The last words of Michael Cohen’s testimony before congress:
Yep.
"what digby sez..."
Month: November 2020
I don’t think anyone who has been following Donald Trump’s administration for the past four years can say they’re surprised that he is refusing to concede defeat after the election, or that nearly all Republican elected officials are either backing him to the hilt or quivering in the corner like a bunch of cold chihuahuas. I predicted this puerile reaction some time ago, which wasn’t exactly a great feat of prognostication since Trump was doing everything but running full-page ads in every newspaper in the country announcing his intentions.
Two days before the election, he said on camera, “As soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers.” This was after months of nonstop attacks on mail-in voting, accusations of cheating in states run by Democrats and declarations that the only way he could lose the election is if it were rigged. How could anyone be surprised that he is doing exactly what he told us he would do?
There’s a lot of speculation about what Republicans have to gain by doing this. As I’ve hypothesized earlier, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has good reasons to keep Trump voters engaged in the state of Georgia, so keeping all this going for a while may be useful there. It’s certainly possible that Republicans are afraid if they buck Trump publicly he will turn on the party, calling them traitors to the cause, and his fervent followers will stay home for the two Georgia Senate runoff elections in January. And there’s always the financial incentive — the cash Trump is raking in for his “legal defense fund” can be spent to retire some of his campaign debt.
And, needless to say, Trump has his own incentives. He needs to be able to say that he isn’t a loser which, to his mind, is the worst thing you can say about anyone. But in the end, unless the courts throw out entire state elections and disenfranchise 75 million people on his behalf, he will have no choice.
Since he loves campaigning more than anything, I have long assumed that Trump would be happy to start a new campaign revenge tour, and at least tease his ecstatic followers with the idea that he’ll be back in four years. (He can certainly drive all other potential GOP contenders nuts for a while anyway.) He’s already considered how to make money while doing that. The Washington Post reported last summer that the Trump Organization had applied to trademark the word “telerally” for “organizing events in the field of politics and political campaigning” — the first time Trump’s business operation has explicitly tied itself to political activity. This suggests they’ve been thinking about how to monetize a political campaign for a while.
Anyway, this whole chaotic post-election mess was long anticipated, and Trump has more than fulfilled everyone’s expectations. It’s a clown show of epic proportions that will only be exceeded if he starts taking the advice of the hardcore right-wingers who are agitating for him to burn the place down on his way out the door. The Federalist, for instance, suggests that Trump should lay metaphorical landmines throughout the government, set to explode on the Biden administration should America be so craven as to actually allow him to become president.
Among other helpful ideas, that article suggests that that Trump should release all “Spygate” documents immediately, fire FBI Sirector Christopher Wray and Dr. Anthony Fauci, have every political appointee start taking the names of disloyal and “corrupt” federal employees, publicly release all government documents regarding potential Biden appointees and staff, along with all alleged information about “Planned Parenthood trafficking in human body parts,” and “accelerate the wall and prepare for caravans.” Oh, and bring all overseas troops home by Christmas, which would be nice.
As absurd as nearly all of that is, there actually is some activity taking place, a bit more under the radar, whose purpose is not clear. We know the administration is withholding all money and cooperation from the Biden transition and that Trump has ordered his budget staff to keep working on next year’s budget, even though it will be thrown in the trash as soon as the new president is sworn in. That sort of thing can probably be chalked up to Trump wanting to maintain the illusion that he has won, and also to fulfill his vengeful promise not to have what he calls “a friendly transition” because, as he claims, the Obama administration spied on his campaign “and got caught.”
But what’s he doing with the Intelligence services and the Pentagon? The Washington Post reported on Monday that the administration had installed Michael Ellis, a hardcore right-wing operative best known as one of California Rep. Devin Nunes’ top henchmen, as head lawyer at the NSA. (You may remember Ellis as one of those involved in the infamous “midnight run.”) This job is not a political appointment, which means Ellis will now have career government employee protections and be more difficult to move out.
This is a practice known as “burrowing,” in which an outgoing administration moves some of their cronies into permanent jobs. In Trump’s case this is particularly concerning because his cronies are such overwhelmingly unethical loyalists and partisan hacks. Considering their characters and vocation, it’s hard to believe they don’t have a hidden agenda. And we have no idea how many of these people are being placed within the government at lower levels.
Even more concerning than Ellis at NSA is what Trump is doing at the Pentagon. We knew he had a short list of people he wanted to fire after the election and Defense Secretary Mark Esper was at the top of this list. They had apparently clashed repeatedly and Trump couldn’t stand him, even giving him a nickname of “Yesper,” which is somewhat baffling since Trump’s principal complaint was that Esper didn’t lick his boots with quite the enthusiasm required. He’s been replaced with Christopher Miller, a counterterrorism specialist who Trump likes for whatever reason.
But Esper wasn’t the only one canned. Trump also fired three other highly regarded civilian leaders and replaced them with notorious Trump loyalists, two of whom were also Nunes acolytes. The third is this fine fellow:
That nut is now in a high-level position at the Pentagon.
CNN reports that the Pentagon in turmoil over the loss of steady hands. Esper delivered a scathing parting interview, denying that he’s a yes man and warning against what might happen if Trump got a defense secretary who would actually carry out his wishes. His last words were, “And then God help us,” no doubt prompting many, especially in the rest of the world, to wonder what exactly he meant.
If you saw all this happening during a fierce election dispute in another country, one run by a man who had repeatedly said the should be allowed to remain in office for many years beyond his legal term, what would you think was likely to happen?
I think this summarizes our situation nicely:
For perhaps the first time in American history, a coordinated effort to taint or even overturn a presidential election may be underway. With no evidence of wrongdoing, the Republican Party and Trump administration officials such as General Services Administration chief Emily Murphy and Attorney General William Barr have refused to acknowledge President Donald Trump’s defeat or cooperate with President-elect Joseph Biden’s transition team. Instead, they are moving forward on multiple fronts to sow doubt about the validity of mail-in ballots and the motives of election officials in states where Trump lost or is losing. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said there will be a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” It was unclear if he was joking.
By the way, its not working:
Nearly 80% of Americans, including more than half of Republicans, recognize President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the Nov. 3 election after most media organizations called the race for the Democrat based on his leads in critical battleground states, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.Slideshow ( 2 images )
Biden – who needed 270 Electoral College votes to win – had 279 of those votes to 214 for Trump with results in three states not yet complete, according to Edison Research. In the popular vote, Biden got 76.3 million, or 50.7% of the total, to 71.6 million, or 47.6%, for Trump.
The Reuters/Ipsos national opinion survey, which ran from Saturday afternoon to Tuesday, found that 79% of U.S. adults believe Biden won the White House. Another 13% said the election has not yet been decided, 3% said Trump won and 5% said they do not know.
The results were somewhat split along party lines: about six in 10 Republicans and almost every Democrat said Biden won.
Polling doesn’t seem t be picking up all the Trump cultists, so I’m not sure I believe this. But it can’t be that far off. There are quite a few Republicans who apparently aren’t buying Trump’s bullshit.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t admire him for doing it anyway. In fact, I’d guess they love him more than ever. As long as libs are crying he’s a winner in their minds.
It is rare to find such a headline so prominently displayed. It is sad there is a need for one.
I’ve been writing about this for years. Republicans make headlines with fraudulent allegations of fraud or the dead voting and by the time they’ve been debunked the story usually ends up buried deep in Section A. That’s what happened in South Carolina in 2012.
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“Dusk of the Dead,” Scrutiny Hooligans (2/25/2012):
Even as Fox News pressed ahead with its zombie voter headlines, the State Election Commission pressed ahead with its investigation, reporting its findings this week:
In 197 of [the 207 cases examined], the records show no indication of votes being cast fraudulently in the name of deceased voters. Research found each of these cases to be the result of clerical errors, bad data matching, errors in assigning voter participation, or voters dying after being issued an absentee ballot. In 10 cases, the records were insufficient to make a determination.
Alas, this is not a sane world, and the report was no bullet through the brain for these zombies. The South Carolina Republican Party is — unsurprisingly — undeterred, NPR reports:
The state attorney general’s office in South Carolina said in a statement Thursday afternoon that the question of “dead” voters is still being investigated by the State Law Enforcement Division and that no “final answer to this problem” can be determined until that investigation is concluded.
“To give this state’s election process the clean bill of health we would like, we can’t simply rely on the review of some 200 of 950 records … that is unsatisfactory,” the statement said.
That’s why the GOP insists we need Zombie ID. Because we must be absolutely certain. Because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence where the Voting Dead are concerned. The minority-looking people in line in front of you, all around you at the polls — What’s that BEHIND YOU! — may seem normal, but what if they’re not? They might be zombies.
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Lies are what’s for dinner when you’re fresh out of brains.
This is not a plot to steal the 2020 election. It is a decades-long campaign to undermine American democracy, which treats Democratic governance as inherently illegitimate. —Jonathan Chait
Republicans are at it again, alleging that the only way the acting president could have lost reelection was because he was cheated.
The modern manifestation of the campaign Chait cites dates at the very least from the 1981 voter suppression lawsuit brought by the New Jersey Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee in 1981. But we might trace its roots to the conservative backlash to the New Deal or even to the notion that governance of the new republic ought to fall to its “owners.” A disquisition on that will wait for another day.
Suffice to say that Republicans have long considered themselves the country’s owners and all others interlopers. When Republicans win, Real Americans™ have spoken. When they lose, Democrats cheated.
So it must be with Donald Trump’s loss in 2020. Despite “Democrats'” losing seats in the U.S. House and failing (to date) to wrest control of the U.S. Senate. Republicans who retained their seats believe their races were fairly decided. But they will go along with Trump’s wild claims that his was not.
Chait writes:
The Republican strategy has several sources of motivation, but the most important is a widely shared belief that Democrats in large cities — i.e., racial minorities — engage in systematic vote fraud, election after election. “We win because of our ideas, we lose elections because they cheat us,” insisted Senator Lindsey Graham on Fox News last night. The Bush administration pursued phantasmal vote-fraud allegations, firing prosecutors for failing to uncover evidence of the schemes Republicans insisted were happening under their noses. In 2008, even a Republican as civic-minded as John McCain accused ACORN, a voter-registration group, of “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
The persistent failure to produce evidence of mass-scale vote fraud has not discouraged Republicans from believing in its existence. The failure to expose it merely proves how well hidden the conspiracy is. Republicans may despair of their chances of proving Trump’s vote-fraud charges in open court, but many of them believe his wild lies reflect a deeper truth.
Belief in the voter fraud bogeyman by these supposed hard-nosed realists is something akin to believing in orgone energy. The belief is unfalsifiable, as Chait observes.
They will have as much luck finding those illegal voters as finding space aliens. (If aliens can take human form, falsifying a photo ID is child’s play.) I mentioned a study on this in 2017:
As those paying attention recall, a clever study published in 2013 looked at how many people in America report having committed voter fraud. Researchers found that roughly the same percentages of the population admit to perpetrating voter fraud as admit to being abducted by aliens:
The implication here is that if one accepts that 2.5% is a valid lower bound for the prevalence of voter impersonation in the 2012 election then one must also accept that about 2.5% of the adult U.S. population — about 6 million people — believe that they were abducted by extra-terrestrials in the last year. If this were true then voter impersonation would be the least of our worries.
Republicans similarly believe Democrats never accepted George W. Bush’s win in 2000 or Donald trump’s in 2016, despite Hillary Clinton’s conceding the morning after.
Republicans blame the four-year stream of misconduct and outright criminality not on Trump but on the reporters and investigators who uncovered it. Trump faced “a political insurgency that refused in practice, if not in formal fact, to accept the outcome of an election its candidate had lost,” Wall Street Journal columnist and recent editor Gerard Baker rants in his column today. “The members of this resistance spent four years using every lever at their disposal — bureaucracy, law enforcement, Congress, news media — to thwart, disrupt and try to bring down the duly elected president.”
Clinton may have technically accepted the election result very quickly, and the Obama administration may have technically offered full cooperation with the transition. But in reality, Trump’s opponents proceeded to expose massive corruption and wrongdoing — and the blame for this rests not on Trump but on them.
So it goes. The party of personal responsibility blames Trump’s bottomless corruption on Democrats and the press. Claims of fraud are “the process” now when Republicans lose.
Meanwhile, Trump is on track to make this the most chaotic transition in history.
The New York Times reports on the Bill Barr decision to allow prosecutors to get involved in election cases before the results are certified. This contravenes 40 years of DOJ policy but whatever. This is Bill Barr we’re dealing with:
Mr. Barr said he had authorized “specific instances” of investigative steps in some cases. He made clear in a carefully worded memo that prosecutors had the authority to investigate, but he warned that “specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries.”
Mr. Barr’s directive ignored the Justice Department’s longstanding policies intended to keep law enforcement from affecting the outcome of an election. And it followed a move weeks before the election in which the department lifted a prohibition on voter fraud investigations before an election.
“Given that voting in our current elections has now concluded, I authorize you to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions,” Mr. Barr wrote.
A Justice Department official said that Mr. Barr had authorized scrutiny of allegations about ineligible voters in Nevada and backdated mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. Republicans have circulated both claims in recent days without any evidence emerging to back them.
Mr. Barr did not write the memo at the direction of Mr. Trump, the White House or any Republican lawmakers, the official said.
Mr. Barr has privately told department officials in the days since the election that any disputes should be resolved in court by the campaigns themselves, according to three people briefed on the conversations. He has said that he did not see massive fraud, and that most of the allegations of voter fraud were related to individual instances that did not point to a larger systemic problem, the people said.
But critics of Mr. Barr immediately condemned the memo as a political act that undermined the Justice Department’s typical independence from the White House.
“It would be problematic enough if Barr were reversing longstanding Justice Department guidance because of significant, substantiated claims of misconduct — that could presumably be handled at the local and state level,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
“But to do so when there is no such evidence — and when the president’s clear strategy is to delegitimize the results of a proper election — is one of the more problematic acts of any attorney general in my lifetime,” Mr. Vladeck added.
Mr. Pilger, a career prosecutor in the department’s Public Integrity Section who oversaw voting-fraud-related investigations, told colleagues he would move to a nonsupervisory role working on corruption prosecutions.
“Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” he wrote, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.” A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Mr. Pilger’s message.
Justice Department policies prohibit federal prosecutors from taking overt steps, like questioning witnesses or securing subpoenas for documents, to open a criminal investigation into any election-related matter until after voting results have been certified to keep their existence from spilling into public view and influencing either voters or local election officials who ensure the integrity of the results.
“Public knowledge of a criminal investigation could impact the adjudication of election litigation and contests in state courts,” the Justice Department’s longstanding election guidelines for prosecutors say. “Accordingly, it is the general policy of the department not to conduct overt investigations.”
He wants to “impact the adjudication of election litigation and contests” on behalf of Trump. Just as he did when he inappropriately intervened in the Mueller investigation, the Roger Stone case, the Michael Flynn case, The E. Jean Carroll case, the Ukraine whistleblower situation, the false claims about voter fraud in Texas, the ordering of federal troops on peaceful protesters and his ongoing sycophantic bootlicking of Donald Trump. How many career prosecutors have resigned and protested his politicization of the DPJ? The number of former DOJ employees sounding the alarm numbers in the thousands.
He is a blight on America. This is totally expected. Whether they “find” any substantial evidence of irregularity is beside the point. (And they may very well manufacture some.) This maneuver shows once again that all a corrupt partisan Attorney General has to do is deploy his US Attorney henchmen and nothing will happen to him. They are destroying any and all institutional guardrails .
I don’t think you can make enough laws to prevent another Bill Barr from doing this all over again.
Stacey Abrams, speaking generally on The Colbert Report on Tuesday, offered her take on the Democrats financial strategy: “To raise all the money that we can as fast as we can from anywhere we can.”
Abrams also took the interview as a change to call President Trump “an orange menace of putrescence.”
They are eating their ownin Georgia for the moment, but who knows how long before they all fall in line:
“Republicans in disarray.” That was the three-word response from Senate Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff late Monday to the extraordinary infighting that’s divided the Georgia GOP over President Donald Trump’s effort to taint Joe Biden’s victory.
This was supposed to be the week that Republicans united behind U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue for a pair of Jan. 5 runoffs that could decide control of the Senate.
Instead, the two senators leveled unfounded claims of a disastrous “embarrassment” of an election at fellow Republicans who oversaw last week’s vote – and called for the resignation of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
It was a brazen effort to appease Trump, who has falsely claimed electoral fraud despite no evidence of any wrongdoing as he and his supporters try to discredit Biden.
We’re told the president and his top allies pressured the two Republican senators to take this step, lest he tweet a negative word about them and risk divorcing them from his base ahead of the consequential runoff.
And shortly after, Trump and some of his inner circle started tweeting attacks at Raffensperger, who was already unpopular with many in the Georgia GOP base long before Tuesday’s vote.
WSB radio analyst Jamie Dupree called it “an orchestrated election move the likes of which I’ve never seen before.” Perdue’s camp pushed back on Tuesday:
“Neither senator nor anyone on their campaigns discussed with the president, White House or the president’s campaign before issuing their statement,” said Perdue spokesman John Burke.
On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins jumped in. He’s leading Trump’s effort to recount Georgia’s race and he called for several steps, including a hand-count of every ballot cast in each county due to “widespread allegations of voter irregularities” but offered no evidence to back that up.
“We can – and we will – petition for this in court after statewide certification is completed if the Secretary of State fails to act, but we are hopeful he will preemptively take this action today to ensure every Georgian has confidence in our electoral process.”
The intraparty war included Gov. Brian Kemp, who echoed the two senators’ criticism of Raffensperger but didn’t go as far as supporting his ouster. Georgia GOP chair David Shafer, who has recently staged “Stop the Steal” rallies as Biden’s lead in Georgia has grown, joined in.
Along with election officials, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan was on the other side of the dividing line. He took to CNN in the morning – before the senators’ statement – saying there was no evidence of any systemic wrongdoing. He has been lit up by Trump supporters for speaking the truth.
The AJC’s Jim Galloway has an exclusive interview with Raffensberger posting today, with plenty to sift through. Here’s an insight to the lack of communication he’s had with Perdue and Loeffler:
“In the business world that I live in, if we have an issue with people, we call them directly and we have our conversation. We don’t just send it out to the world.”
“If that’s how they want to do business, that’s how they do business. I just don’t do business that way.”- AJC
Among other remedies Collins and Team Trump are calling for from Rafensberger, Collins said he wants “a check for felons and other ineligible persons who may have cast a ballot.” That detail caught our eye because Collins has been a vocal champion for criminal justice reform in Congress and, in the final days of his own campaign against Loeffler, brought in Roger Stone, a convicted felon whose sentence was commuted by Donald Trump, to join him on the stump.
What they are asking these Republican officials to do is prostrate themselves before Donald Trump and lie, saying they ran a sloppy or rigged election that benefitted Joe Biden.
The sad thing is that I don’t know for sure that they won’t do it. Trump and the Republicans are a symbiotic organism at this point and if these GOP politicians are ambitious, the pressure on them to put their thumbs on the scale in whatever way they can is going to be immense. After all, nothing, nothing, is more important to the organism at this point than Mitch McConnell being allowed to retain power in the US Senate. Even two minutes, much less two years, in the political wilderness is more than they can even contemplate so they’ll do whatever is necessary to ensure that those Senate seats go their way.
Update — Speaking of eating their own …
President Trump’s election loss and the week-long silence of “Q,” the QAnon movement’s mysterious prophet, have wrenched some believers into a crisis of faith, with factions voicing unease about their future or rallying others to stay calm and “trust the plan.”
The uncertainty has been compounded by the abrupt public resignation, also last Tuesday, of Ron Watkins, the administrator of Q’s online sanctuary on the message board 8kun.
Q has gone quiet before. But the abrupt lack of posts since last Tuesday — Election Day, which the anonymous figure had touted for months as a key moment of reckoning — has sparked speculation and alarm among the movement’s most ardent followers.
Some QAnon proponents have begun to publicly grapple with reality and question whether the conspiracy theory is a hoax. “Have we all been conned?” one user wrote Saturday on 8kun.
Wrote another: “HOW CAN I SPEAK TO Q???? MY FAITH IS SHAKEN. I FOLLOWED THE PLAN. TRUMP LOST!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT NOW?????? WHERE IS THE PLAN???”
Trump’s defeat threatens to undermine the tale that Q, a supposed top-secret government operative, has woven over years: that Trump and his allies would soon vanquish a cabal of “deep state” child abusers and Satan-worshiping Democrats, exiling some to the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
“Have we been conned?”
Honestly, I don’t know what to say anymore. Something malignant is growing in the body politic that this inane conspiracy theory took hold in the first place. Somehow, I doubt this is the last we will hear of it — or that these people will be dissuaded from believing absurd things in the future. Anyone who would buy into QAnon in the first place is unlikely to be someone who learns from experience.
America’s top diplomat tells the world that the election was fraudulent:
This is so corrosive. His smug dismissiveness of the vote results and apparent assurances to the world that Trump is going to steal this election is just unbelievable.
I don’t know what to say. The entire Republican Party is way beyond cynical — it is batshit crazy. This is not normal. Not normal at all.
As I have said many times, shamelessness is their super-power:
The difference between Stacey Abrams refusing to concede and Trump is that there was actual evidence of manipulation of the vote. Trump has produced none, not to mention the fact that he will have to overturn the vote in several states to win the election.