trump.” Perry later :{confirms}: the New York Times report. Neither the report, nor Perry mention Meadows.

Following their introduction, Trump communicates and meets with Clark without alerting Justice Department officials in apparent violation of the :{White House}: and :{Department of Justice}: contacts policies. The New York Times reports:

Department officials were startled to learn that the president had called Mr. Clark directly on multiple occasions and that the two had met in person without alerting Mr. Rosen, those officials said. Justice Department policy stipulates that the president initially communicates with the attorney general or the deputy attorney general on all matters, and then a lower-level official if authorized.

Meadows also :{reportedly}: connects President Trump with former North Carolina Supreme Court justice Mark Martin, who told him that Vice President Pence could stop the certification of Electoral College results.

According to Leonnig and Rucker’s :{book}:, senior administration officials blamed Meadows for neglecting his gatekeeper role. One senior official said Meadows facilitated the president’s being “exposed to crazy people spouting lunatic theories about the election and his ability to overturn it. That is all Meadows.” Meadows “reinforced [Trump’s] instincts,” they said. Politico also :{reports}:, “many blamed [Meadows] for feeding Trump’s belief that he won the election.”

Around Thanksgiving: Meadows acknowledges to the White House communications director that he knows Trump lost the election.

Alyssa Farah :{reportedly}: tells Meadows she wants to step down as communications director. “We need to give a graceful exit and acknowledge that Biden won,” she tells Meadows. “I know, I know,” Meadows says. “We’re going to get the president there.” Earlier in the month, Meadows had multiple conversations with Sen. Mitch McConnell in which Meadows assured that “they would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short” and that “Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat,” the New York Times reported.

Despite what he told McConnell and Farah. “Meadows couldn’t get the president to acknowledge the reality that he had lost. There wasn’t any indication that he had even tried,” Leonnig and Rucker report.

Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020: In White House meetings, Meadows and President Trump express displeasure with Barr for telling news media the Justice Department had found no election fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.

In the early afternoon, the Associated Press publishes an :{interview}: with Barr, in which the Attorney General said, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Barr attends a previously scheduled meeting with Meadows at 3:00 PM. Pat Cipollone joins the meeting. “Surprisingly to Barr, Meadows hated” the news story, but the chief of staff also seemed to acknowledge the election outcome, Leonnig and Rucker report.

President Trump hears Barr is in the White House and asks to see him. According to Leonnig and Rucker, President Trump yells at Barr about the AP report while Meadows is present. Present in the meeting as well are Will Levi, Barr’s chief of staff; Eric Herschmann, senior White House adviser (who earlier served as a personal attorney on Trump’s first impeachment team); and Pat Cipollone, White House Counsel. :{Bender described}: President Trump’s reaction in the meeting as a “volcanic eruption.”

Barr responds in the meeting by stating that Trump’s allegations of election fraud are completely false. Barr calls the allegations, “bullshit,” and that Trump’s legal team is a “clown show” (reporting by Leonnig and Rucker; Bender, :{Jonathan Karl}:). “No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are,” Barr :{says}: in the meeting.

Leonnig and Rucker also report the following part of the exchange:

“Bill, did you say this?” Trump said, his voice sharp and quick. “Yeah,” Barr said. “I said it.”

“How could you say that?” Trump asked.

Barr replied that his statement was true, and that he was merely answering the reporter’s question.

“Why didn’t you just not answer the question?” Trump said.

Then the president, his voice getting higher, switched oddly to speak of himself in the third person.

“There’s no reason for you to have said this!” he said. “You must hate Trump!”

“We’ve looked into these things, and they’re nonsense,” Barr says in the meeting.

On the specifics, “It’s complete nonsense,” Barr says about an allegation that Pennsylvania ballots had been backdated, and that there was no evidence of ballot stuffing in Georgia. Barr also explains in detail why Trump’s allegations of fraud in Wayne County, Michigan were false. “There’s no evidence of substantial fraud that would change the election,” Barr reiterates.

“Meadows sat silently on the opposite side of the dining room, with his arms crossed, a posture that seemed to say, This is DOJ’s problem,” Leonnig and Rucker report (see also Karl). Cipollone, in contrast, “at one point interjected to tell the president that Barr’s department had been dutifully investigating the fraud claims.”

After Barr leaves the room, the president tells Meadows he had every reason to and should fire Barr (Leonnig and Rucker).

As indicated, the meeting is reported in three different books. “The details of this meeting were described to me by several people present,” Karl :{writes}:.

Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020: Meadows asks Attorney General Barr to stay until the end of the term.

Meadows calls Barr early in the morning to ask him to stay until the end of the term. :{According to Bender, }:“Barr agreed, and immediately regretted it.” Barr resigned on Dec. 14 and was replaced by Jeffrey Rosen.

Karl reports the following exchange:

“I think there’s a way through this,” Meadows told him. He could prevent Trump from firing him, but he wanted an assurance from Barr that he wouldn’t resign. “Are you willing to stay?” Meadows asked.

“I’m not going to sandbag you,” Barr said. “I will give you a warning if I’m going to leave, and No. 2, I’ll stay as long as I’m needed.”

Friday, Dec. 11, 2020: Trump decides not to fire Gina Haspel, despite Meadows’ attempts to have her removed.

As rumors circulate that Haspel is going to be fired, she attends a routine intelligence briefing and reminds Trump “of how effective the CIA had been on her watch.” After the meeting, Trump asks Pence, Cipollone, and Kellogg whether he should fire her. Pence speaks strongly in her favor: “Gina’s done a lot for this nation… She’s done a lot of heavy lifting.” Kellogg agrees, “She killed a lot of bad guys.” Trump decides she can keep her position (Leonnig and Rucker book).

Meadows reportedly “had a burr under his saddle about Haspel” and “questioned her loyalty to Trump and indicated he wanted a more politically supportive leader at the CIA,” according to Leonnig and Rucker. He tells Haspel that he has offered Kash Patel the deputy CIA director position, unaware that the president has changed his mind. Haspel threatens to resign. Meadows has to “swallow his pride and reverse the order,” :{according to Axios}:.

Saturday, Dec. 12, 2020: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley warns Meadows about making personnel moves....

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/meadows-cassidy-hutchinson/

witness intim?! attempts to discredit her fail

===

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-family-research-councils-insurrection-connections/

theFamily Research Council, a major player in the religious-right political movement, was deeply involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—a fact made all the more apparent by revelations during the June 23 public hearing of the House select committee investigating the conspiracy that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

We had already known that FRC publicly supported Trump’s schemes to unlawfully stay in power. FRC President Tony Perkins and other leaders connected with the secretive Council for National Policy had signed a letter in mid-December 2020falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” That letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Joe Biden to “appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” It urged the House and Senate to reject pro-Biden electors from those states.

FRC Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin also signed that letter, as did Kenneth Blackwell, FRC’s senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance. Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser who abused the power of his office when he was Ohio’s secretary of state, was all-in on Trump’s election lies from the earliest days of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement. Just days after the election, Blackwell used wildly false and inflammatory language in support of Trump’s claims, denouncing Pennsylvania’s governor, who defended his state’s election results from false claims of voter fraud, and “his legion of darkness.”

Blackwelland Perkins signed a second open letter at the end of December 2020 urging Senate Republicans to contest the votes from five battleground states.

Two days before the insurrection at the Capitol, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”

It turns out that Blackwell was busy behind the scenes, too.

At the Jan. 6 committee’s June 23 hearing, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney revealed the contents of a Dec.28, 2020, email from Blackwell that read in part, “As I stated last week, I believe the VP and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken.”

“John” would be John Eastman, the far right-wing lawyer who doggedly pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power based on false claims of election fraud and bogus theories about the vice president’s power to single-handedly decide who would become the next president. “Ken” referred to Ken Klukowski, a religious-right lawyer and pundit, longtime associate of Blackwell, and former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty.

Blackwell’s email was sent to Ed Corrigan, a former Heritage Foundation vice president who served as part of the leadership team of Trump’s transition and now heads up the Conservative Partnership Institute, which promotes voter suppression in the name of “election integrity.**”**It also went to Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair,whose promotion of Big Lie conspiracies about the election was quoted by Ginny Thomas in her post-election emails to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. Completing the circle,Meadows is now a “senior partner” at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which received $1 million from Trump’s PACshortly after the Jan. 6 committee was created.

Klukowski had joined the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget in the fall of 2019. After the 2020 election, Klukowski was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was scheming to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in key battleground states. Blackwell clearly seemed to recognize the bad optics of Klukowski’s involvement, urging in his email, “As I also mentioned, make sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”

Clark has unwillingly played a starring role in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, which has painstakingly exposed his effort to get Trump to name him acting attorney general. Clark and others had originally planned to send a letter to Georgia legislators—a letter that Klukowski helped Clark write—falsely claiming that the DOJ had identified major election problems in the state and encouraging them to convene a special session to consider naming a pro-Trump Electoral College slate. When Clark’s DOJ superiors blocked his scheme, Trump seriously considered making Clark acting attorney general so he could carry it out, abandoning the plan only after other top Justice Department officials threatened a massive leadership resignation that would swamp news of the letter and define Trump’s legacy.

As Rep. Cheney concluded, “This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election.”

In other words, while a battle raged between principled White House and Justice Department officials who were committed to upholding the election results and facilitating a peaceful transfer of power and the defeated president and his power-at-all-costs supporters, current and former FRC leaders were in the trenches with Trump and the would-be election overthrowers.

Their collusion on Trump’s attempt to overturn the election is far from the firstBlackwell-Klukowski collaboration.They co-authored numerous partisan diatribes in the form of op-eds and books, including “Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency” and “Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America.” In 2016, Klukowksi guest-hosted FRC’s “Washington Watch” radio program and had Blackwell on as a guest.

At FRC’s October 2021 Pray Vote Stand conference—the rechristened activist gathering known for years as the Values Voter Summit—Blackwell slammed federal voting rights legislation and backed new voting restrictions being put in place by Republican state legislators.

The revelations of the Family Research Council’s all-out effort to help Trump stay in power despite his rejection by voters makes it even more appalling to learn from ProPublica that FRC has successfully petitioned the IRS to change its official classification to that of an association of churches, a tactic that Right Wing Watch has reported has been used by other religious-right groups like Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel to evade public scrutiny and accountability.

Tags: Connie Hair Ed Corrigan Jeffrey Clark Jerry Boykin Ken Blackwell Ken Klukowski Kenneth Blackwell Mark Meadows Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection House select committee on Jan. 6 Conservative Partnership Institute Council for National Policy Family Research Council

---

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/22/gop-lawmakers-deeply-involved-in-trump-plans-to-overturn-election-new-evidence-suggests-00027340

ref but no mention of lesko?

no lnx

insurrection fallout

GOP lawmakers were deeply involved in Trump plans to overturn election, new evidence suggests

Deposition excerpts filed by the Jan 6. select committee underscore the expansive cast of elected Republicans who had enlisted themselves in Trump’s effort to cling to power.

Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Matt Gaetz speak to reporters.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) speak to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in 2021. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

By Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu

04/22/2022 11:36 PM EDT

Updated:04/23/2022

Republican members of Congress were heavily involved in calls and meetings with former President Donald Trump and his top aides as they devised a strategy to overturn the election in December 2020, according to new evidence filed in federal court late Friday.

Deposition excerpts filed by the Jan 6. select committee — part of an effort to force former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to appear for an interview — suggest that some of Trump’s top allies in Congress were frequently present in meetings where a handful of strategies to prevent then-President-elect Joe Biden from taking office were discussed, including efforts to replace the leadership of the Justice Department with figures who would sow doubts about the legitimacy of the election.

Lawmakers who attended meetings, in person or by phone, included Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and numerous members of the House Freedom Caucus, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows who provided key testimony about the conversations and meetings Meadows had in December 2020.

The new evidence underscores the expansive cast of elected Republicans who had ultimately enlisted themselves in Trump’s last-ditch effort to cling to power. Members traded theories about ways to push then-Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly stop Biden’s election, they parried with the White House Counsel’s Office on the boundaries of the law regarding presidential electors and they met directly with Pence’s staff to encourage him to take direct action on Jan. 6, when Congress convened to count electoral votes.

“They felt that he had the authority to — pardon me if my phrasing isn’t correct on this, but — send votes back to the States or the electors back to the States,” Hutchinson recalled.

The disclosure came as part of a Friday evening court filing by the select panel asking a federal court to throw out Meadows’ lawsuit against the committee. In the filing, the select committee revealed that Meadows turned over 2,319 text messages during a brief period of cooperation but withheld more than 1,000, citing various privileges.

“[H]e was not acting as anything like a typical White House Chief of Staff advising the President on official matters of government policy,” House General Counsel Doug Letter wrote. “Mr. Meadows was playing a campaign role, attempting to facilitate a strategy that would have reversed the certified results of the 2020 election.”

The committee indicated that Meadows told Jordan in a text message that he supported efforts to convince Pence to send the election back to the states.

“I have pushed for this. Not sure it is going to happen,” Meadows texted Jordan early in the morning on Jan. 6.

Some of the GOP lawmakers were present in December meetings, Hutchinson recalled, when members of the White House Counsel’s Office raised significant legal doubts about a plan for pro-Trump activists to submit “alternate” electors in states won by Joe Biden.

Others attended a Dec. 21 meeting where Rudy Giuliani, then the president’s personal lawyer, and some associates advocated a plan for Pence to unilaterally refuse to count Biden’s electors and instead send the election back to various GOP-controlled state legislatures to replace Biden’s electors with Trump’s.

The panel also released text messages between Perry and Meadows about replacing Justice Department leadership before Jan. 6 with officials thought to be more sympathetic to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.

“Mark, just checking in as time continues to count down. 11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration,”Perry texted the then-White House chief of staff on Dec. 26, 2020, asking him to get in touch with Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark. “We gotta get going!”

“I got it. I think I understand. Let me work on the deputy position,” Meadows responded.

Perry rejected a request from the select panel to testify.

The panel also revealed that it interviewed Steven Engel, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Engel indicated that Clark proposed on Jan. 3, 2021, having DOJ issue a legal advisory opinion regarding “the Vice President with respect to his authority when it comes to opening the votes as the President of the Senate on January 6th.”

“And I shot down that idea,” Engel recalled. “But I said — I said: ‘That’s an absurd idea. The — you know, the Vice President is acting as the President of the Senate. It is not the role of the Department of Justice to provide legislative officials with legal advice on the scope of their duties.” And — you know, and — not to mention it was 3 days from the date. OLC doesn’t tend to provide the legal opinions, you know, in those cases, you know, in that short timeframe.”

[MOST READ

Kate Bedingfield is leaving the White House

Liz Cheney Wins the GOP’s Manhood Contest

The Southwest is bone dry. Now, a key water source is at risk.

Judge holds Cushman & Wakefield in contempt, orders fines in Trump probe

Shadow 2024 race: Newsom vs. DeSantis]

The committee also homed in on Meadows’ role as an unofficial campaign adviser, noting that he routinely straddled the line between his official White House work and his effort to keep Trump in office. Hundreds of documents Meadows claimed were privileged included contacts he had with Trump campaign lawyers, the committee said, citing a privilege log from Meadows himself.

The committee chronicled Meadows’ frenetic activity in the final weeks before Jan. 6, with his actions including:

— Helping the campaign craft and distribute talking points about election fraud, in concert with allies like attorney Cleta Mitchell and campaign adviser Jason Miller. “This is what I prepared and sent to Sen Braun last night to help prepare him for ABC appearance this am,” Mitchell wrote on Jan. 6 to Meadows, who forwarded the email to Miller. “Can the WH press office get and start using??”

— Communicating with Raffensperger and his deputy Jason Fuchs around efforts to get Georgia officials to overturn the results in the state.

— Texting often with Perry about plans to install Clark at the Justice Department in order to use DOJ’s power to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. In one exchange,Perry indicated he had sent separate messages to Meadows via Signal, and the two discussed a potential deputy for Clark.

— Meeting in his office with retired Army Col. Phil Waldron, who was pushing for Trump to invoke national security procedures as part of a plan to seize control of voting machines. Waldron referenced the meeting in an email sent to Meadows’ Gmail account.

— Conducting an array of calls on Jan. 6 from a secure “control car” that was part of Trump’s motorcade.

“I know that he was on several calls during the rally. And I went over to meet with him at one point, and he had just waved me away, which is out of the ordinary,” Hutchinson testified.

The committee also indicated it has come to believe Trump did not attempt to contact any federal law enforcement agency amid the riot, pointing to testimony from former Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, former Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue, who indicated he never connected with Trump that day.

“I never spoke to the President that day,” Donoghue told the panel. “He was not on any calls that I was on.”

The panel concluded: “It is also now clear that Mr. Trump never telephoned his Secretary of Defense that day to order deployment of National Guard, and never contacted any federal law enforcement agency to order security assistance to the Capitol Police.”

Filed under: Joe Biden, Joe Biden 2020, Mike Pence, Donald Trump,

POLITICO

===

expert on White House dynamics says Mark Meadows is by far the worst chief of staff in U.S. history.

Former aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified last week that Meadows seemed unconcerned about the insurrection taking place just blocks away at the U.S. Capitol, and author Chris Whipple, who has interviewed dozens of chiefs of staff, said that testimony cemented Donald Trump's lead staffer as the worst of all time, reported Business Insider.

"It used to be a fairly stiff competition for the worst chief of staff in history, but Meadows absolutely owns it," Whipple said.

Hutchinson told the House select committee that Meadows remained glued to his cell phone instead of asking the president to call off his supporters at the Capitol, and Whipple said that would be his lasting legacy.

"I used to think the defining lasting image of Mark Meadows would be mugging for Don Trump's Jr.'s video camera in the tent at the Ellipse right before Trump went out to incite a mob to attack the Capitol,"Whipple said. "I now think the defining image of Meadows is the guy sitting on the couch in the White House chief's office scrolling through his phone while a violent mob attacks Capitol police that day."

Whipple had previously ranked H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon's chief of staff during the Watergate burglary and subsequent coverup, as the worst in American history, but he said Hutchinson's testimony had shaken up his ratings.

"The Watergate figures really look like choir boys compared to Trump, and Meadows, and their gang," Whipple said. "That was before now the most serious political scandal in American political history, but it pales in comparison to a president who sends an armed mob against the Capitol knowing that they are armed, knowing that there will be violence, and with a chief of staff who at best just shrugs and looks the other way and at worst was a co-conspirator."

Whipple, the author of "The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency," noted that Trump had cycled through more chief staffers in one term than any other president, but he found exactly what he wanted in Meadows.

"What he wanted is what he got ultimately in Mark Meadows, which is sycophant," Whipple said. "I think he was less a chief of staff than a kind of glad-handing maitre d' who tried to please Trump in every way, and, in fact, he told basically everybody what they wanted to hear, not just Trump. He was and is a spineless character and the polar opposite of the best chiefs."

===

i forgot to include jan 6 stuff: closed dr of car 3x, paralyzed on phone (b/c he wanted to give mob time or he realized coup had failed? why did he cooperate at 1st then stop?

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'veneutralized 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:

===

payoff for co-op?

//NRA expose?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jan-6-committee-zeroes-in-on-trump-e2-80-99s-big-lie-fundraising

zoe takes lead;

no lnx

the Jan. 6 committee spent most of its second hearing Monday picking apart Trump’s relentless lies about the 2020 election outcome — lies he pursued despite findings from both his campaign staff and government investigators that the election results were legitimate.

But Monday’s hearing ended with an interesting change of topic: The panel zeroed in on Trump’s fundraising. Specifically, the committee found, Trump lied to his base in order to raise millions of dollars, and then used that money to pursue his own political and personal ends.

According to the committee’s senior investigative counsel Amanda Wick, it went like this: After Trump lost the 2020 election — and even after the “safe harbor date” that usually spells the end of election lawsuits —Trump and his campaign pursued a fundraising strategy based around a so-called “Election Integrity Fund”: A fund that they told donors would help “PROTECT THE INTEGRITY OF OUR ELECTION” in dozens of emails over several weeks.

But the Election Integrity Fund didn’t exist: Gary Coby, the campaign’s former digital director, agreed during a deposition that it was a “marketing tactic.” And the tactic worked: The committee found that Trump and his allies raised nearly $100 million in the first week after the election.

On Nov. 9, Trump created the “Save America PAC.” Wick said most of the money for the “Election Defense Fund” went to that account. And that PAC, in turn, made millions in donations to Trump-aligned groups: $1 million to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ charitable foundation, $1 million to the America First Policy Institute, which employed several former Trump administration officials, $204,857 to the Trump Hotel Collection, and over $5 million to Event Strategies Inc., the company that ran Trump’s White House Ellipse rally — the event that preceded the Capitol attack.

The campaign sent fundraising emails regularly, including one about 30 minutes before the Capitol was breached, Wick said.

...

===

2x? $

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/26/us/politics/ginni-thomas-donald-trump.html

texts Show Ginni Thomas's Embrace of Conspiracy Theories

https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics

Mar 26, 2022 — In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas was involved in a range of efforts to keep President ...

nyt no lnx

Texts Show Ginni Thomas’s Embrace of Conspiracy Theories

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas was involved in a range of efforts to keep President Donald J. Trump in power.

A hard-line conservative activist, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had long been viewed with suspicion by the Republican establishment. Yet her influence rose during the Trump administration.

By Danny Hakim, Jo Becker and Alan Feuer

March 26, 2022

Two days after the 2020 election, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, texted an old friend, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump.

She sent messages that had been making the rounds on pro-Trump sites, where anger over the election echoed her own raw feelings, including this passage: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

...?

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas was involved in a range of efforts to keep President Donald J. Trump in power.

Two days after the 2020 election, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, texted an old friend, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump.

She sent messages that had been making the rounds on pro-Trump sites, where anger over the election echoed her own raw feelings, including this passage: Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.

Then she added of this fanciful, if chilling, set of conspiracy theories: I hope this is true.

She texted Mr. Meadows again the next day. Do not concede, she wrote. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.

The messages were among a flurry of text traffic between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Meadows that was revealed this past week, part of a trove of documents previously turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. (Ms. Thomas has openly opposed the committee and called for Republicans who serve on it to be expelled from the House Republican conference.)

A hard-line conservative activist, Ms. Thomas had long been viewed with suspicion by the Republican establishment. Yet her influence had risen during the Trump administration, especially after Mr. Meadows, who like Ms. Thomas has roots in the Tea Party movement,became chief of staff. Now, an examination of her texts, woven together with recent revelations of the depth of her efforts to overturn the election, shows how firmly she was embedded in the conspiratorial fringe of right-wing politics, even as that fringe was drawing ever closer to the center of Republican power....

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/mark-meadows/

i forgot ziegler:

an 6 22 raw story

Navarro, President Trump’s former trade advisor was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday due to his refusal to cooperate with the January 6th Committee, which has signaled interest in his communications with the president.

Less attention has been paid to Garrett Ziegler, a Navarro aide and zealous Trump loyalist who both supported his boss’ efforts and coordinated with a network of outside operatives who were promoting an onslaught of false claims about election fraud and legally dubious schemes to preserve Trump’s hold on power.

Ziegler received an email from the senior investigative counsel for the committee, which is scheduled to begin public hearings on June 9, requesting a meeting to discuss information he might have that is relevant to the congressional investigation.

Among his extensive efforts from his office at the White House, Ziegler facilitated a now-infamous late-night meeting on Dec. 18, 2020 in which attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne tried to persuade President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-running elections in six battleground states he lost to Joe Biden.

Ziegler used his White House Worker and Visitor Entry System, or WAVES pass to let Powell, Flynn and Byrne into the White House, allowing them to hold an impromptu meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, as he later recounted in aninterview with fellow election denier David Clements. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone were caught by surprise by the meeting, which reportedly descended into a shouting match. Ziegler’s efforts bypassed protocol for White House meetings, and he said when it was discovered that he had let the plotters into the White House, his visitor’s privileges were revoked.

In Navarro’s book In Trump Time, he wrote that “to support the challenge effort, he allowed “several members of my staff to help out in the battleground states on their own time.” Navarro’s book describes “the young and always earnest” Ziegler venturing to an Indian reservation in Nevada to investigate alleged vote-buying shortly after the election. The work eventually culminated in the three-part Navarro Report, which asserted without evidence that the election had been stolen from Trump.

Around the time of the election, a man named Mark Cook took a photograph of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves that were labeled “Dominion Voting” and “Made in China.”

“My good friend Mark Cook took this picture,” Ziegler, who is now 26, wrote on his Telegram channel in June 2021. “We infiltrated the election equipment storage facility in Sacramento County, CA, and documented all of the violations of law.”

Cook’s photograph would later be used on the final page of a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” put together by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in psychological warfare that was shown to members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5, 2021. The presentation recommended that Vice President Mike Pence set aside the electoral votes from the six battleground states carried by Biden, and also called on President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-count the ballots.

For his part, Cook remains active in the election denial movement. Last month, he and Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor, addressed a Republican-controlled board of commissioners in Surry County, NC. Introduced by Clements as “our hardware and IT cybersecurity expert,” Cook told commissioners: “If our Pentagon can’t secure a network, Department of Defense can’t secure a network, our Department of Homeland Security can’t secure a network, are we really so foolish as to think the only system that is completely impervious to any cyber-hack is our voting system?”

Cook’s 25-minute presentation omitted a simple fact — voting tabulation machines are not networked, and preliminary counts are transferred on a mobile drive to a computer to be uploaded from local election offices for election-night reporting.

Both Ziegler and Cook were trusted associates in the network of operatives and conspiracy theorists that worked under the competing legal teams headed by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and by Powell, alongside Flynn and Byrne.

In a private Telegram text to another election denier that has been reviewed by Raw Story, Waldron said, “Mark and Garrett have worked with us since 14 Nov 20.” He added that Ziegler and Cook “both passed rigorous background checks” after suspicions arose that CIA and British intelligence assets were attempting to infiltrate the network plotting to overturn the election.

“I have no idea what Waldron was alluding to,” Ziegler told Raw Story in an email. “None. I had an active [top secret/sensitive compartmented information] clearance at the time. I think he was just spinning a tale for others.”

Waldron declined to comment for this story.

Michael Trimarco, a Giuliani associate who rented a bloc of rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in November 2020,also alluded to a dual role on Ziegler’s part in an interview with the far-right podcaster Ann Vandersteel earlier this year.

“I know some of the people that were his direct reports, because he wasn’t officially reporting directly to Peter,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “So, I know some of these other people. And politically that didn’t make people around in Peter’s world very happy with Garrett in the inter-office kinda…. But from what I saw, he was well connected with Peter… and I know he furnished a lot of information for the report.”

While enmeshed with the outside election denial network, Ziegler also provided the external teams with a direct conduit to the White House and President Trump, to the extent that Trimarco said information about election irregularities would often reach Trump before even Giuliani knew about it.

“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco said. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president. And then it would circle back to Rudy.”

In his interview with Clements, Ziegler dated work on the three-part Navarro Report to Nov. 15 — one day after Waldron said he had started working with Ziegler. Ziegler said he and four other aides assisted Navarro with the reports.

“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler told Clements. “He’s a fantastic, logical thinker, which is very hard — easier said than done. He laid it out, what his vision was. And our job was to get the first draft.”

Much of the information in the reports was funneled up from the outside team, Trimarco said.

“Peter put out a three-volume report together, and a lot of the information — not all of it — came from this group of analysts that work working out of the Westin that did not go toTomotley,” Trimarco said, referencing attorney Lin Wood’s estate in South Carolina, where Powell and Flynn established a working headquarters away from DC.

One day after Powell, Flynn and Byrne’s Dec. 18 visit to the White House to promote their plan to have the National Guard seize voting machines and re-run the election, Trump tweeted out a link to the Navarro Report, with an invitation to his supporters to attend a “wild rally” in DC on Jan. 6, 2021.

Similar to his former boss, since leaving the White House Ziegler has continued to deride a coterie of officials he considers weak and insufficiently loyal to the president. In interviews and Telegram messages, Ziegler has particularly singled out Meadows for savage criticism.

In Telegram message in late January 2021, Ziegler wrote that he feared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would take control of the country and impose a dystopian “technocracy.”

“And I can assure you, from my standpoint in the WH, I did everything I could to prevent this,” Ziegler said. “I broke rules, protocol, etc. If I had a decade more of life under my belt, I would have had the formal power to get rid of Meadows, Cipollone, etc.”

Ziegler’s Telegram messages suggest heviewed Meadows as an obstacleto efforts to overturn the election. In one message, in February 2021, Ziegler faulted Meadows for citing an audit in Georgia as evidence of due diligence, writing that the chief of staff was “so fckn dumb (or compromised)” that he didn’t question whether an auditing company could be corrupted by “mob-like cartels.”

Like Navarro, who was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday, Meadows is fighting a subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Last December, the House voted to hold Meadows in contempt, referring his case to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Meadows played a critical role in shepherding an array of schemes entertained by Trump in his quest to hold onto power. That included hosting meetings with the president and members of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss a plan — much like Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” — to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to remand the electoral votes back to the battleground states and delay certifying the election for Biden, according to testimony to the January 6th Committee by White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Meadows also hosted a meeting in which Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who is now the chair of the Freedom Caucus, expressed support for the idea of sending Trump supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, while others in the meeting remained silent, the New York Times has reported. Hutchinson also reportedly testified to the committee that she saw Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace after a meeting with Perry.

Ziegler has positioned himself to the right of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, of which Meadows was a chair before he left Congress to serve as Trump’s chief of staff.

“He’s a Freedom Caucus guy,” Ziegler complained to Clements during his July 2021 interviewed. “And what this means is — I call them ‘permanent hearing holders.’ So, Benghazi, Killary…. Nobody ever gets indicted with these jokers. Mark Meadows comes from that ilk…. So, how does this relate to the president’s chief of staff? He just wasn’t effective. He would get steamrolled by people.”

Much of Ziegler’s rhetoric on Telegram is laced with racist vitriol that uses African nations as a stand-in for national decline, while Christian chauvinism as force for national rebirth.

“If we elect people like Mark Meadows — good, jolly, your brother next door — we’re gonna end up like Zimbabwe,” Ziegler said. “If I could do one thing — which is stop electing nice guys. We need Christian zealots, frankly.”

Ziegler expressed a similar sentiment in a March 2021 Telegram message, in which he wrote, “We could have a Third Great Awakening in the country, both religious and political. And the coup we just went through could be the flint that ignites it. Hopefully its ends will be a repentance to the Christ and a Republic that gets rid of this corrupt and satanic Oligarchy.”

Beyond the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting he arranged at the White House, Ziegler said he tried to help Powell get to the president on different occasion.

“I walked Sidney over to the residence one to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler said on a podcast in February 2021. “And we got blocked again there, too.”

Ziegler recalled that he would tell anyone who would listen to him in the White House: “Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it.”

===

no lnx few

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/national-conservative-manifesto-a-plan-for-fascism-but-it-s-not-hypothetical/

'National Conservative' manifesto: A plan for fascism — but it's not hypothetical

[Viktor Orbán in 2014, Wikimedia Commons

Trump endorses strongman Viktor Orbán in Hungarian election: ‘He has my complete support’]

Kathryn Joyce andSalon June 24, 2022

Last November in Orlando, dozens of the right's leading intellectuals, writers and think tank staffers gathered for the first meeting of the National Conservatism conference since the COVID pandemic hit, drawing journalists from across the political spectrum seeking to untangle what this high-brow gathering of avowed nationalists was all about. The emergence of the "NatCon" movement several years earlier had alarmed many liberal, centrist and even mainline conservative observers with its efforts to rehabilitate the concept of nationalism.But it energized many on the right who were starting to describe themselves as "post-liberal," meaning they were no longer satisfied with the conservative marriage of convenience that had existed since at least the Reagan era and had drawn together the religious right, anti-communists and free-marketeers in a potent but sometimes uneasy coalition. That consensus, they declared loudly, was dead, and a new conservative fusion must arise to take its place.

After the disruption of the pandemic, the loss of the presidency and the rage of Jan. 6, last fall's NatCon II conference was focused on the goal of building that new coalition along nationalist and post-liberal lines: blending extreme social conservatism with a skeptical approach to some forms of laissez-faire capitalism and a sharp hostility to both global or international authority and what they see as corporate-driven liberal cultural hegemony.

Now, the movement has formalized its ideas in a new manifesto, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles," released last week by the Edmund Burke Foundation. This ambitious document calls for the creation of a "world of independent nations" as the sole bulwark against "universalist ideologies" that would impose a "homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe." The credited authors include some leading lights of the NatCon world: Israeli political theorist and Burke Foundation chair Yoram Hazony, former American Enterprise Institute president Christopher DeMuth, First Things editor R.R. Reno and American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher.

But the list of signatories is much longer, and also far broader, ranging from right-wing mega-donor Peter Thiel to former Trump administration staffers Mark Meadows and Ken Cuccinelli, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo, multiple officials from Hillsdale College — a nerve center of contemporary right-wing politics — and numerous other think tank staffers and writers from across the spectrum of conservative media.

The manifesto hasn't gotten much attention so far — which isn't surprising, considering how much else is happening in the political realm. A column by David von Drehle in the Washington Post declared its contents akin to fascism, and a more substantial fisking in The Bulwark by Cathy Young found it "a document steeped in thinly veiled and sometimes distressingly overt authoritarian ideology." That's not wrong. But it's also worth observing that, in the battle to build a new conservative coalition, much of the NatCon platform has already won.

As Young notes, many of the NatCon's 10 priorities read, at first, like banal restatements of conservative ideology in general: national independence, the rule of law, God and public religion, free enterprise, family and children. But in ways both subtle and unsubtle, those familiar terms don't all mean what you'd think.

The NatCons hope to divorce nationalism from its association with the Nazis, who they claim were not "nationalist" at all.

The first two items, national independence and rejecting globalism and imperialism, follow one of the core, if questionable, goals of the NatCon movement, which is to divorce the concept of nationalism from its most powerful associations, such as the fascist regimes of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, which National Conservatives see as imperialist. Instead, NatCons want to attach the term to smaller, scrappier scrappy countries that resisted the Nazis or Soviet Communism.

While the manifesto holds that "Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course," in alignment with its own legal, cultural and religious traditions, it warns against their "transferring" authority to any "transnational or supranational bodies" and advocates opposing "imperialism in its various forms." Those forms include modern-day China and Russia, of course, but also "the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image."

The "liberalism" described here, as in most NatCon contexts, isn't the center-left politics of the Democratic Party, but rather "classical" liberalism, focused on individual rights, free trade and pluralistic cultures, which until recently was embraced by most mainstream conservatives as well. But within the post-liberal and NatCon world, that small-l liberalism contained the seeds of conservatism's undoing, leading inevitably to the big-L liberalism of progressive ideology by creating a culture in which it's too hard to raise children along traditionalist lines. In this view, societies that uphold pluralistic tolerance and diversity are inherently unfair by denying the majority the right to live in a culture that supports their values — in essence, allowing the minority to oppress the majority.

While both Young and von Drehle read the jabs at boomer "imperialism" as allusions to the Iraq War — which is at least partly true — "empire" for NatCons also has a larger meaning. First, they believe that international compacts, accords and governing bodies like the European Union or the UN infringe on national sovereignty, particularly when it comes to social issues. In the movement's conference this March in Brussels, Hazony sought to align the NatCon vision with Ukraine's fight against Russian aggression. Vladimir Putin's disdain for borders and national independence, he suggested, mirrored the attitudes of bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington. The obvious subtext was that Hungary and Poland — two post-liberal, overtly nationalist countries greatly admired within the movement — were facing EU sanctions over a variety of human rights issues, which Hungarian and Polish leaders rejected as an attempt to squash the rights of the nation-state, and sympathetic fellow speakers cast as the workings of a new "evil empire."

"Empire," in the NatCon world, refers to the right's long, losing battle in the cultural sphere, these days largely waged against what American conservatives call "woke corporations."

===

https://www.alternet.org/**2022/05**/trump-administration-meat-industry-covid/

former President Donald Trump's administration colluded with top-level meatpacking industry executives to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic in order to drive up prices and downplay the severity of the emergency, according to an exhaustive investigation released on Thursday by the United States House Select Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

Representative Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina), the House Majority Whip and chairman of the Subcommittee, said in a statement that "the shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated."

The probe began last year and uncovered a spider web of corruption and flagrant disregard for human life involving American corporate titans and individuals in the highest ranks of the federal government.

Officials at the Department of Agriculture – including Secretary Sonny Purdue and Under Secretary for Food Safety Mindy Brashears – "collaborated" with corporate bigwigs to prioritize profits and production over the safety of employees and the public despite being fully aware of the hazards.

"Infections and deaths among workers for five of the largest meatpacking companies—Tyson Foods, Inc. (Tyson), JBS USA Holdings, Inc. (JBS), Smithfield Foods (Smithfield), Cargill, Inc. (Cargill), and National Beef Packing Company LLC (National Beef)—were significantly higher than previously estimated, with over 59,000 workers for these companies being infected with the coronavirus andat least 269 dying," the report states.

The powerful cadre also "engaged in a concerted effort with Trump Administration political officials to insulate themselves from coronavirus-related oversight," it explains.

In one instance, the chief executive officers of the conglomerates told Purdue on a phone call that their workers “should not be entitled to unemployment benefitsif they are otherwise able to work through the pandemic” and cautioned against “creat[ing] an incentive, much less a path, for food industry workers to choose unemployment overproducing food.”

In that same conversation, they "implicitly acknowledged how dangerous plants were, asking for liability protection against lawsuits if workers were infected on the job."

There was also an aggressive campaign to skirt "pesky" local, state, and federal regulations that would have kept workers and their products safe and healthy.

"Companies lobbied the White House to make clear that—despite concerns by state and local health departments—meatpacking companies should not have to address coronavirus risks if it would impact productivity," the investigation revealed.

Alarmingly, the CEOs managed to successfully lobby Trump to draft and sign an executive order in April of 2020 that "would insulate meatpacking companies from oversight by state and local health departments and provide legal protection against lawsuits for worker illnesses and deaths."

The edict led to Trump "invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure meatpacking plants 'continue operations.'"

Shortly thereafter, records handed over to the Subcommittee show that "meatpacking industry representatives and companies—Smithfield and Tyson in particular—engaged in constant communications with Trump appointees at USDA, the National Economic Council, and the White House, including calls between Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; a joint call with Sullivan, Meadows, and Tyson CEO Noel White;a call between White and Vice President Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short; and a call from Meadows to White asking if White would be willing to meet with President Trump."

Trump subsequently "held a call with officers of the meatpacking companies who had lobbied for it on the morning the order was issued."

After Trump granted their wish, an effort was undertaken between the administration and the industry to "coordinate closely on messaging concerning the order and its effects, apparently hoping to generate positive press coverage" for the ex-commander in chief.

Worker fatalities, meanwhile, were swept under the rug.

In a particularly egregious example, an outbreak at Foster Farms in Livingston,California that infected "at least" 392 workers and killed eight in August of 2020 prompted the company to "intimidate" the Merced County Department of Public Health from shutting down the plant.

"Foster Farms attempts to obfuscate the death count by labeling fatalities as 'resolutions,'" investigators learned. "MCPH officials told the Select Subcommittee that an unidentified person on the call from either Foster Farms or USDA said these cases could be considered 'toe tag resolutions,' referring to the toe tag that is often put on a corpse at the morgue. MCPH said that Brashears asked this individual to 'stop' and said they would 'talk about this separately.'"

Operations at Foster Farms in Livingston were eventually temporarily suspended on August 31st.

Read the full report here.

===

reg to vote

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/mark-meadows-three-different-states/

===

jane m slime machine

A.A.F. describes itself as a champion of transparency, but it declines to reveal the sources of its funding. Its official mailing address is a handsome historic building a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. But when I stopped by there recently, to ask for the group’s basic financial records—which all tax-exempt nonprofits are legally required to produce—a woman at the lobby’s front desk said there was no such group at that address. Instead, the building is occupied by a different nonprofit group: the Conservative Partnership Institute, which serves as a kind of Isle of Elba for Trump loyalists in exile. It has become the employer of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and of Trump’s former ad-hoc legal adviser Cleta Mitchell, both of whom are fighting subpoenas from the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Cameron Seward, the general counsel of the Conservative Partnership Institute,appeared in the lobby and assured me that there was no relationship between his group and the A.A.F. Yet documents that the A.A.F. filed with the I.R.S. in 2021, to secure its tax-exempt status, describe the group as existing “in care of” C.P.I. Moreover, C.P.I.’s 2021 annual report notes that it launched the A.A.F. because “conservatives didn’t have a group performing research on Biden’s woke nominees—even though plenty of liberal groups were digging up (or manufacturing) dirt on our side.” The groups have several overlapping directors, including Jones, who sits on both boards.

The A.A.F. told the I.R.S. that its mission is to conduct nonpartisan research, but it is curious that the largest contribution by far to its parent group, C.P.I., is a million-dollar “charitable contribution” from Save America—Trump’s political-action committee. Trump reportedly raised much of the pac’s money from supporters after his 2020 defeat, and his campaign has called the group an “election defense fund.”

Save America made its contribution to C.P.I. a few months after Meadows joined the group. Meadows’s son, Blake, an associate attorney at the Georgia law firm Foster, Foster, & Smith, appears to be involved with C.P.I., too: his name appears in a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of the A.A.F. against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Matthew Buckham, the A.A.F. co-founder, also has a Trump connection: he worked at the White House during his Administration, in the personnel office. (His father, Ed Buckham, is chief of staff to Marjorie Taylor Greene.)

It’s a great advantage to be able to treat opposition research as a tax-exempt charitable expense rather than as, say, a campaign cost. On March 21st, Paul Teller, the executive director of an advocacy group that serves as former Vice-President Mike Pence’s political operation, gave a lecture to Christian pastors in which he said, of the A.A.F., “I’m just in love with these guys!” Teller enthused, “They are just taking it to every Biden-Harris nominee that comes across to Congress,” adding, “Some of the stuff that we’re fighting with the Supreme Court nominee Jackson came from our friends at the American Accountability Foundation.” He went on, “We’re partnering, we’re collaborating.” Teller’s group is widely seen as promoting a potential Pence campaign for President in 2024.

When the A.A.F. applied for its tax-exempt status, it portrayed itself, under penalty of perjury, as a nonpartisan charity that would neither participate in political campaigns nor try to influence legislation. As a tax-exempt nonprofit dark-money organization, Jones’s group isn’t required to publicly disclose its donors, so it’s impossible to know all the sources of its funding. Clearly, though, it has big ambitions. In its I.R.S. filing, the A.A.F. submitted revenue projections that predict its budget as six hundred thousand dollars in 2021, a million dollars in 2022, and one and a half million dollars in 2023.

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and Trump critic at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, believes that the A.A.F. is doing “frightening, sleazy stuff” with serious implications. Not only is the group creating needless vacancies in important Administration positions; it is intimidating well-qualified people from wanting to undergo the nomination process. “It’s tough enough to get top-flight people in government,” Ornstein said. “But, if you also have to go through a well-funded, well-oiled slime machine, it’s really an attack on government.

===

raw story tom b an 4 16 22

According to former Republican National Committee spokesperson Tim Miller, nothing better demonstrates that even the “good Republicans” like Sen. Mike Lee (UT) engaged inhare-brained schemes to help Donald Trump steal the 2020 presidential election, than Lee’s text messages leading up to the Jan 6th insurrection.

As Miller notes in his Bulwark column, there has existed a narrative that there were “good” Republicans who were not involved in plotting to keep Trump in the Oval Office no matter what voters decided, and then there were the fanatics who saw no problem with running roughshod over the Constitution.

With CNN reporting that Lee and fellow Republican Rep. Chip Roy (TX) were frantically texting former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows asking for help in disrupting the certification of the vote, Miller suggested that the “insane” wing of the party is deeper than people think.

With Lee and Roy’s texts demonstrating a swing from full-throated support for overturning to becoming appalled by the conspiracy theories and legal reasoning being put forth by former Trump attorney Sidney Powell, Miller wrote that the whole affair was a “clown show.”

“Among the self-appointed responsible Republicans, the story of Trump’s attempted election theft goes something like this: The former president had a few CRAZYpeople around him providing bad advice. Rudy and Lin Wood and Sidney “Release the Kraken” Powell and their ilk were egging on a strategy that was never going to work and that nobody was actually on board with,” Miller began. “Meanwhile, the rest of the players were maybe not profiles in courage, but they were trying to do the right thing. Just, you know, behind the scenes. Some were encouraging Trump to be more presidential—to finally do that growing into the office they had promised he would do four years ago now that he had lost.”

“The real story is that the circus was in town and even the supposed ‘good Republicans”’were happy to put on their clown make-up,” he added.

Listing off a series of the texts Lee sent to Meadows, Miller wrote that they are evidence that, “The true story is that ‘good Republican’ Mike Lee and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows were forcing the crazy into the Oval Office at the most combustible time imaginable.”

Noting that Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) were openly trying to derail the certification of the 2020 vote, the former RNC official said Lee was just as bad — but doing it covertly

“In the end, Lee might not have voted to overturn the election but he was every bit a part of the coup as Cruz and Hawley and the rest. As it turns out this wasn’t the case of ‘responsible’ people trying to nudge things in the right direction in private,” he wrote before concluding, “It was a case where one posse of clowns was so insane that they were giving away the game. While the ‘responsible’ clowns like Mike Lee did everything in their power to figure out how they could keep the madman in power, without getting Rudy’s hair dye on their face.”

You can read the whole piece here.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/gop-qanon/

Over the last few years, QAnon has slowly infiltrated the Republican Party, replacing its traditional conservative values with far-right conspiratorial theories that have nothing to do with reality.

Now, NY Mag's Jacob Silverman is explaining how QAnon has practically overtaken the Republican Party. While the radicalized beliefs were previously verbalized among factions of the political party, Silverman notes how those beliefs are progressively becoming more mainstream.

"QAnon’s adherents tend to espouse some selection of bizarre beliefs from the conspiracist’s buffet that includes accusations of pedophile politicians eating children, secret political tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, a great bloodletting, and Donald Trump swooping in to free us from evil. One day. Or maybe the day after. The prophecy is flexible, which is why it has evolved and endured."

Explaining the timeline of the political party's downward spiral, Silverman noted how the actions of Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, are an example of the radical shift in Republican values and belief systems.

"The latest exemplar of the GOP’s descent into anything-goes nuttery is Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a well-connected conservative activist who recently admitted to attending the January 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C.," he writes. "Ginni’s right-wing beliefs have long been known, but leaked texts between her and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed Thomas’ commitment to overturning the election, based on an apparently sincere belief that Joe Biden had stolen the presidency. She encouraged Meadows to help put a stop to Democratic perfidy. 'The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,' went one message to Meadows, encouraging him to stand strong."

Silverman is also highlighting Republican lawmakers' latest actions that signal the party's shift toward more extremist beliefs.

"The signs of the Republican slide towardfull epistemic crackup are all around us," Silverman writes. "One can see it everywhere lately, not only in the 'why do you want to hurt children?'-type questions hurled by Republican senators at Jackson, but also in the revanchist anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in Texas and Florida and in fearful talk of teachers 'grooming' children on Fox News. The ginned-up moral panic, centered around the child exploitation themes that helped give life to QAnon, is now a regular part of Republican political rhetoric."

===

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-march-11-2022/

3/11 covid profiteer bk nichols

trump was going to do mask mandate but MM stopped b/c it was off freedom brand

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/mark-meadows/

voter fraud

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/mark-meadows-wife-may-have-filed-3-false-voter-claims-in-2020-report/

---

me not thee voter suppr

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/washington-post-editorial-mark-meadows/

===

an 222

reason for 180 on 1/6 cooperation? other 5 or 10K? trms

trump PAC transferred $1 million to a Mark Meadows nonprofit as House coup probe got underway

Daily Kos Staff February 02, 2022

nBC News is reporting that, only weeks after the formation of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, Donald Trump's "Save America" PAC donated a whopping $1 million to a conservative training "institute" headed in part by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows—a man who was intimately involved with multiple parts of Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election. What makes the donation especially conspicuous is that it's orders of magnitude above the Trump PAC's usual gifts.

The Trump PAC distributed a total of $1.35 million in the last half of 2021, reports NBC News. And that single $1 million donation to Meadows' group accounted for the lion's share of it.

It should be immediately clarified that this is not Donald Trump's own money. Trump's fascist-premised "Save America" fundraisers have been sucking the money out of Trump supporters' pockets just as every other Trump grift has, providing a means for Trump to give financial rewards to party allies without having to write any of the checks himself.

And Donald Trump is not known for writing checks himself. It is said that the reason Trump's fingers are so short is that whenever anyone comes to him asking him to write a check, the man bites his own fingers off so that nobody can make him pick up the pen. After the unpleasant visitor goes away, a team of surgeons reattaches each finger—always with a bit of loss, shrinking each digit by a few millimeters or so—and the cycle repeats. Or something. It is only a rumor I heard.

Trump's sudden shove of $1 million to Meadows is notable for its large size, even as the rest of his PAC spends its days trickling out money only a few thousand dollars at a time, but also because it has been clear from the beginning thatMark Meadows knows more about the Trump White House's attempts at self-coup than perhaps any other person, Trump included.Meadows participated in the call to Georgia election officialsin which Trump asked them to "find" enough Trump votes to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the state. Meadows was involved in discussions about taking pseudo-military action to erase or "redo" the election. Meadows was involved in Trump's efforts to gather a crowd of his most rabid public supporters and set them loose to "march" to the U.S. Capitol at the precise day and hour that a joint session of Congress would oversee the final constitutional acknowledgement of his loss.

Mark Meadows is, in other words, up to his ex-House-Republican eyebrows in a multipronged plan to overthrow the United States government, and Trump throwing a million bucks his way just after it became clear that House Republicans had not been able to halt the investigation of Jan. 6 and that Congress would be making an effort to haul Meadows' aiding and abetting ass into a hearing room, a donation absurdly out of scope of what the Trump PAC was doing before and since, can certainly be taken as a distribution of hush money.

And that might be an untoward accusation to make if Donald Trump had not already been caught red-handed handing out similar "hush money" in the past. And it's difficult to find examples of Trump spending money anywhere, at any time, that hasn't been directly linked to what the recipient has personally done for or said about Trump. We can be sure that Trump's PAC did not throw $1 million at Mark Meadows because Donald Trump—sincerely and urgently—believes in the "Conservative Partnership Institute" goal of training new conservative staffers for future generations. Donald Trump doesn't give a flying damn about anything that does not provide immediate and tangible benefit to Donald Trump.

So sure, maybe it's hush money. Maybe it's witness tampering with a big ol' check attached. One way to determine what the money is for is to watch how Meadows' group spends it. If it turns out the "institute" is suddenly spending $1 million or so on unexplained legal fees, as Meadows' own battles with the Jan. 6 committee heat up, well then golly gee won't that be something.

But it ain't gonna be spent on anything that Donald Trump did not personally want it spent on.

12 21

...We have received exceptionally interesting and important documents from a number of witnesses, including Mark Meadows. He has turned over many texts from his private cell phone from January 6th.

"We have litigated and won Trump’s executive privilege case in Federal District Court. The Federal Appellate Court has expedited the appeal, and we anticipate a ruling regarding many more Trump White House documents soon. [As indeed happened moments later.]

"The investigation is firing on all cylinders.

"Do not be misled: President Trump is trying to hide what happened on January 6th and to delay and obstruct. We will not let that happen. The truth will come out."

New details about Meadows' actions during the Capitol riots have also been reported by CNN. According to an inside source, Meadows provided the House Select Committee with records of his text messages and emails that suggest he was "exchanging with a wide range of individuals while the attack was underway,"

The inside source also noted that although Meadows is now refusing to communicate with investigators, the records he provided “offer a window into what people were texting to Meadows on January 6, what he was telling them about Trump in real time, and what the former President was doing for those hours while the Capitol was under attack and rioters were chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence."

Other sources have also explained how critical Meadows' text messages may be to the investigation.

Per CNN:

"In a letter sent to Meadows' attorney on Wednesday, the committee hinted at the content of the texts it has received from Trump's former chief of staff. The letter noted Meadows provided the committee with "text messages about the need for the former President to issue a public statement that could have stopped the January 6th attack on the Capitol."

The source familiar with the communications tells CNN the texts may not reflect well on the former president.

The investigation into the U.S. Capitol insurrection will likely be ongoing.

===

flip flops on coop, bunch taking 5th now but...

12 21 an

two days before the January 6 insurrection several Republican U.S. Senators and Representatives were briefed on a 38-page coup PowerPoint memo. That document is being described as a roadmap for then-President Donald Trump to declare a national security emergency, invalidate all electronic votes, and move to have himself declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

It does not appear that any of the Republican lawmakers alerted the public to the in-process coup attempt. It is not known if they alerted the Dept. of Justice, FBI, or other law enforcement agency.

The Guardian GUK revealed late Friday night that the 38-page coup PowerPoint "was presented on 4 January to a number of Republican senators and members of Congress." Those GOP lawmakers have not been publicly named.

Then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows turned the coup memo over to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, claiming it had been emailed to him but not implemented.

But the document itself calls for the lawmakers to be briefed.

"Senators and members of Congress should first be briefed about foreign interference, the PowerPoint said, at which point Trump could declare a national emergency, declare all electronic voting invalid, and ask Congress to agree on a constitutionally acceptable remedy," The Guardian, which saw a version of the memo, added.

The New York Times, also on Friday, added that the coup PowerPoint "included a claim that China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states," which is false.

Larry Sabato, the highly-respected Director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics said on Twitter the 38-page document was "COMPLETE HORSESHIT."...

===

no lnx

Republican Paul Gosar told Jan. 6 rioters they'd get a blanket pardon from Trump: report

Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona speaking at the 2018 Arizona Manufacturing Summit, hosted by the Arizona Manufacturing Council and the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry at the Renaissance Downtown Hotel in Phoenix, Gage Skidmore.

Sarah K. Burris and Raw Story October 25, 2021

Rolling Stone is reporting that a pair of witnesses have spoken to the House Jan. 6 Select Committee revealing that Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) told them President Donald Trump would issue a blanket pardon for some who attacked the U.S. Capitol that day.

According to the report, some of the planners of the rally are communicating with the investigators and the committee.

"Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump's efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent," said the report, saying that it confirmed the account from a third person.

It's the first time that Americans have heard about a member of Congress being officially tied to the events that unfolded that day.

"While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope," said the report. Both of the sources said that there were several members of Congress who participated in planning calls, but Gosar, in particular, was named for making blanket promises that couldn't be kept.

Gosar participated in a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on May 12, 2021, that focused on the Capitol attack and unanswered questions.

"And Gosar, who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters, allegedly took things a step further," said the report. "Both sources say he dangled the possibility of a 'blanket pardon' in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests."

"Our impression was that it was a done deal," the organizer told Rolling Stone, "that he'd spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support."

They noted that Gosar made the promise "several" times.

"I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you've been doing," Gosar told those on the call.

"I would have done it either way with or without the pardon," the organizer explained. "I do truly believe in this country, but to use something like that and put that out on the table when someone is so desperate, it's really not good business."

The report said that it has "documentary evidence" to prove what the three sources claimed.

Trump campaign aide Katrina Pierson has also been called a "liaison" between the insurrectionists and the White House and Mark Meadows was also named as a key part of the organizing.

Read the full report from Rolling Stone.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Republican's own sister goes on CNN to say he is so 'hateful and ... ›

A GOP congressman just tweeted a white nationalist slogan in a ... ›

'You've lost your mind': GOP Rep. repurposes MLK tribute — in ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trumps-chief-of-staff-mark-meadows-accused-of-campaign-finance-crimes-watchdog-complaint

government ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint on Friday accusing White House chief of staff Mark Meadows of campaign finance crimes for allegedly spending thousands of dollars in campaign funds on personal expenses, including clubs, gourmet cupcakes, a jeweler in Washington and lodging at the president's hotel.

The complaint, which draws from Salon's exclusive reporting last week, urges the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to administer any and all appropriate fines and to take further action, "including, but not limited to, referring this case to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution."

In the document, CREW isolates suspicious transactions among nearly $75,000 in campaign expenditures after Meadows announced his retirement from Congress last December, payments which extended well after his official resignation when he joined the White House on March 30.

"One of the clearest rules in campaign finance is you can't spend your campaign's finances on yourself," Noah Bookbinder, director of CREW, said in a statement announcing the complaint. "That is what it looks like happened here, and it must be thoroughly investigated."

Across the course of 2020, Meadows' campaign committee, Meadows for Congress, continued to rack up expenses, including more than $6,500 in spending at numerous clubs and restaurants, including the Capitol Hill Club, the Trump International Hotel and its in-house restaurant BLT Prime. Other charges included grocery stores and Lavender Moon cupcakery in Washington.

As Salon first reported, the complaint also shows that the Meadows campaign dropped $2,650 at Ann Hand jewelry in Washington on the day that Meadows officially resigned from Congress. It also paid out more than $5,800 to a campaign aide for "field representative" mileage months after the former North Carolina representative announced he would no longer be campaigning — timing which CREW flags as suspicious.

At the time of the mileage charges, across a few weeks in February, Meadows' hand-picked successor and friend of his wife Lynda Bennett had been conducting fundraising events in Meadows' western North Carolina district. Salon on Friday reported that Meadows appears to have used taxpayer-backed congressional allowance funds to reimburse a congressional aide for travel "mileage" accrued across the exact days of one of Bennett's fundraising swings with Debbie Meadows.

According to campaign finance law, funds are improperly converted to personal use "if the contribution or amount is used to fulfill any commitment, obligation or expense of a person that would exist irrespective of the candidate's election campaign or individual's duties as a holder of federal office."

Despite the spending, Meadows for Congress does not appear to have been actively fundraising during the same period. The campaign reported a total of $786.00 in contributions from Jan. 1 to March 31, 2020, and $0 in contributions between April 1 and June 30, 2020, after which Meadows and McMichael converted the entity to the Freedom First PAC.

The alignment of expenditures, the complaint says, makes them "unlikely to be legitimate campaign expenses" and raises "serious questions about whether Meadows and Meadows for Congress violated legal prohibitions against converting campaign funds for personal use."

Meadows, who drew fire recently for having hosted a "lavish wedding" in Atlanta in May in violations of state coronavirus restrictions, continued to report questionable expenses after the campaign converted toFreedom First PAC on July 2. Payments included more than $1,300 in food and beverage spending, including a $1,000 charge at Capitol Hill Club — a popular haunt for Republican officeholders — and nearly $400 at Trump's Washington Hotel. The PAC raised $0 from July 2 through October 14, 2020, again making the committee's spending unlikely to be legitimate campaign expenses, the complaint says.

"Accordingly," the CREW filing says, "an FEC investigation of Meadows, Meadows for Congress, Freedom First PAC and McMichael is in order."

The day Meadows formally tendered his resignation from Congress, March 30, 2020, his campaign reported a $2,650 expenditure on "printed materials" from Ann Hand jewelry, which does not advertise stationery or other "printed materials" on its website, as Salon reported. The closest item would be American Eagle Silk Scarves in three different colors, which go for $350.

An Ann Hand representative told Salon on Friday that the store does not sell anything which could be characterized as "printed materials."

The complaint says that this payment "strongly suggests personal use." Debbie Meadows has been photographed multiple times in Ann Hand jewelry, including at the Republican National Convention in August.

Some of the spending appears to intersect with Bennett's campaign, which the Meadows campaign gave a maximum donation to in March, weeks before he stepped down. On June 23, the day of Bennett's district primary — and nearly three months after Meadows had resigned — his campaign paid aide Henry Mitchell an additional $2,300 for "Management Consulting."'

Mitchell was also the individual who received the $5,800 in "field mileage" that winter. It is not clear what those costs may entail, and the complaint alleges they appear to constitute unlawful spending.

Seven days later, after Bennett lost the primary, Meadows for Congress spent $600 at Safeway grocers.

The complaint itemizes $5,577.50 spent on food and beverage from January through March, including $84 to Lavender Moon Cupcakeryon Feb. 12, and $1,583.12 to the Capitol Hill Club on Jan. 13, Jan. 17, Feb. 11 and March 13.

Other food and beverage charges include a $500 payment to Trump International Hotel in early March, as well as multiple expenditures to its in-house BLT Prime restaurant totaling $581.40.

Despite these expenses in this period, the complaint notes that Meadows for Congress does not appear to have been actively fundraising, as Salon reported.

After converting the campaign to Freedom First PAC on July 2, Meadows reported more than $1,300 on "PAC food/beverage," including $1,000 at the Capitol Hill Club on July 21 and $69 at Lavender Moon Cupcakery. The PAC spent an additional $400 on lodging at Trump's Washington hotel in September.

FEC rules give the agency the authority to judge whether expenditures constitute personal use, including meal and travel expenses.

On Friday, Salon furthered its reporting on Meadows' spending, detailing possible use of federal taxpayer resources to support his wife's friend's campaign.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/prominent-gop-mega-donors-enthusiastically-supported-congressional-candidate-marjorie-taylor-greene-despite-her-extremist-pro-qanon-views-report/

no lnx pix twt

Prominent GOP ‘mega-donors’ enthusiastically supported congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene despite her extremist pro-QAnon views: report

Written by Alex Henderson August 24, 2020

One of this summer’s most disturbing Republican victories came on Tuesday, August 11, when QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene defeated fellow Republican John Cowan in a primary in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. Given how overwhelmingly Republican Greene’s district is, she is likely to win in November — and bring her pro-QAnon views to the U.S. House of Representatives. Journalist Julia Carrie Wong discusses Greene’s campaign in an article published in the Guardian on August 24, stressing that some well-known GOP mega-donors have supported the Georgia Republican despite her extreme views.

Greene’s campaign, Wong reports, received financial support from “groups connected to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and his wife” as well as “the chairman of the board of prominent conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation” and “multiple Republican mega-donors.”

The QAnon conspiracy cult believes that President Donald Trump, who congratulated Greene after her primary victory, was sent to the White House to combat an international ring of pedophiles and Satanists that has infiltrated the U.S. government and that an anonymous figure named “Q” is giving them updates on Trump’s battle. And Greene gave the QAnon movement her enthusiastic support in a video posted on YouTube in 2017.

In addition to her support of QAnon, Greene has a history of racist, anti-Islam and anti-Semitic remarks. Her opponent in the congressional primary, John Cowan, is a hard-right Trump supporter, but he wasn’t extreme enough for some Republican voters in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District.

Wong notes that Greene “received significant backing” from theHouse Freedom Fund, a political action committee associated with the far-right House Freedom Caucus — and the Meadows-associated political action committee Your Voice Counts donated $2000 to Greene’s campaign in March.

According to Wong, “Greene received further support from the Meadows family when the RightWomen PAC, whose executive director is Debbie Meadows, Mark’s wife, endorsed Greene and spent $17,500 to oppose Cowan in the runoff…. In addition to spending more than $30,000 on an independent expenditure campaign to support Greene over Cowan, theHouse Freedom Fund raised nearly $90,000 from its own donors, earmarked for Greene’s campaign. These earmarked donations include $5600 from Barb Van Andel-Gaby, the chairman of the board of the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank.”

One outfit that is now making a point of distancing itself from Greene isKoch Industries, which donated $5000 to her campaign though its PAC. After Greene’s victory, a spokesperson for Koch contacted AlterNet and stressed that “Koch does not support her campaign” — pointing out that “in June, upon learning of Ms. Greene’s past comments, KOCHPAC immediately requested a refund of its contribution” and saying that Koch does not condone Greene’s “harmful and divisive rhetoric.”

Never Trump conservative Tim Miller, who formerly served as communications director for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and is now political director of Republican Voters Against Trump and a frequent contributor to The Bulwark, is vehemently critical of Republicans who have openly supported Greene.Miller told the Guardian, “Getting involved in a primary on behalf of an absolutely insane, conspiracy-minded, explicitly racist candidate in a seat that is reliably conservative is mind-bogglingly irresponsible. This is how you signal to the Trump base, ‘We are with you. We

===

an 820

mark Meadows smears Trump’s sister over audio tapes: ‘She didn’t show up for her brother’s funeral’

David Edwards / Raw Story August 23, 2020

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Sunday sought to smear the President Donald Trump’s sister, retired federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, after she was heard on audio calling…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/mark-meadows-claims-lack-of-evidence-of-widespread-voter-fraud-is-somehow-the-definition-of-fraud/

on CNN’s State of the Union, host Jake Tapper talked to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about the Trump administration’s latest favorite talking point: voter fraud. Specifically,voter fraud via voting by mail. In this case, Meadows came out swinging against the notion that states should send ballots to all registered voters. In perhaps the most mind-blowing exchange, Tapper (accurately) pointed out that there is no proof of “widespread voter fraud,” and Meadows said, “there’s no evidence that there’s not, either.” Then, Meadows added: “That’s the definition of fraud, Jake.”

How did we get there? Let’s check out the now-viral clip below.

While already talking about voter fraud, Tapper asked Meadows to get specific, using voting by mail in Florida versus Pennsylvania as examples, as Trump, as well as First Lady Melania Trump, requested their absentee ballots to vote in Florida just last week. In fact, Trump even voted absentee for Florida’s March primary.

“Can you tell me the difference between voting by mail in Florida and, say, voting by mail in Pennsylvania?” The CNN host asked Meadows on Sunday morning. “What’s the difference?"

meadows sidestepped the question, saying he wasn’t familiar with Pennsylvania’s system, but claimed he and Trump don’t have problems with what he described as “no-excuse absentee” voting. He went on to say that he does have a problem with “sending millions of ballots across the country to sometimes empty mailboxes,” noting that he doesn’t want his vote to be “disenfranchised.” Obviously, the word “disenfranchised” coming from the mouth of any Republican is a bold move given the systemic disenfranchisement of Black and brown voters across the nation, but the back and forth didn’t jump on that particular word choice.

Meadows further suggested the “problem” is that people are “looking at just sending out ballots,” using California as an example. Tapper cut in there and argued that California has already done that for the majority of its population, at about 75%, as well as Oregon, Utah, and Washington state, without problems.

“Now there are four states that are adding to the sending out ballots to every registered voter. I understand that that’s a concern that you’re claiming,” Tapper stated.

Meadows countered this by asking Tapper, “Isn’t it a concern to you?” He continued by claiming that voter rolls are “inaccurate” with “people just moving around” and, in his words, “the people that die off.”

Tapper again cut off this argument, this time simply saying: “But there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”

To which Meadows offered up the response that has now gone viral for its absolutely head-scratching, empty wordplay: “There’s no evidence that there’s not either. That’s the definition of fraud, Jake.”

Here is that clip....[trump nevada rant]

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/cnns-jake-tapper-busts-trump-chief-of-staff-mark-meadows-live-on-air-for-lying-about-disabling-usps-sorting-machines/

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/conservative-writer-warns-the-gop-is-increasingly-embracing-the-utter-lunacy-of-qanon/

no lnx twt vid?

Conservative writer warns the GOP is increasingly embracing the ‘utter lunacy’ of QAnon

Written by Alex Henderson August 14, 2020

On Tuesday, August 11, the QAnon conspiracy cult enjoyed a major victory when far-right QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene won a Republican primary in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District and was congratulated by President Donald Trump — who wasn’t the least bit troubled by her pro-QAnon views. And veteran conservative pundit/author Mona Charen, in an article published in The Bulwark on August 13, laments the willingness of prominent Republicans to endorse those who embrace the “utter lunacy” of QAnon.

The QAnon cult believes that Trump was elected president to combat an international pedophile/child sex ring that operates within the U.S. government and that an anonymous figure named “Q” is providing updates on Trump’s battle. Greene, in a 2017 video that has been posted on YouTube, expressed her solidarity with QAnon. And considering how deeply Republican her district is, Greene has a very good chance of defeating the Democratic candidate, tech worker Kevin Van Ausdale, in November and taking a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2021.

Charen explains: “Pizzagate morphed into the QAnon conspiracy in which Q followers wait for signals from their leader that a vast conspiracy of Satanic child abusers, run by the ‘Deep State,’ George Soros, the Supreme Court, and God knows who else is about to be unmasked.Did I mention that they think Beyoncé is only pretending to be black? It’s a hydra-headed thing, this conspiracy, and contains multitudes. But the one common thread is this: the great deliverer will be Donald J. Trump.”

QAnon, Charen writes, is a “paranoid conspiracy (theory that) has gathered momentum at the Republican grassroots.”

Greene is not an anomaly: support for QAnon has been growing in the Republican Party.

“No fewer than 60 current or former congressional candidates have expressed interest in or support for the QAnon conspiracy,” Charen laments. “One of them, Jo Rae Perkins, got the Republican nomination for Senate in Oregon. And now, Marjorie Taylor Greene seems almost certain to be going to Congress.”

Charen notes that although some prominent Republicans condemned Greene — including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise — Trump and others have embraced her.

“Greene received backing from the House Freedom Fund, an arm of the House Freedom Caucus,” Charen observes. “Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and formerRep. Mark Meadows, now Trump’s chief of staff, also backed Greene.”

To make matters worse, Charen adds, Greene critics like Kinzinger are being slammed by Trump supporters for speaking out against her.

Voters in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, Charen points out, could have chosen her GOP primary rival, Dr. John Cowan — who she describes as a “gun-rights-supporting, anti-abortion Trump loyalist” — to run against Van Ausdale. Instead, they went with someone even further to the right: a QAnon extremist.

“It’s odd that Republicans, who pride themselves on their practical understanding of life — incentives matter, money doesn’t grow on trees, personal responsibility is essential to a well-ordered society — should display such a marked weakness for utter lunacy,” Charen laments. “I don’t offer an explanation, just a warning. This disordered thinking is no longer just a fringe phenomenon.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/nytimes-investigation-finds-trump-administration-was-desperate-to-shift-blame-for-a-crisis-of-its-own-creation/

Conducting over two dozen interviews with senior administration and public health officials, and consulting a cache of previously unavailable documents, the *New York Times* has uncovered what now seems obvious to everyone except perhaps Trump’s dwindling and ignorant base of supporters: the Trump administration deliberately sought to shift blame for its botched handling of the Covid-19 pandemic to the states, in what theTimes authors aptly characterize as a “catastrophic policy blunder” and “one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.”

A team in the White House led by President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, met daily on the crisis, but the ultimate goal was shifting responsibility. “They referred to this as ‘state authority handoff,’ and it was at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations,” write Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger.

Other than Trump himself, two of the officialstaking a lead role in causing this catastrophe, according to the Times, were Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Coronavirus Task Force leader Deborah Birx. Birx’s role in delivering deliberately upbeat information to Trump (in the face of dire negative news directly to the contrary) played a major role in Trump’s decision-making, according to the Times, which refers to her as the “chief evangelist” portraying the threat from the virus as “fading.” (The Times article in fact contains an entire, devastating segment explicating Birx’s influence on the policy; she declined to be interviewed for the article).

For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the Meadows group. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing. The country, she insisted, was likely to resemble Italy, where virus cases declined steadily from frightening heights.

As late as April 11, Birx was telling Trump that the “nation was in good shape,” while Meadows was casting the handling of the crisis in ideological terms, as an issue that the states should handle, rather than the federal government. Birx was also largely instrumental in developing a plan that shunted responsibility for the pandemic away from the federal government and onto the cash-strapped states. Not surprisingly, these were the exact types of messages guaranteed to please Trump (who from Timesinvestigation was clearly too uninterested and self-absorbed to interpret any data himself).

Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.

The results of this deliberate exercise in self-delusion manifested themselves in an overall attempt to minimize the necessity of lockdowns and social distancing, with the catastrophic results we are now witnessing today. Importantly,the Times investigation makes clear that Trump’s policy was not simply a matter of misjudgments, but “a deliberate strategy that he would stick doggedly to as evidence mounted that, in the absence of strong leadership from the White House, the virus would continue to infect and kill large numbers of Americans.”

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

It was also a strategy designed solely with Trump’s re-election prospects in mind, and extended to deliberately and “disdainfully” ignoring scientific studies which contradicted the Trump line, “muzzling” voices advocating a more safety-oriented approach, and “continu[ing]to distort reality even as it became clear that his hopes for a rapid rebound in the economy and his electoral prospects were not materializing.”

The Times’ report includes several facts not previously disclosed. First, nearly the entirety of the administration’s policy was formulated by aides with no public health or scientific background whatsoever. Second, Trump’s perverse “campaign” against testing was intentional and in fact directly related to shifting wholesale responsibility to individual states so that he, Trump, would not be blamed for the catastrophe. Third, the silencing of Fauci through limiting his media appearances was deliberate as they were afraid he would “go off message” and start telling Americans the truth about skyrocketing infection rates; and fourth, California’s governor was told by administration officials that if he wanted bulk deliveries of nasal swabs to test for Covid-19 infections, he would have to call Trump personally and thank him before they would be delivered.

The article also confirms that it was Jared Kushner, as well as administration officials acting on his cues, who was largely influential at the federal level in depriving states of the number of tests necessary to adequately combat the virus.

But the enabler of the administration’s failure, at least according to the emphasis implicit within theTimes’report, was Birx. It was Birx who came up with the language referring to individual hotspots and outbreaks as “embers” that simply needed to be tamped down. She repeatedly and persistently likened the situation in the U.S. to the experience of Italy, which turned out to be disastrously wrong. She ignored warnings that the models she continually hyped to White House Officials might not be accurate. The authors of the University of Washington model, in particular, were alarmed when administration officials began using their model to try to predict what would occur if social distancing measures were abandoned.

TheTimesarticle is a devastating portrait of a slow-motion train-wreck in the making, with the health and safety of the American public repeatedly treated as an afterthought to Donald Trump’s political fortunes.

Unfortunately, as we now know, that train is now bearing down on all of us.

===

also 720 fauci fail, trump navarro under bus?! https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/white-house-is-waving-the-white-flag-on-fauci-attacks-after-trump-throws-navarro-under-the-bus-cnns-acosta/

BS? blame for fail?

on CNN Wednesday, chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta reported that White House officials are backing down from their attacks on top public health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, following an op-ed by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro attacking his judgment.

“After days of attacks, Dr. Anthony Fauci has had enough and he is firing back,” said Acosta. “He is describing the attacks on him as a, quote, ‘major mistake’ on the part of the White House, and White House officials are jumping into damage control mode, insisting that aides across the West Wing are not happy with trade adviser Peter Navarro, saying he violated instruction from Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who had warned staffers to stop going after Fauci.”

“After waging a campaign to discredit one of the nation’s most trusted experts on the coronavirus … the White House appears to be waving the white flag, at least for now,” said Acosta. “President Trump and his top aides are now backing off on their attacks of Fauci, but only after Peter Navarro blasted Fauci in a USA TODAY op-ed. Asked about that, the president all but accused him of going rogue.”

“Now, White House officials are trying to distance themselves from Navarro, with one top aide saying in a tweet, ‘the Peter Navarro op-ed is the opinion of Peter alone. The president values the expertise of the medical professionals advising his administration,’” said Acosta. “One White House official went further, saying Navarro had been told by Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to de-escalate the situation with Fauci, but that he violated those instructions by writing the op-ed anyway.”[vid]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/mark-meadows-is-aggressively-going-after-white-house-leaks-according-to-anonymous-leakers-report/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trump-chief-of-staff-mark-meadows-floundering-and-viewing-exit-after-less-than-four-months-white-house-sources/

according to a report from Politico, White House sources claim that Donald Trump’s latest chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has found the job of policing the activities of the president not as easy as he had anticipated and stated he will only stay on for one more year at best should Trump be re-elected.

The report notes that White House officials are saying Meadows is frustrated in the job, which has been a revolving door since Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who was then followed by Gen. John Kelly and then Mick Mulvaney.

According to the report, Meadows left his previous job as a House Republican and brought a smattering of staffers along with him to help implement changes in White House operations but, like his predecessors, has been stymied by an unpredictable president.

“Meadows has yet to establish a strong power base in a White House known for backbiting — and he has not been able to execute on many conservative priorities, according to interviews with a dozen current and former senior administration officials and Republicans close to the White House,” Politico reports, adding, “Several administration officials, Republicans close to the White House and conservatives have been underwhelmed at the Meadows tenure so far.”

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

Faced with that, Meadows has told associates he already has plans to leave — if not after a Trump defeat, sometime in 2021, with the report stating, “he’ll only stay in the role for an additional year, if that long.”

According to Chris Whipple, who has written extensively about White House chiefs of staff, the failure of Meadows to bring order to the White House is no surprise.

“Look at what has happened on Meadows’ watch: the walk to Lafayette Square, the complete mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis, the defense of the Confederate flag and the botched handling of the intelligence on the Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers. We could go on and on. It has been one of the worst stretches of the Trump presidency,” Whipple explained. “He took the job, so he owns it. That was his first big mistake.”

The report goes onto to note that Meadows has run into the same obstacle — outside of Trump — that dogged the previous Trump chiefs of staff: Jared Kushner.

“Meadows also sought to exert his control early on by overseeing and approving all staff promotions, raises, presidential commissions and detailees to White House to make sure the chief’s office had a handle on personnel. That worked fine until Kushner complained and told Meadows his staff was off limits. Meadows eventually acquiesced to Kushner’s demands, according to four people familiar with the matter,” Politico reports before adding that their relationship has improved and Trump’s son-in-law tasked him with finding leakers in the White House.

Politico also reports that Meadows has no regrets about taking the job, before adding that conservatives are displeased with him for not “living up to his reputation as the former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus” and implementing their agenda from the White House.

You can read more here.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/white-house-turmoil-as-senior-staffer-denied-key-promotion-after-right-wing-fury-on-twitter-report/

according to a report from Politico, a senior White House official slated to take a high profile position overseeing domestic policy had his appointment derailed by a furious response on Twitter from extremist conservatives questioning his bonafides.

The report notes that Derek Lyons was on the verge of being announced as President Donald Trump’s next top domestic policy adviser before having the rug pulled out from him and seeing the job suddenly go to Brooke Rollins.

According to Politico’s Anita Kumar and Daniel Lippman, “The abrupt shuffle at the Domestic Policy Council was the result of several typical Trump-era factors: an announcement that got out early, conservative anger and differing internal messages.”

“Nothing’s done until it’s done, and that’s always been true in Trump world and this is yet another of many examples,” explained a person close to the White House.

jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, floated several people for the role, including both Lyons and Rollins. Newly installed chief of staff Mark Meadows floated his own name, Stephen Miller, an influential immigration policy aide. It was expected that the domestic policy chief would play a significant role in the president’s efforts to reopen the country amid the coronavirus pandemic,” the report notes. “After several days of deliberations, it appeared Kushner and Meadows had selected Lyons to serve as acting DPC director for the rest of Trump’s term, while continuing in his current role as White House staff secretary, a key official who manages document flow to the president.”

However, after a Politico report noted the upcoming announcement, it set off a furor among conservative hardliners about Lyons association with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

“Lyons, a lawyer and Harvard Law School grad, started his career as a law clerk to Brett Kavanaugh when the Supreme Court justice was still a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals. He later worked on Capitol Hill,” the report continues. “But it was his time with Jeb Bush’s campaign that made some conservatives suspicious. His affiliation with Kushner also raised some eyebrows, given that Trump’s son-in-law has pushed for some more moderate policies, including business-friendly immigration changes that hardliners say are too lenient.”

That announcement set off anti-immigration gadfly Michelle Malkin who tweeted out, “This is not what #AmericaFirst voters signed up for,” along with the hashtag, “#JaredKushnerIsNotMyPresident..”

Conservative writer and political consultant Ryan Girdusky, piled on, tweeting, “Trump has picked Derek Lyons as the head of the Domestic Policy Council…- he’s a former Jeb! Person.”

The report notes that the outside criticism set off alarms in the White House that eventually led to Lyons being skipped over.

“A White House official said Meadows received praise internally about Lyons but some in the White House worried that criticism from influential conservative pundits, such as Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson of Fox News, would soon follow,” the report states. “There was another problem that arose during deliberations: Meadows and Kushner had yet to have Trump sign off on Lyons’ appointment when the news broke, according to two White House officials. The White House official said Lyons and Rollins were finalists for the job, but the job ultimately went to Rollins in part because she would be able to appear on television as part of ‘the public facing role’ of DPC director.”

“By the end of the week Rollins had been tapped to head the DPC in an acting capacity,” the report notes before adding, “Lyons was elevated to the title of counselor, making him one of the closest advisers to the president alongside Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway, who have similar titles, although Conway is senior counselor. The move was seen internally by some as a face-saving measure and by others as a Kushner attempt to diminish Conway’s status.”

You can read more here.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-newest-chief-of-staff-mark-meadows-is-already-facing-damaging-leaks-from-white-house-staffers/

no lnx

Trump’s newest chief of staff Mark Meadows is already facing damaging leaks from White House staffers

Written by Travis Gettys / Raw Story April 9, 2020

President Donald Trump’s new White House chief of staff is already in hot water after just a couple of weeks on the job.

Mark Meadows, who resigned from Congress in late March to begin work in the White House, quickly pushed out legislative liaison Mike McKenna and then replaced press secretary Stephanie Grisham — and other aides could soon be on their way out, reported Bloomberg.

The North Carolina Republican has also ruffled feathers by calling Republican governors who have resisted issuing stay-at-home orders and asking them to do so immediately, according to two people familiar with the calls.

The president has said those decisions are the responsibility of individual governors and has not publicly criticized those who held out — all of them Republicans — and it’s not clear whether Meadows had his blessing to make the calls.

Meadows has ratcheted up tensions in a White House known for infighting and frequent turnover, according to multiple sources.

Two sources told Bloomberg that Meadows told Grisham over the weekend that he wanted her to give up the press secretary job and serve only as communications director, but she declined.

Grisham stepped down and returned to her job as first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff.

Top aides say they are trying to work with Meadows but complained that he didn’t spend enough time learning how the West Wing works before making changes.

Meadows also pushed out Jessica Ditto, who had worked for Trump since 2016 and was the primary spokeswoman for Ivanka Trump.

One source said aides have gone to Meadows to suggest other staffers to push out, which has raised anxiety and damaged morale.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trumps-new-chief-of-staff-hasnt-resigned-from-congress-why-is-he-representing-the-white-house-in-coronavirus-negotiations/

he git to work in da big house now

PO'd at him for a while (get over it") --> mark meadons needs a job b/c fixed gerry?!

320 an

trump announces Mick Mulvaney is out as chief of staff — to be replaced by a congressional ally

===

Rep. Mark Meadows

At the 2014 Values Voters Summit, Meadows said, "How ridiculous is [sic] that when you have our fighting men and women, they get up and they say, 'man, it's a little chilly, maybe today is the day that we've got to worry about climate change.' It's just ridiculous."

In a slight movement from his previous denial of climate science, Meadows told reporters in March 2019 that "there are some things I'm willing to look at," related to climate change. Though he didn't fully back climate science, he reportedly said, "I think that greenhouse gas emissions is certainly something that we need to look at."[// djt ploy?]

League of Conservation Voters score: 1%

april 2019

Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican and the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, suggested this week that he might be willing to support climate change legislation.

During a House oversight hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday, Meadows accused former Secretary of State and onetime Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry for politicizing climate change.

But while he excoriated Kerry for his approach to the issue, Meadows mentioned that his staff was considering the merits of a carbon tax — a climate change policy that has long had bipartisan support.

“Mr. Secretary, I am one of the few people here that … is more predisposed perhaps to your message than most on my side of the aisle,” Meadows told Kerry.

“I was a wind, solar and geothermal expert for an electric utility many years ago, back when the Department of Energy actually started. I have people on my staff that are looking at a carbon tax and a number of issues.”

That may come as a surprise to some, given Meadows’ past reluctance to back climate policies.

When President Obama announced the Paris climate agreement in 2016, Meadows issued a statement saying, “With the Paris Climate Agreement, this administration is throwing away significant gains made in our country’s energy sector and handcuffing the American economy and job creators to burdensome regulations that will hurt, not help, American workers.”

He added, “The American people are tired of watching our government hamstring the economy and burden U.S. businesses in a fruitless pursuit of climate change goals that are both ineffective and unenforceable globally.”

Meadows has a 1 percent lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters, and scored zero percent in 2018.

Meadows’ office did not respond to a request for comment about what sort of climate change policy he might be open to.

Still, Meadows told Kerry on Tuesday, “There is no doubt that human contributions have attributed to greenhouse gases.”

The North Carolina Republican also told Roll Call in February, “I think that greenhouse gas emissions is certainly something that we need to look at.”

===

https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/some-gop-lawmakers-are-thawing-on-climate-change

2/19?

Congressional Republicans seem to be thawing on climate.

Rep. Mark Meadows, the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who has denied the science behind climate change, told reporters Wednesday he was open to confront the peril of the warming planet.

“There are some things I’m willing to look at,” the North Carolina Republican said of addressing climate change. While he remains skeptical of climate science, he said, “I think that greenhouse gas emissions is certainly something that we need to look at.”

Last week, Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman John Barrasso of Wyoming said America can cut its carbon output. It’s a business opportunity for U.S. firms, he said. “You know, as other countries grow their economies, they should be using the best possible technology to capture carbon emissions.”

And Illinois Republican Rep. John Shimkus, who in 2008 called a carbon tax “the only intellectually honest way to move forward on global climate change,” said Wednesday, referring to a possible climate bill, that there are “areas of agreement where Republicans can be supportive so that you might have a legislative solution that actually gets signed into law.”

As the long-set Republican opposition to addressing climate change recedes on Capitol Hill, even highly conservative members in the House and Senate are indicating they view greenhouse gases as a problem and are open to climate measures that would emphasize an expanded role for the private sector rather than the federal government.

While no deal is imminent or likely in this Congress, Republicans have set out areas they might be willing to compromise on or use as bargaining chips in negotiating climate legislation, including carbon-capture technology, energy efficiency, nuclear power, battery storage and funding for basic energy research and development.

In a column published Wednesday, a trio of top Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee — ranking member Greg Walden of Oregon, Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, and Shimkus — offered an “innovation” pitch to address the issue with what they called “bipartisan solutions”: renewable energy development, carbon capture and utilization, hydropower and nuclear power.

“These are bipartisan solutions we must seize on to deliver real results for the American people,” they wrote.

That type of offer may have an audience with Democrats who may view a proposal with more federal involvement, like the Green New Deal resolution from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, as less politically palatable. The resolution aims to overhaul the U.S. energy system and swiftly pull away from carbon-heavy sources.

House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Peter A. DeFazio of Oregon, who opposed cap-and-trade legislation Democrats narrowly passed when they last had control of the House, said he was interested in what Republicans had to offer.

“Renewable energy, R&D, energy efficiency, research into new battery technology, massive federal investments in those areas? Sure, I’m interested in that,” DeFazio said.

He said that before he’s willing to work with Republicans on these efforts, they must acknowledge the science behind climate change and the related risks presented to the planet.

“They have to acknowledge there’s a problem if they want to spend a bunch of money to solve it,” he said. “If they’re going to spend a bunch of money on a problem they say doesn’t exist, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Shimkus said that he, with Walden and Upton, was trying to move beyond the topic of climate science, which “we all agree with,” to a strategy of “how we can move forward.”

Republicans are considering “where are there areas of agreement where Republicans can be supportive so that you might have a legislative solution that actually gets signed into law,” he said.

‘No-regret solutions’

At a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing last week, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who chairs the committee, laid out similar grounds for compromise.

“I have often spoken about clean energy innovation policies as ‘no-regret solutions,’” the Alaska Republican said. “But in reality, these are just those first steps.”

Deploying low-carbon energy infrastructure worldwide requires research and cost-cutting, she said, underscoring carbon capture technology, which is still in its infancy.

“It is time to push hard to bring down the cost of clean energy technologies like renewables, advanced nuclear, next-generation energy storage and carbon capture,” Murkowski said. “If we want credible technological solutions that are cost-effective and deployable globally and at-scale, we must ensure that the policies we put in place propel those efforts.”

Energy and Natural Resources ranking member Joe Manchin III said at that hearing that a comprehensive measure like the Green New Deal could be a way for lawmakers of both parties to “come together and understand that it’s a really lofty goal.”

“We get these divides where our caucuses, whether it be within the Democrat or Republican, or divide within the whole Senate or the whole Congress,” the West Virginia Democrat said. “We don’t want to drink dirty water. We don’t want to breathe dirty air. We want our kids to have a future. We really do. They also realize they have to have a job to sustain themselves.”

Shimkus agreed with the sentiment that Democrats’ Green New Deal created an opportunity to craft a more politically-moderate approach to addressing climate that could receive buy-in from his party.

“I think that’s helpful in getting us to look at something ... that we might be willing to consider,” he said.

In an interview, Rep. Paul Tonko, who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce’s Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee, lauded the Republicans’ willingness to address climate change but said their push for innovation falls short of what is needed to tackle such as sprawling threat.

"Innovation and research are important but again that's only picking two tools out of the kit,” the New York Democrat said. “And if we’re going to get to this very lofty ambitious goal with urgency, we’re going to need to have many more elements to be part of the equation for success.”

Tonko, whose subcommittee would be the first stop for legislation in the House to address climate change and energy issues, said there are opportunities to work out a deal between both chambers and parties.

He mentioned energy efficiency, weatherization, conservation, research and upgrading the electric grids as areas of collaboration — points Republicans have broadly said they would be open to.

“I applaud they're coming around,” Tonko said. “It appears as though the denial syndrome or the delay syndrome has been abandoned and that people are now talking solutions.”

Trump: Green New Deal sounds like a ‘high school term paper that got a low mark’]

Search Results

Web results

Mark Meadows – climate policy champion? | The Progressive ...

pulse.ncpolicywatch.org › 2019/04/11 › mark-meadows-climate-policy-ch...

Apr 11, 2019 - WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican and the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, ...

Missing: pledge ?| Must include:

pledge

Some GOP lawmakers are thawing on climate change - Roll Call

https://www.rollcall.com › news › congress › some-gop-lawmakers-are-tha...

Feb 14, 2019 - Congressional Republicans seem to be thawing on climate. Rep. Mark Meadows, the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus ...

Missing: pledge ?| Must include:

pledge

north Carolina Republicans accuse Mark Meadows of retiring from Congress to help elect a friend of his wife: ‘It just looks very suspicious’

===

https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-and-republicans-congress-global-warming-2019-2

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/gop-mass-exodus-continues-freedom-caucus-co-founder-and-warrior-for-the-president-mark-meadows-is-quitting-congress/

no lnx

GOP mass exodus continues: Freedom caucus co-founder and ‘warrior for the president’ Mark Meadows is quitting Congress

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement December 19, 2019

The GOP mass exodus continues. U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, will not run for re-election and may not even finish his term in Congress. Meadows is a powerful Republican who is a co-founder and former Chairman of the far right House Freedom Caucus. He is one of President Donald Trump’s top supporters in Congress.

Politico first reported that Meadows will not run for re-election and may leave Congress early, to go to work directly for Trump. He becomes at least the 28th House Republican to retire or quit before the end of their term during the 116th Congress.

While no formal role has been determined, the four-term Congressman could end up in the White House or in the re-election campaign. Last year Trump strongly considered making Meadows his Chief of Staff.

Rep. Meadows is an anti-LGBTQ extremist who pushed Trump hard to ban transgender service members from the U.S. Armed Forces. He is also among the 38 House Republicans who signed a letter last year urging Trump to remove protections for LGBTQ workers from his USMCA trade pact.

Even before Trump was sworn into office, Meadows began to pressure the president-elect to roll back or rescind a variety of President Barack Obama’s LGBT protections, including guidelines to help protect the rights of transgender students. The administration, via Secretary Betsy DeVos and then-Attorney General Jeff Session, complied.

In 2013 Rep. Meadows claimed if the Supreme Court were to rule same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry it would create “a constitutional crisis.”

Senior Advisor to the President, Jared Kushner, told Politico, “Congressman Meadows has been a warrior for the president and a champion of his agenda. We have greatly valued his guidance for the last three years in the administration, and I have no doubt that Mark will play an important role going into 2020.”

Meadows sees his job, now and in the future, as fighting for Trump.

“So this is not me shrinking away from a fight. In fact, it’s just going to be continuing to fight a different capacity, whether that’s officially as part of the Trump team or unofficially in my capacity as a sitting member of Congress,” he says.

===

SYSTEMIC ANALYSIS

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-decade-republicans-hijacked-our-democracy-via-the-gerrymander/

no lnx

The decade Republicans hijacked our democracy — via the gerrymander

Written by David Daley / Salon December 30, 2019

As this decade comes to a close, 59 million Americans live in a state where one or both chambers of the state legislature is controlled by the party that got fewer votes in the 2018 election.

In Wisconsin in 2018, voters elected a Democratic U.S. senator, defeated an incumbent Republican governor, picked Democrats for every statewide office, and favored Democratic candidates for the state assembly by more than 200,000 ballots. Republicans nevertheless controlled more than 63 percent of the seats.

We end the 2020s with voter purges in Ohio, Wisconsin and Georgia, with precinct closures weaponized to lower voter participation across the South, with Texas, Tennessee and Florida making it harder to register new voters. The ball drops on the 2010s with state legislatures in Florida, Michigan and Missouri willing to undo voting reforms approved by upwards of 60 percent of the people via initiative.

One of our final images of the U.S. House will be the floor debate over impeachment, with its dueling images of older, white men defending the president’s actions over Ukraine and younger members, largely women and people of color, insisting that no one, even a president, stand above the law.

White men make up a smaller slice of the American electorate with each election. Yet they maintain outsized power in Congress and state legislatures. A new decade dawns with a crisis of representation that threatens the integrity of representative democracy itself.

We’re in this mess, in many ways, because of gerrymandering. This was the decade that the gerrymander — perhaps the oldest political trick in the book — pushed American politics into a dangerous state of anti-majoritarianism, grounded in racial fear and identity politics, that may take at least another decade to overcome, assuming we ever do so.

It’s worth remembering how we got here. After all, the decade began with the likelihood that changing American demographics might push the nation in a very different direction.

As thousands celebrated America’s first black president in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008, the smartest analysts on every network, left and right, watched Barack Obama defeat John McCain and wondered whether an increasingly diverse nation might render Republicans a minority party for decades.

Top Republican strategists had a different idea. The 2008 election might have been historic, they understood, but 2010 had the potential to be transformative. Every state legislative and congressional district in the nation would be redrawn after the 2010 census. State legislatures would draw most of the lines. If Obama and the Democrats suffered a difficult midterm election, as new presidents often do, Republicans could quickly change their fortunes, dominate redistricting, and draw themselves an enduring advantage, even in competitive states they’d lost in 2008, such as Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The GOP plan — known as REDMAP, or the Redistricting Majority Project — was headquartered at the Republican State Leadership Committee, led by former party chairman Ed Gillespie. It was announced on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal by no less than GOP mastermind Karl Rove. The RSLC’s key benefactors included Koch Industries, Walmart, Reynolds American and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The RSLC identified just over 100 state legislative races in crucial states, and drowned Democratic incumbents in waves of sophisticated negative advertisements in the final weeks of the 2010 race. (It helped that cocky Democrats snoozed on the importance of redistricting and barely put up any fight.) And when it came time to remap these states in 2011, using the most exacting voter data andsophisticated mapping technology ever deployed on redistricting, the political operations of new House Speaker John Boehner, Paul Ryan and many other establishment figures would play key roles.

It worked. In 2012, the first election held under these lines, Democratic U.S. House candidates won 1.4 million more votes than Republicans nationwide. Republicans held the chambers nevertheless, decisively, 234-201. In targeted swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, Democratic candidates would earn tens of thousands more votes, but the Republican-drawn districts packed and cracked those votes so precisely that the GOP would win 13 of the 18 seats from Pennsylvania and nine of 14 from Michigan. Democratic state legislative candidates would routinely win more votes in these states as well; Republicans would hold both chambers in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin regardless.

So yes, it worked. But it also contained the seeds of the party’s unraveling, placed a frustrated and impossible-to-please base in charge, and set the stage for an outsider to sweep up the pieces four years later.

But first, something else would happen in 2012: Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney, and shaken Republicans realized they’d lost the popular vote in five out of six presidential elections, GOP leaders commissioned a warts-and-all diagnosis of the party’s brand. It wasn’t pretty. One-time Republican voters now described the party as “scary,” “out of touch,” “narrow-minded,” even “stuffy old men.”

Its authors named the report the Growth and Opportunity Project but it soon became known by everyone as something catchier and more urgent: the Republican autopsy. Among the causes of death? Republicans had “lost their way with younger voters.” Many minorities “think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

It recommended that the party modernize itself, learn how to persuade and appeal to a wider variety of people, champion policies that make life better for working Americans rather than the rich, then head to communities Republicans had tended to avoid and make their case. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian and gay Americans and demonstrate that we care about them, too,” the autopsy concluded.

When Donald Trump captured the GOP nomination in 2016, many Republicans bemoaned not following this advice from the autopsy and more, such as championing immigration reform and becoming genuinely welcoming and inclusive on social issues. But it was already too late. The autopsy itself had been dead on arrival, and long before Trump descended his gilded Manhattan escalator and joined the Republican race. It had already been smothered, unaware, by the very Republican establishment who commissioned the report.

REDMAP made it impossible.

The new districts drawn by Republicans made their districts older, whiter, and more conservative. These new districts — where the Republican primary was the only race that mattered — produced a different kind of congressman (and most of them were men), incentivized against compromise, insulated from the ballot box, interested in listening only to their base.

These members also didn’t much care for the Republican establishment in Washington. They would bring a much different tone and tenor to Congress. Boehner, now the House speaker, learned this right quick. In summer 2013, a first-term congressman from North Carolina’s 11th district wrote Boehner a letter, suggesting that the GOP look to defund Obamacare by threatening a government shutdown. Boehner knew it was folly. Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate. It was a strategy doomed to fail. Rove blasted it in the Wall Street Journal.

But Mark Meadows enlisted 79 other Republicans in this quest. His own district, previously a swing district that most recently produced a conservative Democrat, had been redrawn so that he captured it by more than 15 percentage points. It was 87 percent white.

In the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza and David Wasserman looked at the districts of the 80 signatories. They were, on average, 75 percent white and just 9 percent Latino, compared to an average district that’s 63 percent white and 17 percent Latino. In 2012, Obama won the national popular vote by 4 percentage points. In those districts, Romney won by an average of 23. The Republican members exceeded even that landslide margin: They won their seats by an average of 34 percentage points. As the nation changed, redistricting not only held back demographic change, but it turned back the clock and solidified conservative white power. As Lizza concluded, “these 80 members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.”

Boehner, given little choice, followed the “suicide caucus” over the cliff. Predictably, disaster ensued and he had to change course. And predictably, the “suicide caucus” saw no reason to compromise or change its own. This was just one of more than four dozen battles to repeal Obamacare in the House, none of which stood any greater likelihood of victory. Immigration reform, one of the only policy options the autopsy’s authors saw as crucial for the party’s future, stood no chance in this climate.

Neither did the GOP leadership. A year later, Meadows would turn on Boehner, filing a parliamentary motion to “vacate the chair” that would ultimately lead to the speaker’s resignation.

The House had been set on a dangerous new course. REDMAP, like some Frankenstein’s monster, would not only devour Boehner, but the new members empowered by these toxic, technology-driven gerrymanders would accelerate all of the worst polarizing trends in our politics. The Freedom Caucus, legislators created and empowered by REDMAP, would run the House. Ryan, Boehner’s successor, would later step aside in frustration as well, proven ineffective despite GOP control of Congress and the White House. The autopsy wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on. The GOP establishment hoped that controlling redistricting would buy themselves time to set a new course. Instead, the party’s course, and our nation’s history, would beset by the new leaders that their gerrymandering rendered unbeatable and uncontrollable.

Did Boehner learn any lesson from his unholy creation? Well, earlier this month he and Ryan signed on as chairs of a Speakers Advisory Council generated to fundraise for the REDMAP creators’ 2020 redistricting strategy.

Here’s the thing: When you’re trying to ensure that the side with less support continues to hold power, when you’re trying to maintain control without talking to a changing nation, your tactics aren’t likely to end with redistricting. [MAX X DRIVES SYS OUT OF BALANCE --> UNINTENDED CONSEQ AND SYS FAIL?]

Indeed, efforts to make it harder for citizens to vote were among the very first actions by gerrymandered state legislatures, especially in Wisconsin and North Carolina, where a federal court found that those barriers were “surgically” crafted to target blacks. Gerrymandered legislatures can take such anti-democratic actions because the people’s representatives need not fear the judgement of the people. [no FEEDBACK] And after the U.S. Supreme Court [MOD] undid essential protections within the Voting Rights Act, in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, states and other entities didn’t have to fear the courts, [DISABLE CHECKS AND BALANCE] either, when they wanted to change the rules around voting. Across much of the nation, but especially in the South, as well as in states with one-party control and newly gerrymandered legislatures, came a flood of voter ID bills, cutbacks in absentee and early voting, voter roll purges, precinct closures and more.

Gerrymandered legislatures felt free to ignore the will of the people. Other legislatures followed along. In Florida, for example, where 64 percent of voters approved a 2018 state constitutional amendment ending felony disenfranchisement, lawmakers added an additional burden instead — complete repayment of any fines and fees connected to the sentence or prison term — that many critics compared to a poll tax. Legislators also undermined a legal victory allowing campus sites to be used for early voting with a sneaky provision that requires something always at a premium on colleges: Easy parking.

Texas would make it a felony for anyone to cast an ineligible ballot, even by accident. Arizona looked to dial back early voting and expand voter ID requirements. Tennessee passed legislation that would make it put those who run voter registration drives in jeopardy of massive fines if they submitted too many incomplete applications. Indiana made it harder to sue in state court to extend voting hours, often necessary when machines malfunction or when lines are long. Legislatures in Missouri, Utah, Michigan and Idaho worked to unwind popular 2018 initiatives won by citizens demanding reforms politicians had refused to make.

And so we end this decade with the water in Flint still undrinkable, thanks to gerrymandering.

In 2011, Michigan’s GOP-controlled legislature dramatically expanded the state’s power to take over financially struggling municipalities and place them under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager. Angry voters toppled the law in a November 2012 ballot initiative, concluding that it gave the state too much power to usurp local control and run roughshod over elected officials. One month later, lawmakers ignored the public and reinstated the program.

Then, in 2014, the emergency manager appointed to run Flint changed the city’s water supply to the Flint River and decided against installing corrosion inhibitors to properly treat the water, saving an estimated $140 a day. It sparked a lead contamination crisis and an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease that killed 12 people and sickened hundreds of children.

And so we end this decade with fetal heartbeat laws on the march in aggressively gerrymandered states like Ohio, Georgia and Alabama, that would enact abortion restrictions dramatically out of sync with the wishes of voters even in these red states.

And so we end this decade with a national consensus on gun control and putting an end to the horrifically numbing routine of mass shootings, but an anti-majoritarian and broken political system where large majorities are ever-stymied and unable, again and again, to translate the will of the people into action. The decade closes with consensus on climate change, but progress and agreements being rolled back.

We stand on the verge of the next redistricting cycle, which will begin in 2021, without the prospect of intervention from the federal courts, with the gerrymander wars headed south and the prospect of states using citizen population, rather than total population, to draw state legislative districts, all, again, with the goal of standing athwart demographic change and shouting “stop.”

These wars will be fought with Democrats, at last, fully awakened and focused on state legislatures. They’ll take place with dramatically more public awareness and media attention paid to the importance of structural voting issues that once made eyes glaze over. And they’ll be undertaken with solid majorities of Americans of all ideologies backing rules and reforms enshrine the best promises of our democracy.

But the damage that has done is severe and will be long-lasting. Forty years ago, when Raymond Donovan, the labor secretary under Ronald Reagan, was acquitted on fraud and larceny charges, he famously asked “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back.” We should all pose the same question about the way urgent issues went unaddressed during this bitter and polarized decade, stolen from us, in part, by the gerrymander.

It may require a generation to repair the damage to our civic fabric from this decade’s cynical and corrosive festival of partisan gerrymandering. It helped heightened and accelerated polarization, extremism and our dysfunctional politics. It’s incumbent on all of us to ensure it doesn’t get worse before it gets better. There may not be any battle in the next decade that’s more urgent.

David Daley, a former editor of Salon, is the author of the national bestseller “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” and the forthcoming “Unrigged: How Americans Fought Back, Slayed the Gerrymander and Reinvented Democracy.”

Mark Meadows and the gerrymandered district: How Republicans ‘cracked’ the liberal city of Asheville — and elected a right-wing buffoon

Republicans "cracked" the liberal city of Asheville into two safe…

===

This week gave the GOP no shortage of opportunities for controversy.

President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee. A new report showed Trump overruled his own officials to grant his son-in-law Jared Kushner a top secret security clearance, provoking outrage from intelligence experts. Some Republican senators warned the president his border emergency declaration may fracture the caucus. And throughout all this, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) took place, giving the far right a bizarre echo chamber in which to cheer each other’s nonsense.

Here are five of the craziest right-wing moments this week:

Matt Gaetz tries to tamper with Cohen’s testimony — and lands in hot water.

Trump’s Republican allies had a singular strategy to try to discredit Cohen: destroy him personally, and paint him as a disreputable sleazebag who cannot be trusted on anything (while ignoring the rather obvious question of what that says about Trump’s judgment for retaining him for years.)

But one congressman, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) took things way too far in a tweet directed at Cohen on Tuesday night:

View image on Twitter

Spin Doctor

@SpinDr

Matt Gaetz’s tweet likely violates 18 USC § 1512(b): Whoever knowingly uses intimidation or threatens with the intent to cause or induce any person to withhold testimony shall be fined and/or imprisoned for not more than 20 years.

2,170

2:27 PM - Feb 26, 2019

932 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Gaetz initially brushed off the controversy, saying he hadn’t engaged in witness tampering, only “witness testing.” But faced with furious criticism and a stern rebuke from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Gaetz eventually deleted the tweet and apologized to Cohen. Even after that, however, he was allegedly overheard telling Trump he was “happy to do it for you” in a phone call — although he denies this happened.

Regardless, Gaetz’s damage control may not be enough to avoid consequences. It is unlikely he will be criminally prosecuted, but the Florida State Bar, where he is licensed as an attorney, is now investigating him.

Mark Meadows invites a black Trump appointee to the Cohen hearing to prove Trump isn’t a racist.

Another Republican who humiliated himself trying to take down Cohen was Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus and ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. Ahead of rumors that Cohen would offer examples of Trump’s racist behavior behind closed doors, Meadows thought he had the perfect plan to discredit him: invite Lynne Patton, a black woman and former party planner who serves in Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, and point to her to prove Trump is not racist.

This stunt enraged freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), another woman of color, who proceeded to shame Meadows for the “prop” of dragging out a black woman as a “racist act” itself. Meadows, visibly stung to the point of tears, demanded Tlaib’s words be stricken from the record.

House hearing to shine spotlight on Clinton Foundation

Posted By -NO AUTHOR- On 11/22/2018 @ 3:45 pm In APP Frontpage,Politics,U.S. | No Comments

Hillary Clinton at the American Federation of Teachers Union on July 13, 2018 (Video screenshot)

As they prepare to hand over the leadership of committees to the Democrats, House Republicans will hold a hearing into the Justice Department’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., told Hill.TV on Wednesday that U.S. Attorney John Huber, who has been working with the DOJ and the FBI on the the probe, will testify before the House Oversight Committee Dec. 5, the Daily Caller reported.

Meadows said Huber was tasked in part with investigating possible “improper activity” by the Clinton Foundation.

The allegations center on “pay for play” donations to the charity while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

Critics, including investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, have presented evidence Clintons exchanged political favors for donations and pushed favorable policies to receive donations.

The New York Times reported Trump told his White House counsel earlier this year he wanted the DOJ to prosecute Clinton.

In March, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided a special prosecutor was not needed to investigate Hillary Clinton regarding allegations the sale of Uranium One to a Russian state-owned company while she was secretary of state was related to donations made to the Clinton Foundation.

Sessions said Huber also was reviewing the allegations of Republican lawmakers that the FBI used the unsubstantiated anti-Trump dossier to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016.

Meadows said in a Twitter message at the time that Sessions’ decision not to appoint a special counsel was “disappointing.”

“So the Obama DOJ can open a legally questionable investigation into the Trump campaign — allegedly based on a campaign volunteer mouthing off at a London bar — but this DOJ can’t appoint a second special counsel after all the troubling documents we’ve seen? Disappointing,” he wrote.

Schweizer, the author of “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” was the first to report nine foreign investors in the Uranium One deal gave $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times confirmed in an April 2015 story Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. The Times found that the Clintons, however, did not publicly disclose the contributions, despite an agreement Hillary Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors.

In addition, Bill Clinton received a $500,000 speaking fee from a Russian bank tied to the Kremlin in 2010, when Hillary Clinton opposed sanctions on Moscow. She reversed her position the following year.

Article printed from WND: http://www.wnd.com

URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2018/11/house-hearing-to-shine-spotlight-on-clinton-foundation/

===

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/lawmaker-decries-republican-grilling-fbi-agent-peter-strzok-orwellian-report

https://www.alternet.org/deputy-ag-rosenstein-battles-trump-loving-gop-rep-contentious-hearing-your-use-attack-me-personally

Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Thursday battled Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), a Donald Trump supporter who is among the House Republicans leading an investigation into special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

During his combative testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Rosenstein pushed back on Jordan’s attempt to paint the Russia investigation in a nefarious light as fellow members of Congress objected to Jordan’s line of questioning. At one point, Rosenstein told Jordan, “your use of this to attack me personally is deeply wrong."

“It’s not personal,” Jordan assured Rosenstein, before launching into a personal attack on Rosenstein’s role as deputy attorney general.

Jordan asked Rosenstein if the threatened to “subpoena phone calls” from members of the House Intelligence Committee.

“No sir, and there’s no way to subpoena phone calls,” Rosenstein said as the chamber erupted in laughter,

“Who are we supposed to believe?” Jordan asked. “Staff members who we’ve worked with who’ve never misled us? or you guys, who we’ve caught hiding information from us, who tell a witness not to answer our questions, who are we supposed to believe?”

“Thank you for making clear it’s not personal, Mr. Jordan,” Rosenstein replied. “You should believe me because I’m telling the truth and I’m under oath.”

Watch below:

Report Advertisement

ABC News

@ABC

"Your use of this to attack me personally is deeply wrong."

https://www.alternet.org/trumps-gop-house-henchmen-lay-groundwork-hold-top-doj-official-overseeing-russia-probe-contempt

Ryan caved to Donald Trump's Russia hatchet squad and now the GOP caucus is closer than ever to delivering Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein an ultimatum: hand over every sensitive document they want on the Russia probe or be held in contempt and possibly impeached. Bloomberg writes:

Passing the resolution would escalate pressure on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to hand over material, including some related to the origins of the investigation into whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The measure would give Rosenstein and other officials until July 6 to comply.

The resolution itself doesn't explicitly reference impeachment or even contempt and it's effectively unenforceable, but the House henchmen have been hanging that threat over Rosenstein's head for months. GOP Reps. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, so-called Freedom Caucus staples, now say the resolution is coming to the House floor on Thursday, contingent on the Rules Committee giving it final approval Wednesday afternoon.

full House vote would supercharge a battle that has primarily been waged by a handful of GOP zealots into potentially having the imprimatur of the entire Republican caucus. The showdown comes as both Rosenstein and FBI director Christopher Wray prepare to testify before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday morning about the agency's Inspector General report on the Clinton email investigation.

Rosenstein does not appear to be without some recourse. He has already threatened to request that the House conduct an internal investigation of the House Intelligence Committee staff. Though it's unclear where that stands, doing so would give him the ability to subpoena the internal communications of the staff.

...

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/house-republicans-want-straight-break-actual-system-law-itself

House Republicans are attacking the Department of Justice and by extension the special counsel's Russia probe on so many fronts it's impossible to keep track. Freedom Caucus chair Mark Meadows's new tact is to push for a federal audit of Robert Mueller under the guise of oversight in order to get an unredacted copy of the "scope memo," which lays out the boundaries of his Russia investigation. The Washington Post writes:

Meadows, speaking Thursday during a taping of C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” that is to air Sunday, said he believed the audit is required under federal law and could not be completed without an unredacted copy of the memo written in August 2017 by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. [...]

Meadows and fellow Freedom Caucus member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has pushed for weeks to get unfettered access to the memo, but the Justice Department has so far refused them access. Only a heavily redacted version has been publicly shared as part of the prosecution of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort because, according to people familiar with the Justice Department’s thinking, prosecutors think its full disclosure could compromise Mueller’s probe

...

Just to make the whole situation really crazy, our old friend Steve Bannon has apparently taken on the role of chief strategist for the extremist faction of the GOP. Jonathan Swan at Axios reported that Bannon recently met with Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the head of the House Freedom Caucus, which has about 40 hardcore right-wing members ready to rumble. Swan writes that they plan to fight the leadership’s decision to attach hurricane relief to the debt ceiling increase. The only good news is that unctuous Sen. Ted Cruz won’t be leading the opposition to relief funds this time around, since his constituents in Texas are the ones who need it. Swan quotes a source saying this:

This is bigger than Breitbart or the Freedom Caucus . . . The topics discussed included conservative alternatives to everything the anti-Trump Republican leadership has planned on every major policy matter facing the United States of America in September. Including Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s demonstrated failure to govern, and how to effectively implement the Trump agenda moving forward.

A source told Hallie Jackson and Kristen Welker of MSNBC that “they focused on the idea that the GOP should brace for a ‘bloody September,’ as the president’s far-right base prepares to dig in on key issues from DACA to the debt ceiling.” This may well include Bannon’s desire to settle scores with his enemies, like White House economic adviser Gary Cohn, but it’s also likely to result in some twisted legislative scenarios in which Republicans will be battling each other simply to keep the country from defaulting on its debts or the government from shutting down.

===

wapo 1/17

This year’s agenda from House and Senate Republicans has clarity that was often lacking from Trump’s own campaign. Senate Republicans favor using a procedure known as “budget reconciliation,” in which measures can be passed with a simple 51-vote majority rather than a filibuster-proof 60 votes, to tackle the ACA and to undo much of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform.

As part of undoing the financial overhaul law, some GOP leaders have begun planning strategies for how to effectively kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whether by giving Congress control over its budget or finding cause to replace its director, Richard Cordray, with a weaker board.

“I’d like to repeal the whole thing, period,” Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby said of Dodd-Frank in a December interview with the Wall Street Journal.

The reconciliation process is also likely to be used to pass tax changes, which both Trump and congressional Republicans want to use to lower rates and end the estate tax.

Republicans also are examining ways to undo many of the regulations and other orders enacted by Obama and his administration, including ones issued in the weeks since Trump’s victory and designed to solidify the Democratic president’s environmental legacy.

GOP leaders have cited the 21-year old Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to cast simple majority votes of disapproval for regulations, as a way to block anything the administration has ordered since June 2016.

Since its passage, the CRA has been used only once. But in December, the conservative House Freedom Caucus began compiling a list of more than 200 regulations it views as vulnerable to a disapproval vote. They include “burdensome” school lunch standards, tobacco regulations, laws that set higher wages for contractors and elements of the Paris climate-change agreement.

“Talking to some individuals with the Trump transition team, they are taking this extremely serious[ly],” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the Freedom Caucus, told the Heritage Foundation last month.

Republicans intend to supplement the CRA by enacting a law that would subject any regulation with an economic impact greater than $100 million to a vote of Congress, a change that would have prevented nearly every climate or employment rule change of the Obama years. The measure, called the Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act, or Reins, is a conservative priority that passed the Republican House in 2011, 2013 and 2015 with backing from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Republican aides now hope for a vote on Reins in the coming days so it can be sent for Trump’s signature immediately after he is sworn in on Jan. 20.

Some Republican lawmakers also want legislation that would stop courts from deferring to federal agencies’ interpretations of statutes — a practice known as “Chevron deference,” after the 1984 Supreme Court case that went against the energy company — and have them instead defer to Congress.

bb bs

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/12/05/mark-meadows-wins-chairmanship-house-freedom-caucus/

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), a strong conservative with a history of actually taking action inside the Beltway — known for doing nothing — has won the chairmanship of the House Freedom Caucus.

Meadows replaces outgoing two-term chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and will serve alongside the House Freedom Caucus’S new whip Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA). Jordan will become chairman emeritus of the House Freedom Caucus.

“Mark Meadows is one of the most principled people I have ever been around in politics,” Wayne King, Meadows’ deputy chief of staff and the only senior staffer from his original team still there, told Breitbart News. King is a former vice chairman of the North Carolina GOP, and a top conservative leader both in his state of North Carolina and in the national party and on Capitol Hill—a key, critical reason why conservatives have won so many battles in recent years.

“Meadows has a record of taking action and actually accomplishing things that further the conservative agenda in a city that is renowned for gridlock,” King told Breitbart News on Monday night. “He deeply understands what drove millions upon millions of people to deliver Donald Trump a landslide electoral victory over Hillary Clinton and looks forward to fighting day in and day out to drain the swamp in Washington.”

Meadows is perhaps best known for being the man who toppled now former House Speaker John Boehner. Back in 2015, on the third such try for conservatives, Meadows employed a tactic right before the August recess known as introducing a motion to vacate the chair. The motion, which could have later been offered as a privileged resolution that would have forced a floor vote determining whether the House still supported Boehner as Speaker, gained support among House Republicans who rallied to Meadows’ side. As Meadows obtained enough support to oust Boehner, before he forced a vote on the resolution, Boehner resigned—shocking the political establishment.

Meadows is known AS a rock-ribbed conservative and haD a history in business and real estate—just like President-elect Donald J. Trump—before he ran for public office. In fact, when Breitbart News was profiling him in his district for a day before Boehner resigned, some of his constituents actually mistook him for Trump and thought the congressman was Trump.

Meadows moving into the position of House Freedom Caucus chair means bad news for the career politicians in Washington, and for the bureaucracy throughout the D.C. swamp, as the action-oriented businessman-turned-reformer-in-Congress is unlikely to stand for shenanigans pushed by either the Republican establishment or the institutional left.

The House Freedom Caucus, with more than 40 members, has become an important bloc of votes with an extraordinary amount of power that can essentially veto any legislative priorities of the GOP establishment if it sticks together as a minority within the majority.